Chapter 3: A Bath and a Revelation
The steam from the washroom still clung to Aldric’s skin as he descended the stairs, the coarse linen of his clean troughs scratchy against scars both old and new. The memory of Lir’s wide-eyed stare at the doorway played in his mind, followed by the kid’s flustered stammering.Just surprised, he’d said. Aldric shook his head, a faint, dry smirk touching his lips. Kid was probably greener than he let on, never seen a proper knight out of his steel shell.It was almost endearing.
The common room of the Staggering Hart had descended into the loud, smoky chaos of evening. Rough-looking men—trappers in worn leather, off-duty garrison soldiers with the dull eyes of bored militiamen, a few merchant guards with better armor but worse manners—crowded the long tables. The air was thick with the smell of venison stew, sour ale, and unwashed bodies. A bard in the corner was plucking a mournful tune on a lute, but no one was listening.
Aldric shouldered his way to the bar, the press of bodies naturally parting slightly for a man of his size and bearing, especially one with a sword hilt peeking over his shoulder. The innkeeper’s wife slid a tankard of dark ale towards him without a word. He took it, leaned back against the scarred wood, and surveyed the room. His eyes automatically found Lir, who was perched on a stool near the hearth, trying to look inconspicuous. The elf was nursing a small cup of what looked like broth, his silver eyes darting around the room, taking in every detail with a hunter’s quiet intensity.“He your boy?”
The voice came from Aldric’s left. A man, older, with a weather-beaten face and the keen, calculating gaze of a fellow sell-sword, had sidled up next to him. He wore a brigandine studded with rusting rivets and carried a notched hand-and-a-half sword on his back.
“My squire,” Aldric corrected, his tone leaving no room for further inquiry.“Squire. Right.” The man took a long pull from his own tankard. “Small for the work, ain’t he? Looks like a stiff breeze would carry him off.”
“He does his part.” Aldric’s voice was flat, a clear warning.“Easy, friend. No offense.” The sell-sword raised a placating hand.“Name’s Corvan.Just making conversation. You two look like you’ve seen some road. Coming in or heading out?”
“Depends on what’s on offer.”
Corvan’s smile revealed a missing canine. “Isn’t there always?The usual.Bandits on the Northrun, getting bold. A few farmers south of here swear something’s been lifting their sheep clean over a six-foot wall. Probably a warg.Or a bored giant.” He chuckled dryly. “Pay’s shit for that stuff, though.The garrison handles it when they can be bothered.”
Aldric grunted, unimpressed. He’d hunted bigger game for emptier coffers. “Nothing else?”
Corvan leaned in, his voice dropping.“Well, there’s the other thing.The quiet talk. Up in the Duskwood Marches, the old elven territory.Folk are going missing. Not taken, not killed outright.Just… vanishing.No tracks, no screams. One day they’re there, tending their solitary huts or checking traplines, the next… poof.” He snapped his fingers.“The garrison sent a patrol.Five men. They came back four days later, down two.The ones who returned wouldn’t say a word. Just shook, drank themselves blind, and took the first cart out of Ironbeck.”
Elven territory. The words sent a cold trickle down Aldric’s spine.He hated the Duskwood. Hated the way the light never seemed to reach the floor, hated the silence that felt like being watched, hated the fey-touched wrongness of the place. It was exactly the kind of job he would normally avoid like a plague village.Too much mystery, not enough monster to stick a sword in.
His gaze drifted back to Lir.The elf was watching them now, sensing the shift in conversation. Those ancient eyes held a question.“What do the locals say?” Aldric asked, keeping his voice neutral.
Corvan shrugged.“They say it’s the Whispers.Old magic. The ones who’ve lived on the border for generations, they lock their doors at night and paint iron nails on their shutters.They say the forest is remembering it doesn’t like us. That it’s taking back what was stolen.” He took another drink.“Superstitious nonsense, most like. Probably just some clever beast.Or a particularly nasty clan of forest goblins. But the pay… the pay is good. Lord Everly’s steward is offering fifty silver crowns for proof of what’s happening. A hundred for a solution.”
A hundred silver was a year’s comfortable living.It was new armor. It was a real stake, something beyond the next meal, the next miserable roadside ditch to sleep in.Aldric felt the familiar, cynical calculation begin.Risk versus reward. His eyes flicked to Lir again.The kid had saved his life against the troll. Had held his nerve.Was smarter than he looked.But the Duskwood… and elves. He’d sworn off anything to do with that treacherous, glamour-ridden folk after his last disastrous contract guarding a faerie-touched border lord.“Who’s paying?” he asked finally.
