Chapter 1: The Last Ember
The last goblin died gurgling, its rusty cleaver skittering across a mossy stone. Ser Brynna wrenched her longsword free from its chest with a wet scrape, the sound lost in the ringing silence that followed the skirmish. Her breath came in ragged clouds in the chill air, each one a minor victory.The forest road was a slaughterhouse. Shattered wagon wheels leaned like drunken skeletons against trees. A fine elven lute, its strings snapped, lay trampled into the mud beside a spilled basket of wool, now slowly absorbing dark blood.She scanned the ruin. They’d been swift, the goblins, but not swift enough to stop her from hearing the screams and crashing through the undergrowth. Now, the only sounds were the creak of her plate armor and the distant, indifferent chatter of a brook.A whimper.
It was soft, stifled, the sound of a small animal trying not to be heard. Brynna turned, her boots crunching on splintered wood and broken glass that glinted like cold stars. The noise came from a half-crushed wagon, its canvas canopy smoldering at the edges. She approached, sword low but ready.A ripped tarp flapped in the breeze.
She used the tip of her blade to lift the heavy canvas.
Two large, silver-blue eyes stared up at her from the shadows.They were set in a pale, delicate face smudged with soot and tears. Shoulder-length hair the color of winter moonlight was tangled with twigs. He was tiny, curled into a ball behind a collapsed cabinet.A child.An elf child.
Her heart, a hardened lump in her chest, gave a single, painful thud.She hadn’t felt that specific ache in years. It was the ghost of a feeling she’d sworn to bury.
“Are you alone?” she asked, her voice gruff and low, the practiced tone of a man.
The elf nodded, a tiny, jerky movement.He unfurled slightly, and Brynna revised her assessment. Not a child. The frame was slender, yes, but the face, while elegant and fine-boned, held a knowledge in those wide eyes that wasn’t juvenile.A young man, then. Just… small.Fragile as a bird.
“Can you stand?”
He tried, pushing himself up on shaking arms.A wince flashed across his features.He was favouring one leg. Brynna scanned the perimeter again, her nerves taut. Goblins rarely travelled in just one pack.The silence was too heavy, too complete.“We need to move. This isn’t safe.” She sheathed her sword with a definitive click and extended a gauntleted hand, a gesture of pure utility.
He looked at her hand, then up at the grim, blood-spattered visor that hid her face.Slowly, he placed his small, clean hand in the stained metal. His touch was shockingly light. She pulled him gently from the wreckage, and he stumbled into the light, revealing clothes of simple, travel-worn linen, now torn at the knee where a dark bruise was blooming.Once upright, he barely came to the middle of her breastplate. He gazed around at the carnage, his breath hitching. “They’re all gone,” he whispered, his voice high and clear, like the brook she’d heard earlier.
“Yes.”
“You killed the goblins.”
“I did.”
He looked back at her, those unsettlingly bright eyes searching the narrow slit of her helmet. “Thank you.”
The gratitude was so stark, so undeserved.She’d just been too late for everyone else. “Don’t thank me yet.We’re not to safety. What’s your name?”
“Lirien,” he said. “Lirien Mossflower.” He hugged his own arms, shivering despite the wool cloak she fetched from a nearby trunk and draped around his shoulders.It swallowed him.
“Ser Brynna.Of the Iron Vale.” She began walking, not looking back, trusting he would follow. He did, his steps a quiet patter behind her. They moved off the road, into the thicker undergrowth of the forest.The goal was distance, then a defensible position.
After ten minutes of silent travel, he spoke again. “Your shoulder is bleeding.”
She’d barely registered the shallow cut from a goblin blade, a sting beneath the layers of steel and leather. “It’s nothing.”
“It’s not nothing,” he said, with a gentle insistence that was entirely alien to her.The men she served with grunted about wounds or boasted about them. They didn’t observe them on others with soft concern.“You should clean it. Infection sets in quickly here. The moss near the water has properties…”
“I’ve patched worse by myself,” she interrupted, more harshly than intended.She couldn’t afford his concern. It was a chisel tapping at the stone wall around her.She picked up the pace, her armor grinding softly.
