Hrafn reached the hersir's tent feeling his whole body throb.
Leif, they had told him.
A kind man, Hrafn thought. Kind enough to have him fetched while he was broken all over just to talk. Though, to be fair, the hersir himself looked as though he had been hastily assembled out of what was left over.
Grim stood beside him, quiet for the first time since Hrafn had met him. In normal conditions the white talked too much, always with the face of a man who understood more than the rest and less than he imagined. He had too much expression in his face. Almost caricatured. He would make a good actor. A good bard, even.
Now, however, he was silent.
In Leif's presence, Grim looked like a man who had been holding in his entrails for a week. Tense. Half trembling.
Hrafn could understand him.
He himself could feel the hersir's weight too, though in another way. Leif had a presence of his own. He did not need to do anything to fill the whole tent with it.
"The two of you may go," Leif said after studying Grim for a moment.
He had sat back down again, returning to the improvised chair behind the low table. Half of his red hair was gone from the side of his face where one useful eye no longer remained.
"Y-yes, exalted hersir," Grim answered, far too pleased to hide it.
Good for him.
Hrafn had not taken much to Grim from the start. He rarely took much to religious types in general. But the white at least had some sense of humor, and that counted in his favor.
The other voroir merely nodded and went out after Grim, too old or too tired to spend words on it.
Then only the two of them remained.
They measured one another for an instant.
Leif was a wreck. The armor, or what was left of it, had been patched with warped pieces and metal seams hammered together in haste, likely by some red.
It did not make him any less intimidating.
If anything, it made him more so.
The hersir's one good eye-brown, calm, too attentive-rested on Hrafn as if it had already opened him and read what lay inside.
"Ask," Leif said at last.
He knew Hrafn had questions. It would have been strange if he had not.
"Why did you send for me?" Hrafn asked.
He saw no reason to make the hersir's life easier. He did not know what the man wanted and had not the slightest intention of giving him anything beyond the minimum.
"How did you do it?" Leif asked in return.
Dry. Brief. Direct.
Hrafn already knew what he meant.
He wanted to know how Hrafn had survived. After all, it had been the hersir himself who had torn him from death after the blow.
"What did I do?" Hrafn lied, shifting in the chair with a slight discomfort born more of caution than pain.
He had no desire whatsoever to tell the man that he had already touched something which, as far as he understood, he should not yet be touching. He was hoping Leif was merely trying him, guessing in the dark.
He was not.
The question killed the mood. Leif did not repeat it. Did not press. He only kept looking.
That was worse.
The silence lasted long enough to grow offensive, and Hrafn gave way before the conversation could rot entirely.
"Things got slower," he said. "Then I managed to defend myself better."
"Good," Leif answered.
He paused briefly.
"But you are not yellow."
Hrafn understood.
Blessings of the mind-perception, precision, focus, that sort of thing-usually came to the yellows, almost always. In different forms, but they came. Not that others could not reach something like it. They could. But there was a difference between using one of your own arms and sewing onto yourself the stiff arm of another creature, hoping it would obey.
"I don't know either," he lied again.
He lied because lying was better than explaining. There was more to fear in men than in much of what prowled outside. And if he was already being dragged down that road, he would surrender the bare minimum.
"That is enough," Leif said.
Then he pointed with his chin toward the kettle and the cups on the table.
"Coffee?"
"Yes. I accept."
Shame had never been a strong feeling in him, and coffee was too fine a luxury to refuse.
Leif poured for both of them.
They drank in silence for a while. The smell was strong and clean. There was sugar too. Little, but enough.
Rich man.
Hrafn took another sip and concluded that he was beginning to like the hersir a little more. Not enough to trust him. Only enough to hear him out more readily.
"You are a voroir now," Leif said, setting the cup on the table.
Hrafn stayed quiet.
"Seems you began at the wrong point," the hersir continued, indicating him with a small motion. "But it can be good."