“The steward, like I said.Man called Harlen. He’s at the manor house, just north of the town wall. You can’t miss it.” Corvan pushed off from the bar.“Think on it.But don’t think too long. Rumor is Harlen’s talking to another group.Wolves’ Heads, they call themselves.Nasty bunch. You seem like straight steel, which is why I mentioned it.” He nodded once and melted back into the crowd.
Aldric finished his ale, the bitter taste lingering.A hundred silver. And the kid… the kid was part elven.He might know things.Might be useful. Or he might be a liability, a fey-tainted weak spot in the one place Aldric didn’t want any weakness.He crossed the room and stood before Lir’s stool. The elf looked up, setting his broth aside.“Sir?”
“Got a lead on work,” Aldric said, his voice low. “Up north.In the Duskwood Marches.”
He watched the reaction closely. A flicker in those silver eyes—was it fear?Recognition?Something deeper and older? But Lir’s face remained carefully composed.“What kind of work?”
“People disappearing.No traces. The locals blame old magic. ‘The Whispers.’ Ever heard of it?”
Lir was silent for a long moment.He stared into the low fire. “The Duskwood is… an old place.It does not forget. And it does not forgive trespass easily.” His words were measured, each one chosen with a care that felt distinctly un-childlike. “The Whispers are not a thing.They are a… a condition. A state of the forest itself when it is wounded.”
Aldric filed that away.The kid knew something, alright.“Could it be done by a beast? Or men?”
“It could be done by many things.A beast would leave a trace. Men would, too, unless they were very skilled.” Lir finally looked up at him. “It is dangerous.”
“The pay is good.A hundred silver.”
Lir’s eyebrows raised slightly. That was a fortune to anyone, let alone a orphaned squire.He swallowed. “You are considering it?”
“I am.” Aldric crossed his arms. “I need to know if you can handle it.Really handle it. Not just standing your ground against a troll you’ve pissed off, but walking into a place that might not play by any rules we understand. Where the enemy might not have a face you can shoot.”
The challenge hung between them. Aldric saw the pride flare in Lir’s eyes, hot and bright, warring with what looked like a deep, instinctual dread.The kid squared his small shoulders.“I am your squire. Where you go, I go.My duty is here. With you.” He echoed his own words from the troll gully, and they held the same solid weight.Aldric gave a slow nod.“Alright then. We see the steward tomorrow.Get some sleep. And Lir?” He paused, ensuring he had the elf’s full attention. “If you know anything—anything at all—about what we might be walking into, you tell me.Not when we’re already neck-deep in it.Before. Clear?”
The command was blunt, leaving no room for evasion. Lir held his gaze, and for a second, Aldric saw not a boy, but a person of startling depth wrestling with secrets. “I will,” Lir said, and the promise sounded true.
Back in their room, the silence was different.The two cots felt like islands in a sea of unspoken things. Aldric lay on his back, staring at the smoke-stained rafters, listening to the muffled roar from downstairs and the softer sound of Lir’s breathing from across the room.
The image from the washroom resurfaced, unprompted. Not his own nakedness, but Lir’s face in that moment. The crimson flush, the stammer, the way those eyes had lingered not with childish curiosity, but with a kind of arrested, intense focus that had felt… off. Heard elves were prone to perversions, Aldric had teased, trying to break the awkwardness. The kid’s reaction had been too sharp, too defensive.
I like girls, he’d blurted.
A normal boy, a human boy of his seeming age, might have giggled or made a crude joke.He wouldn’t have declared it like a solemn oath. The pieces still didn’t fit.The knowledge in his eyes.The careful speech. The sheer, relentless toughness in such a small package.Aldric rolled onto his side, facing the wall. It didn’t matter.Whatever the kid’s secrets were, he was loyal.He was capable. In their line of work, that was the currency that mattered.The rest was just noise.
Across the room, Lir lay rigid, eyes open wide, watching the silhouette of the knight in the dark. The word Duskwood rang in his mind like a death knell. He knew the stories, the oldest laments of his people. Places where the veil between the world and the old, deep magic was thin.Where the forest itself could dream, and its dreams could be spiteful.
He thought of Aldric’s body in the steam, the powerful lines of him, the stark, unashamed masculinity. The memory caused a confusing, warm lurch in his stomach, followed immediately by a wave of sickening fear.Not fear of desire, but fear of discovery. One wrong look, one moment of unguarded softness, and the knight’s gruff tolerance could shatter into disgust or, worse, betrayal.My duty is here.With you.
