A catastrophic encounter with a sea serpent has left the surviving crew of the Seek adrift in the Still Sea, with no hope for rescue . . .

Cast adrift, the captain of the Seek floated in the still, cold waters, his arms hung over a broken oar. Through the night, in those moments when the wails of terrified seamen quieted to hopeless moans, he dwelt gloomily on the loss of his ship and the ruin of his family, replaying events in his mind’s eye. He saw again Oeric’s impossible leap from the Seek’s deck, soaring so high it seemed he might take wing; then his arm reaching out, lightning quick, to grab the line that dangled from the harpoon, its barbed head stuck fast in sea serpent’s mouth, the monster rising ever higher above the galley.

The captain knew time and fancy had not embellished his recollection—he had seen it with his own eyes, only hours before—but the physicality of what Oeric had done astonished him. Oeric’s feat was a prodigy. Thinking on it now the captain understood why his niece, usually so practical, married the man. Yet his awe was soon replaced with disgust, when he remembered the sea serpent’s tentacles pulling Oeric near its mouth and, heedless of the Seek’s position, Oeric thrusting his lance into the monster’s brain. If only, the captain thought, my niece’s fool husband had waited a moment longer. A single heartbeat more and the Seek might have rowed free of the dead monster’s crash.

Still, only because of Oeric had they survived at all, even if their lives were destined to be short. The captain estimated a hundred men had lived long enough to witness Oeric slay the sea serpent. During the night, some of the survivors had called out messages for their bereaved and then, once a message was acknowledged, slipped below the waters to drown. The captain counted twenty-three of these. Their messages forgotten, he remembered their names; he owed them that much. And in the morning light, the sun rising pale and huge on the eastern horizon, he guessed more than half again had died in silence, no message for anyone. By his count, less than seventy still lived.

Two of those, sharing the same oar that kept the captain afloat, were the harpooner, Niall, and Oeric himself, his survival yet another prodigy. When the captain and Niall first pulled Oeric from the tentacles of the sinking sea serpent, he had blazed with fever despite the chill waters, the monster’s venom burning in his veins. Seizures afflicted him, his hands and legs were palsied, and foam bubbled from his mouth. But in time his fever abated and, though he hadn’t yet regained his senses, only his wildly twitching eyes and the occasional violent convulsion of his hands showed that anything ailed him. What was wrong with Niall, though, was more difficult to diagnose.

When they dragged Oeric to the oar, Niall had seemed unhurt, his reason intact. A steady hand in perilous moments, a dead-eye with a harpoon, he had shipped with the captain for more than ten years, a reliable member of the Seek’s crew. But once the three clung to the oar, all sense left him. He raved—first quietly, growling to himself, then with growing volume—about how the gods gathered and murmured to each other, wagering on what would come next. Then his voice went shrill, a grating falsetto to give even a hard man chills, and he chanted, “He comes! Wave-Roarer and Earth-Shaker! He comes! Sire of Monsters and Lurker Below!” Over and over, Niall had chanted this.

The captain knew the god’s epithets as well as any, and the harpooner was no god-struck fool, to become hysterical in a crisis and lay blame on unseen powers for his own panicked failings. In this moment of extremity, something otherworldly possessed Niall. Yet the gods of the Far Shore offered no succor, only terror; that they gathered meant not deliverance, but only more suffering and dread. Niall soon left off his chilling cries, sinking into a low babbling, a slow arrhythmic ba-baaa-buh-buh-baa . . . that had continued through the night. But with the new day Niall stirred, and the captain started when he shouted, “Oeric meets him!” The captain looked to Oeric to confirm he was still senseless, and then studied Niall’s face. His eyes vacant, the harpooner gazed beyond this world as he continued, “He grips a god’s hands with his own! He wrestles the divine for our salvation . . . .”

* * *

Oeric burned at first, his senses aflame, heart alight, the serpent’s venom in his blood and blazing through his body. An unbearable pain, this burning from the inside, it pushed to the margins all else—all thought and awareness, his very humanity. But then the agony faded, his vision swimming in a phantasmagoria of smeared, greasy colors—a sliding churn of murky reds and browns, ochres and bruised purples—and his ears were deafened by a low roar. He knew he still suffered, but the pain was disembodied, a reflection in a mirror considered dispassionately. His only feeling was a dull tugging, as if his soul were being shucked of its body, like a man who devoured clams pinching the meat from its shell.

