Chapter 2

The evening air blew gently through the opened doors of the run-down tavern, bringing with it the smell of looming rain mixed with the filth of the gutter that ran parallel to the building’s wall. It filled the barroom, a sad affair of rough sawn tables and chairs in varying states of disrepair, mixing with the sour tang of spilled beer and the scent of the meager fare that had gone unsold.

            The fetid breeze played at the wisps of curling hair that had escaped Loira Fald’s braid, pulling it to and fro across the width of her temple. She moved not a fraction to brush it back from encroaching on her furrowed bro, seemingly oblivious. She stood, feet apart and hands on hips, in a manner that was only threatening when one considered the roiling knots in her forearms and the twitching muscle in her jaw. Though she was the only woman in the room, standing a good head shorter than all others gathered, she commanded it with a natural authority that had pushed all the eyes of the surrounding men onto the rotting floorboards. Save for one who possessed the courage, or the folly, to meet her glare.

            “You were to leave with your charges an hour past, Faltus,” she stated, “and yet here you stand, well into what appears to be your third glass of horses’ piss. Is this what my coin has bought, not but the callow heart you inherited from your forefather?” 

            The man, garbed in travel-stained cloth, fingered the axe at his belt before responding in an accent foreign to the lands of Húr.

            “Faltus Ruthash, like his father before him, is no coward,” he proclaimed, anger and pride in his eyes, “five generations of the Ruthash family have plied this trade. We know best when to move and when not to. I will not have some northern woman dictate to me my own craft. Let alone the daughter of a crippled man and an aged-out whore.”

            “Easy Faltus,” warned the barkeep, halting in the polishing of a filthy glass.

            The two men flanking Loira stiffened, their shoulders squaring. Loira smiled a dangerous little smile, one rife with a reckless desperation. She walked towards the large man, her pale eyes never leaving the muddy brown of his own. The last few steps she took at great pace, a conscious effort taken so she could hold firm his wrist just as he made to levy his axe from its belt loop.

            “Oh, sweet Faltus,” she tutted, the humour in her voice at odds with the venom in her eye, “fifteen years of foreign invasion have turned most men to cripples and twice as many mothers and daughters to whores. You should count your stars lucky that it has or there would be no one willing to keep your bed warm, nor beggars’ cups for you to kick from destitute hands. But aye, callow you stand, there is nought to you but bitter impotence.”

            The man snarled at her, enraged less so by her words than the muffled laughter it drew from the barkeep. Ruthash stepped back, making way for what Loira already knew was to come. The broad plain of his palm came flying towards her, laden with heavy rings of cheap metal and poor stone.

It was almost too easy.

            Loira took a calculated step rearward, rocking on her heel as she watched Faltus’s weak attempt at assault sail past her. Fighting, in Loira’s opinion, was always best left to those who knew it in the calmness of their heart and not only when the fires of emotion called.

            She dropped to her knee just as the smuggler’s attempted strike sailed wide, unbalancing him. Seizing at the opportunity, she lunged for his waist with her hand, tearing his skirmisher’s axe from his belt loop. Hooking the beard of the axe behind his knee, she tore savagely towards and behind her. The man went down like a tree before the storm of Loira’s intent, bouncing his head off the floor boards with a sickening crack. His hand reached for her, and Loira grabbed it, smelling victory, though she felt no satisfaction in it. Her knee went from floor joist to neck joint, the man’s jawbone cutting against that of her shin. A silent growl spread across her lips as she gripped his forefinger in one of her calloused hands and his middle finger in her other, prying them slowly apart like a turkey’s wishbone. Faltus’s curses of outrage devolved into whimpers of pain as he found his other arm pinned beneath his body, a pleading sound that Loira took no pleasure in.

            “Quiet,” she commanded, eyes locked with her unwilling prisoner, “do not think yourself in a position of command within this tavern, nor even in the borders of this town. You are providing a service to a desperate people, should you attempt to leverage that for so much as a free pint I shall know and you will feel my displeasure. Understood?”

            Loira eased the pressure on Faltus’ neck, just enough for him to draw breath and nod with vigour. From the corner of her eye, she saw the barkeep laughing into a beer as he sipped from his own stock.

            “You find yourself plying your trade in Húr, Master Ruthash. Unlike in your southern home, you are smuggling refugees, not slaves or those being sold into it. We have the means of holding you accountable. You will be watched on your way north to those parts of Húr that still stand free. You shall feel the wrath of the fighting peoples of this nation should you deviate from your contract with us. Understood? Then rise.”

Loira let the smuggler stand, breathing mightily in his shame as he did so. She knew his type, a tribal man from the most southern deserts of Easaus, where the local culture held men of his skill and standing in high regard. Loira only saw him as a tool, one that now had acceptance in his eyes.

            “You are a strange woman, Loira Falds, to be given such respect in a roomful of men,” he drawled, in a tone that hinted at approval, “though me thinks perhaps you take it, instead of expecting as given. Queer folk, you northerners.”

            Before she had time to answer, old Seamus, the barkeep, interjected.

            “Our Loira’s seen more war and bloodshed than most men twice your age, southerner. Gave her youth to the Seekers Corps when Easaus invaded, did she. The respect she holds in these parts is freely given. Though she has more than the right to take it should fools fail to give it.”

