We rounded the corner, and I did, in fact, see. Someone had erected a platform in front of the garrison. At least three dozen human forms, bound at the hands and feet, swayed by rope around their necks from the crossbeam above.

  “You see,” the mayor explained. “It seems our neighbors appreciated the Kharkan soldiers even less than we did. When you arrived, we were getting ready to cut them down and burn them now that they’ve started to turn.”

  I noticed a handful were noticeably less discolored. “Were those caught later, then?”

  The mayor’s face soured and he shook his head. “Just two. The others were, depending on how you want to label them, collaborators. They were the ones that alerted the Kharkans to the iron. Sadly, we didn’t catch them all, but you never know, we might get more yet.”

  Aoife didn’t seem bothered as we passed by the line of corpses. “I was told there were fifty. How many did you catch, total?”

  “Not counting the collaborators, forty swing by the rope. Two, well, there wasn’t quite enough of them left to bring back by the tell of it. That leaves eight unaccounted for.”

  I cleared my throat. “Two. We ran into a patrol shortly before arriving the first time and disposed of them.”

  Albert’s face lit up and he cast a wide smile at Aoife. “Well, there you have it. Just the two then.”

  Aoife glanced back at the burnt edges of the hole that was the garrison’s gate as we passed through. “Your neighbor’s response seems unusually well coordinated, Mayor Adermann.”

  In reply, the mayor shrugged before offering the sort of smile I’d seen on every E-4’s face when they’d been caught dead to rights and were about to deny ever being remotely involved anyway. “I think the word you were looking for is coincidental.”

  Aoife’s brow came down. “Certainly that, too. Either way, lead on Mayor. We can come back to that later.”

  All too happy to move on, the Mayor happily nodded and began talking us through the buildings as we passed by. All in all, we spent maybe another thirty minutes walking around and through the handful of buildings inside the garrison wall. Two buildings were dedicated as barracks, a third for the commander. The place had small workshops for a smithy, a leatherworker, and a bowyer. Aside from another building that served as a combination of granary, long-term food storage, cook house, and eating space, there was a fairly small stable off to the side that handled horses for the commander, messengers, and a handful of draft horses.

  “These workshops, did the garrison staff them themselves?” Aoife asked the mayor at the end of the tour.

  “No, Harvester. It irked the Captain to depend on local labor, but he didn’t have the influence to have tradesmen sent out here.”

  “I see.” Aoife’s attention drifted to me for a moment, but despite the suspicion playing across her face, she said nothing.

  “I hope you can find use of the place, Harvester. The staff were unharmed, so when you take possession, they can be of immediate service.”

  Aoife glanced around one more time. “We’ll see.”

  “Is something amiss?” Mayor Adermann inquired, looking somewhat worried.

  “Nothing that can’t be addressed at a later time, no. It’s been a long walk here; is there some place Mr. Byrne and I can sit down and have a drink?”

  “Ah, yes,” the Mayor noted. “I sent word ahead earlier. They should be ready by now. If you would?”

  I kept my mouth shut while we followed the Mayor out of the garrison and turned toward a familiar building, the one we’d presumed was a warehouse and had Millwall wait outside during our first visit.

  As we crossed the street, a heavy thump behind us earned a quick glance back. Several men were starting to cut the corpses down. Wonder how far out they’ll take them before burning them.

  Turning my attention back toward our apparent destination, I caught a momentary glimpse of something much further down a side street, close to the center of town if my guess was correct. At first, all my brain registered was blackened metal and wood. By the time we walked up to the warehouse, I had a list of things I knew it wasn’t, but that’s largely it.

  “Head on in. Irrik will take care of you. I’ll check back in a while to see if you need anything,” the mayor told us as he motioned to the door.

  Stepping inside, two things became immediately apparent. One, it was hot as hell inside. Two, the clientele weren’t terribly pleased to see us. By that, I mean as the first person through the door, I was immediately mean-mugged by every patron who heard the door open. Imagine being a svelte skinny-jeans wearing, manbun-clad young political science major from Portland walking into a bar full of one-percenter bikers. That’s basically what it felt like for the first two seconds as every sweaty, scruffy, and scarred face swiveled toward the noise. And then I knew precisely the moment Aoife entered behind me because they all collectively looked anywhere but at us, as if they’d all just checked their watches and found out it was fuck-this-shit o-clock.

