Chapter 8: The Charcoal Burner's Camp
The river path was a narrow, grudging thing, worn by deer and desperate men. Mara’s directions had been simple: follow the water north until the smell of cold ash overpowered the smell of damp earth. The promised solitude felt like a fragile gift. After the silent watcher in the trees, the idea of being truly alone was equal parts relief and terror.
My pack, now stocked with a waxed cloth of hard cheese, drier bread, and a small pouch of what Mara called “waking tea,” felt heavier with each mile. The blight’s metallic-sweet rot seemed lodged in my sinuses, a phantom stench I couldn’t shake. Every rustle in the bare bracken made my shoulders tense. Was it the wind? A bird? Or a man with a silver-tipped cane moving with unnatural quiet?
The landscape grew rougher, the river carving a deeper channel through crumbling shale. The air grew sharper, colder. And then, the smell arrived. Not the blight, but the acrid, ancient scent of old fire—cold ash and bitter charcoal.
The camps were exactly as Mara described: a series of semi-circular clearings hugging the riverbank, each with a large, dome-shaped mound of earth at its center—the remnants of charcoal clamps. They were like burial mounds for trees. In one clearing, a rough lean-to of rotted logs and mildewed canvas sagged against a rock face. It looked like the skeleton of a small beast.
Solitude. I exhaled, the tension in my neck loosening a fraction. This was good. Isolated, defensible with the river at my back, full of escape routes into the thick woods. I could rest here. Think.
I pushed through the brittle undergrowth into the clearing. And stopped.
A fire crackled in the stone-ringed pit before the lean-to. Not the ghost of an old fire. A new one, flames licking hungrily at a stack of dry branches. And sitting on a rolled blanket beside it, methodically running a whetstone along the edge of a long, brutal-looking dagger, was a man.
He was armored, but not like a city guard. His armor was a matte, weathered black, segmented like a insect’s carapace, and scarred with use. A heavy wool cloak, dark green and travel-stained, was thrown back from his shoulders. His hair was black, cropped short, and his face was all sharp angles—a blade of a nose, a slashing mouth, cheekbones that looked like they could cut stone. He didn’t look up as I entered.
He simply finished a long, smooth stroke with the stone, inspected the edge, and then, finally, lifted his eyes.
They were a pale, wintry grey, the color of a frozen lake. They held no surprise, only a flat, assessing calm. He looked me over in one swift, comprehensive glance: my mud-caked boots, my damp cloak, the weariness I knew was etched into every line of my face.
“The herbalist’s apprentice,” he said. His voice was a low baritone, roughened by weather. It wasn’t a question.
Every instinct screamed to run. But my legs were leaden. The fire was between us. He was between me and the easiest path back to the river. Running would be an admission of guilt, of fear. It would trigger the chase.
So I stood my ground. I channeled every ounce of Princess Celestine’s dormant, haughty poise. “This camp was recommended to me. I wasn’t told it was occupied.”
“It wasn’t. An hour ago.” He set the whetstone down and flipped the dagger, catching it by the blade to offer me the hilt in a deliberately non-threatening gesture. He didn’t stand. “It is now. The fire’s warm. The meat’s shared.” He gestured with his chin toward a haunch of something wrapped in leaves, resting near the coals.
A test. An offer. A trap. It was all three.
“I’m not hungry,” I lied, my stomach tightening at the smell.
“Suit yourself.” He pulled the dagger back and used the tip to nudge a log deeper into the flames. Sparks spiraled into the twilight. “Mara’s a sharp old bird. Sending you here. Off the roads. Smart.”
He knew Mara. My mind raced, tripping over possibilities. Was he another one of her contacts? A fellow… whatever she was? Or was he the watcher from the tree line?
“You know her?” I kept my tone neutral, taking a cautious step closer to the fire’s warmth. The heat on my skin was agonizingly good.
“I know of her. People who know things tend to know each other. Or know of each other.” He looked up again, those grey eyes pinning me. “She said you were trouble. I don’t see it yet. But Mara’s rarely wrong.”
“Maybe her eyes are getting old.”
A faint, humorless smile touched his mouth. “Maybe.” He jerked his head toward the blanket across the fire from him. “Sit. You’re swaying on your feet. Trouble or not, you’ll fall in my fire and then we’ll both be inconvenienced.”
The sheer, practical bluntness of it disarmed me. There was no flowery courtesy, no courtly manipulation. It was the language of someone who lived on roads like this. Carefully, I lowered myself onto the edge of the blanket, keeping my pack between us. My muscles screamed in gratitude.
“My name’s Riven,” he said, returning to cleaning his nails with the dagger’s point. A mercenary’s fastidiousness.
