My view from the parapet had changed many times in recent days.

  Once, I stared unto an enemy. Disciplined ranks with roaring cannon, poised to strike the moment their courage failed or their orders cleared.

  Then, I stared at calamity. Putrid darkness itself—some ancient hatred pulled from the marrow of the earth—so deep it devoured even our own quarrels, forcing us into one trembling shape of survival.

  Now, I scan the marsh, and I see light.

  Trenches and palisades stretch into every diggable nook and cranny, North to South. Fires stitch the ground with a crude constellation, making this wet shithole almost resemble a city from the Old World. One might—at a lazy glance—mistake the glow for streets, chimneys, and markets instead of entrenchments, cannons, and firepits.

  Unless one looked too close.

  First thing one would see is the rotting flesh-pile—some horrid interpretation of man—rising several man-lengths high, sagging already, collapsing into its own bones, dripping fat and ruin into the mud below.

  That would snap any man out of the comfort of civilization.

  I stared a moment longer. Dug up a memory—a tactical consideration I had weighed more than once in the quiet stretches of monotony before calamity took its due.

  Then I pointed, trusting Jensson’s gaze would follow the line of my finger.

  “You see there?” I said. My tone stayed calm. No need to powder it with the musk of command.

  “Your firing range. Your cannons laid that hill bare with shot, mortar, and grape.”

  Just naming it set the echo ringing through my skull—the phantom crack of powder, the hollow thunder that had haunted our days.

  “You fired practically every day in the weeks before the attack. Some of my men lost their nerves completely by it, you know?”

  I didn’t look at him. My eyes kept to the cratered hill across the river, a torn thing, pocked like diseased skin.

  A slow, measured breath behind me signaled a response forming.

  “That was the intention. At least a part of it.”

  His Gustavian certainty sharpened when he touched military matters—his natural language, it seemed.

  “I would assume you also see the value of drilling your men for combat.”

  “The fact is, we saw it as a preventative measure. Cannon and powder were never in short supply, but we lacked the means of attack—and of proper defence.”

  I looked back at him then. He stared at the same hill, measuring it as I once had.

  “Your fortress has always seemed impenetrable,” he continued. “A single bridge. Marshland. Stoneworks angled for cannon and shot all along the approach? By God, Edelmer, you could have ended us with a single barrage.”

  I studied his features. Nothing shifted. He wasn’t pleading, nor accusing. He was naming facts as one names stones in a road.

  “The shots were training,” he said, “and a cover. Our way of saying we were ready for war—and had the means to wage it.”

  I stared at a crack in the wall. Cobwebs and moisture had settled into it like tenants who’d long forgotten rent. The sight made me chuckle—soft, incredulous.

  “We saw you as the unstoppable force we thought you were. And us? Trapped in this ruin of a shithole? A promised doom, if ever I’d seen any.”

  The humour tugged at the back of my mind and refused to be silenced.

  “Incredible. And here we were, ready to die by the swift action of disciplined Gustavians.”

  “This fort is marked as a high-order priority in case of attack,” Jensson answered. “Erden’s Edge is the bastion that leads to the neck of your nation. Pass it, and Hasholm is ready to be beheaded.”

  He shrugged at that last part—an old soldier’s shrug. Must I kill, then I will. Nothing proud in it.

  “So our incoming ‘Gustav’ will think the same? That this bastion will be hard-fought?”

  “Yes. My observations come straight from the United Warplan, in the event of a Grenzland attack on our fractured colony.”

  “So his forces will be concentrated—readied for a force triple our make,” I grumbled. Whatever humour had lingered guttered out.

  “Gustav will be ready for a lightning war. Any sign of resistance will be met with a cannonade without likeness. That is how he rendered down the other principalities in such short order.”

  Jensson’s recollection carried a tint of resentment, the kind a soldier acquires only after seeing his own people ground under brilliance that came too quickly.

  “Your land is known as a land of plenty. Flat plains, calm rivers. The perfect front to act swiftly.”

  I slapped the parapet. The wet thud echoed across the marsh, swallowed quick by mire and fog.

  “Our land is wet. Cold. Step wrong, and you will need the aid of three men to stand again.”

  Jensson smiled—just the faintest curl of the mouth—but he did not answer.

  “And we have your expertise at our side now. The Blue Coats. Killers in unison. The necks of my proudest men shiver when they speak of you; you know this?”

  “And you—the Red Devils. Armored from top to toe, flashing beards like wild boars, dressing as though the act of killing were a play and nothing more,” Jensson replied.

  A hint of learned apprehension haunted the words, yet no denial followed.

  I studied him, the “Blue Coat.” Up close, his garments looked more civilized than threatening—cloth meant for finer rooms, negotiations, dinners behind shuttered windows. Not the attire of a man built to kill.

