Chapter 25: Shave or dye?

My answer did something I hadn’t expected.

The tension in the carriage shifted. Ghost’s pale eyes lingered on me for another heartbeat. Then they moved to the window slit and stayed there, watching the road scroll past with detached interest.

He stopped staring.

Brandt didn’t. His dark gaze remained fixed on my face, but the quality of it changed. It was more curiosity than assessment.

Beside him sat a mountain.

I hadn’t noticed the third figure until now, which was absurd, because not noticing him was like not noticing a boulder in your living room. He occupied the far end of the bench. His shoulders were so broad they pressed against the carriage wall and Brandt’s arm simultaneously.

I recognized him.

The Knight with the iron slab.

The one whose sword had erased two elves from existence while I lay bleeding against a wall.

His weapon rested on the carriage floor between his boots. Even lying flat, it dominated the space. A block of raw steel that someone had ground into a rough approximation of a cutting edge and apparently decided that was close enough. Its surface was scarred and stained with streaks of something dark that could have been oil or old blood or both.

I tore my eyes away from it and looked up at the man who carried it.

“Thank you,” I said.

The mountain blinked.

“What for?” he asked.

His voice was deep.

“You saved my life,” I said. “Last night. On the street near the square. Two elves had me pinned against a wall. One of them put a blade through my stomach.”

I paused.

“You cut them in half.”

The mountain’s brow furrowed. His eyes narrowed with the concentration of someone trying to remember what they had for breakfast three days ago.

“Ah,” he said.

That was it.

One syllable. Delivered with the tone of a man who had just been reminded he’d left a window open.

He doesn’t remember.

He had bisected two armed elven assassins with a single stroke, and it had made so little impression on him that the event hadn’t survived hours in his memory.

Ghost leaned forward from his position by the window.

“Don’t waste your breath,” he said. “Shit Brains only cares about one thing. Fighting. If he killed those elves, he didn’t do it to save you. He did it because they were between him and the next fight.”

Ghost’s pale eyes flicked to the mountain.

“The fact that you happened to be dying at his feet was coincidental.”

The mountain’s expression shifted.

It was a remarkable thing to watch. The vast, placid geography of his face rearranged itself into something that resembled offense. His jaw jutted forward. His brow lowered over his eyes.

“Don’t listen to him,” he said, “I’m Roen.”

A beat.

“Some call me Iron.”

I looked at him properly.

He was enormous. His head was completely bald, the scalp smooth and scarred in places where hair would never grow again. A scar ran from the center of his forehead down through his right eyebrow.

His hands, resting on his knees, were each the size of dinner plates. The knuckles were swollen and misshapen, broken and reset so many times they’d given up trying to look normal.

“Thank you, Roen,” I said. “Regardless of why you did it.”

Roen grunted.

It might have been an acknowledgment. It might have been indigestion.

I shifted on the bench, the ropes around my wrists biting as I adjusted my weight. The carriage rocked steadily.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

Brandt answered without hesitation.

“The capital.”

The word hung in the air. I let it settle, then probed further.

“Is that where the training happens?”

The three of them exchanged a look.

It was a fast look. I couldn’t read it. Couldn’t tell if it meant this kid asks too many questions or do we tell him or something else entirely.

“The first stage starts there,” Brandt said. His tone was measured. Careful. He was trying not to reveal too much.

I nodded slowly.

Another thought surfaced. One that had been waiting after the more immediate concerns of ropes and roads and enormous bald men.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

“Will there be problems?” I asked. “With my family?”

Brandt’s eyebrows rose by a fraction.

“What family?”

The question was genuine. Not dismissive. He simply didn’t know.

Ghost tilted his head from his position by the window.

“We assumed you were an orphan,” he said, tone flat. “No one came looking for you while you were unconscious.”

I stared at him.

“Did you investigate me at all?”

Brandt had the grace to look slightly uncomfortable. It was a small thing, a shift in his jaw, a brief glance toward the floor, but from a man whose default expression was carved stone, it was practically an admission of guilt.

“There wasn’t time,” he said. “You had a punctured stomach and a collapsed lung. We sealed the wound, loaded you onto the carriage, and moved. The standard process takes weeks of assessment and negotiation. We had hours.”

His steel hand flexed. The articulated fingers clicked softly.

“Normally, people resist when the Iron Cross comes to requisition a soldier. Families petition. Officers lodge formal complaints. The bureaucracy alone can delay a transfer by months.”

“Your colleagues, however,” Ghost said, “seemed at ease with your departure.”

He let the words settle.

“Several of them appeared relieved, in fact. When we carried your unconscious body to the carriage, I distinctly heard one of them say, ‘good riddance.'”

“So we assumed you were either an orphan or a troublemaker. Possibly both.”

I exhaled through my nose.

The sound was somewhere between a laugh and a sigh.

“Well,” I said. “You were half right.”

I straightened on the bench as much as the ropes allowed. Squared my shoulders. Lifted my chin.

“My name is Kaspar von Hexenzeit. Firstborn of my house.”

I paused long enough for the name to land.

“But you could consider me an orphan.”

The carriage seemed to go still.

Ghost’s eyebrows climbed his forehead. It was the most expression I’d seen from him. The pale gray eyes widened by a fraction, and for the first time, genuine surprise cracked through the frost.

“Hexenzeit,” he repeated. The word left his mouth slowly, as if he were tasting each syllable. “As in Roderich von Hexenzeit? The leader of Silberwald’s magical armies?”