He clung to the duty, to the structure of being a squire. It was his armor, more than any leather jerkin could ever be.It had to be enough. As the sounds of the inn finally died down, giving way to the creeping cold of the frontier night, Lir made a silent vow to the darkness.He would follow Aldric into the Duskwood, into whatever waited there. He would be useful.He would be brave.
And he would keep his secrets buried, no matter the cost.
The morning in Ironbeck dawned grey and damp, a thin mist clinging to the muddy lanes like a patient ghost. Over a breakfast of gritty porridge, Aldric watched Lir push his food around his bowl. The elf hadn’t touched his broth the night before, either.
“Spit it out,” Aldric finally said, his voice cutting through the inn’s morning clatter.
Lir looked up, startled. “Sir?”
“The Duskwood. It’s sitting in your gut like a stone. You know something. So tell me.”
Lir set his spoon down carefully. He took a slow breath, his gaze fixed on the wood grain of the table. “My… people have stories. Not children’s tales. Histories. The Duskwood Marches are not just trees. They are a memory. A wound that never closed.” His silver eyes met Aldric’s, and for the first time, the knight saw real fear in them, cold and ancient. “The Whispers are what happens when that memory turns hungry. It is not a thing you can fight with a sword. It listens. It learns a shape from your own mind, and then it shows it to you. It shows you what you fear most, or what you love most, and it… it unstitches you from the world. No one is paying a hundred silver to solve it. They are paying a hundred silver to deliver a corpse for their peace of mind.”
The conviction in Lir’s voice was absolute. It wasn’t a plea; it was a clinical assessment. Aldric leaned back, the legs of his stool groaning. He thought of Corvan’s story—the patrol that came back broken, the men who just shook and drank. He thought of fey tricks and glamours, of battles where you couldn’t see the enemy. His hand instinctively went to the rough scar beneath his tunic, a souvenir from a fight with a will-o’-the-wisp that had led him into a bog full of sucking mud and sharpened stakes.
“Alright,” he said, the word short and final.
Lir blinked. “Alright?”
“We’re not going.” Aldric scooped the last of his porridge. “A hundred silver’s no good to a ghost. And I don’t fight wars I can’t see.” He stood, the decision settling into his bones with a pragmatic thud. “We’ll head east instead. Follow the riverlands. There’s always work protecting barges from river-pirates, or clearing out wolvren dens for farmers. Simpler problems.”
The relief that washed over Lir’s face was so profound it was almost physical. He nodded, a quick, jerky motion, and stood to gather their kits.
They crossed the rickety bridge out of Ironbeck as the mist burned away under a pale sun. The road became a dirt track, then little more than a wagon-grooved path through rolling hills thick with autumnal bracken. The air smelled of damp earth and decaying leaves. For two days they saw no one but a lone shepherd who pointed them towards a shortcut through a narrow, wooded valley.
“Might find hospitality at the far end,” the shepherd had mumbled. “Widow lives there. Does alright for herself.”
The valley was quiet, the only sound the crunch of their boots and Pebble’s steady clopping. Late on the second afternoon, the trees thinned, revealing a cleared homestead. It was neat, stubbornly orderly against the wilderness. A robust cottage of honey-colored stone stood beside a substantial barn, with a split-rail fence enclosing a chicken run and a tidy kitchen garden. Smoke curled from the chimney. It spoke of relentless work and a quiet, determined prosperity.
A woman was chopping wood near the front porch. She was perhaps thirty, with strong, capable arms and a thick braid of chestnut hair falling over one shoulder. She paused, axe in hand, as they approached, her eyes assessing them with a wariness that softened into pragmatic curiosity.
“Lost?” she called out, her voice clear and unafraid.
“Just passing through,” Aldric answered, halting a polite distance away. “The shepherd said we might find a friendly face.”
“Did he.” She planted the axe in the stump and wiped her hands on her apron. “Well, you look more like working men than beggars. I’m Marta.” She didn’t offer a surname. “You’re welcome to water your beast and rest a moment. For a price.”
Aldric raised an eyebrow. “What price?”
“Conversation.” She nodded towards the house. “And an opinion. I’ve a problem that might suit men of your profession.”
Inside, the cottage was warm, clean, and fragrant with the smell of baking bread. It was a defiantly cheerful space. Marta poured them small cups of sharp cider and sat across from them at the heavy oak table. Her story was direct and unvarnished.
