On the trail again.

  Boots slick with muck, back slick with sweat, and the bastard sun making soup of my eyes. Elrik was behind me, breathing like a mule and dragging the pack we’d stuffed full with everything that didn’t scream when picked. Poor bastard had his coat half-unbuttoned and his boots squelching like he’d pissed himself—but he kept moving. He always kept moving.

  We were headed back over the line. Back across the Gustavian border.

  Dusk falling fast now, and the air starting to cool in that sour way it does before a storm. We hadn’t spoken in an hour. No need. You don’t jabber when every branch might carry a voice that doesn’t belong, and every wrong step could get you an acorn sized hole in the spine. The Gustavians were known for their aim, damn them to God.

  Elrik was still mourning Henrich, though he wouldn’t say it out loud. You could see it in the way he walked—like he was dragging two packs instead of one. Poor lad had liked the boy. Took to him like a little brother. I didn’t have the heart to scold him for it, but I also didn’t share it.

  Henrich was dead the moment he came over the border with us. He knew it. We all knew it. That’s the tax you pay to learn what’s on the other side of the fence. He paid in full, and messily. That’s all there is to it.

  Nice enough boy. Good aim. Walked like a drunken mule.

  Still dead.

  We were trespassers. Poachers. And Gustavian law’s clear on that: you cross, you die.

  Simple. Stupid. Fair enough.

  But I’ll be damned if I leave a harvest like this rotting on holy dirt. They can keep their saints and sermons—I’ll take the dirt and the moss. The rest is just window dressing.

  We’d reached the edge of the cedar break, and past that, the marsh—flat and green-brown, still and steaming under the last slant of daylight. This was borderland proper. Our side again, by half a mile and a few hundred regrets.I dropped the pack with a grunt and rolled my shoulders 'til they cracked. Elrik followed suit, slumping down onto a flat rock and pulling off one boot to pour out whatever swamp god we’d pissed off today.

  He fished into his sack, rummaged for a minute, and then pulled out the prize.

  A root. Thick, veined like a muscle, wriggling slow in the air like it hadn’t yet figured out it’d been dug up. No sound, no hiss—but the moment I looked at it, I felt a tingle behind my eyes, like someone whispering secrets to the inside of my skull.

  Elrik held it a moment, then pressed it gently against his brow.

  His whole body eased.

  The sweat on his skin dulled. His shoulders straightened. He exhaled slow, like a man stepping into warm water. And for a blink, he looked five years younger.

  “Aye,” he murmured. “I see why the Barons pay mountains for these miracles.”

  “Indeed,” I said, stretching out my legs. “If only they paid us.”—black trees, low shadows, and a sweet smell akin to rotting meat baked with honey.

  We made the bordertown by midmorning two days later. A scatter of hamlets, some fenced, most not. Sooty chimneys. Fields gone to seed. The largest poaching ring east of Hasholm, dressed up like a dying farming collective.

  Inside the main hall—if you could still call it a hall, let alone main—the air was wet and sour. The place hadn’t served a hot meal in ten years, and smelled like the last one had died screaming. And, not a face in sight that looked like it came here by choice.

  Off in the corner, under a rotting beam, sat a native woman with a child wrapped up wrong. She met no one's eyes.

  Skin like sausage left too long in the sun. Eyes too wide, lips too thin. The all toghether unsettling visage the original people of this land bore: Almost human, but all together more animal.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  And the child—Prophet help me—the child looked like a lamb someone had tried to teach to sit upright. It whimpered once, wet and high, like a piglet half-cut.

  Elrik leaned toward me, quiet. “Where’s the rest of her clan, you think?”

  I shrugged. “Gone. Dead. Doesn’t matter.”

  He watched the child. “That one’s sick.”

  “Dying,” I said. “Natives leave the weak. Always have. That one’s got two days left, maybe. Doesn’t look like the mother gives a damn either. Dozing off like she’s sunbathing.”

  Elrik frowned. “Or maybe she’s been walking for three nights straight.”

  I snorted. “Maybe. Or maybe she’s just another slack-jawed breeder waiting for someone else to carry the load.”

  He didn’t like that. “They didn’t lose the land easy,” he muttered.

  I glanced at him. “No?”

  “No.” He looked back at his drink. “We just burned it faster.”

  I didn’t reply. Just spat on the floor. Something crawled under the table and didn’t come back out.

  Elrik wouldn’t look. I stared too long, just to keep the balance.

