I woke up that morning and ate breakfast. When I asked mother why father wasn’t eating with us, she said he had a stiff back again today and that I should go ahead and prepare to open the shop. So I left. I never even said goodbye. I was too groggy. And I will never see them again.

  My home is still burning in the distance when Heimdall comes up to me:

  “You too, huh? I can’t stand watching that anymore. Wanna get off the ramparts and find ourselves a drink?”

  Disgusting. This man has never been my friend. I remember clearly how he used to beat me up when we were young and how later he would mock me when buying bread at my shop.

  “No, I’ll stay.” I sigh and wipe my face with my hands, trying to mold it into a more composed expression.

  “What? Are you saying you’re too good for me?” He sounds like he wants to start a fight. I bet he’s expecting me to back down again, as if I was still a child.

  “I didn’t say that. Piss off you drunk.” I finally turn to look at him and I feel a strange sort of pity at the sight. He is no longer a head taller than me. He now looks like a toddler throwing a tantrum.

  I chuckle when I imagine him crying and beating his fists against the floor like a poorly disciplined child. But his fist instead rises to meet my face. I taste steel as I recoil from the blow and quickly start to feel blood dripping from my nose.

  “Fucking baker’s boy. Stay in your fucking kitchen!”

  He throws another punch and my body moves on its own. Like some deep primal instinct for survival has decided to take control of me. I weave under the jab and lunge forward to his side. With my back against the wall I push with all my might in the opposite direction. Heimdall falls off and breaks his neck.

  So now, I sit in the stocks. A girl who must have had a thing for Heimdall comes up to slap me every now and then, between her loud sobbing. The only reason I am not hanging from the gallows yet is because the only noble of high enough rank to hang me is busy talking to some sellsword.

  I must say, I don’t feel particularly bad about killing Heimdall. He was the dumbass who started a fight on the ramparts. But people around here don’t want to listen to some orphaned baker’s boy talk. They want to feel they have control over life and death again after that gruesome morning.

  After what feels like an eternity, that same sellsword who went to talk with Lady Winchillas comes into the town square and gets up onto the gallows. Another man built like a mountain and covered in strange grotesque tattoos comes up with him. They truly hire the lowest of the low to be mercenaries… Who am I to talk though? I am a killer.

  Still, I want to live. I want to see the world and find a place where the people are nice. Then I will settle down and forget about the past. About this entire cursed place. I would live happily and watch my children play in endless fields of flowers… But I need money and freedom for that. These lowlives can offer me at least that much. Maybe they’ll let me join their company for a while.

  —

  “Alright Thorvald, get their attention for me will ya?”

  “Aye aye Sir Tanner!” He mocks with enthusiasm and a sly grin, then turns to the crowd and puffs his chest full of air before roaring at them: “SILENCE! WE HAVE NEWS ABOUT THE SIEGE!”

  After the crowd turns silent, except for the continuing murmurs, Landyn steps in front of Thorvald and addresses the crowd: “We are the Knight Flayers! If you want to fight among the best during this siege, then join us!” One could almost hear crickets. “We pay 20 crowns a day!”

  “HOORAY!!!” The crowd erupts in cheers.

  “Alright! Alright! Line up by the gate so we can pick the best of you!” Landyn is barely heard over the noise, but the people listen to him and start heading to the gate.

  Just as Landyn is about to get off the gallows, a weak battered voice squeaks out behind him: “Take… me… too”

  It was the baker’s boy. He has already been in the stocks for a few hours. The uncomfortable position has worn down his stamina and the continued slapping and throwing of trash has swollen his face. He does not look like a warrior at all, but Landyn has a thing for rescuing dying men. ‘They’re the only loyal ones’ he likes to say, but the truth is that he is meek.

  “What are you here for?”

  “I… killed a man… he attacked me… on the ramparts… I… pushed him.”

  “I’ll have a word with Lady Winchillas later. Hang tight- Oh! Sorry! Just… stay there.” A small blunder in communication.

  The baker’s boy laughs softly in his broken raspy voice.

  The Knight Flayers recruit five men from those lined up at the gate. They don’t ask for names or stories. They will wait and see if they survive their first raid and then try to get to know them.

  After the new recruits are armed and ready, they are sent to their homes and told to sleep now and report at the gate at sundown. Then, Landyn goes to see Vulpes and ask for the release of the baker’s boy.

  At the gate stands guard a knight who scowls at Landyn. He must be holding a grudge for the treatment his comrade got earlier: “What’s your business here, sellsword? Fattening your purse again?”

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  “It’s plenty fat for now, thanks for asking. I’m actually here to speak with Vulpes about releasing a prisoner.” Landyn purposefully plasters a shit eating grin on his face. This seems like a good opportunity to let off some steam.

  “Watch your tongue, lowlife! Call my liege by her name again and I shall smite you!” The disdain which simmered now turned to boiling rage.

  “Haha! Whatever. Go get your master, mutt.”

  A very predictable swing of the halberd comes down but Landyn dodges and responds with a headbutt. He must have been a little too eager because not only does his helmet break the knight’s nose, but it pushes him back with so much velocity that the gate to the keep’s garden breaks down and he falls on top of it.

  As Landyn levels his eyes in front of him, he sees Vulpes, mouth agape, sitting in a lavish chair, spilling her tea onto the lush grass.

  “H-Hiii! E-heh… He was… being rude?”

