Chapter 1: Ropes and Rain
The rain didn’t fall so much as it seeped, a cold, persistent drizzle that turned the village square into a sucking graveyard of mud and broken stone. Oscar’s boots, caked in the muck of a retreat that had become a rout, sank an inch with every shuffling step. The torches guttered, their light bleeding into the general gray, painting the faces of the huddled survivors in streaks of orange and shadow. He smelled wet wool, spent fear, and the coppery hint of blood not yet washed away.
A Gerulian soldier shoved him forward, a hard palm between his shoulder blades. Oscar stumbled, caught himself on the slick edge of the central fountain, its carved figures shattered, water overflowing to mix with the filth. His breath came in ragged clouds. The pride was the last thing to go, a hot coal in his gut. He was Sir Oscar of Haust, a knight of the Griffin’s Wing. He would not show them his face.
“This one,” a voice boomed, cutting through the drizzle and the low weeping. “Bigger than the others. Let’s have a proper look.”
Oscar knew that voice. Varek. He’d seen him on the field, a roaring giant of a man directing the pincer movement that had collapsed the Haustian line. Now, Varek’s scarred visage loomed into view, a grin splitting his face like a crack in old leather. He smelled of sausage and cheap wine.
“Stand him up,” Varek said.
Hands grabbed Oscar’s arms, wrenching him upright from the fountain. He kept his eyes fixed on a broken cobblestone swimming in a puddle. Varek’s calloused fingers gripped his chin, forcing his head up. The man’s eyes, a flat brown, scanned him like a butcher assessing stock.
“Proud,” Varek mused, his thumb grinding into Oscar’s jaw. “I can always see it in the eyes. Like a stallion that needs breaking.” He let go and nodded to the soldiers. “Strip him.”
The order hung in the damp air for a second before the hands moved. Oscar stiffened, the hot coal of pride flaring into a wildfire of panic. He jerked an elbow back, catching a soldier in the throat with a satisfying grunt.
Varek’s laugh boomed out, genuine and horrifying. “See? Spirit!”
The blow came from the side, a gauntleted fist to his kidney. Oscar’s vision whited out, the air exploding from his lungs as he folded. They let him drop to his knees in the icy mud. Fingers tore at the fastenings of his surcoat, the leather cuirass beneath. The sound of ripping cloth was louder than the rain. Cold air hit his skin, then the rough, impersonal scrape of hands pulling wool and linen over his head, yanking his boots off, taking everything.
In moments, he was on his knees, naked, the mud oozing between his toes and over his shins. The drizzle prickled on his skin. The shame was a physical weight, colder than the air, pressing him down into the filth. He heard a muffled sob from the huddle of captives, a woman’s voice. He couldn’t tell if it was for him or for them all. He focused on the mud, on the fractured stone, on anything but the eyes he knew were on him.
“A fine piece,” Varek said, circling him. His boots squelched. “Good shoulders. Strong back. He’ll last.” He stopped in front of Oscar. “You know what happens now, Haustian?”
Oscar remained silent, his jaw clenched so tight it ached.
“We don’t kill men like you,” Varek continued, conversationally. “Waste of good material. You lost. Your kingdom is dust. You belong to the Gerulian Empire now. And the empire has a use for proud, strong men who need to learn their place.” He leaned down, his breath warm and foul against Oscar’s ear. “You become a war wife.”
Oscar’s head snapped up, his hazel eyes finally meeting Varek’s, confusion and dawning horror cutting through the humiliation.
Varek straightened, enjoying the reaction. “You have women, yes? Wives. For breeding, for children, for home.” He waved a dismissive hand toward the sobbing women. “A war wife is something else. A reward for our brave soldiers. A comfort for the men who won the field. You exist for one thing: pleasure. Their pleasure. You learn to submit. You learn to serve. You learn to be grateful for the use.”
The words slithered into Oscar’s brain, unthinkable, obscene. It was a fate worse than a sword in the gut. It was the utter annihilation of everything he was.
“No,” Oscar rasped, the first word he’d spoken since his capture.
“No?” Varek chuckled. “It’s not a request.” He gestured, and a soldier stepped forward, holding a strange garment—a stiff leather jockstrap, crude and utilitarian, with thick straps. “You fight, you make trouble, your life becomes very difficult. The men get rougher. The duties get harder. Or,” Varek shrugged, “you learn. You adapt. Some even come to prefer it. No more orders. No more battle. Just simple, earthly duty.”
The soldiers hauled Oscar to his feet. He struggled, a raw, primal sound tearing from his throat as they manhandled the leather onto him, tightening the straps with impersonal efficiency. It was a branding, more effective than any hot iron.
“Now,” Varek said, his tone shifting to one of casual command. “My cousin Darcy is taking a shipment north at dawn. He gets the pick of this lot. He has a taste for projects.” He looked Oscar up and down again. “You’ll do.”
He turned to walk away, then paused, as if remembering an afterthought. He nodded to the soldier holding Oscar’s discarded sword, a fine, straight blade of Haustian steel, notched but serviceable. The soldier bent, picked it up, and tossed it through the air.
Varek caught it by the hilt. He turned back and flung it, not at Oscar, but into the mud at his feet. It landed point-down, quivering, an arm’s length away.