He fell silent again, but she could feel his eyes on her back. When she finally chose a spot—a small, rocky outcrop creating a shallow cave—and shrugged off her pack, he immediately moved to help.“I can manage,” she grunted, kneeling.
“You can’t reach it properly,” Lirien said, his logic infuriatingly sound. He stood before her, holding a clean strip of linen he’d somehow already pulled from her pack and a waterskin.His gaze was unwavering.“Please. Let me.”
The command in his request was disarming. She was a knight, a veteran of a hundred hunts, and this slip of an elf was offering to tend to her like a squire. Like a… like something she couldn’t name. With a sigh that was half a growl, she unstrapped the pauldron and vambrace on her left arm, then worked the leather straps of the gambeson beneath. She exposed the slope of her shoulder, the muscle lean and scarred, the cut a seeping red line.Lirien’s hands were deft and cool. He cleaned the cut with water, then applied a poultice of crushed moss and leaves from his own small pouch with a focus that was utterly clinical, yet his proximity was a kind of agony. He was so close she could see the fine gold lashes around his eyes, smell the scent of rain and green things on his skin. It was a scent utterly removed from the metallic blood and sour sweat of her world.
“There,” he said softly, tying the linen strip.His fingers lingered for a half-second on her bare skin. “It should heal clean.”
She pulled her gambeson up quickly, covering herself. “You’ve done this before.”
“My caravan… we were healers. Herb-merchants.” His voice cracked on the past tense.He looked down at his hands. “I was an apprentice.”
The words hung in the damp air between them, a final, heartbreakingly simple epitaph for his entire world. Brynna busied herself with re-securing her armor, the cold metal a welcome anchor. She could feel him watching her, a silent, spectral presence clinging to the only solid thing left in his life.Her.He broke the silence, his voice small but clear. “What will you do with me?”
The question was a practical one, but it landed like a physical blow. With me.As if he were a piece of loot, a burden to be disposed of. “There’s a garrison fort, two days’ hard ride west. They’ll see you to the nearest elven enclave. You’ll be safe there.”
“Two days.” He said it not as a measure of time, but of distance from the horror. From the bones of his family on the road. He was silent for a long moment, his fingers worrying the edge of the oversized cloak. When he spoke again, his words came in a rush, as if he’d been gathering courage.“I don’t want to go to an enclave. And I don’t… I don’t want to be defenseless anymore.”
Brynna finished buckling her vambrace with a sharper click than necessary. “That’s the smart place for you.”
“Please.” The word stopped her.She turned to look at him. He’d stood up, straightening to his full, unimpressive height, those ancient eyes blazing in his child-sized face.“Take me with you.Let me serve as your squire. I can tend your gear, your horse.I know herbs.I can cook.I’ll be quiet. I’ll learn.I don’t want to just… be safe. I want to be able to make myself safe.”
A squire.The absurdity of it choked her. This fragile creature, this walking bruise, wanting to step into her world of mud and blood and iron. He’d last a day.Less. The very idea sent a jagged spike of fear through her gut—fear for him, a sensation so visceral it shamed her.
“No,” she said, the word flat and final.“Why?”
“Because it’s not a game. What I do, it’s ugly.It’s not gathering moss. It’s separating goblin heads from their shoulders.It’s sleeping in the rain and riding until your bones shake. You’re not built for it.” She gestured at his slight frame, the delicate hands that had just so gently bandaged her.“You’re a healer. Stick to that.”
“Healers are useless when the wound is a spear through the chest,” he fired back, a sudden, shocking hardness in his tone.It was the first true echo of the trauma he’d witnessed. “I watched that today.I won’t watch it again from behind someone else’s armor. I’d rather be in the mud with a blade I don’t know how to use than stand clean and helpless.”