“Five men. They’ve taken up residence in the old mill, half a day’s walk north. They started by demanding a ‘toll’ from my couriers. Then they took a whole wagon of my autumn cider. Last week, they threatened to burn my barn if I didn’t pay a monthly ‘protection’ fee.” Her knuckles were white where she gripped her cup. “The garrison says they’re understrength and it’s a ‘civil matter.’ The mill is technically on my land, but that parchment means nothing to men with knives.”
“How much are they asking?” Aldric asked, his voice low.
“Fifty silver a month.” She laughed, a harsh, dry sound. “That’s my entire profit. They’ll bleed me dry by winter, then take the land anyway.”
“And you want us to… persuade them to leave?”
Marta’s gaze was flint. “I want you to make them leave. Permanently. I have forty silver saved. It’s all I can offer. But you can take whatever they’ve hoarded in that mill. And you can sleep under a roof, with hot meals, for as long as it takes to resolve it.”
It was straightforward. It was a problem with edges, something he could grasp. Bandits were a known quantity—greedy, cruel, and ultimately stupid. Aldric glanced at Lir. The elf gave a faint, almost imperceptible nod. The relief of avoiding the Duskwood had made him eager for this cleaner task.
“We’ll need a layout of the mill,” Aldric said. “Their patterns. Then we’ll go and have a talk.”
Marta’s smile was thin but genuine. “I’ll draw you a map.”
The next three days were a tense, quiet routine of planning and waiting. Aldric and Lir scouted the mill from a distance, confirming Marta’s details. It was a two-story stone structure beside a choked stream, with a single usable entrance on the ground floor. The bandits were sloppy, leaving their latrine trench too close to the walls, their watch rotations predictable.
In the evenings, they returned to the homestead. Marta fed them stew and fresh bread. She spoke of her late husband, a carter who’d died of a fever, and her fight to keep the land. She was sharp, unsentimental, and there was a rugged appeal to her resilience. Aldric found himself talking more than he usually did—about practical things, mostly, the management of land and the price of grain, but it was talk that didn’t require guarding his words.
Lir watched it unfold in silent, coiled misery. He saw the way Aldric’s shoulders loosened at Marta’s table. He noted the occasional, rough chuckle that escaped the knight, a sound Lir heard so rarely. He saw how Marta’s eyes lingered on Aldric’s scars, not with pity, but with a kind of recognition. She touched Aldric’s arm once, pointing something out on the map, and Lir felt a hot, irrational spike of anger so intense he had to look away.
He was useless in this. He could not offer this easy, human companionship. His own stories were prisons of secrecy, his body a lie. He retreated into his duties, checking and re-checking his gear, tending to Pebble with exaggerated care, speaking only when spoken to.
On the fourth evening, after the plan was set for the following dawn, Aldric and Marta sat by the hearth after Lir had gone up to the loft to sleep. Their voices were a low murmur. Lir, curled on his pallet, could not make out the words. But he heard the cadence. It was gentle. It was familiar.
He heard the creak of the floorboards later, the soft click of a door. He lay stiff in the dark, imagining Aldric crossing the short space to Marta’s room. The cottage held its breath. No further sound reached him, but the silence that followed was a vast, screaming confirmation.
He stared at the rough-hewn beams above him, a cold hollow opening beneath his ribs. This was what normal was. This was the simple, human comfort Aldric understood, a comfort Lir could never provide. The warmth of the hearth downstairs felt like a mockery. He curled tighter into himself, the weight of his hidden truth a physical ache, a boulder on his chest. His vow felt foolish now, a child’s game. His duty was here, with Aldric. But Aldric, it seemed, had found a place where he needed no squire.
Sleep was impossible. The quiet of the cottage was a thick, cottony silence that pressed against Lir’s ears, amplifying every shift of fabric, every imagined sound from below. His mind replayed the casual touch, the low laughter, the closing door. A sick, restless heat crawled under his skin. It was an ugly feeling, twisting in his gut—part jealousy, part a crushing sense of irrelevance. He was a child-squire, a temporary convenience. Marta was real. A woman. A whole person who could offer things Lir’s deception permanently barred her from offering.
He rose from his pallet, his movements soundless, the elven stealth he normally suppressed coming to the fore. The wooden ladder to the main floor made no noise under his weight. The hearth was banked, casting the room into a geometry of deep orange ember-glow and long, swallowing shadows. He could hear it now: a low, rhythmic sound from behind Marta’s bedroom door. A soft, wet murmuring. A sharp, hitched breath that was unmistakably Aldric’s.
