Morning Work

The muster yard was cold before the sun came up.

Kent had slept on harder ground than the packed dirt of the yard, but not by much. He’d put his back against the covered wall, knees drawn up, pack wedged between his hip and the post beside him so nobody could lift it without waking him, and he’d slept the way he always slept — light, restless, some animal part of him keeping its ears open even while the rest of him was under.

The sky above the yard walls was the blue-black of early morning. Not dawn yet. The hour that wasn’t quite anything. Around him, men were shapes under cloaks and blankets, the slow heave of their breathing, the occasional shift and grunt of someone whose body had decided sleep wasn’t worth the effort.

He was awake before he understood why.

The sound registered first — a thud, wet and low, the sound of a boot finding something soft. Then a grunt. Not a sleeping sound. A compressed, controlled sound. The kind you make when you’ve taken a hit and you know another one is coming and you’re trying not to give anyone the satisfaction.

Kent was on his feet.

He didn’t think about it. His body moved and his mind followed, eyes already adjusting, already finding shapes in the dark.

Fen was on the ground ten yards away, on his side with his arms pulled up over his head, which was the right instinct and not enough of one. Three men stood over him. Two were rangy, both with the careless posture of men who weren’t worried about consequences, and the third was broader — big across the chest and shoulder, maybe twenty-five, with a battered nose that had been broken before and a way of planting his feet that said he’d done this kind of thing more than once and found it easy. He was the one who’d kicked Fen. He drew his boot back to do it again.

Kent was already moving.

He crossed the ground fast and quiet, no announcement, no warning. The nearest man heard him at the last second and started to turn, which was all the time Kent needed — he grabbed a fistful of the man’s collar with his left hand and shoved him hard sideways into the man beside him, tangled them both, and stepped past them toward the big one.

Rast — because that was his name, as Kent would learn later — spun around. He had quick eyes for a big man, and they went immediately to Kent’s hands, and then to his face, and whatever he saw there made him hesitate for half a second before he swung.

Kent ducked under it. Came up on the inside, drove an elbow into the hinge of Rast’s jaw. Not perfect — Rast rolled with it, took most of the force across the cheekbone instead, stumbled but didn’t go down. He shook it off with a sound somewhere between a growl and a cough and reset himself, hands up now, no longer underestimating.

Behind Kent, one of the other two had untangled himself.

The kick took him square in the lower back, just left of the spine, with the full force of a grown man’s leg behind it. The pain was immediate and enormous — a white-hot detonation through the muscle that buckled his left knee and dropped him to the dirt before his body had properly registered what his mind was telling it.

He heard someone, somewhere, say something that might have been there you go.

He got up.

Not fast. Not clean. He pushed off the ground with both hands, got one knee under him, then the other, and straightened, and the pain was still there, crackling up his back like a fire that hadn’t decided how far it wanted to spread. He turned to find the man who’d kicked him and found him standing three feet back with his weight already shifting, ready to follow up.

Kent hit him in the throat. Short, economical, no wind-up. The man folded forward making the sound of a man whose body has suddenly decided that breathing is an emergency priority. Kent stepped around him and came back to Rast, who’d used the moment to close the distance.

They met in the middle of it.

Rast was strong and he’d been in fights and he knew enough to keep moving, to not give Kent a clean shot. He caught Kent across the cheekbone with a short right hand that snapped his head sideways and put sparks in his vision, and for a second they were chest to chest, grappling, Rast trying to get his arm around Kent’s neck and Kent refusing to let him, turning into it, using the grip to control where Rast’s weight was going.

He got a foot behind Rast’s ankle. Put his hip into it. Drove him backward.

Rast went down hard, landing on his shoulder blades with a sound like a sack of grain dropped from height, and the air left him in a sharp animal noise. He started to get up — he was tough, credit to him — but Kent was already there, knee dropping onto his chest, one hand pinning his wrist to the dirt and the other fisted above his face.

He held it there.

Rast looked up at him. His chest was heaving. Something in his expression had changed, the aggressive heat of it gone down to a lower, more cautious thing.

Kent said, quietly, “Are we done?”

A long second. Rast’s jaw worked. Then he turned his head to the side and spat blood into the dirt.

Kent stood up.

The other two men were no longer a concern — one was still doubled over by the wall, the second had put considerable distance between himself and everything that had just happened and was finding the far side of the yard very interesting. The one whose collar Kent had grabbed first was sitting in the dirt, head down, in the particular posture of a man who had reviewed recent events and decided to stay out of whatever came next.

The yard was awake now. Men who’d been sleeping were sitting up, or standing, watching from a cautious distance. Nobody had moved to stop it. Nobody had helped.

The pain in Kent’s back was settling into something deep and throbbing, the kind that would be worse by midday and worse again tomorrow. He pressed a knuckle against his cheekbone where Rast had caught him, felt the beginning of a swelling, and lowered his hand.

He became aware of the watching soldiers.