  The quartermaster was still perched behind the slate, rat-quiet and ledger-proud, dressed like a man who still believed he served something noble. Blue Gustavian wool with salt stains down the sleeves. Gold thread fraying at the cuffs. His face was liverish and pale, like something pressed flat in a book.

  I dropped the packs. He didn’t rise. Just reached for his knife—worn ivory handle, too clean to be honest—and split the root like he was gutting a fish. He sniffed it, touched the pulp to his tongue, and made a noise in his throat like a man who’d tasted shit but didn’t mind the vintage.

  Then came the coins. Three, maybe four. Dropped in a tin like he was flicking crumbs to a stray.

  “That’s it?” Elrik asked, voice tight.

  The man didn’t look up. “Demand’s not what it was,” he muttered, already writing. “Buyers from the Old World haven’t sent ships in weeks. No letters. No bids. This root’s worth its weight in sermon, not silver.”

  “Sermon doesn’t feed us,” I said.

  He scratched another line in his ledger. “Try prayer, then. Or don’t. Just try not to get hanged, aye?”

  I took the coin. Didn’t count it.

  “Here’s a prayer,” I said, loud enough for him to pause. “Let me know how sermon tastes when your ribs start showing.”

  We left the packs behind. No one said thank you.

  We found a table near the back, where the stink was bearable and the stools still held weight. I slammed my arse down and the whole thing creaked like it owed me money. Elrik sat quieter, kept glancing toward the counter like maybe they’d come back with a real payment, or a sorry. Foolish hope.

  “What a fucking joke,” I spat. “Weeks in the brush, half-starved, pissing swampwater, dodging Gustavian hounds and roots that hum nightmares—and for what? Enough coin to wipe our arses with. If that.”

  Elrik rubbed his brow, still looking dazed from the root. “They said the Old World’s gone quiet. No ships. No buyers.”

  “Aye, and next they’ll say the sea’s dry and the sky turned to ash. Always an excuse, never a wage. We do their dirty work and they give us pocket lint and a warning. ‘Try not to get hanged,’ the bastard says—I'd like to see him try not to shit himself out in the cedars.”

  Elrik didn’t laugh. Just stared at the mug he’d bought with his last earnings. Weak beer. Looked like bathwater.

  "I had hopes for Henrich," he murmured. His gaze was still fixed on his cup, like the answer might be floating somewhere in the head.

  I scraped my nails across the grain of the table. “And I had hopes for clean latrines and warm boots. Life’s full of disappointments.”

  He didn’t rise to it. Just took a slow sip of the stale vinegar they called beer.

  “Just thought… maybe he’d stick. Didn’t seem like the dying type.”

  “No one ever does,” I said. “But the wind don’t ask your permission when it wants your lungs. He crossed the line with us. That was the dying. The bleeding after was just noise.”

  Elrik ran a hand through his greying hair, looked even older than his age. “Still feels wrong.”

  “Of course it feels wrong,” I spat. “You think there’s a right way to die out here? A proper ceremony with candles and wives weeping into linen? That’s the Old World’s fantasy. Out here you die in the dirt, and if you're lucky, someone remembers to take your boots."

  For a moment, only the wailing of a child that should never have been, was tainting the air. Elrik never shifted his eyes. He stood without a word.

  He crossed the room slow, careful not to look too long, and reached into his coat. A heel of bread—hard, but clean. He set it down beside the woman without a glance and turned back just as silent.

  Didn’t say why, but the motive was clear; Weakness. The same weakness that brought a greenhorn to heel by the wind.

  I didn’t speak either. Just watched the bread sit there, untouched, like a kindness she’d already learned not to trust.

  He sat down. I glared. He took the point, not that he cared.

  “So what now?” he asked, nearly begging to change the subject. I hit a chord, i reckon.

  I leaned back, spit on the floor.

  “If the hunt’s gone sour here, we move. South maybe. There’s whispers of anomalies near the sinklands. Dangerous, but fresh. Or north—deeper into Gustavian ground. Rich pickings if we don't end up flayed and hung from a tree.”

  “Thought you said you'd never poach north again.”

  “I say a lot of things,” I grunted. “And I ain’t dead yet.”

  Elrik nodded slow. “Erden’s Edge, then. Better than waiting around to starve.”

  I grunted approval, then waved the barkeep for another round. No use mourning a dry well. There’s always another hole to crawl into. Just hope the rats aren’t bigger than you.