  “Jensson, I would be bowed to as the promised ruler of Grenzland if I presented myself in public in your finery,” I laughed.

  Jensson allowed himself a smile.

  “And I would be shot on sight if I dressed even half as gruesome as you, dear sir.”

  His chuckle carried a softness rare among men who’ve lived too long with powder in their teeth.

  A small glimmer of accord, here in this dim wetland, on the eve of something horrible.

  The thought ended my laugh in a sigh.

  A shout from beyond. I knew the sound—the curdled reproach of an officer catching his crew unready. Some cannon team down in the trenches was getting their money’s worth in berating, by the tone of it.

  “Enough dillydallying,” I said, brushing the damp from my coat, settling myself back into the skin of duty. “Let us see to our men.”

  Jensson nodded. The smile had not entirely left him, but it was tempered now—drawn back into the discipline I could only dream to match.

  Down in the bastion grounds, a hushed silence lingered—an uneasy quiet shaped by exhaustion and too much recent terror. Firepits glowed here and there, revealing a patchwork of figures caught in their circles of light.

  Women and children. Uniforms of every cut and colour. And the Blemmye—those towering shapes hunched like boulders, their silhouettes wavering against the flames.

  Our Gustavians had settled into the presence of the giants with surprising ease. I did not doubt the Blemmye’s handiwork in the battle of our lives had softened whatever reservations they once carried. They were kin now, in a way—speaking in their riddles and half-sermons.

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  I supposed they saw the light of God in them too, now.

  By a fire, men rose before I even had the chance to make them out. I took their attention as a sign of welcome—or at least a tempered discipline—and chose to reward it with a visit.

  “Commander Edelmer.”

  A soft, ill-timed chorus answered me.

  One did not stand.

  The graying hunter—the one who had borne us warning of the storm—remained seated, leg bound in rough bandages, eyes lifting to mine with a plea that all but begged for mercy.

  The rest, I knew.

  Barely.

  For as I looked over my officers in these dire times, two of them had… altered their visage. Remarkably so.

  “Riedel, Vollmer—what has happened to your face?”

  To be honest, I was not entirely certain I recognized the men I addressed.

  “We have reached an agreement with the Gustavians,” Vollmer grunted.

  “Yes, sir. In their ranks, beards are forbidden—shunned even. In ours, a beard is a sign of manly countenance,” Riedel continued.

  “So, after some liquor and soft words were spoken, we came to an agreement. Moustaches will be the sign of the uniformed man!”

  Indeed.

  Their once-heavy growth—those bristling chins that had hidden all but hardened noses and stern brows—was gone. In its place lay two freshly revealed landscapes of scraped skin and knife-nicks. All that remained of their proud beards were a pair of, admittedly, well-kept moustaches clinging beneath their noses.

  “The Gustavian officers have promised to grow theirs out. But, for now, we sport the most impressive growths there are.”

  Vollmer laughed the words out. His breath carried the faint note of something alcoholic.

  No matter.

  Some joy must be allowed—especially when it brings unity, no matter how silly.

  Jensson reared up behind me, and to my quiet pleasure I saw both my men and his straighten at once in his presence. Habit runs deep.

  “And you, good sir,” Jensson said, turning his attention to Brandt, “will you sport a growth as impressive as your comrades?”

  Brandt stood as straight as he could manage in that lopsided, rotund way of his, ruined leg set firm.

  “Nay, sir. I fear my meagre growth would shun and shame rather than bring pride to the fort. Bare as a maid’s thighs my chin is—and that is the truth!”

  Laughter erupted. Earnest. Full. Light.

  It still struck me, what time, accord, and wine could draw out of men pressed hard by fate.

  Jensson’s officers laughed with them—and for a moment, in the firelight’s flicker, I could have sworn I saw the faintest shimmer of hair upon their lips, catching gold in the glow.

  Unity, I hoped at last, might find us even here.

  Two men did not stand. Did not laugh. Hard not to notice, in a gathering otherwise so lightened.

  Elrik, I understood. His leg forbade much standing just now.

  Johan, our accursed hunter, I did not yet fully understand. There he sat—dressed like the finest killer, the most seasoned forestman, and the oldest sage all at once. Greying beard. Wide-brimmed hat. Fingers worrying his prized jar from the swamps as if it were a rosary or a blade. I had not expected him to stand—not truly.

  Still, curiosity gnawed.

  “Johan,” I said, drawing what little humour I had left into my voice. “I assume your respectable beard will be sacrificed for the sake of common unity?”

  “This old pisstain here, sir?”

  A Gustavian officer answered before Johan could, thick-armed and broad-chested, tapping Johan on the shoulder with a familiarity that spoke of roots sunk deeper than I would have wagered.