After that he pulled the glove from his good hand with his teeth and brought his callused fingers to the wound on his face. His own color was still red, but Hrafn saw the flesh improve a little beneath the touch. Slowly. Slightly. Enough.
He understood more from the gesture than from any explanation.
"I see," he said.
Silence fell again.
And Hrafn rather liked it. Liked it enough to take another sip in peace and begin to find the hersir almost agreeable company.
Then Leif spoke again.
"You will have duties now."
Shit.
"But you will still have time. As is due to every fylkirn."
The relief came so quickly it almost hurt.
One of the first fears that had occurred to him when he woke was that he would be thrown from one battle to another from that very day forward. Voroirs were few. One for every hundred selected, if that. They lived longer than the average, people said, but they died more as well. There was always a shortage of new blood for the Hird.
"But your time will be different."
Ah, shit.
Hrafn began to like the hersir a little less. The coffee no longer seemed quite so generous.
Greens were rare. Of little use in battle, less even than whites in certain contexts. Before this, perhaps they would set him to tending herbs, helping with cultivation, feeding megin into the fields, things of that sort. More food was always welcome to the Hird. He might have ended up living like a quiet, one-armed noble, which did not sound so bad. Worse would be to die young and in some ridiculous fashion.
But it was beginning to seem unlikely that fate would offer him that sort of kindness.
"I understand," he answered, disliking the words as he said them.
There was not much else to do. He was noble now, yes. He was also a glorified slave. At least until he became enough of a hard bone that no one could treat him that way. If he lived that long.
"Good," Leif said.
And then he said nothing more for a while, as though he had wanted only to see Hrafn with his own eyes before deciding anything.
At least he had the decency to let him finish the coffee.
"Why take us to Sahirid?" Hrafn asked, taking advantage of the silence before the man decided to dismiss him.
The matter had been needling him since the night before. Perhaps since even earlier. It seemed stupid. Why not train voroirs in every city, instead of dragging people along the salt roads into the heart of the realm?
"Because yes," Leif answered.
Rough. Short. End of it.
Hrafn was not surprised.
"But more die this way," he insisted. "Normally, no one should die."
This time there was something else in the hersir's voice beyond the habitual dryness. Something harsher. Closer to shame than Hrafn would have imagined hearing there.
And then he understood.
Something had gone wrong.
The roads existed, and therefore were used. The Hird's cities traded with one another. Great caravans crossed the realm all the time, and crossed protected. It worked, most of the time. Sometimes, it did not.
"You are dismissed," Leif said, before Hrafn could push farther.
He set the cup on the table and saluted the hersir as he ought. Then he went out feeling like hell.
Not exactly because of the conversation. It was not pleasant to understand that his life from then on would likely be made of struggle, pain, and usefulness. But he had already suspected as much. Nearly expected it.
What was crushing him at that moment was the body.
It hurt a great deal.
It hurt all the time.
He kept walking, passing his own tent without stopping right away. They would leave later that day. They would not make full use of the Star's light, because the night before had demanded too much of them all. They needed time. Enough not to collapse on the road.
"Hrafn!"
He heard the voice before he recognized whose it was.
"Come here, Hrafn! Look what this rogue has!"
It was Grim.
The white was waving to him from the far end of the caravan, already beside several commons. Somehow, in the time Hrafn had spent sitting and drinking coffee with the hersir, Grim had managed to get drunk or close to it.
Impressive efficiency.
"Here, drink, Hrafn," Grim said, raising a strong-smelling bottle. "Drink. Drink eases pain, eases burdens, eases everything."
That...
"Come on, don't be weak. You lost an arm, not your mouth."
Grim burst out laughing at his own joke as though it were the finest thing said since the creation of the world.
"You have to make use of what you still have. Come on, let's drink."
Hrafn stared at him for an instant, brow furrowed, the bottle waving inches from his face.
Well. What's the harm.
"Give it to me."