His breath was coming fast now, silver-blue eyes glistening but unwavering. He was begging, but there was a demand in it, a raw scrap of pride dredged up from the ruin.Brynna stared at him. The maternal instinct, that deep, forbidden ache, screamed at her to bundle him up and deliver him to soft beds and quiet songs. The knight, the survivor, saw the ruthless truth he’d just spoken. Helplessness was a luxury the world had violently stripped from him.He was offering her a solution, however insane. A squire would provide cover, a reason for constant companionship.It would also be a constant, terrifying vulnerability.
“You have no idea what you’re asking,” she said, her voice low and rough.
“I’m asking not to be left behind,” he whispered.The forest sighed around them. Somewhere, a branch snapped. Brynna’s head jerked up, her hand automatically going to her sword hilt.The moment of decision was gone, replaced by immediate threat. They’d stayed still too long.“We move.Now,” she commanded, swinging her pack onto her back. “We’ll discuss this on the trail. If you can keep pace, we’ll talk.If you fall behind, you go to the garrison. Understood?”
It was a brutal, evasive compromise.A test.Lirien simply nodded, a fierce light in his eyes. He pulled the voluminous cloak tighter and took a firm step toward her, ready.
He pulled the voluminous cloak tighter and took a firm step toward her, ready.They hadn’t made it another hundred yards.The forest around them erupted. Not with birdsong, but with the sickening, guttural chitter of goblins. Five of them, boiling from a thicket of ferns to their left, their green-grey skin mottled in the dappled light.Their eyes were pools of dumb malice.
Brynna’s sword was a silver arc before Lirien could even gasp. “Back!” she roared, shoving him behind a broad tree trunk.
The first goblin died mid-leap, its skull cleaved open. The second stumbled, trying to flank her; her reverse stroke took its head clean off, which bounced once with a wet thud. The third came in low, jabbing a jagged spear at her knees. She brought the longsword down in a brutal chop, severing the spear-point and burying the blade deep in the creature’s collarbone. It shrieked, twitched, and went still.The problem was the force of the blow. The blade, lodged in bone, didn’t pull free. For a single, critical second, she was yanking at it, her guard open.
The fourth goblin, smarter than its kin, didn’t charge. It darted in while she was struggling, slashing a crude, blackened knife at her exposed side.She couldn’t get the sword loose. She twisted, taking a shallow graze along her plackart instead of a gut-stab, and drove her armored knee into the thing’s face. It staggered back, but her sword was still trapped in the dead weight of the third.The fifth goblin saw its chance. It had a rusty short sword and a clear path. Brynna saw it coil, its muscles bunching for a lunge she couldn’t fully evade.Her hands were still on her own weapon’s hilt. She braced for the impact, calculating which pauldron would take the blow.
A blur of grey wool and pale hair shot past her.
Lirien flung himself between the charging goblin and Brynna.
There was a sound, horrible and soft, like a sack of grain being punctured. The goblin’s rusty sword entered just below Lirien’s ribs on the right side and didn’t emerge.Brynna’s world narrowed to a tunnel of silent horror. Lirien didn’t cry out. He let out a sharp, punched-out breath, his body arching against the goblin’s weight. The goblin snarled in triumph, its foul breath washing over Lirien’s face.Then Lirien moved. His left hand scrabbled at the goblin’s studded belt. His right arm, trembling violently, hooked around the creature’s neck, holding himself up despite the steel in his side. His fingers closed on a bone-handled knife. With a desperate, guttural sound that was more effort than scream, he drove the knife up under the goblin’s jaw, yanking it sideways.Black blood fountained. The goblin’s snarl died in a wet gurgle.It collapsed, dragging Lirien down with it.
“No!” The word tore from Brynna’s throat, raw and unfamiliar even to her. She abandoned her lodged sword, vaulted over the dying fourth goblin she’d kicked, and reached them. The fifth goblin was dead. Lirien lay on his side, the goblin’s hilt protruding obscenely from his slender frame. His eyes were screwed shut, his face a mask of chalk-white agony.
“You idiot,” she breathed, her hands hovering, afraid to touch him.“You stupid, brave idiot.”