The pulling started with his extremities, his arms and legs, a building pressure that ended with a satisfying release, his soul coming free—free from biceps and calves, femurs and leg bones, and all his other parts. Whatever tugged at him moved inwards, working along his ribs and pelvis, and finally reaching his spine. Freed of his body at last, Oeric stood beyond himself, a ghost passing from here to somewhere else. His vision cleared, and before moving wholly into the void, he glimpsed the wreckage of the Seek and knew he had failed.

Oeric saw himself draped over an oar, his uncle beside him, and felt the captain’s thoughts, his disappointment and contempt. Some of Oeric’s insight came from experience, from the many times his uncle had upbraided him for his failures, but Oeric also felt as his own what burned in his uncle’s heart. The captain despaired over the future of the family, cursing Oeric for not saving the galley, and the depths of his uncle’s hate surprised him. Yet he saw himself as his uncle did, too—poor choices and slow decisions, the times he had frozen instead of acting or flinched instead of holding steady. And he experienced his uncle’s obligation to the family, a crushing weight of duty he himself had never felt. The captain had a deep responsibility not only to his wife and children, but to all who claimed his kinship, living or dead. Oeric understood then his uncle’s hatred, at least a little.

In the next moment Oeric was gone, and the scene of castaways adrift in the Still Sea disappeared. The world he passed into was midnight black, a place of unadulterated night without moon- or starlight, and vertigo overwhelmed him. Despite his blindness he knew he stood on the precipice of a void, some bottomless depth. He was nauseous and dizzy, and an urge to leap warred with an animal instinct to flinch away.

Around him, he heard the murmur of the gathering gods, their words indistinct and unintelligible. Crowding around him, looming over him and pressing in from below, they made themselves known through flashes of images imposed on Oeric’s consciousness. The Gold-Monger was a grimacing mouth full of chattering gilt teeth that clacked like clinking coins; the Man-Slayer flashed a horrified face dripping blood, then an insane rictus, still bloody, and then yet another visage, each replacing the previous in a staccato of violence, terror, and rage. All the rest of the gods gathered around Oeric, too, perceptible in the same way, a cacophony of images that tested his sanity.

But one god, Oeric realized, was missing, and from the unseen void before him, Oeric felt his advance, a roaring gust of air carrying with it the smell of brine and semen. Unlike the other gods, this one came as no ephemeral tableau of images and gut-wrenching emotion. The Earth-Shaker stood before Oeric, massive, scaled, and shadowed, backlit with a darkly gleaming cerulean light.

Thou hast killed my spawn, the god told Oeric, his voice a howling wind over cold seas in winter. For the deed, I shall snuff out thy soul. I grant oblivion, here and now, thy companions dying soon after, shouldst thou wish. Or strive with me and if thou pleasest, a reprieve is the prize, thou and thine to die elsewhen. Yet even to prevail is to suffer, for I shall be revenged upon thee. I am the Lurker Below and Sire of Monsters, my seed spawns monsters, some hidden in the depths of the sea, some in the hearts of men . . . .

The vertigo passed with the coming of the god, and Oeric felt rested, healthy, and strong. He did not understand the god’s words, not wholly, but to strive with the god, he knew for certain, would leave him changed. For the first time since his marriage three years ago, he considered what was best for the family. To lose himself and his uncle, the family’s patriarch, could only harm the family’s prospects, already dire with the loss of the Seek. Yet the Sire of Monster promised a transformation; no good could come of that. In the main, though, Oeric did not want to die. It was this fear of death that most consumed his thoughts. And so he put aside consideration of the god’s promised consequences, only a need to survive deciding him, as he stepped forward to wrestle a god for salvation. Once again, to his uncle’s later despair, Oeric made the wrong decision.

* * *

Niall slumped on the oar, again unconscious. The harpooner had narrated a wrestling match between Oeric and a god: thew strained against thew, hand clenching hand, fingers intertwined, until Oeric overthrew the Earth Shaker, a leg braced behind the god’s own, inexorably bending him backward until he was thrown.

