[ Marten ]
I wrote to Kael on the sixth day, sitting on my cot in the barracks, with a piece of paper borrowed from Commander Bryce's supply closet and a pen that worked approximately seventy percent of the time and that I had to shake every third sentence like a small, ink-filled maraca.
Kael,
We're in Alden's Cross. I stepped in horse dung on day one. Premium dung. The horse eats better than us.
The city is mad. There's a market that sells food in COLOURS. Not brown. Colours, Kael. I ate a plum so good I nearly cried. Torvald actually cried. He says he didn't but there was moisture on his face and it wasn't river water.
Speaking of river — we swam. In an actual river. Torvald went in first and made a noise like a startled cow. Dek floated on his back for an hour. Kess sat on the bank and judged us. Standard formation.
There's a tavern called the River Bend. The woman who runs it — Lira — she just feeds you. Doesn't ask why you're there or what you need. She just puts food in front of you and it's good and it's warm and she calls us children, which Torvald objects to and the rest of us have accepted because arguing with Lira is like arguing with weather.
The patrols are different here. In the garrison everything is sand and distance. Here it's people and streets and the way a city breathes. Fenn — she's a soldier here, sharp, patient, doesn't waste words — she showed us how the complaint system works. Garrison files a form. Form goes to the commander. Commander sends to governor. Governor sends to the Justice Bureau. The whole thing runs on paper, Kael. Paper and patience and the specific belief that the chain will work if you feed it enough reports.
There's a noble here. Thorne. Young lord. The kind you told me to watch for — small title, small power, pushes because nobody pushes back. The baker on the hill road has a cracked window from a stone his people threw. Seven complaints filed. The chain is moving.
Dek's grandmother would solve it faster. Dek's grandmother would solve most things faster. I think the empire would function better if run by grandmothers with spoons, but nobody is asking me.
Kess is Kess. She disappeared three times on one patrol and nobody saw her go. She went to the tavern alone and came back different — not changed, just… lighter? Like something that was tight got loose. I don't know how to explain it. You'd have to see her.
Torvald found stairs. He climbed them. He got yelled at by an officer. He says it was worth it. I believe him.
Tell Dren the food here is better than his lamp oil wine. Tell Garrett I'm watching the way Callum does it here — the old soldier walk, the know-every-face thing. Tell Sera that Kess says hi. Kess didn't actually say hi. But she nodded in Sera's general direction once and I'm interpreting that as a hi.
Tell Asha I miss her. Don't tell her I said that. She'll use it against me.
We come back in two days. I'll have stories. Good ones. The kind that don't go bad in the heat.
— Marten
P.S. Torvald says he's marrying a dumpling stall. I cannot confirm or deny this. But he's very committed.
I folded the letter. It would go with the next dispatch rider — garrison mail, slow, three weeks to the Shield if the roads were clear. Kael would read it a month from now. The dung story would be old. The plum would be forgotten. But the words would arrive, and the arriving was the point.
I placed the letter on the dispatch pile in Bryce's office. The stack was small — a border garrison in a trade town didn't generate the volume of correspondence that Eden or the Shield produced. My letter sat on top, folded twice, addressed to "Kael, Southern Shield" in handwriting that my father would have called "enthusiastic."
Two more days. Then back to the desert. Back to sand and training and the misfits' table and Asha's judgmental exhale and the specific, hard, beautiful routine of becoming something I hadn't finished becoming.
But first — one more evening. One more tavern. One more night in a city that had shown me what the world looked like when it wasn't watching borders.
The letter would arrive in a month. The stories would last longer.
That was enough.