            Seamus poured another pint of brown ale and placed it before the dejected-looking smuggler before continuing.

            “And as for her father and mother, well, ye best forget the titles you gave them. Roil Falds lost a leg saving my boy in the first year of this eternal war. His wife took to whoring to keep him alive, cuz that’s the only trade these oppressors and hard times left to her. He loves her all the more fiercely for it, though I hope those days are behind them. Pray southern-son, that you might live long enough to attain such strength and nobility as those whose names ye blacken with the honorifics of cripple and whore.”

            The smuggler merely swallowed his drink, though he had the decency to look ashamed.

            “You lead the refugees out of town an hour before the sun shines on the morrow,” stated Loira briskly, pushing past a burst of compassion that had bloomed in her chest at old Seamus’ honeyed words, “Ryt and Wiln here will keep an eye on you until then.”

            With that, Loira turned and departed the tavern, stepping into the overcast streets of Drystun Town, a place lost in the conquered southlands of Húr. Turning left, she walked towards the slum that sat in squalor at the town’s eastern edge, though it was hard to differentiate it from the rest of the squat wood and clay hovels that made up the once proud town. The slum, a product of the town’s partial sacking some years earlier, housed the fifty would-be refugees that Faltus was to smuggle north under the noses of Easausian patrols uncounted. Amongst those collected there were three, two parents and a son that she held most dear. Goodbye already burned hot at the corners of her eyes.

            Loira scratched at her thumb with her forefinger as she walked, pacing through the frigid mix of mud and shit, ignorant of the blood she dug up from the skin there. Thirty years of living, fifteen spent fighting, had seen a calloused mountain develop upon her thumb and soul both. It appeared all it would ever do was grow.

…

            Loira sat at a silent table, shovelling in the mean gruel that served as her family’s last supper together. There was not much to say. The plan was laid, and the coppers spent. There was naught left to do but wile away their remaining time together in quiet anticipation of the trials to come. Yet for all the preparation, all the planning and scheming, Loira almost hear her heart breaking when she looked at the worry on her mother’s face and the delicate façade of her father’s would-be comforting smile. It was the red-rimmed eyes of her Raul, her five-year-old son, that blew her soul asunder. Looking at him brought tears to her own eyes and invited doubt into her well-laid plans. How could she call herself mother when her decision only ever felt like abandonment? Why did the look of betrayal on Raul’s face bear such an uncanny resemblance to his father, dead in an Easausian prison years past?

            The cleaning up after their dinner was an equally silent affair, puncture by bracing pats and squeezes upon once-proud shoulders as they shared the weight of their looming separation, shuffling around the single room of the house. Loira had never thought she’d yearn for the dirt packed floor of the shanty, but the place seemed heavenly if only for the people huddled beneath the meager thatch of its roof. As the sun set and their single candle faded to a useless nub, they disappeared behind their respective curtains, their excuse for walls, and to thin cots. Loira did not sleep, though she was weary to the bone. Worry at the unknown gnawed at her insides, threatening to break loose and consume her. She hugged Raul to her chest the whole night through, breathing in the smell of his hair and praying to all her mother’s gods that the life she sought for him in the north would only ever be kind to him. She had duties to attend to, her parents and fate would care as best they could for Raul.

            The darkness in the home grew pale, as morning threatened the tranquil of the night. Loira rolled Raul onto the cot as she slid herself from the bed. This was to be goodbye, the only one she knew she’d be able to handle. She gazed upon him for a long moment, the best thing she’d ever done in the world. Quiet tears rolled down the precipice of her face as she turned for the door. She paused, gathering herself as she stood outside the doorway, and breathed in the would-be fresh air of the alleyway, soured by the smell of enforced poverty.

            “Daughter,” came a voice beside her.

            She spun in surprise, meeting the eyes of Roil Falds. How he had left the house without her noticing was beyond her, yet he stood there on his single leg appraising her with a look of such compassion and abject misery that it nearly drove her to her knees. He placed a hand on her shoulder.

            “Few fathers are blessed with a child that would give so much for so many,” he said, “to say you go with my love is not meaning enough. May a gentle sun shine down upon you in future fields of gold. Go now, while you still have the courage to leave us for what must be done.”

            They embraced for a long moment, and then Loira turned and walked off into the last hours of darkness night offered. Behind her she left a man weeping in loss and silent pride, a mother who ought to have been afforded all the kindness in the world, and a son who would likely never know his mother. Loira walked with dry eyes, dry by force of will. The future to which she went was no place for emotion.

            Seamus was standing outside the Tilted Goose, leaning against the greyed wooden wall, beneath the faded sign that squealed in protest of its hinges with every breath of wind. Loira could tell by the wrinkled brow of the barkeep, and the fury with which he struck the steel and flint into the hungry throat of his pipe, that something was amiss. Loira quickened her stride.

            “What is it? Has that sad excuse for a smuggler run off on us? I’ll flay him alive, I swear to the gods, if I have to say goodbye twice…”

            “It’s not him that’s got me smoking,” interjected Seamus, tugging at his pipe, “ye wouldn’t have seen them, not coming in from the east as ye did. A troop of those Easausian soldiers came through the south road about an hour past, about a dozen. The towns been put on lockdown, so they say, to ensure there be no rebellious souls hiding in our larders. An inspection, for our safety, they be calling it. On today of all days.”

END OF EXCERPT