During Niall’s telling, Oeric hung lifeless over the oar. The captain thought that maybe he was dead, he was so still, but as Niall told of an impossible victory, Oeric sputtered back to life. He took a deep, gulping breath, then another, thrashing in the water. His uncle grabbed at a flailing arm, ordering Oeric to calm down, but then stopped in mid shout. Fearful, astonished cries interrupted him, as the waves moved against the current, picking up speed. The god paid Oeric his prize, the unnatural waves carrying the adrift seamen steadily to the northeast, and soon the captain caught sight of gulls circling just above the horizon.

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Lord of the Still Sea © 2026 by Allen Thomas (Part 1, Chap. 2; 1788 words)

The monster exploded from below slate-gray waters. The horror rose above the Seek, the loops of its thick serpentine body uncoiling from the depths of the sea. In the galley’s bow Oeric fumbled with his lance, nerveless fingers letting it fall. Beside him stood the harpooners. One, a seasoned hand named Niall, flung his weapon at the serpent with a blood-curdling whoop, the tip glancing off the horror’s mottled gray hide; the other threw his arms over his head and fled to cower in the ship’s stem. The wake from the monster’s rising, an onrush of frothing water, crashed over the rail and overwhelmed Oeric, despite his strength and size, sweeping him amidships. He caught himself on the shrouds, hooking his arm over a rope, and wiped the stinging salt water from his eyes.

The old folk called these things sea serpents, but Oeric had seen snakes, smooth-scaled and graceful as they slithered through summer grass, and this creature was no serpent. Five twisted, curving horns crested its arrow-shaped head, and a curving fringe of tentacles, each twice the length of a tall man and barbed with small hooks, writhed behind the hinge of its jaw. Its mouth opened wide like a serpent’s, maybe, but the rows of needle-like teeth were an eel’s, and unlike any beast, a malevolent intelligence gleamed in its bulging oblong eyes, blood red with black pupils the irregular shape of blotted ink.

Already the sea serpent had shattered the other galleys in the whaling expedition—rising high above to crash down on the deck, breaking the hull beneath its immensity, almost a hundred men thrown into the water to die. But the Seek’s crew were hardened veterans of the Still Sea. They had manned ships through soul-shaking storms and fought off reavers, and the rowers stayed at the oars. The captain, Oeric’s uncle by marriage, gripped the shoulder of the drummer sitting at his feet to brace the man’s courage. In a voice like a trumpet, a clarion rising above the desperate cries of drowning men and angry shouts of the rowers, the captain called for his men’s attention and then barked orders.

“Larboard! Oars! Starboard! Back astern and hard on! Hard on or we die! Hard on!” and the drummer set the pace, pounding out a mad tempo. The rowers followed the captain’s command: on Oeric’s left they lifted their oars from the water, while on his right they pushed theirs furiously, and the galley spun back and away from the monster, as it rose to the height of the ship’s single mast. Oeric could feel the drum beat deep in his chest—thrum! thrum! thrum!—as he regained his feet. The rhythm steadied his racing heart, and he lurched back toward the bow, eyes searching for his lance.

When the sea serpent crashed down, the Seek had turned enough that the monster missed the deck. It glanced off the starboard wale, shattering the oars, but leaving the galley unscathed. The captain yelled for half the larboard rowers to shift oars starboard; he shouted for the others to ready oars. The drum beat paused, the drummer holding his mallets poised above the drumhead, sweat beading on his forehead despite the cool summer air of the northern sea. The monster’s head broke the water’s surface, its blood-colored eyes barely visible, then it breached and snaked away, seizing swimmers in the tentacles around its head and other adrift seamen in its open mouth, before plunging into the depths.

His command was too complicated to execute without closer direction, so the captain descended from the stern deck to stalk between the benches, set herringbone to the mast. Lean and wiry, with a rolling gait from decades at sea, he gripped the back of a rower’s neck or punched a shoulder as he passed, barking at each to lower his oar in the water or pass his oar to starboard, alternating his order by row. When he reached the end of the benches, near where Oeric bent to retrieve his lance, the captain commanded them all to row, the oars now divided between lar- and starboard, and called for the drummer to set a furious pace. Then his flinty eyes met Oeric’s, a disgusted sneer on his thin lips.

