Gruin didn’t die, in case you’re wondering. This was more due to luck than anything. Actually, now seems like a good time to hand you some of my modern knowledge and go over what it actually takes to kill a Grynkori and why.

  Firstly, they die if their head is cut off. No wonder there. Their organs are smaller than ours even proportionally, with much more of their body made up by muscle and bone, and so impalement actually has a high chance of simply failing to be lethal purely due to missing anything important. That said, put a hole in their lungs or liver and you’re as likely to kill them as you are a human. Maybe moreso.

  Other inconveniences in killing a Grynkori include their resistance to disease, their stamina and their tendency to heal better than humans. More notable than anything else, though, is how dense they are. Their skin is tougher and thicker than ours, their bones are like wrought iron, and, having once seen a Grynkori skull laid bare, I can personally attest to the fact that there’s about twice as much protection around their brains as we have.

  So it was no surprise that Gruin, while wounded past the point of consciousness, did not die.

  It was also very convenient, for me at least. Because with him out of the equation I was free to do a lot of things he’d have found…let’s say objectionable.

  Arig was quite surprised, for instance, when I told him I’d leave him alive and head out of the village in exchange for a cut of his profits. He took some persuading of course, but once I brought up who my father was, managed to convince him I wasn’t acting on behalf of any wider power, and bonded with him over our shared greed, he became quite amenable. That left me with the issue of Gruin going potentially berserk of course, but I was out of the village before that danger could arise.

  The Grynkori awoke only when we’d already put another mile between ourselves and the shitty little settlement.

  “Ah! Fuck! Bastards!” He screamed the moment consciousness returned to him and, with one hand mind, punched his horse in the back of its head. The poor animal went mad, dazed and confounded enough that it threw him from its back and started sprinting around shrieking like he was.

  It took a long while to calm the horse down, and even longer to calm Gruin. Apparently the last thing he remembered at first was our fight with the darkthings. That did, at least, explain his violent awakening, and as the minutes dragged by he slowly calmed into a state of…well, not relaxation, but one where he didn’t punch any more horses at least.

  “You killed the elder then?” he asked at last.

  I didn’t hesitate before answering. “Of course,” I snapped, somewhat confident in the lie given that we were currently riding away from him, and Gruin had been very consistent about his preferred direction of travel. “He was a dick,” I added.

  Gruin laughed, then coughed and started wincing.

  “Bloody wounds,” he growled, “darkthings, hate them. Your kind, living on the surface, what are you thinking?”

  “That darkthings are better than going into caves and meeting Grynkori,” I shot back. We shared a grin.

  Gruin was still in a bad mood at having ‘missed the killing of that elder’ and I did, actually, feel somewhat guilty over lying to him. Not guilty enough to tell the truth mind, but guilty enough that I was quick to share what I saw as a more than fair consolation prize for being victimised by my rattish deception. To tell the truth, Gruin might well have agreed with that estimation.

  Grynkori do so like money.

  When we came to rest one evening I unveiled the small chest I’d been given by Arig, now claiming to have looted from his house, and the considerable pile of valuables within. Low-purity silver made up the bulk of it unfortunately, not worth even one third its weight in the pure metal, but there was so much of it that I reckoned we’d more than doubled our wealth overnight.

  As I might have expected, Gruin’s mood hit the sky from there and remained high as we continued on our journey. Where we were heading now, though, he remained cagey about. Apparently he’d gotten a particular direction in mind somewhere before our last spot, and the fact that he wasn’t sharing it had me…nervous, to say the least.

  I was actually getting to like Gruin, despite his…flaws. But those flaws were still very much there, and, I knew keenly, perhaps the most imminent threat to my life currently extant in this world. As something of a growing expert in the art of not dying, I considered it my natural goal to find out exactly what he was keeping to himself.

  “We’ll get a good grain for this, I reckon,” Gruin grinned.

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  That gave me pause, because I’d been certain we’d get a good twenty grains.

  “What do you mean?” I snapped, “it’s silver right?”

  He laughed.

  “Yeah, maybe a bit of it is, why?”

  “It’s…At least half silver, or more.”

  “Ha!” Gruin looked positively cheery now, his mood improving the way only a demonstration of Grynkori superiority could ever make it. “Maybe half of a half of a half silver, human eyes are dreadful aren’t they?”

  Of course in his head, I’d just gotten over-excited by a bit of loot. In mine, with the complete picture, I realised I’d been had. That fuck-rat elder had promised me twenty grains’ worth and I’d felt smug to have gotten the offer, assuming he was thinking he’d gotten off lucky. I’d pushed him on the rights to his lamp oil, made him think that I was serious about coasting in with my father’s money and snatching up a chunk of the profits. Done all that so he’d be easier to pry away from a more immediate reward.