  “Way too many people in here,” I muttered to Aoife as we approached the bar.

  The bartender, who had his back mostly to us, pulled a wooden case of something off the shelf he’d been stretching to reach, and pivoted immediately to stuff it under the bar. A few seconds later a hand popped up, depositing first a bowl thinly populated with some sort of roast nut and a few seconds later a pair of glasses filled with what I assumed was water.

  “Oi, sorry ‘bout the ‘eat,” the bartender rasped from out of sight amidst the clinking of glass against glass and wood. “I wuz told them bodies ‘ed be down by now, but they ain’t.”

  Looking at the liquid in the glasses, I realized it wasn’t quite clear, but ever faintly yellow. The longer I looked, the more certain I became that whatever filled them would make American beer look like high class Euro craft beers, the sort you only see come out for things like Oktoberfest when someone wants to brag.

  I cast a glance at Aoife who merely shrugged. Well, if you’re fine with this then I won’t complain.

  Just as I started to reach for the glasses, the bartender muttered, “Oi, clear off, I got—”

  The man’s words jerked to a sudden halt as he stood, his face transitioning just as quickly from irritation to surprise. “—two. Guests. Comin’. Bugger all, I suppose that’s you.”

  Aoife grinned as she nodded and leaned up against the bar. “Last time I was here at the Green, I had some particularly good mead. You wouldn’t happen to have any available, would you?”

  The man blinked for a moment before managing to engage his mental clutch and get it in gear. “When were you here last?”

  “A little over fifty years ago.”

  It took me a moment to realize that not only had she been speaking the local language, but her accent roughly matched his.

  The bartender’s eyes drifted in my direction.

  I smiled politely. “Never been, myself. Just heard the mead here was decent.”

  “Well, Miss,” the man said somberly. “My da, Aeric, passed on year before last; that business with the Kharkans, you see. It would’ve been his recipe you had, his or my grandda’s. I’d like to think he taught me well, but I guess you’ll know here in a bit.”

  With that, the man took a step back, pushed aside the hanging divider in the doorway behind him and yelled, “Rik, get the mead. No, not the shite in the cellar, the good mead.”

  I’d barely heard the voice respond over the crowd the first time, but the second time was clearer. “In the shed, innit?”

  “Aye, the bales. Stop your yawpin’ and hop to it.”

  When the bartender turned about, I offered my hand. “Irrik, I presume? I’m Samuel Byrne and this is my good friend, Aoife.”

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  The man finally smiled as he shook my hand. “Aye, that’d be me, Irrik Ericson. Sorry ‘bout the wait, it’ll take me boy a wee bit to fish it out for you.”

  I chuckled. “Where I come from, it’s every man’s duty to avoid paying a single cent more in taxes than can be proven owed.”

  When Irrik joined in, I realized his reaction was far more honest than the initial smile. “Quite so.”

  “If you don’t mind, Irrik,” Aoife casually asked as she slid several silver coins and a single gold one across the bar to him, “What happened with your father?”

  “Oh, you know how it goes with the Kharkans. They wanted to take his pub to make room for their fancy lordling’s new hovel. He didn’t think that was a good idea, so they split his head with an axe and burnt the place down. Made me and ma watch.”

  “Would this lordling be the guy I shot in the throat a few days back?” I asked.

  Irrik squinted at me and just as I realized he was one of the men that had accompanied the mayor that fateful night, he reached out and pushed the gold coin back at us with a finger. “Aye, that’d be the cunt. Bastard could’ve stood to suffer a bit more, but I’m not about to ask anyone to dig him up for a second go. That’s blood payment from the Erickson clan. If’n you need something a bit more tangible, some helpin’ hands or the like, feel free to ask. We aren’t shy when it comes to debts, nor stingy with friends who help the family like that.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” I replied with a courteous nod. I cast a glance at Aoife just as she spoke.

  “That’s a shame. Your father was a bright young man. He clearly took after his father, as you do yours.”

  She started to say more when a teenaged boy emerged through the curtain carrying a decent-sized dark bottle.

  Irrik smiled and gestured to the young man that was clearly his son. “Rik here will show you to your table.”

  We followed Rik up a set of stairs I’d missed in the crowd to an open second floor overlooking everything. As expected, things got even warmer as we went up.

