Chapter 35: The idiot’s here
They came.
By the third day, when Jin was getting tired of waiting, they finally arrived.
The merchants arrived first, hard-riding men with ink-stained fingers and lists of losses they could recite from memory.
Then the village heads, weathered and disbelieving, came to look for a season’s carvings, a boat’s worth of cured fish, a bride-price that had vanished southward in spring. They climbed into the yard braced for a trap or a tax, and instead found their goods laid out in ordered rows with a Gannon knight standing guard, and a young noble at a table with the manifests, checking claims against paper.
By the fourth day, the disbelief had changed into something Jin found harder to sit under.
"My lord." A boatwright from the river villages, holding his recovered tools like children. "The winter. You’ve handed us back the winter. If there’s ever a thing the river folk can do-"
"Sign the receipt," Jin said, pushing the paper across. "And when men ask you what happened here - tell them exactly what happened, and who paid for it. That’s the whole fee."
Not all of it was goods.
On the second day, a grey-haired fisherwife climbed the whole switchback on foot, stood at the table, and asked, in a voice held together with wire, not about cargo but about her son - a carter, taken with his caravan in the spring.
Jin sent for the freed prisoners, and the old carter with the badly-set arm came out of the barracks, and stopped, and the two of them stood in the middle of the yard holding each other up while fifty strangers found urgent business to look at elsewhere.
Jin looked back down at his manifests and discovered the ink had gone blurry.
’Encrid’s tear ducts,’ he decided, blinking hard. ’It seems drinking so much has made them defective.’
Between claimants, he ran his new kingdom of thieves.
He had thought hard about the bandits. Thirty-seven men were a rope problem or a resource, and Jin had never in either life been rich enough to waste a resource.
"Here’s the arrangement," he’d told the roped rows on the first evening, walking the line with Volk beside him.
"The gallows is what the law owes you, and nobody here would blink to have you all killed."
He made sure they understood that.
"Instead - you work. You carry, cook, haul, and repair, you follow my knights’ orders, and you keep breathing. Any man who runs -" he gestured pleasantly at Sir Gareth "- gets to find out how the white griffins can track. Any man who works has a bed, bread, and a neck. Choose by morning."
The bandits hated him.
He could feel it off them like heat - hate for the ropes they were bound in, for the lost fortress, for the leash.
Jin, however, didn’t mind at all.
Hatred was honest, and honesty was workable - he would use them until they were useful.
He also learned about them as he worked. Some among them, even with low martial levels, were worth the notice.
Merta, the quartermaster. She was a sharp-faced woman of forty who had kept the fencing accounts, argued the value of everything down to the nail, and guarded the food stores against her own crewmates with a ladle like a mace.
Tobb, a mountain of a man, simple and placid, who had wept - actually wept - when the prisoners came up out of the cellar, and had spent every hour since carrying firewood to their fires unasked.
Fennick, a whip-thin scout with restless eyes who noticed everything and had already tested the perimeter twice, as if he was weighing if he could make it for a run.
And Volk. Who watched Jin work through the manifests hour after hour, and finally, on the fourth evening, spoke without being spoken to.
"You’re not what they said you’d be."
"No," Jin agreed, not looking up. "I get that a lot lately."
"Rodric’s coming, you know. Word will have reached the keep by now. He can’t let this stand - his name’s in that ledger."
"Volk." Jin set down the quill and smiled, and Volk, a man who had ambushed caravans for a living, looked into that smile and understood suddenly that he had spent his career as an amateur.
"Why do you think I sent the letters?"
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The boy ate.
That was the report, morning and evening, from Gus - who had appointed himself to the task without being asked and performed it with grave dedication.
Gus seemed to have been affected by what he had seen back in the prison cell, or he might just be seeing himself in the strange child, who wouldn’t come to the fires and wouldn’t speak.
The boy had claimed a corner of the yard with his back to stone, and he ate what Gus brought, and he watched everything with those eyes.
And once - just once, on the fourth day - Jin had looked over and seen him standing, feet apart, holding the cloth-bound sword held out before him in both small hands.
Not unwrapped and not drawn. Just held level, and utterly still, for a very long time, while his starved arms shook.
’Training,’ Jin realized, with a chill that had nothing to do with the north.
[ Quest Progress: The boy survives. ]
[ Hidden Objective: ▮▮ 1% ▮▮ ]
’One percent of what?’ Jin asked the system.
The system, as usual, said nothing.
[ Narrative Relevance: calculating ]
The notification had taken to appearing in the corner of his vision at odd hours now, without numbers, like a plant he was watering. Jin had decided not to look at it directly in case it got shy.
On the fifth morning, Fennick came down from the watchtower at a run.
"Riders on the ridge road. Twenty horses under a red banner. I think it’s the Maren."
Jin stood, straightened his coat, and looked around the yard - at the merchants and the guild men, the village heads, the boatwrights, and at the freshly arrived party from House Cavel, whose lean young leader was even now dismounting with a book under his arm.
"Perfect timing," Jin said. "Places, everyone. The idiot’s here."
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