“Eva.”
“Eva.” He tested the name as Orin had. But where Orin’s repetition had been thoughtful, Riven’s was analytical. Like he was comparing it to a list. “You’re a long way from any apothecary’s shop, Eva. And you don’t smell of herbs. You smell of river mud and fear.”
So much for subtlety. “The river was cold. And the world is… concerning.”
“The blight.”
It wasn’t a question. I just nodded, watching his hands. They were broad, scarred across the knuckles, moving with economical precision.
“It’s getting worse,” he said, almost to himself. “Faster than it should. Whoever’s feeding it is getting ambitious. Or desperate.”
“You’re tracking it.” I remembered what he’d first said. A mercenary tracking the blight for his own purposes.
“I’m being paid to.”
“By who?”
His grey eyes flicked to me, a glint of something like amusement in their pale depths. “By someone who doesn’t want their name said aloud at charcoal burners’ camps. Let’s just say they have a vested interest in the kingdom not turning into a desiccated wasteland. Surprisingly altruistic for the type.”
A noble, then. Or someone with noble backing. Not Drevik, surely. The Shadow Court wouldn’t hire a mercenary to track a phenomenon they were probably orchestrating or, at minimum, collecting. Unless Riven was lying. The thought settled in my gut like a stone.
He unwrapped the meat, used his dagger to slice a strip, and speared it. He held it out to me over the flames. “Eat. You’re no good to anyone faint from hunger, and I’d rather not have to carry you if we need to move quickly.”
The ‘we’ hung in the air, presumptuous and unnerving. I took the offered meat. It was venison, tough and gamey, but warm and filling. I forced myself to eat slowly, to not appear as starving as I was.
“Why would we need to move quickly?” I asked between bites.
“Because things that make blights tend to dislike witnesses. And we have at least one.” He finally sheathed his dagger at his hip. “Saw a man in a fine grey cloak watching the pasture this morning. Carried a cane with a silver wolf’s head. He was… observing. Not like a farmer. Like a scholar noting an interesting mold.”
The description was a splash of ice water down my spine. I kept chewing, kept my eyes on the fire. “Sounds like a city man lost on a walk.”
“He didn’t look lost,” Riven said, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial murmur that carried perfectly over the crackle of the fire. “He looked like the most dangerous thing for miles. And he saw you, too. With Mara. Which means if he’s looking for the source of the blight, he might start with the people poking around its edges.”
The logic was inescapable. I’d walked right into a narrative trap. The mysterious watcher, the converging paths. Of course Drevik would see me. The game’s camera would have lingered on his smile as he spotted the princess in disguise.
“What do you think he wants?” I asked, trying to sound casually interested.
“The same thing my employer wants, probably. To understand it. To control it. To own it.” Riven leaned back on his elbows, the firelight dancing on the planes of his face. “The difference is intent. My employer wants it contained. A man with a cane like that… he might want to take it apart to see how it ticks. Or put it in a bottle on his shelf.”
That sounded exactly right. “And you? What do you want?”
He was silent for a long moment. “I want to be paid. And I don’t like sleeping in blighted fields. It gives me nightmares.”
It was too simple an answer. I studied him. The armor was high-quality but unadorned. His weapons were clean, practical. He moved with the lethal grace of a predator at rest. This wasn’t just a hired sword. He was a specialist.
“Mara said the blight is a pact. An invitation to an old hunger.”
His gaze sharpened. “She told you that? She must like you. Or find you useful. She usually just dispenses herbs and scowls.” He sat up straight again. “She’s right. It’s a ritual. A stupid, greedy one. You don’t invite the Below-Green to dinner unless you’re prepared to be the main course.”
The name sent a shiver through me. “You know of it.”
“I’ve seen its work before. Further north. A village that made a bargain for fertile soil. Got it, for a generation. Then the soil started eating their children.” He said it with a chilling matter-of-factness. “It always collects its debt. The problem is figuring out what it was promised this time. And by whom.”
The conversation was veering into dangerous, revealing territory. I was a princess pretending to be a herbalist’s apprentice discussing forbidden magic with a mercenary who was either my best chance or my immediate death. The absurdity was almost calming.
“How do you find the person who made the pact?”
“Follow the hunger,” he said simply. “It creates a… trail. A thinning. The life around the epicenter gets sucked toward the feeder. The blight’s just the visible spillage. The real flow is subtler.” He tapped the side of his head. “You have to feel for it. Most people can’t. But you… you’ve got a trace of something on you. Like a scent.”