“Grip the lance strong! Strike true! Protect our livelihood, damn you!”

Looking away in shame, Oeric nodded. Galleys were the lifeblood of Nor’sail, the Seek’s port of call: whaling to provide sustenance in the warm months, sailing south for the winter to trade. The leading families organized themselves around ship ownership, even lending the galley the family name. A captain and his wife were the heads of a household, and the ship-owning families formed the town council, governance, as well as the administration of the family’s holdings, a wife’s responsibility. This morning two families had lost all status, their galleys sunk by the monster, but the Seeks would not join them in ruin, not if the captain could help it—and especially not because of the handsome, feckless man who had bewitched his favorite niece, the brilliant woman groomed to be matriarch someday.

“Stop failing the family! Earn your place!” the captain barked at Oeric, and as he returned down the rowers’ benches, he ordered those without an oar to arm themselves with whatever was at hand.

Over three years of marriage, crewing the Seek under his uncle’s command, Oeric had disappointed his in-laws. He was cast in a heroic mold, in size and appearance. A head taller than any other crewmember, shoulders and chest to match his height, he was impossibly strong—so strong Nor’sail’s eldest had to recall the legendary dead to remember his equal—with unnatural grace for a man his size. He was handsome, too, with long, fine blonde hair and deep blue eyes. But he lacked grit. His wife would be the family’s matriarch someday; Oeric, though, would fail as the Seek’s captain. His weakness, his uncle feared as he resumed his place beside the drummer, would be the family’s undoing.

“Your uncle’s an asshole,” Niall said with a grin, Oeric taking his place in the bow beside the harpooner. Niall’s tangled red hair, soaked with sea water, was plastered against his head, and his short, braided beard hung stiff from his square jaw. Barefoot and shirtless, he rolled his shoulders, the flat muscles across his chest and broad back flexing, as he loosened up to throw. He took up a harpoon, the one cast aside by the other harpooner who still huddled in the lee of the stem, and as he coiled the harpoon’s knotted line at his feet, his eyes scanned the sea. “It’ll rise in the same place as last time, off the starboard bow. You must stick it in the mouth when it does.” He pointed a finger in his mouth, poking his fingertip against the upper plate. “In the mouth and into the brain!”

When Oeric asked Niall how he knew, the harpooner’s grin turned wild, his wide-eyed glare and pinned out pupils showing his barely controlled frenzy. He shoved Oeric forward toward the rail. “The gods whisper in my ear!” he shouted. “The gods tell me—” and he broke off his crazed talk of gods to howl, a wolfish cry at battle rejoined, as the sea serpent’s head broke the water.

The monster rose where Niall predicted, its tentacles writhing, some still wrapped around dying seamen, and its mouth open wide. Niall cast his harpoon over Oeric’s shoulder, and Oeric leapt after it, lance held overhand. A shaft of ash wood the length of two men, the lance was tipped with a slender, bodkin-shaped head of imperial steel. Sharp, light, and impossibly elastic, the alloy was forged centuries ago in fallen Taratellum, the secret of its forging long lost to the people of the Far Shore. Its point was meant to cut through a whale’s thick blubber and pierce its heart, the shaft long enough to reach. Having flung himself from the Seek’s deck, over its rail and out over the water, Oeric hoped his lance was long enough and sharp enough to transfix the brain of a sea serpent, too.

Above him, the harpoon sunk into the pillowy, dead white flesh inside the sea serpent’s mouth, its line trailing after it, but Oeric fell short, the monster rising so swiftly into the air. Desperate to stop his fall, his hand shot out to grab the harpoon’s line, his arm almost pulled from its socket as he jerked to a stop, his fist closing around the knotted cord. One hand gripped the line, the other his lance, and he dangled helplessly, suspended high above the frothing sea and near the monster’s mouth, but unable to climb higher without a free hand.

Yet the sea serpent’s murderous instinct brought about its own demise. Oeric hung within reach of the fringe of tentacles just behind its jaw. Sensing prey, a tentacle whipped out and curled around his waist; another wrapped around his thigh. The tentacles’ hooks cut into him, cruel barbs catching his flesh, and his blood caught fire, as the hooks injected him with the serpent’s venom. Constricting, the tentacles pulled him close to the monster’s neck, bringing his lance within reach of its mouth.