His eyelids fluttered. Silver-blue peeped through. “Told you… I wouldn’t… be helpless,” he whispered, each word a ragged breath.There was no time for gentleness. She snapped the goblin’s fingers to pry its grip from the sword hilt, then, with a sickening sense of violation, she wrapped her gauntleted hands around the blade itself. She couldn’t pull it out here.It might be the only thing plugging the wound. “This will hurt,” she warned, her voice shockingly steady.
He gave a tiny, jerky nod, biting his lip until it bled.
She broke the sword off close to his body, leaving a handspan of ragged metal in the wound.He made a small, choked sound, and his eyes rolled back.
Panic, cold and liquid, flooded her veins. She shrugged off her pack, yanked out her bedroll and a length of rope. With brutal efficiency, she bound the padding around the protruding metal, cinching it tight to stabilize the horrible object.Then she lifted him.He was so light. Lighter than her sword and shield combined. The warmth of his blood seeped through her gambeson, a terrifying contrast to the chill of the forest air.She ran.
She ran.
The forest became a green-grey smear, her vision tunneling on the treacherous ground ahead. Every jolting step sent a fresh wave of agony through the elf in her arms—she could feel it in the tense tremor of his body, in the choked gasps against her neck. Her own breath sawed in her helmet, loud and desperate.She couldn’t run forever. The weight of her armor, of him, was monumental.
A darker patch of shadow resolved into the mouth of a shallow cave, little more than a scoop in the hillside curtained by thick elderberry bushes. It would have to do.She crashed through the foliage, kneeling carefully to lay Lirien on the dry earth within. He was unconscious again, his skin the colour of ashes.Work.Just work.
She shrugged her pack off, her hands moving with a frantic, trained efficiency. She built a small fire just inside the cave mouth, the smoke diffusing through the leaves.Light.Heat.She needed both.
Now the wound.Her gauntlets were too clumsy. She stripped them off, revealing hands that were strong, calloused, surprisingly slender. The gambeson came next, then the buckles and straps of her breastplate.The plate fell with a heavy thud. In her padded undershirt, she felt exposed, vulnerable in a way the armor never allowed.She pushed the feeling down. He was dying.“Lirien,” she said, her voice low but sharp. “Lirien, I need you to tell me what to do.”
His eyelids fluttered. A sliver of silver-blue appeared.“Cold,” he whispered.“I know. I’m going to look at it now.”
She had to get the ruined tunic off. Her dagger made quick work of the fine linen, slicing it from neck to hem and peeling it back. The cool, damp air of the cave touched his skin.He was so slight. It was the first, stark, terrible thought.Every rib delineated, the hollows of his collarbones deep enough to hold shadow. His chest rose and fell in shallow, rapid hitches. A dusting of pale hair across his forearms, a finer trail down his flat stomach. His hips were narrow, his legs long but thin. He was all graceful lines and fragile angles, a sapling compared to the gnarled oaks of the men she served with.
And there, just below his right ribs, was the brutal punctuation: a handspan of grotesque, blackened goblin steel, surrounded by livid, swollen flesh.His first major scar, if he lived to bear it. It was a violation, a dirty thumbprint pressed into something achingly pristine.
Her eyes tracked downward, a medic’s assessment, nothing more.A pale dusting of blonde hair. His penis lay small and soft against his thigh, shrunk ever so slightly by the cold and the shock and the rain that had begun to patter outside the cave.A purely clinical observation. Human, elf, man, woman—bodies were just bags of blood and muscle that leaked when pierced.She had seen hundreds.This one was just another.
But it wasn’t.The knowledge sat like a stone in her gut. This one had thrown himself on a blade for her.“The moss,” he breathed, his voice threadlike. “Not the green.The grey, on the north side of the birch.And… yarrow. Silver-leaf.In my pouch.”
She found his small leather pouch, her fingers sorting through the dried bundles. “Yarrow.I see it.”
“Clean the blade… the broken edge.In the fire. Then… pull.Straight and fast.”