  “Don’t worry about the heat,” Rik stated. “Now that they’re taking the bodies down, I’m going to open a few windows on the far side, it’ll cool off fairly quickly. With some luck, the wind won’t change direction.”

  “This used to be a warehouse?” I asked as Rik pulled back a chair for Aoife.

  “Aye. If’n I recall properly, it’s been in the family a good long while. Back when travelling merchants still came through on the regular, we aged a lot of our drink here. Mead, beer, even distilled spirits if you can believe. Not much call for that anymore, though. So, we’ve got a stew on the fire right now, but we’ve some beef that should be coming out of the smoke shed any minute now. Any preference?”

  I eyed Aoife, who nodded. “The stew is fine but do spare a cut of the beef if you can. If you have clean water, that’ll do. Otherwise, decent ale.”

  When Rik’s attention shifted to me, I nodded. “Same.”

  I shrugged off my pack and settled into my chair while the young man went about opening the promised windows. Neither of us spoke until he’d gone back downstairs.

  “So, thoughts?” Aoife asked.

  After checking the stairs behind us one more time, I answered, “Something is seriously fucky about this place.”

  “How so?”

  I frowned and shifted in my seat. “It’s not like I grew up out here, so maybe I’m wrong, but everything feels slightly too off. Too conveniently explained.”

  Aoife grinned. “I believe the word you were looking for was coincidental, Sam.”

  I snorted. “That too. Look, this place was empty when I was here the first time. Bars don’t tend to be closed at that hour where I come from. Also, I’ve seen a lot more military aged men in the last hour than I would expect. Also, isn’t it a little bit odd for the garrison to have workshops for all those trades?”

  “How so?” Aoife asked with a raised eyebrow.

  “Well, those trades would be useful out here, so where’s the shops for them? If there aren’t any shops, then the garrison workshop would have to be a full-time job, but I can’t see that being the case for all the trades considering only fifty men at arms were stationed there. There’s only so much work to be done, and it’s all with local labor, right? So yeah, where’s their shop out here? Who are they selling to? Just doesn’t add up.”

  Aoife merely smiled. “And the mayor?”

  I shook my head. “I like the guy, but I don’t trust him. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think he’s a bad person, per se, but he’s playing his cards awfully close to his chest.”

  “That he is,” Aoife agreed and turned her attention behind me. Footsteps reached my ears a moment later.

  Rik appeared at the top of the stairs carrying a tray full of various things including a pair of steaming bowls. After setting the tray on the table behind me, he started transferring things over to ours.

  “Okay, so here’s today’s stew. The meat is beef cut yesterday, rounded out with potatoes and carrots. Plenty of onion, too. Still pretty hot, so be careful. Oh, the other stuff just came out of the smoker, so I’ll bring up a plate here in a bit. A pitcher of our ale, some cups to go with that.”

  I ran my thumb across the edge of the bowl, wiping up a little of the stew that had dripped on the side when he sat in front of me and stuck it in my mouth. I savored the flavor, which reminded me very much of mom’s beef stew from back home. It also sparked a random thought that tumbled into a few facts I vaguely remembered about how things were done at this tech level in the real world.

  Once he finished setting dishes down and asked if we had any questions, I spoke up. “Yeah, where do you get your salt?”

  His deer-in-the-headlights reaction lasted only a single instant. “Is there something wrong with the stew?”

  I held up a hand over the bowl. “No, it’s perfect from what I can tell. Where I come from, salt isn’t cheap, and by not cheap I mean soldiers were paid in salt at one point in time. Considering this is well-seasoned and we’re not remotely near any coastline, I’m just curious where you guys get your salt.”

  “Oh, I don’t really know. Sorry,” Rik stammered before retreating back down the stairs.

  “Good catch,” Aoife noted while filling both our cups with ale from the pitcher.

  I accepted the cup when she offered. “So, where do you think they get it?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine, but I’m thinking we’ll know soon enough.”

  I took a sip and decided ale really wasn’t my thing, or at the very least this ale wasn’t. “You know, it’d suck if we’d walked into a trap.”

  Aoife shrugged and tasted her ale. She frowned at it and then her eyes came up to me. “For them, mostly. That stairwell limits how many can get up here at once. I could probably hold them off myself if need be. These windows make for an easy way out otherwise. Either way, let’s enjoy the meal.”