A flush burned Lir’s face, his ears ringing. He shouldn’t. It was a violation, a trespass worse than any he’d committed. But his feet moved anyway, drawn by a desperate, painful need to see, to understand this part of the knight that was so wholly closed to him. There was a large, old linen press against the shared wall of the bedroom, its bulk creating a narrow gap between it and the stone fireplace. A child could fit there. An elf definitely could.
She slipped into the darkness of the gap, her back to the rough stone, and peered through the slim crack where the door hadn’t fully latched.
The room was lit by a single tallow candle on a bedside table. Aldric stood beside the bed, his head tipped back, eyes closed, one broad hand braced against the wall. He was fully naked, the firelight painting the hard planes of his chest and stomach in gold, glinting off the silvered lines of his scars. Marta knelt before him on the woven rug, her chestnut braid undone and cascading over her bare shoulders. She was naked too, her body strong and full, her breasts heavy with pale, pink-tipped nipples. The thatch of hair between her legs was a darker, rich brown.
Her mouth was on him, on the thick, rigid length of him that Lir had only glimpsed in the steamy washroom. Now she took it deep, her lips stretched, one hand cupping the heavy weight beneath. Aldric’s stomach muscles jumped. A low groan vibrated in his chest, raw and unfiltered. “Gods, Marta,” he rasped, his voice thick and unfamiliar.
Lir watched, paralyzed. Her own breath came in shallow, silent hitches. The sight was a physical blow, shocking in its intimacy, devastating in its completeness. This was Aldric without armor, without gruffness, laid utterly bare and vulnerable to someone else’s touch. A hot, aching tightness coiled deep in Lir’s own belly, a shameful mirror to the act she witnessed. Without conscious thought, her hand slipped inside her own rough-spun trousers.
Her fingers found the slick, desperate heat between her legs, so different from the anatomy on display. She touched herself, a slow, frantic mimicry of the rhythm Marta set, her silver eyes fixed unblinking on the conjunction of their bodies. She watched the flex of Aldric’s thighs, the way Marta’s throat worked, the dark flush spreading across the knight’s skin. She saw the precise moment Aldric’s control fractured. His hand fisted in Marta’s hair, not roughly, but with a claiming urgency. His hips stuttered forward. A sharp, guttural sound tore from him, and he spent himself into her mouth with a shudder that ran through his entire frame.
Lir pressed her own face into the crook of her arm to smother a whimper, her body clenching around her fingers in a swift, violent wave of release that left her trembling and hollow. For a long minute, there was only the sound of ragged breathing in the bedroom, and the silent, shattering collapse of Lir’s world in the dark.
Marta rose, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, a small, satisfied smile on her lips. Aldric pulled her up, kissed her, a deep and languid thing full of mutual gratitude. “You’re a wonder,” he murmured against her hair, his voice still rough.
“You’re not so bad yourself, hedge knight,” she chuckled, turning to blow out the candle.
In the sudden darkness, Lir extracted herself from the hiding place. She felt filthy, shattered, a ghost in her own skin. She crept back up to the loft, the taste of iron in her mouth where she’d bitten her cheek. She lay down, staring into nothing, the vivid afterimage of their bodies burned onto the back of her eyelids.
When dawn seeped grey into the loft, it found her already dressed, her bedroll tightly packed. Her face was a careful, neutral mask. Downstairs, Aldric was buckling his vambrace, his expression focused, the man from the night before completely tucked away beneath the familiar, practical exterior. Marta handed him a hunk of bread and cheese.
“You’re quiet this morning,” Aldric said, glancing at Lir as she descended.
“Readying myself for the task, sir,” Lir said, her voice thankfully even. She accepted bread from Marta without meeting her eyes.
“Stick to the plan,” Aldric said, finality in his tone. “You watch the tree line. You only loose if I’m backed to the water. Clear?”
“Clear,” Lir said. The mill, the bandits—it was a clean problem. A welcome one. Something she could possibly solve with a well-placed arrow. It was everything else that felt impossibly broken.
They left the cottage in the crisp morning air. Aldric strode ahead, his stride long and sure, the weight of his purpose settling back onto his shoulders like a familiar cloak. Lir followed, her own steps silent, carrying the weight of the night, a secret now nested within a secret, sharp as a shard of glass in her chest. The bandits were ahead. But the real battle, she knew, was the one she was losing inside herself, with every step that took her further from the cottage, and closer to the knight who would never, could never, see her.