A fever from the venom gripped Oeric, delirium overcoming his senses, only a single blurry thought in his head, barely articulate, little more than instinct: to drive the lance up through the monster’s mouth into its brain. Senses wholly consumed, he never felt the serpent stop its rise or the swift rush of air as the monster fell. He drove the lance into its mouth, through its palate, into its brain—withdrawing the lance only to thrust deeper, impossibly focused on killing the sea serpent, unaware of where the Seek lay below.

Oeric was numb to the impact and deaf to the crack of wood, as the monster crashed onto the Seek’s deck, the galley’s hull shattering—the broken ship, the dead sea serpent, both sinking slowly below the waves. Less than a hundred men still lived, clutching wreckage to stay afloat. Two of those were Oeric’s uncle and Niall, the harpooner who heard the gods speak. Strong swimmers both, together they freed Oeric from the barbed tentacles that clutched him tight even after the monster was dead. They draped his senseless body over an oar, each taking a position beside him to guard against him sliding free, and the captain wondered how they would survive—and if not survive, then how they would die.

Chapter Two

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Lord of the Still Sea © 2026 by Allen Thomas (Part 1, Chap. 1; 1773 words)

Events converge, as an astrologer and shakedown artist seek to exploit a wealthy client and Rooster tries to cheer a distraught bankrupt with stolen wine . . . .

Rooster Vane had a heroic soul (though not a moral one), and was a man of action, not one to dwell on the consequences. Both qualities were never more plain than when he was filled with good cheer, and just before what happened next, Rooster overflowed with fellow-feeling for those at his table in the Ratter’s Grin. At his insistence each new friend took a cup, dipped it in the stolen cask of Westmost’s most sour—Rooster joining in with a flourish and tipsy grin—and after both cups were raised in a toast, they gulped down the wine. So what comes next, no matter how ill-considered, was only the inevitable progeny of a hero’s heart married to a will to act, steeped in drunken reasoning.

On and on it went, people joining Rooster’s table until the Grin was half-full with toast-making, wine-drinking new-made friends. There was a minstrel (self-described) with a whistle, who played a shrill, unidentifiable tune, and a big man accompanied him, singing slurred, unintelligible words in a pretty tenor. Two women, some-time prostitutes, and a man, their friend, a full-time one himself, closed up their shops (so to speak) to join the merrymaking. A fishmonger and his apprentice, the boy squinching his face at the taste of the wine, the master telling everyone he taught his apprentice more than buy low, sell high. And more beside, some staying for a quick sip, others for many thirsty swallows.

There were old friends, too. Jilly and Tibor sat at Rooster’s table, side-by-side, holding hands, one’s fingers teasing the other’s, and heads together, they whispered in one another’s ear. Cole from The Dumpling came through, brought in by the song and laughter; he had a drink, told how he’d escaped, and then departed back into the night to seek his family. Rooster didn’t sit alone, either; Becca was in his lap, arm around his shoulders. Her tunic was bunched under her, its hem pulled up, and Rooster’s hand was on her thigh, palm against her dimpled flesh, her hand atop his, the piled hands drifting higher.

Her husband, the Grin’s proprietor, had come over to share Rooster’s wine and sit near-by, and to glower at his wife, too. Whatever his thoughts, he kept his words in check. His own peccadillos condemned him to silence or else face an accounting, an overlong reckoning of what she owed him to balance accounts. Besides, she promised her husband—loudly, for everyone to hear—she would sleep only with him tonight, no one else. But the wet pecks she gave Rooster drifted down his cheek to the corner of his mouth, and hard not to wonder whether she meant to keep her promise.

Rooster paid Becca little mind. The man seated across from him had most of his attention and all of his pity, the man’s bruised face so dejected, his voice so maudlin. A jumble of unhappy, obtuse references spilled from him, a piecemeal retelling of his misfortunes becoming more muddled the more he drank. “Oh dumpling, my love! If only she would give me her patronage, you see? Do you see? The lady Alee!”

