[ Dek ]
I met Essa the baker because Torvald was hungry. Again.
We had finished the morning patrol and had an hour before the afternoon briefing and Torvald had declared — with the dramatic certainty that he brought to all food-related matters — that he was "dying of starvation" despite having eaten breakfast forty minutes ago. Kess suggested he was confusing hunger with boredom. Torvald said they were "the same emotion, experienced differently." Nobody could argue with this because it was simultaneously stupid and profound, which was Torvald's entire brand.
The bakery was on the hill road. A small shop — stone walls, wooden counter, the smell of fresh bread that hit you from twenty paces away and made rational decision-making impossible. Essa was behind the counter. Fifty. Flour-dusted. Built like a woman who had spent thirty years kneading dough and who could probably arm-wrestle most of the garrison into submission.
"Garrison?" she said, looking at our uniforms.
"Southern Shield rotation," Torvald said, already eyeing the bread rack with the intensity of a hunting dog on point.
"Hallam's?"
"Does EVERYONE know Hallam?" Torvald asked.
"Everyone who's been through the southern district. She trained half the soldiers here. The other half heard stories." Essa smiled. "Both halves behave."
She gave us rolls. Fresh, warm, with seeds baked into the crust that crunched when you bit into them. Torvald made a sound that I was fairly confident was illegal in several provinces.
While Torvald was having his religious experience with bread, I noticed the window. One pane cracked. Thin line, corner to corner, patched with tar. Fresh tar.
"What happened?" I asked. Nodding at it.
Essa's smile didn't change. The smile was permanent — not fake, just practiced. The smile of a woman who had decided that showing the world a pleasant face was easier than showing it the real one.
"A stone," she said. "From a disagreement about bread prices."
"Someone threw a stone at your shop. Over BREAD?"
"Over the principle that I should charge less because a young lord suggested it. I didn't. The stone was his rebuttal."
"Which young lord?"
"I think you can guess."
I could. The hill. The estate. The crest.
Essa sold us more rolls than we could carry and refused to let Torvald pay extra. "You're children," she said. "Children pay child prices."
"We're RECRUITS—"
"Same thing, love."
We left. Torvald was happy because bread. Kess was quiet because Kess. Marten was thinking because Marten.
I was looking at the hill. The Thorne estate sat at the top — stone walls, family crest, the specific architectural arrogance of a building that existed primarily to look down on everything below it.
A cracked window. A stone. A baker who smiled because the alternative was harder.
My grandmother had a word for men who threw stones at bakers. The word was not repeatable in polite company. The word involved suggestions about the man's parentage, his intelligence, and his future relationship with various agricultural implements.
I missed my grandmother. She would have known exactly what to do about the hill.
The system would handle it. Fenn said so. Seven reports. The chain was moving.
But my grandmother never trusted chains. My grandmother trusted spoons.
We walked back to the garrison. The hill's shadow followed us like a hand reaching for something it thought it owned.