  “Hardest son of a bitch I’ve seen in my poor life. Came close to ending the bastard—but he turned my soldiers on me in a blink. Who knows if it was his balls, his beard, or his sheer presence. Damn him.”

  Laughter followed. Shorter this time. Less certain.

  Johan’s mouth twitched—just a glimmer of a smile, and nothing more.

  And as the laughter fell, silence took its place.

  Johan seemed to savour it. I was sure of that. His grandfatherly wisdom was rising to the surface now—perhaps even without swearing like a devil for once.

  “My company sported beards,” he said. “We were proud of them. Braided. Groomed. Enough to make any poor lass lacking sense or judgment swoon.”

  The half-smile climbed a fraction higher. He still did not stand.

  “I could not grow one. Like you, Brandt—my growth was like a balding leper’s. Thin. Unimpressive.”

  A few chuckles stirred. I joined them. He had struck true—Brandt took it as well as a man could.

  But Johan’s face soured at his own words. There it was. I knew it would come.

  The face of a veteran surfaced—eyes turning inward, toward battles begun long ago and never truly finished. The face of a killer, revealed without pride.

  “They rounded up the whole mountain,” he went on. “Every gaard, every farm, every cottage. One man was taken from each. Sent off with whatever the household could muster.”

  His fingers flexed once, slow.

  “Most of us got axes. Long ones. Twisted just right—made to cleave a man from head to arse, if one had the strength. And by God, I did. I was young. Ready. Eager.”

  The fire cracked. Sparks leapt and died. No one else made a sound.

  “They needed me,” he said. “Why should I not go? Why should I not prove my worth beside my fellow men?”

  Only the fire answered him now.

  “Brigands. Deserters from some fucking company or another were roaming, and the local baron saw fit to end them. With us. Farmhands, smiths, and other ilk. With axes. Axes.”

  His voice hardened on the word.

  “Who amongst you would go to war with naught but a blade, facing steel, horse, and powder?”

  Some looked away. Some could not stop staring. I was among the latter.

  Go on, Johan. Unburden it.

  “But we did. Oh, by God, we did.”

  His mouth twitched, the echo of something like old pride curdled by memory.

  “Braided. Bearing the finest colours. Axes held high—polished, shining in the sun. We had been practised in the art of the axe. How to strike. How to kill.”

  His gaze drifted farther now, beyond the fire, beyond the marsh, into a country none of us could follow.

  “They had not taught us how to survive a gun barrage.”

  The words came flat, factual.

  “Most of my friends from my hill died there and then. Bullets through hearts, eyes, brains. Men on horses trampled many more.”

  A breath. Slow. Measured.

  “Some were cleaved by our hand. Sigurd—that strong bastard—took a horse’s head clean off in a single swing.”

  A pause.

  “His strength did naught against a hail of bullets.”

  At the edge of my sight, figures gathered. A Blemmye or two loomed closer in the firelight. A young boy. A man well past his prime. The circle widened without a word spoken.

  “Two hundred youths died that morning,” Johan said.

  “Me—and the few who were equally wise—fled. Into the forests to the west. Thick as sin. To hide. From them…”

  His eyes returned at last, settling among us.

  “…and from whatever lord would see fit to hang us for our will to live.”

  Johan chuckled suddenly. Whatever humour lived in the sound died the instant it left him—born of bitterness alone.

  “The Dwindling Forest,” he said. “What kind of fucking name is that?”

  A slow shake of his head.

  “Why does man insist on naming evil with laughable words? Call it the Forest of Pestilence, and maybe we’d have been wiser in our escape.”

  His voice lowered. The fire seemed to listen.

  “For while we hid, my friends—my companions, my brothers—fell apart. Swallowed by fog that rendered meat dead. Moss that drank them down. Roots that lured them with voices, promising peace, delivering death.”

  Elrik’s quiet sob cut through the stillness. It broke Johan’s gaze as well. He looked to him then—really looked.

  “Me and him made it through,” Johan said. “He pulled me from the voices. I dragged him out of the fog. And we—alone—made it through.”

  He slapped Elrik on the shoulder, a thump so hard I feared it would break him. It did not. It only stopped the sobbing. Something steadier rose in Elrik then—something I had not seen since his arrival.

  “It is a lie,” Johan went on. “It is all a fucking lie. No ceremony. No God. No rhythm or faith will keep you safe.”

  His jaw set.

  “The roots whispered to me. Told me I’d find peace with them. But my mind was stronger. They did not get me. And they did not get Elrik.”

  “They did not get us because we did not allow it. My hate was stronger than their baubles and promises. My will bested theirs. And as long as blood and piss still flow through me, no God, wood, beast, or master shall command me.”

  He looked up then, straight at me.

  “No, Commander Edelmer. My beard will stay.”