I froze. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Don’t you?” He cocked his head. “It’s not the flashy city magic. That’s a burnt smell. This is fainter. Greener. Like you’ve been sleeping in a forest that remembers your name.”
Lyra’s vial. The one that had unlocked the door. The magic that had felt like roots and deep water. It had left a residue on me, and this man could sense it.
“I don’t—” I began.
He held up a hand, cutting me off. “You don’t have to explain. Honestly, I don’t care. Magic’s a tool. Sometimes it’s useful. Mostly it’s a headache. But it might mean you can sense the thinning too, if you try. Might be why you’re here and not dead in a ditch. The old roads have a way of pulling the right travelers onto them.”
The night deepened around us, the woods a wall of darkness beyond our circle of firelight. The river murmured its endless song. I was exhausted, my mind reeling from the day, from this man, from the sheer precariousness of my existence.
Riven watched me for a long minute, then gestured with his chin toward the lean-to. “Get some sleep. I’ll take first watch.”
“I don’t need you to watch over me.”
“You’re right,” he said, unfazed. “You need someone to watch for them. The man with the cane. The idiot feeding the blight. The things that might come out of the woods looking for a easy meal.” He leveled those pale eyes at me. “Sleep, Eva. Or don’t. But stay by the fire. It’s warmer, and I can see you better.”
It was as close to a threat as it was a offer of protection. A transaction. My presence, and whatever strange magic clung to me, in exchange for his sword and his vigilance.
Defeated by fatigue and cold, I gave a curt nod. I pulled my cloak tight and lay down on the blanket, my back to the fire, facing the woods. I could feel Riven’s gaze on me, a steady, physical pressure.
My hand crept to the inner pocket of my cloak, where the music box lay wrapped in its cloth. The heirloom I’d supposedly stolen. The key to nothing. Was this blight connected? Was Drevik here for the box, or for the hunger in the land, or for me?
And who was Riven’s mysterious employer? A rival noble? The Crown itself?
The questions swirled, a turbulent eddy with no exit. Beneath them, a colder, more pragmatic thought surfaced. Riven was a weapon. A dangerous, unpredictable one. But he was here. And for now, his interest seemed aligned with my survival.
As I drifted into a shallow, uneasy sleep, the last thing I heard was the soft, rhythmic scrape of steel on stone as Riven resumed sharpening his dagger, the sound a quiet promise of violence in the dark.
The scrape of steel faded into the whisper of leaves, then into the deep, resonant silence of a stone hall. I was dreaming, but the air felt solid, cold, and smelled of incense and old blood.
I stood on a black-and-white checkered floor, stretching towards a distant throne of shadow. Two figures were silhouetted against a stained-glass window that showed no recognizable scene, only shattered colors.
One figure knelt. It was Riven, but clad in polished silver, his head bowed. The other stood over him, a hand resting—not on his shoulder—but on the hilt of a sword pointed at the floor between them. The standing man’s face was obscured, but his posture radiated a terrible, weary authority.
“You will never have it,” the standing man said, his voice echoing as if from the bottom of a well. “You are a reminder of a night our father could not control. A living sin against the state.”
“I don’t want your kingdom, brother,” dream-Riven said, his voice clear and dripping with a contempt I’d never heard from him awake. “I want you to remember you are not the only one who loved her.”
The scene shattered like glass.
Then I was in a bedchamber, all velvet and dust. A woman with hair like spilled ink lay still upon a canopy bed, her skin pale as marble. Not sleeping. Empty. A sickness that didn’t look like sickness, a wasting without a wound. The same hollow feeling I carried.
Riven stood at the foot of the bed, his armor gone, looking young and utterly broken. The brother—the king—stood by the window, his back to the room, shoulders rigid with grief or rage.
“The dark ones she consorted with promised her power,” the king whispered, the words hanging in the stale air. “This is the price. And you, brother, you brought their poison into our home. You introduced her.”
“She was searching for a cure for you,” Riven spat, the accusation raw. “For the rot in your own blood. And you let her pay the cost.”
Another splintering shift.
Now I saw tangled, pulsing roots buried deep beneath black soil, cradling bones and secrets. The kingdom’s foundations were not stone, but these hidden, gnawing things. The dark ones. They weren’t monsters from a fable. They were a consequence, a cancer grown from desperate choices.
And I saw myself, not as Eva, but as Celestine, standing in the checkered hall. I was not on the throne. I was on the square between the two brothers, a piece moved into a position I didn’t understand. The focus of two different kinds of hunger.
I was a key. Or a lock. Or the thing they would break trying to open the door.
My own voice echoed in the dream-darkness. In between the king and his brother.
A twig snapped in the real world.