  We ate in silence, listening to the crowd below us as they nattered on about a litany of topics, though the number of voices involved made tracking any given conversation for more than a few seconds difficult. As expected, the stew was amazing, as was the beef that came up a short while later, which turned out to be something very close to what we called burnt ends back home.

  All in all, by the time things suddenly quieted down downstairs I was pretty satisfied with our dining experience. It wasn’t quite restaurant-grade like I’d expect back home, but in many ways it did remind me of home in ways I didn’t realize I missed.

  Based on the sudden hush, I wasn’t remotely surprised when the mayor came up the stairs. I’d already moved my pack and sat beside Aoife by the time I heard the first footsteps.

  Albert eyed the untouched bottle of mead before sitting in the chair I’d left pulled out. Unlike earlier, his expression spoke of deep weariness. “I hope our hospitality meets expectations.”

  “The cook is quite skilled.” Aoife said with a nod. Just as the mayor began to relax, she added, “But I think it’s time we speak plainly. Subterfuge is unbecoming between allies.”

  When the mayor tensed, she added, “Not that we’ve given you much reason to suspect we are, in fact, allies, mind you.”

  Albert’s chair creaked as he shifted uncomfortably. “You understand, then?”

  “I do, to an extent. That said, my patience has limits, as does that of the Lady of the Glade. This negotiation is yours to lose, Albert, and by what I’ve seen, you have quite a bit to lose.”

  The mayor’s expression soured, and Aoife made a point of filling both cups with what was left in the pitcher.

  She nodded to the cup she slid over. “Be that as it may, you also have quite a bit to gain, as do we. Personally, I’ve trained to kill humans most of my life. Your blood spills just the same as theirs, but given a choice, I’d prefer Kharkan blood over yours.”

  Albert hesitated before reaching for his cup. “Why’s that?”

  “Because while your kind turned on us after we ground ourselves to dust fighting the Infested, the people of the Green, in specific, did not. Your parents, or at least some portion of the Green’s parents at any rate, chose to stand beside us. The Kharkans, on the other hand, waited until we were too weak to fight back and struck like the scavengers they are. Were it up to me, I’d see their cities razed to ash, their citizens put to the sword, and their king fed to dogs. Still, that’s not the question we’re here to decide.

  “You have at least two hundred men here when you told Sam you could muster less than half that. By the smell, I’d wager you have closer to three hundred, just not all in the Green itself. You have siege equipment, ballista at the very least, when a village this size should barely be able to muster a company of swordsmen and archers. You managed to interdict nearly all of a fleeing cohort of broken infantry with remarkably little notice, at night. Simply put, you are far more than you should be, so I’ll ask just the once, who exactly is the Green? With whom do they stand?”

  The mayor looked down at the cup in his hands for several long seconds before lifting it to his lips.

  When he sat it down the weariness in his eyes had been tempered with something stronger, something abiding that added gravitas to his expression. “The answer to the first question is not quite that simple. You’d be better off asking who we became after the Winnowing. A goodly number of the Green swore service to the Acadian lords beforehand, and when ruin came to our nation, we welcomed many survivors. They brought friends, countrymen, and even refugees from afar as news of the devastation spread, or at least that’s what I remember. I was but a boy, then, and my father served Lord Hemmit as huntsman.

  “In truth, many of the countrymen we welcomed were soldiers from units that had not managed to muster before the Infested swept everyone aside. They fled, as did so many mercenaries and other survivors, to the Green because of our proximity to the Glade, all in the hope that if someone could stop the Infested, it would be you, and if any could help, it would be them.”

  Albert’s eyes fell to the cup. “I remember that night. You could see the fires from here, and the smoke—Gods, the smoke choked everything for days. But, you asked who the Green is, and I can tell you we are the men and women who came to your aid too late. We are those who saw the skies darken with ash and saw the shape of the world to come should our friends have failed. We are those who decided it wiser for the wolves to don the guise of sheep than be caught unprepared by bigger beasts. That Samuel’s hand lifted the yoke a matter of hours before we would have lifted it ourselves is merely coincidence.”

  Albert drained the cup and placed it on the table calmly. “As for your second question, we’d prefer to stand alongside you once again, but all things considered, we already chose to die with our boots on, come what may. You won’t find us lacking in courage.”