  “What the fuck Tanner???”

  “He started it!”

  “Are you a child?! What kind of reason is that? You broke my gate!”

  “Ugh- And my nose!” The guard moans in pain.

  “Shut up! I’ll deal with you later!” Vulpes shuts him down immediately then rubs her finger and her thumb on the bridge of her nose. “Good heavens above, when will my servants learn not to interrupt me. I lost my train of thought.”

  “...You were mad at me for breaking the gate.” Landyn sheepishly reminds her.

  “Ah, yes of course. What the fuck Tanner?!”

  “Look, I’m sorry about the gate. At least it looks like it only came off its hinges. Give me a hammer and I’ll fix it right up!”

  “Haaa. Nevermind the gate. What did you come here for?”

  “I need a small favor-”

  “Wow. Great start!” She says, sarcastically.

  “Could you maybe let me have the man that’s in the stocks right now?”

  “That limp wristed baker’s boy? What would you need him for? Also, he’s a murderer, you know?”

  “He only killed in self-defense, but that’s still more than the others can claim. A man that is used to killing and is also indebted to me is very valuable in my line of work.”

  She hangs her head in quiet contemplation for a few seconds, but she secretly sneaks a peek at Landyn to see him squirm. Masking a grin she lifts her head: “Fine. But you forfeit tomorrow’s pay.”

  “What? That’s too much!”

  “I am giving you a loyal fighter for free. Also, that amount of money should be enough to make me forget that you broke my gate and assaulted a nobleman.”

  “Ehem… That’s good then. Thank you, your highness.”

  “Vulpes.”

  “Ah, yes. Thank you, Vulpes.” He bows briefly and quickly scurries away.

  Not even a minute after Landyn has disappeared, Vulpes seemingly has an epiphany as she exclaims loudly and scares the guard that is still lying in the same spot Landyn had left him. “Haa, that fool didn’t even take the key to the stocks with him. You there! Get up off the ground already and go free the baker’s boy!”

  “But my liege, I am injured.” He points to his crooked nose.

  “You call that injured? The bleeding’s already stopped, you whiny ungrateful mutt! Get moving already!”

  “Y-yes m’am!”

  —Late in the evening—

  The sellswords, like many others, did not have room in the only inn that was within the walls of the fort. So, they pitched a tent made of thin scraps of cloth and made a fire around which to sit and wait for the enemy to go to sleep.

  The veterans all sharpen their weapons and scuff up their armor to not reflect moonlight. But the new recruits who were so eager to join this morning, now are nothing but nervous wrecks who shiver and jump at the smallest sound. Saul is included in the latter category.

  Landyn sees that Rabbit, who is usually very loud and annoying, is instead leaning on the ramparts above and smoking a pipe all alone.

  “Oh, Sir Tanner. Is it too lively down there?” Rabbit tries to joke, but it is clear something is bothering him deeply as the smile he fakes does not even come close to reaching his eyes.

  “Nah, just came to check on you. We joke around a lot, but you know I depend on you out there, right?” He then starts to stuff tobacco into his pipe.

  “So it’s that obvious, huh?” Rabbit takes a long drag from his pipe.

  “Yep. I’ve known you for about four years now, it’d be weird if I didn’t notice anything wrong. What is it? Are you nervous about the sortie?” Landyn then pokes holes in the tobacco to let the air flow through to his lungs and lights up. He puffs it quickly to light it and then takes a long drag of the freshly lit pipe. He exhales the smoke like a long sigh and it floats away into nothing.

  “We’re kinda like the weeds in these pipes, you know. We burn up quickly and then we’re gone. Maybe we warm somebody up, maybe we destroy something on our way, maybe we ease the stress of somebody, maybe we make someone cough. But at the end, we’re gone. Where? Well I reckon nobody really knows. I travelled enough these past few years to know that there is no god. Not the Righteous Three of the northerners, not the Old Gods of the southerners, not even the weird tribal shit of Thorvald’s people. So I reckon, when we’re gone, we go just like the smoke. Into nothing. But still, if we go into nothing, then how come the men I killed still manage to haunt me? Did their scent stick to me? Are they waiting for me to join them? Or are they just waking me from my sleep because it’s funny to them? Why did you not let me hang back then?”

  Rabbit’s gaze is focused into the darkness, somewhere a million miles away in a foreign land. There he could be a simple farmer, breaking his back in the fields day in and day out and in the evenings he would drink with old friends and go to bed with a kind wife and he would hold her tight against his chest. But his back’s already been broken once, and the only friends he’s still got left are sellswords, not farmers. And no woman would be able to sleep against his rough scarred chest and scruffy beard. His eyes start to water.

  “You know, I sometimes dream. Usually it’s just black and then I wake up, or I have a nightmare and pissmyself awake, but tonight I had a dream. And it’s funny, I sometimes things that have yet to happen. It’s never something important, just mundane conversations which might happen months from now or tomorrow, I never know. Do you know what I dreamed today? I dreamt that I was sharing a drink with you all. And then Eagle Eye pulled me aside by the collar and whispered a dirty joke in my ear so Anna and Jacob wouldn’t hear. Hah. And I laughed so hard that I fell off my chair. Do you think that was the future, or just a dream?”

  “...I hope it was the future, old friend.”

  The lean against the crenelations in silence and smoke away at their pipes. Watching the smoke get lost in the darkness and the sky.