My eyes flew open. The fire had burned low to embers, painting the clearing in pulsing red and deep shadow. Riven was gone from his spot. I lay perfectly still, the dream clinging to me like a cobweb, every detail horrifically sharp.
The soft crunch of a footstep on ash. Close.
I rolled silently onto my back, my hand sliding into my pack, closing around the handle of my eating knife. It was pathetic against armor.
Riven emerged from the tree line at the clearing’s edge, a dark column against the lesser dark. He wasn’t looking at me. He was staring out across the river, his posture alert, head tilted as if listening to a frequency I couldn’t hear.
“You feel it?” he asked, his voice low but clear in the absolute quiet.
“Feel what?” I whispered, pushing myself up to my elbows.
“The thinning. It just… shifted. Like a tide pulling back before a wave.” He finally glanced at me. His face in the gloom was all sharp planes, the wintry grey of his eyes nearly colorless. “Something just got fed. Something big.”
The dream’s image of the dead queen, of a sickness that was a pact, flashed before my eyes. “The blight?”
“The source of it.” He walked back to the fire, knelt, and began quickly scattering the embers with the heel of his boot. “We need to move. Now.”
“Why? What’s happening?”
“The hunger is satisfied for a moment. That means the ritualist got what they needed, or a piece of it. The backlash of energy… anything sensitive for miles will have felt that shiver. Including your friend with the cane.” He stamped out the last glow, plunging us into near-total darkness. “He’ll be moving toward the epicenter. And so are we.”
“We?” I scrambled to my feet, my heart hammering. The dream’s revelation about him—a bastard prince wrapped in secrets and sibling hatred—made the word vibrate with new danger.
“You can feel the trail. I know you can. That green scent on you is practically screaming now.” He shouldered his pack, his movements eerily precise in the dark. “I need that sense. You need my sword. Mutual convenience.”
“I don’t know how to feel a trail,” I protested, though it was a lie. The hollow ache behind my eyes was throbbing in sync with a new, distant pulse, a wrongness in the land like a toothache in the earth.
“You do. You’re just afraid of what you’ll find at the end of it.” He stepped close enough for me to see the grim certainty in his expression. “We all are. Now choose. Stay here in the dark and wait for whatever just fed to come looking for dessert, or move.”
The memory of the desiccated sheep, the grey grass, was answer enough. I slung my pack over my shoulders, the simple weight of it a tiny anchor. “Which way?”
He gestured north, further upriver. “The pull is coming from there. The old timberlands. Where the trees are too thick for roads.” A faint, grim smile touched his lips. “Of course it is.”
We moved into the woods, leaving the dead fire behind. The moon was a sliver, offering little light. Riven moved like a shadow, and I did my best to mimic his silence, every sense straining.
The thrumming grew clearer, a sub-audible vibration in my teeth. It felt like walking toward a massive, sleeping engine. My magic, that drained well, gave a faint, sympathetic twinge.
“Who was she?” The question left my mouth before I could cage it, born from the residual clarity of the dream.
Riven’s step faltered for half a second. “Who?”
“The queen. The one who died searching for a cure.”
He stopped entirely. The forest held its breath. When he turned, I could barely see his face, but I felt the intensity of his look like a physical blow. “What did you say?”
The dream felt too real, too sharp to have been just my imagination. “A sick king. A dead queen.Dark ones. You’re not just a mercenary.”
His hand shot out, closing around my upper arm. His grip was iron, but not bruising. It was the grip of someone stopping a fall. “How could you possibly know that?”
“I dreamt it.” It sounded insane. “While I slept. Just now.”
He was silent for a long, terrifying moment. Then he released my arm, turning away to stare into the consuming dark ahead. “Then the old magic is already deep in you. Deeper than I thought.” He sounded almost resigned. “It shows truths. Ugly ones. She was my brother’s wife. She was my friend. And she is dead because the kingdom is sick from the inside, and the supposed cures are all poisons.”
He began walking again, his voice a low, continuous stream, as if the dam had broken. “My brother seeks a remedy in control, in locking the sickness away. He thinks he can wall it off. He’s wrong. It just finds new cracks. This blight… it’s the same kind of crack. Someone, somewhere, is trying to use the sickness to gain power. They’re making a pact with the very thing that’s killing us.”
“And you’re trying to stop it.”
“I’m trying to understand it. So I can cut its throat.” He looked back at me, a silhouette against the deeper black. “And you’re now in the middle of it. Between the king and his brother. A puzzle piece that just fell onto the board. I suggest you learn your shape, and fast.”
He picked up the pace. The pulse in the earth grew stronger, a sickening lure. We were no longer just following a trail. We were running toward the open wound.