Daerth of Woodedge was pretty sure they meant to torture him to death. He was also pretty sure he'd do anything in his power to avoid that fate, even if it meant pleading for a straight-forward execution. Pain, to some extent, he could handle, but Men were so much crueler then animals when it came to finding ways to torment a man. A wolf might eat you, a bear might maul you, but Men... they'd ruin you.

He hid beneath his hood the entire journey, not daring to allow the Circle-curse-him bard to get into his head. For all he knew, it was part of the ploy. Make a prisoner optimistic, give him some false sense of hope, only to snatch it away again in some cruel way. Maybe they meant him to think he had a friend, only for that “friend” to turn on him.

You won't get me that easily, bloody idiot nobles. I'm a hunter; I know how to find traps.

The bard seemed to get the hint, finally, and didn't try anything when they pulled into the courtyard. The guard stood up first and prodded Daerth with his foot.

“Get up, poacher.”

The bard gave him a look as he hopped off the back of the wagon, but Daerth didn't acknowledge it. He didn't know what was going on or who else was in this wagon-train, but he wasn't going to risk trusting anyone until he got a feel for the terrain.

The one guard pulled them off to one side and stood behind them, breathing down Daerth's neck, as the other two went to help the riders unload their wagons. He didn't like the look of them – dark grey metal walls, a single barred window barely a hand's width in the padlocked door at the back – but he could hardly see things getting worse, either. Unless, of course... torture.

Maybe I should try to escape? Chances are they shoot me, but that'd be better then having my fingernails melted off or my legs broken inch by inch.

He winced to himself and watched while guards, leveling their spears at the door of the first of the two metal wagons, turned the key in the lock. Whatever was going to happen, he couldn't justify trying to get himself killed yet. Deep inside he still harbored the tiniest of hopes that, despite the massive incompetence of the Kingdom nobility, someone was going to realize that all of this was a huge mistake.

~

Woodedge was a tiny village, just on the northern side of the border between Second and Third Region. The forest that it sat next to was technically split in ownership, the territory of two Princes and neither at the same time. No one really cared to claim it, so to Daerth, it might as well be his.

Forest-born and forest-raised, Daerth of Woodedge was more at home among the trees then the houses of the village whose name he bore. His great-grandfather had built the village mill, but his grandfather had built the cabin and his father had built the stable. Daerth preferred the cabin and stable. The beds were draped in fur, the mantle crowned by antlers, and the barrels of salted deer and smoked bear in the pit of a cellar made a comfortable shield against winter's bite.

And with the shield strong, there was plenty more to trade. The village always needed meat.

Daerth rode into the village one cool autumn day with a deer carcass draped behind him and rabbit fur in his saddlebag. The soft material would fetch a nice price for trade, and he needed a new axe-blade. That was all he had on his mind... until, as he stacked rabbit fur on the trader's table, a string of the Prince's Men rode into the village center behind him.

The Prince's Men. Not that they were actually on any mission from the royals, but they sure acted like they were. Sometimes, if you were lucky, they'd just demand provisions and the use of your beds, then be on their way. Sometimes, if you were unlucky, they came looking for trouble.

Daerth was not lucky.

Don't look suspicious and you won't be seen as suspicious, he told himself, and kept his eyes to himself. The trader was distracted, but Daerth looked over the selection of axe-blades and selected the one he wanted for his furs. When the trader didn't seem to notice, Daerth tapped the table to get his attention.

And a swordblade slammed into the table next to his hand.

“Where did you catch all those rabbits, hunter?”

Daerth was not much of a talker. On a lucky day, he could get away with appearing shy instead of off-putting.

Daerth was not lucky.

Two of the Prince's Men hauled him to the center of the village, while others bundled up his furs to take back to whichever nobleman had hired them to do a patrol. As Daerth waited for the leader to come over, he watched as a few more of the legalized thugs discover the deer he had just traded to the miller. They claimed that too, then spotted his horse.

“Poacher from across the border,” one of the Men reporter to their leader. Daerth tried to explain, but a backhand to the mouth silenced him before he could get a full sentence out.

“These filthy peasants are too far from real power. They need a reminder of who's in charge.”

The villagers were gathering. Maybe the Prince's Men thought they were getting the audience they needed, because the leader drew himself up and raised his voice, declaring Daerth's supposed crime for all to hear. And then,

“Punishment for stealing from the Prince is, of course, death. But mercy may be given, and I shall give it.” The leader gave a signal, and Daerth heard the hair-raising slither of metal leaving a sheath. “For the first offense, I'm only taking your hands.”

They tied his wrists together and forced Dearth to his knees beside someone's firewood block. Daerth tried to protest, tried to explain, but his mouth kept filling with blood and his mind seemed blank. Things weren't supposed to go so wrong so fast in civilized places. This was forest logic. One wrong step, and the deer was gone. One wrong turn, and the wolves surrounded you.

One bit of bad luck, and the Prince's Men had you by the throat.

He didn't know the villagers nearly as well as they all knew one another, but he was a part of the village. He was Daerth of Woodedge, son of Jon of Woodedge. And the citizens of Woodedge had lived for too long too far away from “real power.”

The first stone hit the Prince's Man who had his sword hovering over Daerth's wrists. The second hit the leader in the jaw.

