Three Days Later

Victor - POV

By the third day, everything hurt in a different place.

My feet ached first. Then my shoulders from the pack. Then the back of my neck from trying to stay alert too long. Walking had seemed simple when I was younger. Put one foot down, then the other. It turned out walking all day with grief on your back and a weapon at your side made the ground feel longer.

The ten of us who had left Hearthvale did not look like villagers anymore.

Not exactly.

Dust had worked into our clothes. Sleeves stayed rolled. Hands stayed close to belts and blades. Every sound off the road made heads turn in the same direction now.

Papa walked beside me, steady as a metronome. Every few minutes his eyes went to the tree line, the hills, the bends ahead.

“How much farther?” I asked.

“Another hour to Millhaven,” he said.

Henrik dropped back to join us, one hand resting on the club at his hip. “Roads are worse than I remember. That farmstead this morning had bodies no more than two days old.”

Papa’s face hardened. “Malachar’s people. Angry men with no prize to show for a raid usually go looking for easier victories.”

Because they lost me.

I did not say it aloud. I did not need to.

We all knew.

A little farther back, Thomas stumbled and caught himself before falling. Willem reached out automatically and steadied him without breaking stride.

“What if your contacts won’t help?” I asked Papa.

“Then we find others.”

“And if others won’t help?”

“Then we pay the kind who need less convincing.”

That sounded like Millhaven.

Millhaven

Victor - POV

Millhaven smelled like wet rope, forge smoke, fish guts, and old ale.

Even before we entered the town properly, I could tell it was not like Hearthvale. Hearthvale had tired people. Millhaven had guarded people. The kind who looked at strangers and immediately started measuring what trouble they might become.

The streets were tighter, the buildings packed closer, stone and timber leaning over one another as if listening. Men with scars sat outside taverns in daylight. A woman in boiled leather argued with a stablehand while cleaning blood off a knife with a strip of cloth.

Papa led us through it as if he had been there yesterday instead of years ago.

The sign above the tavern he chose showed a cracked crown split by a sword.

“The Broken Crown,” Henrik muttered.

“Exactly,” Papa said.

He turned to the rest of us. “Weapons covered. Mouths shut unless needed.”

Then to me, more quietly: “Stay with me. Watch everything.”

Inside, the air was darker than outside and thicker by three things at once: stale drink, old sweat, and the iron tang that comes when a room has seen enough blood to remember it.

A broad man behind the bar was cleaning glasses with the kind of care people use when their hands would rather be doing violence.

Papa stepped up to him.

“Looking for Gareth Blackthorne.”

The man did not stop wiping the glass. “Who’s asking?”

“Gregor Ironforge. Merchant Wars.”

That got his eyes up.

He looked at Papa once, then at the rest of us, then back at Papa.

“Thought you were dead,” he said.

“Nearly was.”

The man set the glass down. “Back room.”

He looked at me then, not kindly, not unkindly either. Measuring.

“The boy too,” he said. “If he’s part of this.”

Papa did not argue.

That told me enough.

The Back Room

Victor - POV

The room behind the tavern felt more honest than the bar.

Less noise.
More danger.

A scarred table sat under a single hanging lamp. Maps pinned to the wall. Weapons stacked in corners not because people had forgotten them there, but because they wanted them close.

Four people looked up as we entered.

The first was a human woman with short dark hair and the stillness of someone who never wasted movement. She sat sharpening a curved dagger with slow patient strokes. Scars marked both knuckles. Not decorative scars. Working scars.

The second was Skathari, cat-blooded, golden-eyed, with twin curved swords across his back and the kind of loose grace that said he could be across the room before a slower person had finished deciding he was dangerous.

The third was Delvarin, massive through the shoulders, beard braided with bits of metal, war hammer resting beside his chair like another limb.

The fourth was another Skathari, scaled rather than furred, dark green and brown shifting across skin like wet stone, pupils narrow and vertical under the lamp.

“Gregor Ironforge,” the bartender said. “Needs work.”

The human woman looked at Papa. “What kind?”

Papa did not sit. “Blackhaven. Slaver recovery. Seventeen taken from my village three days ago. My wife and infant daughter among them.”

The room changed.

Not softened. Sharpened.

The cat-eyed Skathari’s ears tipped back. “Blackhaven is not a place you walk into and back out of by accident.”

“I’m not planning to rely on accident,” Papa said.

He put a leather pouch on the table.

The coins inside hit wood with a sound everyone in the room understood instantly.

“Half now. Half when my people are breathing free air again. Anything you take on the way out is yours.”

The human woman finally set the dagger down.

"Kara Nightwhisper," she said. She nodded to the others as she spoke their names. "Finn scouts. Thorek breaks things. Senna knows more about poisons and silent killing than anyone alive."

Papa gave his own name without ceremony.

Kara glanced at me. “And the child?”

“My son.”

“That is not what I asked.”

Papa did not blink. “He’s coming.”

Kara leaned back in her chair and studied me with open skepticism. “Why?”

Because they came for me.
Because I can help.
Because I will not stay behind.

I was about to say all of that when Papa answered first.

