Chapter 14: Work with what you have
Jin dismounted.
That was the plan, at least.
What actually happened was that his right leg refused to cooperate with the left, and the combined result was that he more or less succumbed to gravity and slid himself off the saddle sideways, leaning heavily against the grey horse’s flank for a moment, both arms braced, letting the animal take his weight while his legs remembered what they were for.
Thank god it was a trained Gannon house steed. Any other horse would have taken off in distress.
The four knights behind him said nothing as they watched.
Jin straightened, let go of the horse, and walked to the edge of the creek like nothing had happened.
He crouched and elapsed water to his face. It was very cold - as expected of the north.
He stayed like that for a moment, letting the cold do its work.
Then he stood up and turned around.
The four knights had dismounted with the kind of clean, practiced ease that made it look effortless. Armor settling, boots on the ground, reins passed - all of it in one fluid sequence that required no thought whatsoever.
Gus had also perfectly dismounted and was now moving toward him quietly with a cloth.
That seemed to piss Jin off for some reason.
He didn’t show it, of course.
"Thank you," he said, taking the cloth.
Gus just stared at him as if he had heard something wrong.
Jin dried his face and looked out at the road ahead while the knights watered the horses and the pack animal.
The Gannon house had long disappeared behind them, and right now only the flat, pale sky could be seen.
’Twelve days,’ he thought. ’Fuck!’
He sat down on a flat rock near the bank.
"Do you know the route we’re taking?" he asked.
Gus nodded. "Yes, young master. We’ll be passing through two houses before we reach the Wall. Both are bannermen under the Gannons."
The Gannons owned the North.
That wasn’t a figure of speech. Some people went as far as to say that not a single blade of grass moved in the North without the permission of Duke Aegis Von Gannon.
"The first is House Cavel," Gus continued. "Maybe four days north. The town sits on the main road - we’d have to pass through it."
"And the second?"
"House Maren. They hold the eastern ridge. The road passes close to their boundary - we won’t go through the town, but the terrain runs along their land for most of a day."
Jin filed both names carefully.
"What do they know about me?" he asked.
Gus was quiet for a moment, and Jin got his answer.
He looked at the water. The creek was moving steadily over the dark stones, indifferent to everything.
Jin looked at the sky and sighed internally.
The days were shorter than he’d imagined, which meant that they had to cover as much distance as possible when the sun was still up, which in turn meant more time on the saddle and more misery to his ass.
’God save my arse!’
He prayed.
"The path until House Cavel is passable," a voice said. "There’s a stretch past the second ridge where the trail narrows and the footing gets loose, but it’s manageable on horseback. I used to run supply escorts on this road twice a year."
Jin turned.
One of the knights had drifted within speaking range while pretending to check his saddle strap. He had the bearing of someone who had decided the conversation might be relevant to his professional interests and had moved toward it on that basis.
"You are?" Jin said.
The knight looked slightly taken aback. Something in his ego took a minor hit, but he swallowed it with the efficiency of a professional.
"Harun, young master."
"I’m not good at remembering names," Jin said plainly. "So don’t take it personally. It’s useful to have someone who knows the road."
Harun looked at Jin strangely. The exact expression on his face was bewilderment.
It seemed like he hadn’t expected such a mature response from the deadbeat young master.
’Did he eat something wrong?’ Harun thought, and went back to his horse.
✧ ✧ ✧
It had been two days since they left the Gannon estate.
Jin’s thighs had stopped aching on the second day, which he understood was not because they had adapted to riding but because they had simply gone numb and given up protesting. He’d decided to accept this as progress.
Since there wasn’t much else to do on horseback for eight hours a day except think, Jin used the time to think.
He had a great deal to think about after all.
He had bought the list he’d written in Encird’s room. He reviewed it mentally over and over again during the trial.
The Eight Stars and the Seven Sins. He knew roughly where some of them should be at this point in the timeline.
Piecing together what the novel had mentioned about their origins, their first appearances, the scattered background details that had seemed like flavor text when he was reading and had now become the most important information he possessed.
There were three names connected to the Wall.
The first was the Mercenary King. In the novel, his early reputation had been built on the Wall, and it was not through noble connections or inheritance but through raw, undeniable capability and the specific kind of character that made people want to follow him.
The second was Yggdrasil’s Shadow - someone who existed within the Great Green Forest itself.
The third was the Sin of Wrath. Jin knew almost nothing about them except that they were connected to the Wall’s eventual fall and that their involvement had come without warning in the novel’s timeline. The author had revealed very little about their origins.
He set two of those three aside for now.
The Mercenary King was the priority.
Not because of his individual strength - though that was real and significant. What made Rael exceptional wasn’t power.
It was people.
The novel’s Mercenary King had unified every sellsword and hired blade under the Astralis Empire under a single guild, commanded tens of thousands at his peak, and had reached a point where even high nobles addressed him with careful respect.
His strength was leverage. His leverage was loyalty.
His loyalty had been built from the kind of life that survived entirely on their own terms.
Jin didn’t know exactly where he was right now.
But the novel said that he’d grown up at the Wall and that was his destination.
When he got there, he was going to start looking for him.
That was the plan.
’Work with what you have,’ he thought.
It wasn’t much that he had. But it was something.
He shifted his weight in the saddle, immediately regretted it, and looked at the horizon.
Two more days to House Cavel.
✦ ✦ ✦