There were three of them along the north wall, standing in the grey pre-dawn. They’d been there long enough to have seen most of it, going by their positions. One held a torch that had burned low. One had his arms crossed and was watching with the mild interest of a man observing a working dog do something expected. The third was the scarred soldier from the scaffold — Sergeant Sorn, whose name Kent had caught from another soldier the evening before — and he wasn’t watching with mild interest at all. He was watching with the close, still attention of someone cataloguing information, the way an experienced tradesman looks at raw material and starts calculating what it might become.

Their eyes met. Sorn said nothing. His expression didn’t change in any way that Kent could name.

He looked away, toward Fen.

---

The boy was trying to sit up, one hand pressed to his mouth, the other braced flat on the ground. His eye had swelled partially shut — the same side as the split lip, which had opened again and was painting his chin red. He was breathing through his nose and his hands were shaking, though he had them pressed flat on the dirt like he thought the shaking might be less obvious that way.

It wasn’t.

Kent walked over and stood above him. “Anything broken?”

Fen moved his jaw carefully from side to side. “Don’t think so.”

“Ribs?”

“Hurt.”

“That’s different to broken.” Kent reached down. Fen looked at the offered hand for a moment with the expression of someone not quite sure what it cost, then took it. Kent pulled him to his feet, steadied him when he listed left, then let go.

Fen straightened slowly. He looked at Rast, who was still on the ground on the other side of the yard, getting his wind back. He looked at the two by the wall. He looked at Kent.

“What’d you do that for?” he asked. Not ungrateful — it didn’t come out that way — but genuinely asking, like the answer might be something complicated he needed to understand.

Kent picked up his pack from against the wall and shrugged it onto his shoulder. He kept his face neutral against the protest in his back. “You kept your arms over your head,” he said. “That’s the right instinct. Most people don’t do that.”

Fen blinked. “That’s — that’s why?”

“Get your things. They’ll be calling the transport soon.”

He left Fen to work that out and walked to the water bucket near the processing scaffold, splashed his face and hands, and pressed a wet palm against his cheekbone. The cold helped somewhat. Behind him, he could hear the yard beginning to properly stir — voices, the sounds of men getting up and gathering their gear, the normal noise of thirty-odd people starting a day they hadn’t chosen.

He heard boots behind him. Heavy, measured. The kind of walk that had learned over years that it didn’t need to hurry.

“Where’d you learn that?” Sorn’s voice.

Kent set the wet cloth down. “Didn’t learn it anywhere,” he said. “Figured it out.”

A silence. Not an unfriendly one.

“Your file says impressed,” Sorn said. “Debt case.”

“That’s right.”

Another pause. “Waste,” Sorn said, and that was all, and then the boots went away.

Kent stood at the water bucket and looked at his own reflection for a second — broken up by the ripple of the water, a dark shape with a swelling face — before the camp bell rang from somewhere above the gate and the morning took over from everything else.

---

Devn appeared at his elbow as they crossed the yard toward the gate where the transport wagon was pulling in, larger than the one from Broad Street, a canvas-covered hauler with iron wheel guards and a mounted bracket at the front for a lamp. He was eating something — dried meat, by the smell of it — and looked as though he’d slept considerably better than anyone had any right to in a yard with no beds.

“Saw that,” he said, nodding back in the vague direction of the yard.

Kent said nothing.

“Three of them. One a big bastard. You took a kick.”

“I know.”

“And yet.” Devn chewed thoughtfully. “Sorn was watching.”

“I noticed.”

“Sorn doesn’t watch things,” Devn said. “Not like that. Sorn’s been soldiering since before most of us were born. He’s seen ten thousand recruits come through here.” He looked sidelong at Kent. “He watched you all the way to the end.”

Kent looked at the wagon. At the men lining up to board it. At the grey dawn sky above the city wall, the sun not yet risen but the light thickening, the black pulling back from the east in slow degrees. Somewhere in Karlberg, behind him, the bells of the morning were beginning.

He thought of Aldenmere. Of the Camp. Of what came after that, if anything did.

“Good,” he said.

Devn smiled — genuine this time, small and sharp, like a man who’d just seen a card turned face-up that confirmed what he’d suspected. He said nothing else.

Fen fell into step beside Kent as they reached the line, holding his side with one hand and squinting through his half-swollen eye. He didn’t speak. He didn’t need to. He stayed close the way people stay close to a fire when the night is cold, without making a production of it.

They climbed into the wagon.

The driver released the brake. The wheels found the road.

Karlberg moved past the wagon’s open back end — the gate, the outer wall, the last buildings, the last streets Kent had known his whole life — and then it didn’t anymore. The road opened north, straight and grey between flat fields that were still mostly bare in the early season, the soil dark and damp from recent rain, a crow working at something on the verge ahead until the horses startled it up into the white sky.

Kent watched the city go until there was nothing left of it to see.

Then he turned around and faced the direction they were going.