“Go on,” Varek said, his voice dropping to a mocking whisper. “A knight of Haust should die with his steel in hand. A clean end. I grant you that. Take it.”
The world narrowed to the sword. The last symbol of who he was. The honorable way out. The drizzle pattered on the blade. Oscar looked at it, then at Varek’s expectant, cynical face. He saw the truth. If he reached for it, they wouldn’t let him die. They’d beat him, put him in the wagon anyway, and his defiance would only make the coming hell worse. It was a final, cruel joke.
His body trembled with the urge. Every instinct screamed to seize the blade, to lunge even if it meant being cut down. But the weariness, the crushing weight of the lost battle, the cold shame on his skin, and the terrifying, surreal picture of the future Varek had painted… it all coalesced into a leaden void.
He took a shuddering breath, the kind that cracks something inside the chest. He did not move toward the sword.
Instead, he let his shoulders slump, the last of the tension bleeding out into the chill air. He surrendered. Not to the man, but to the fact. Haust was gone. The knight was gone.
Varek watched the light leave Oscar’s eyes. He nodded, satisfied. “Wise. Load him up.”
They bound his wrists with rough hemp before shoving him toward a heavy wagon with barred sides. The back was open, and inside he saw shapes—other men, naked but for the same degrading leather straps, curled against each other or staring blankly at the wooden planks. The stench of sweat, fear, and leather filled the space.
He was pushed up and over the side. He fell onto the crowded mass of flesh, earning a grunt. No one spoke. The bodies were warm, a horrible parody of comfort. He twisted, finding a sliver of space against the bars, and drew his knees up.
From his position, he could see Varek standing by the fountain, laughing at something another officer said. He saw the torchlight glint off his own sword, now tucked into Varek’s belt as a trophy.
The rain began to fall harder, drumming on the wagon’s canvas roof. It sounded like marching feet, fading into the distance.
It sounded like marching feet, fading into the distance.
Time lost meaning in the wagon. It was measured in shivers, in the rough jolt of a wheel hitting a stone, in the low, shared breathing of twenty broken men. The leather strap was an alien cage, chafing and cold. The rain leaked through a seam in the canvas, a single, stubborn drip that found the back of Oscar’s neck every few seconds. He didn’t move to avoid it. The petty discomfort was almost a relief; it was something real, something from the world before.
A body shifted next to him. A young man, barely more than a boy, his face smeared with mud and what might have been tears. His eyes, wide and glassy, kept darting around the enclosed space, looking for an answer that wasn’t there.
“Sir Oscar?” the boy whispered, his voice cracking. He’d been a squire in the garrison, Oscar recalled dimly. Finn. “What… what are they doing? Why… why are we like this?”
Oscar didn’t look at him. He watched the silhouettes of Gerulian guards walking past the bars, their forms blurry in the downpour.
“They stripped us. Naked.” Finn’s whisper grew more urgent, tinged with a hysterical edge. “And they put these… these things on us. Why? It only covers the front. It doesn’t… it doesn’t cover our backsides. Why would they do that? What’s it for?”
The question hung in the foul air. Several other men had gone still, listening. They all wanted the answer, and they all dreaded it.
Oscar closed his eyes. The image of Varek’s grinning face, the feel of the mud under his knees, the weight of his own sword in another man’s belt—it all pressed down, compacting his pride into a cold, dense slurry in his gut. He had to say it. Giving voice to it would make it true, but silence was a lie now.
“They’re not going to kill us,” Oscar said, his own voice flat, dead. It wasn’t his voice. It was the voice of something left behind in the mud by the fountain.
Finn waited, desperate.
“They’ve won. They own us. This…” Oscar finally glanced down at the stiff leather, a brutal and purposeful design. “This isn’t armor. It’s… packaging. A label.”
“For what?” Finn breathed.
Oscar turned his head and looked at the boy properly. He saw the ghost of his own younger self, full of fire and ignorant fear. He had to kill that ghost. “For use. We’re war wives now.”
The term meant nothing to Finn. His brow furrowed in confusion.
“They give us to their soldiers,” Oscar continued, the words ash in his mouth. “As a reward. The leather is for them. So they see what they’re getting. So we remember what we’re for. They don’t cover our asses…” He trailed off, a violent, involuntary shiver seizing his shoulders, rattling his teeth. It wasn’t from the cold. It was from the picture his mind finally completed, vivid and obscene. “Because that’s not the point. The point is access. We’re going to be given to a man. An Empire man. And he’s going to…” He faltered, the crude, clinical reality of it robbing him of even the soldier’s vocabulary for violation. “He’s going to take that. He’s going to penetrate us. And dominate us. That’s the whole job. Until we break. Or until we die from it.”
The silence in the wagon after he spoke was absolute, deeper than before. The only sound was the rain and the creak of the wheels. Finn’s face went slack, the confusion melting into a dawning, unspeakable horror. He opened his mouth but no sound came out. He just stared at Oscar, looking for a denial that wouldn’t come.
Oscar turned away, back to the bars and the weeping night. He focused on the rhythm of the drip on his neck. He made his mind a blank, gray wall. But behind the wall, a single, terrified thought echoed: Who will they give me to?
The wagon lurched forward, beginning to roll. The journey north had begun.