“It will bleed.”
“Pack the wound. The moss, chewed.Then yarrow poultice over. Bind it… tight.”
His instructions were clear, practiced.He was guiding her hands from the edge of oblivion. She nodded, though he couldn’t see it. She fed the fire, holding the snapped-off end of the goblin sword in the flames until the ragged metal glowed a dull orange. The stench of searing fouled steel mixed with the herbal scent from his pouch.
“Ready?” she asked, her voice a grating whisper.
He gave a microscopic nod, biting down on a rolled piece of leather from her kit.She planted one hand on his cool, damp hip to steady him. Her other hand closed around the hot, protruding metal.She didn’t hesitate. A firm, brutal yank.The sound was wet and terrible. Lirien’s body arched off the ground, a silent scream in the line of his throat, before collapsing back into shuddering unconsciousness. Dark blood welled instantly, a swift, frightening flood.She worked. She chewed the dry, bitter moss into a pulp, spitting it into her palm and pressing the wad deep into the hot, open wound. She mashed the yarrow with a stone, making a green paste, and slapped it over top. Then linen, then her own belt, cinched so tight around his narrow torso she feared she’d crack a rib.The bleeding slowed.Then stopped.
She sat back on her heels, her own breath coming in gasps.The fire crackled. Rain drummed a steady rhythm on the leaves outside.She watched the slow, gradual rise and fall of his bandaged chest.
She watched the slow, gradual rise and fall of his bandaged chest.
For a long time, that was the only thing that mattered. The shallow rhythm of his breathing was a thread holding him to the world, and she was its guardian. The rain fell harder, sealing them in a damp, grey world. She let the fire burn low, adding just enough dry wood to keep a heart of coals alive.Heat was life now.
When he woke, hours later, it was to a shuddering gasp. His eyes flew open, blind with panic until they found her, a solid silhouette against the cave’s dim light.She was just Brynna. The knight.The fixed point.
“Don’t move,” she said, her voice rough from disuse.“You’ll tear the packing.”
He lay still, his gaze clearing. The terror receded, replaced by a dazed, exhausted calm. “It hurts.”
“I know.”
She had already begun to work.Her armor stood in a stacked, silent sentinel near the cave wall. In her gambeson and trousers, she moved with a quiet efficiency that felt more real, more vulnerable, than the clanking ceremony of plate. She cleared a clean space near the fire, laying out her bedroll and his—his was just her spare cloak, but she folded it thickly. She assembled waterskins, her kit of salves and needles, the leftover herbs.
“You need to drink.” She held a skin to his lips.He sipped, coughed, sipped again. The water traced a clean line through the soot on his throat.Food was next. She’d ventured out only once, just beyond the curtain of elderberries, to set simple snares. She returned with two conies. Skinning them was a silent, bloody business done at the cave mouth, the offal discarded far into the woods to avoid scent. The meat she roasted on a green stick over the coals.The smell of cooking fat filled the small space, a mundane, deeply human comfort.
She tore the meat into tiny strips.“Eat. Slowly.”
He tried to prop himself up and failed, a sharp intake of breath his only sound. Without a word, she moved behind him, sliding an arm beneath his shoulders to lift him just enough. She fed him the pieces one by one, her movements methodical, devoid of tenderness.It was a logistics problem.Fuel for the furnace. His eyes never left her face, watching the firelight play across the grim set of her jaw.
He ate everything.Color, faint and fragile, began to seep back into his cheeks.
The first time she changed the bandage, she was clinical. “This will feel worse than the pulling,” she warned, her fingers already working at the knot of her belt.He nodded, bracing.
She peeled the linen back. The wound was an angry, puckered star, the poultice a dried green crust over it.The skin around it was hot.Too hot. She cleaned it with boiled water that had cooled, scrubbing away the old yarrow. He trembled under her hands but didn’t make a sound.She packed it with fresh moss and bound it again.
“No fever yet,” she said, more to herself than to him. “Good.”