“Because he already proved he belongs on the road.”

Kara’s eyes narrowed slightly. “That is a dangerous sentence to apply to a seven-year-old.”

“It is a dangerous road.”

Fair.

She looked at Henrik, then Willem, then the rest of the men who had come from Hearthvale. All of us travel-worn. All of us carrying some version of the same grief.

Finally she said, “You still don’t have enough.”

“I know.”

The bartender, Gareth, stepped away from the wall. “Maybe he does if I add names.”

Everyone looked at him.

Gareth shrugged once. “Malachar’s made enemies. I know some of them. Give me two days and I can raise eighteen more fighters who hate him enough to discount the risk.”

Thorek grunted. “Hate lowers rates.”

“Sometimes it raises quality,” Gareth said.

Kara considered that, then looked at Papa again. “With us, your Hearthvale fighters, and Gareth’s recruits, this stops being a grieving father’s suicide ride.”

“What does it become?” Papa asked.

Kara’s mouth moved at one corner. “A small war.”

That sounded right.

Too right.

“We leave in two days,” she said. “You rest. Refit. We plan once. We don’t improvise unless the place catches fire.”

“It will catch fire,” Papa said.

Kara looked at him another second, then nodded like that answer had improved his offer.

“We’ll work well together.”

Two Days Later

The Approach to Blackhaven

Victor - POV

Blackhaven looked wrong before it looked real.

At first it was only a dark shape against darker cliffs. Then details rose out of it as the moon cleared the clouds.

Walls of black stone.
Ironwork that drank light instead of reflecting it.
A fortress built into the coast as if the cliffs themselves had gone rotten and grown battlements.

Below, the harbor held lanterns low over dark water. Small ships rocked against the docks. People moved there in twos and threes, too calm for a place built on suffering.

We watched from the tree line.

Thirty-four of us now.

The ten from Hearthvale.
Kara’s team.
Gareth’s eighteen.

More men than I had ever traveled with. More steel than I had ever seen gathered for one purpose.

Papa crouched beside me with a spyglass, speaking quietly to Kara, Henrik, and Finn as they marked positions on a rough map scratched into the dirt.

“Four at the main gate,” Papa murmured. “Two rotating on the eastern wall.”

“Dock patrol every six minutes,” Finn added, ears twitching toward sounds I could not hear.

Thorek peered toward the lower harbor. “More traffic than a normal night.”

Papa lifted the glass again, then swore under his breath.

“What?” Henrik asked.

“Carriages,” Papa said. “Rich ones.”

Kara’s face hardened. “Auction night.”

The words moved through the group like cold water.

That meant our people were not just imprisoned.

They were being sold now.

My stomach turned.

Somewhere inside those walls Mama was there.
Naelira too.
Maybe being watched.
Handled.
Measured.

The thought hit so hard magic stirred under my skin before I noticed.

Papa’s hand touched my shoulder once. Grounding. Not soft. Just there.

“Easy.”

I breathed.

Aldric stepped forward then. I had not spoken to him much over the last two days. Elkin, silver-haired, severe-faced, the kind of man who seemed to listen to silence for flaws.

“You stay with us,” he said.

He meant him and the last woman from Kara’s team, Moira.

I looked from him to Papa. “No.”

Papa did not even glance away from the fortress. “Yes.”

I took one step closer. “I came all this way to help.”

“And you will.”

“Not from the trees.”

Moira, who had said almost nothing all day, finally spoke. “You’ll be helping more from here than inside.”

She was human, brown-haired, plain in the useful way that makes a face hard to remember. When she looked at me, though, her eyes held no softness at all. Only focus.

“I handle communication,” she said. “Aldric handles concealment. We keep eyes on the field and pass what matters where it needs to go. You, Victor, are an early warning system with a range none of the others have.”

That made me pause.

Papa finally looked at me. “Inside those walls you are still seven. Out here you are distance, awareness, and one more set of eyes the enemy doesn’t know to fear yet.”

That was unfair.

Because it made sense.

Moira stepped close enough to touch my forehead with two cool fingers.

“Hold still.”

I did.

The world did not change visibly.

It changed inward.

At first I thought I was imagining things. Then I felt it: not voices exactly, but impressions with shape. Papa’s grim focus. Henrik’s contained nerves. Kara’s knife-clean concentration. Finn’s restless alertness.

I sucked in breath.

Moira stepped back. “There. Mental link. Keep your thoughts small unless there’s urgency.”

Aldric moved next, weaving concealment over our position until the air around us felt slightly wrong, as if light itself had forgotten to settle.

Below, Blackhaven waited.

A predator pretending patience.

Papa rose slowly and looked over the gathered fighters one last time.

"Positions," he said quietly. "Fast in. Fast out. Kill slavers. Free captives. Burn what deserves burning. Anyone buying human beings is as guilty as the ones selling them. No mercy for either."

No one answered.

They did not need to.

One by one, the war party vanished into the dark.

And I stayed in the trees, heart hammering, part of the battle and not in it yet, watching the fortress where my family waited and knowing that before dawn, one way or another, everything would be different.