No one was killed, but when the Prince's Men rode out of the village, it wasn't in an orderly, dignified fashion. They left their provisions, their confiscated goods, and a hundred curses behind, and in exchange received multiple bruises, broken teeth, two black eyes, and a particularly colorful message to take back to “whatever pompous brat thought he could terrorize Woodedge today.”

The Prince's Men returned nine days later, and this time they had actual soldiers with them.

Daerth was trying to get a replacement axe-blade when they rode into town. His brand new one had broken the day after the raid.

Nine villagers were killed, one building burned down, and the rest of the people were lucky to get away with a few beatings between them. Those declared “leaders of the rebellion” were the real unlucky ones.

Guess what Daerth was?

They dragged him all the way to the Baron's estate. The Baron heard them out – Daerth, the village elderman, and the blacksmith – then nodded and ordered them all thrown into the dungeon until the Prince deemed them worth judging.

The Prince didn't care and passed the job off to the Duke. The Duke was too busy.

The three “rebels” of the nowhere village wintered in a dungeon far from home. The elderman died there from the cold and neglect. The blacksmith broke the door of his cell and escaped.

Everyone forgot about Daerth.

~

Two men left the second wagon, one after another. Even at a glance, Daerth understood why these two had required so much heavier a guard.

The first man was huge. He towered over every guard present by at least a hand, his shoulders were broad and strong, and every muscle in his body seemed purposefully sculpted by some wargod of the Circle. Daerth had never been awed by anyone before, but he felt strangely insufficient in the presence of this lean, muscular giant. The newcomer, perhaps contributing to the effect, had a look in his dark eyes as if everyone present was beneath him (in more then stature,) and his black hair was styled, strangely, like a noblewoman's; long, straight, and allowed to fall around his shoulders.

Behind him, more commonly built but far more alien, came a being Daerth couldn't immediately place. He appeared to be a man, but his skin was greyish and tinted with a dull swampy green color. His darker but similarly green-tinged hair was longer even then the proud giant's, hanging well past his narrow waist and interwoven with thin silver threads from some oddly-shaped hairclip at his brow. Strangest of all, though, were the eyes. They were like black pits with no whites, but from deep inside rose a yellow-green glow that seemed capable of fixing on things and brightening to the point of actually emitting a sickly light.

Both were shackled, same as Daerth and the bard, but while the giant wore the same sort of dull prison clothes as the bard, the green-man had obviously been allowed to keep his own outfit, like Daerth. Unlike Daerth and instead of anything remotely practical, the green-man wore some foreign hybrid of religious robes and nobleman finery, draped in some tiny half-cape attached at the shoulder.

All in all, there was no doubt in Daerth's mind who he was looking at. A swamper – a native sorcerer from the Southern Marshes.

They didn't open the last wagon. Not yet. The four prisoners were herded like dangerous animals toward the building, and the Southern Marshman came last.

~

Kwanai was alone.

The invaders couldn't drive him away like the others. They tried – daily they tried – but an asggani was not moved by force or fear.

They had killed his people in the swamp. He reshaped the rot of their corpses into disease for the conquerors. They felled trees the water had caused to flourish. He took the poison of stagnant water and cursed their streams. They came for him with metal and hounds. He vanished into the marsh fog, and the marsh itself confounded them to run to their own drowning.

And then, when the conquerors withdrew in dismay, he struck back.

Any settlement within a night's walk of his endless marshes would be his prey. Any man or woman from warm-hued lands would be the weregild for his people, a thousand Kingdom lives for one of Ku'eb's decaying favoured.

They called him Plague-bringer, mancer, sorcerer. Kwanai accepted their names, but they didn't understand. They would. Some day. When they were dead, they would see the name carved on their second-flesh forever. His name, and Ku'eb's name, and the name of a people they had never bothered to learn.

It took them years. He couldn't know how many he had claimed, but it must have been many to finally draw the army out. The so-called Prince marched a thousand men into Kwanai's marsh, and at the southern edge of his peoples' ancient territory he stopped, allowed the fog to drift past and leave him exposed. He stood his ground there, and the metalmen closed around him.

He could have kept going. The marsh continued into the south for further then Kwanai could even guess.

The others had gone south. Kwanai would not.

He was alone.

He had claimed dozens more. The rot, once inside their fragile lungs, would eat them alive, but they wouldn't know for days. Alas, it was too slow a death. Metal chains and nets dragged him to the ground, and a dozen steel boots crushed him into darkness.

He hadn't expected to wake. He expected to go to stride among the fields of his dead, present the marked flesh to his god.

But then he woke, still first-flesh and in pain. Metalmen left dark bruises.

And... strange promises.

A truce?

Kwanai would hear this... Judge, and then he would decide. The black-haired one's eyes promised death, and Kwanai could make use of that. Warm-hued ones could not mark their dead, but they certainly knew how to kill one another.

And, in the end... more dead Kingdomers was all Kwanai wanted. Ku'eb would be fed, no matter who struck the blow.

~

The chamber was grim and dim, lit only by scattered candles. The four prisoners stood alone in the middle of the floor, and their judge entered through a door at the back of the room.

Metcenzerin broke the dark silence.

“May I ask why we were brought here, my lord?”

“A moment more, singer,” said the Judge, Duke Elford of Northhighvale. “I do not want to repeat my offer, and there is still one missing.”

Outside, a King's Messenger arrived at the forsaken estate with a sealed key, and the guards unlocked the last wagon.