He sank back, sweating and spent.“Thank you.”
She didn’t acknowledge it. “You need to be clean. The filth will kill you as fast as the steel did.”
She heated water in a small pot, testing it with her wrist.She soaked a clean cloth. “Arms up.”
He tried, weakness making his movements clumsy. She helped, pushing the ruined tunic up and over his head.It was easier to just remove it completely. He was naked then, save for the bandage circling his torso.The cave air was cool. She saw the gooseflesh rise on his skin.This was the first true look. Not the emergency assessment in the forest mud, but a clear, quiet observation in the fire’s glow.He was still so slight. The architecture of him was one of economy: fine wrists, sharp hip bones like wings, the delicate cage of his ribs. The bruise on his knee from the wagon wreck had ripened to a sunset of purple and yellow.New scrapes marred his forearms.But the terrifying pallor was gone. His skin, where it wasn’t bruised, had regained its dusky gold undertone, like old parchment held to a flame.He looked less like a corpse and more like a sleeping youth. A starving one, but alive.
She washed him with the cloth, starting with his face, wiping away the last streaks of soot and dried sweat.His eyes stayed open, watching her. She moved down his neck, over his collarbones.She washed his arms, his hands, carefully cleaning each finger. He had healer’s hands, long-fingered and graceful even in their current fragility. She avoided the bandage, working around it, down the flat plane of his stomach.
She rinsed the cloth, wrung it out.“Turn onto your side. Carefully.”
He obeyed, moving with the stiff care of the deeply injured. She washed his back, the knobs of his spine, the soft dip at the base.The skin here was unmarked, smooth. She washed his legs, the long muscles of his thighs taut with disuse. He was utterly passive, a patient in her care.It was impersonal.It had to be.But she saw it. The comparison was involuntary. Then: ashen, bleeding, broken on the forest floor, a thing discarded.Now: clean, breathing, healing under her hands.The victory was microscopic. A fraction of a degree of warmth returned.A slight easing of the grimace around his eyes.It was everything.
Finished, she draped the blanket over him.“Rest. No more moving today.”
He gathered the wool around his shoulders, burrowing into it. “You don’t have any clothes that would fit me.”
“No.”
“So I’m to live in a blanket?”
“Until we get to the garrison. Or until you’re well enough to wear your own, once I clean them.”
He was silent for a while.The fire popped. “You bathed me like I was a child.”
She busied herself with cleaning the pot. “You’re as weak as one.”
“I’m not.” There was no anger in it, just a flat statement of fact. “I killed one.I felt it die.”
She stopped.Looked at him. The blanket hid everything but his face, which was weary but sharp, aged by what he’d done. “You did.It was a stupid, brave thing. Don’t do it again.”
A ghost of a smile touched his lips. “You’d prefer I let it stab you?”
“I’d prefer you to be smart.Let the armor do its job.”
He studied her, his head tilted. “It’s quieter without it.The armor.Your voice is different.”
Her spine stiffened. She turned back to the pot, scrubbing with unnecessary force.“You’re hearing things. It’s the pain.”
“Maybe,” he said, but he didn’t sound convinced. He shifted, a small sigh escaping him.“The caravan… my master. He said healing was about seeing what is, not what you expect to see.”
“Wise man.”
“Are you what I see, Ser Brynna?”
The question hung in the air, delicate and dangerous as a spider’s web. She felt his gaze on the back of her neck, where her short, sweaty hair curled against her skin.A place no male knight would have such hair.
She put the pot down with a definitive clank.“You see a tired warrior who needs to check the snares. Sleep.”
She left the cave, pushing through the wet elderberries into the drizzle. The clean, cold air hit her face.She leaned against the rock, breathing hard. The image of him, clean and pale in the firelight, wrapped in her blanket, flashed behind her eyes.Not as a child. As a young man, fragile and fierce, who saw too much.He was healing.That was the problem. With every day, his eyes grew clearer, his perception sharper.He was seeing what is.
And she didn’t know how long she could keep him from seeing her.