  But he’d played me from the start, because this reward wasn’t worth shit. And he knew that I wouldn’t be able to come back and kill him in retaliation once Gruin had woken up, because he’d seen the way I changed to negotiating only when the Grynkori passed out.

  “Cheer up, eh?” Gruin frowned as he stared at me, “we’ll make more.”

  He was trying to be nice, seeing my simmering rage for what it was but not knowing the first fucking thing about its real source.

  And I couldn’t correct him on it.

  I kept simmering right up until a new city was in sight, at which point I had to stop simply out of convenience. Large, scowling travellers tended to have more trouble with the guards. This place was Eoryg, and just laying eyes on it made me feel some way about…everything.

  A merchant city, you might call it, Eoryg was a major hub of trade and commerce, which meant my father’s kind swarmed to it like bees in a hive. I’d never joined him in coming here, but I recognised enough of the place from how much I’d been told of it over the years. A uniquely melancholic feeling, considering.

  I wasn’t welcome here anymore, not the way I’d always banked on being welcome. I was just…I looked at Gruin.

  Just a traveller with a sword who killed things for money. Fuck.

  Well, I was still a man with money at least, and that went nice and far in Eoryg. Though not as far as you might expect, everything was expensive in the city for more than one reason. Having so many men of wealth gathered in close proximity had naturally shot up prices in general, and the men in question had worked hard to exacerbate this effect so as to ensure they had even more money.

  Which wasn’t to say that we had a difficult time getting settled in, of course, because as earlier established—we did have money. Our reserves from Rogrid were essentially untouched, and went very far in booking us a comfortable set of rooms, a bloody big meal…and a chirurgeon.

  Gruin was seen first, naturally, and the poor medical man looked somewhat pale by the time he’d finished stitching everything that needed stitching and wrapping up everything else. He looked rather relieved when I showed him my own gashes and bruises, informing me after the treatment that they’d be gone within two weeks.

  It was less time than I’d expected, and when asked the chirurgeon actually shared my surprise.

  “You heal better than anyone I’ve ever seen,” he replied, “assuming this really was inflicted a mere week ago. I’d expect most men to be in bed for a month before recovering this well.”

  Made sense, I supposed, that I’d have some yet unobserved faculty for recovery, considering how little I’d actually gotten hurt earlier in my life. If there was any power of mine that would go unnoticed through life it was that one. We paid the chirurgeon and kicked back to take it easy for a day.

  By morning, I felt a great deal better. Still hurt of course, but contrary to what the chirurgeon had said it seemed like I’d not be knitting myself back together for more than days.

  Gruin was still in awful condition, which if anything made things even better. I enjoyed gloating while partaking of our expensive breakfast, and for basically all of that day neither of us got much of anything done save sitting around, eating and resting. It was a bloody good time.

  Couldn’t last of course, no good thing can last, and early into the next morning there was a new incident in the city that demanded both of our attentions. I was the first one up as I saw the crowds shifting outside, and Gruin followed me with only the barest reluctance.

  The crowd was easy enough to pursue, with so many people moving to the same point making our way after them was almost an involuntary affair—simply standing still in the street would have you forced along by the tide of bodies whether you wanted to be or not.

  “What’s going on?” Gruin snapped. “I can’t see!”

  I grinned at that, not missing that his head was close to a foot lower than most of the men in this crowd, and several inches shy of even the women.

  “I can’t see either, yet,” I assured him, “just wait.”

  He waited, and soon enough we’d made enough progress that my extra inches let me peer over the surrounding heads and see what everything was about.

  I was disappointed, after all the anticipation, because it was nothing more glamorous than a bloody recruitment drive for a militia.

  Oh, right, this was…a while ago, I should explain. Anglyn didn’t have a standing army back then. I mean, it had lots of armies that stood, to be clear, but the idea of a nation-wide “Anglysh army” hadn’t really been coined yet—old King Hengrys had been trying to work at something like that for a good long while, but of course the Dukes, most of whom had been Dukes back when he was fighting to be King, didn’t like that idea. It meant forking over a lot of their money for something they didn’t own and would let the King boss them around more. National pride indeed.

  The result of this was that back in my youth, war was done on the regional level and by regional forces. It was expensive to sustain an army when it wasn’t in use, so outside the personal guards of our Peerage, Anglyn would mostly form up forces as they were needed.

  Seeing the recruitment being promised now, I saw heavy steel breastplates and full gambesons, halberds and pikes and, of course, an endless supply of longbows for those trained in their use. There was money to be made as a soldier.

  I turned around and left.

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