Rooster lied and said that yes, he did see, it was all very obvious, and so the man continued, “That’s right! She would profit by sea and road, both. Profit every way! I could pay my debt and my dumpling—she would stay mine! Both! But that damn thug—”

“The man who hit you?” Rooster interrupted, pointing to his own cheek in the place where a welt and three wide gashes marked his new friend’s face.

“Yes! He wouldn’t let me past. Then hit me! Slapped me!” Indignant, he shook his head before continuing, “So humiliating! If only I could have explained . . . .” He took a deep drink. “Terrible wine just like this!” He pushed himself up from the table to dip his cup in the cask, drank off the cup, and filled it again before returning to his seat. “So worthless everything that fool brought back. All the worthless things on the manifest . . . Wine! For Hyrkoon! Who could be so foolish?”

For a while Rooster had an inkling about his new friend, a suspicion that grew more certain the more he heard. The Dumpling was his former berth, after all, and the crew all knew she was named for the owner’s wife. Many of Rooster’s mates mused about what a ship-shaped wife might look like, a favorite pastime. Yet the man himself—the shipowner, Rooster now knew him—experienced no dawning recognition. For him it was a startling, shocking moment, the pieces falling into place of a sudden. Thunderstruck, his mouth hung open until he said, “This is from my ship . . . my wine.”

“My pay,” Rooster answered with a shrug, and the shipowner offered no rebuttal that a wage-earner didn’t take his own pay, the employer must offer it voluntarily. Not even a half-hearted protest that Rooster’s pay was truthfully stolen goods, no more than common thievery, the shipowner’s failure so abject and total. He fell into a defeated sulk instead, shoulders slumped and head down.

Though never one to scruple at the occasional theft or unavoidable murder, Rooster wasn’t without shame. He felt regret now, learning that he’d stolen this pitiful man’s wine (though in the least criminal way imaginable, by anyone’s judgment). And then to give him his own wine to toast and to drink! The cuckholding turn made Rooster ashamed, no matter its intended generosity. He had an idea, though, for how to make amends. A simple solution to the shipowner’s plight, direct and confrontational—the best kind of solution to Rooster’s mind. He slid Becca from his lap (she had moved from small kisses to whispered vulgarities in his ear) and stood. “I’ll get you past the man,” he promised. “Then you and the lady can make a deal to set things right.”

Not waiting for the shipowner to agree, Rooster grabbed a handful of the drunk man’s tunic and pulled him to his feet. Together, they went up two flights of stairs to a ladder that went to a hatch, Rooster taking the steps two at a time, the shipowner dragged behind, keeping up as best he could. Following them both was the Grin’s proprietor, who yelled at them to stop. He was relieved that Rooster had set aside his wife, true. Yet the astrologer renting his attic made him uneasy and he knew that Marcello was the Weeper’s man. Whatever the wine-drunk fools planned, the proprietor felt certain Cat-a-Weeping would blame him. No one, him least of all, wanted to give her cause for blame.

Before climbing the ladder, the shipowner wondered aloud at the propriety of intruding right then, and the Grin’s proprietor coming behind loudly warned against going up the ladder. Rooster paused to explain the sense of his plan, his words only slightly slurred. Then a wail came from above—a woman’s for certain, but almost like some beast’s, so absent restraint and reason, so full of emotion as if all civilizing refinement were lost. Such a terrible cry demanded action, at least from a man of Rooster’s impulsive, heroic character. Up the ladder he went in a rush, bursting through the hatch and loosening the door’s hinges with the force of his blow, and springing into the attic loft.

Some of what Rooster saw right then was weird and incomprehensible. Naked with white markings barely visible against her pale skin, a mass of ruby red curls falling past her slender shoulders, Alee M’longe stood trapped within a circle chalked on the floor, writhing. Her arms were palsied, hands clasped before her chest; her thin legs sagged like she wanted to fall, but some invisible grip held her on her feet. With each long wail, she retched up another length of bloody dust, the airy stuff vomited from her mouth in slender strands that arched toward a small berobed man, where he directed them into a flask.

Some of the scene was familiar, though. Just beyond Rooster’s reach, Marcello shot to his feet, the stool he’d been sitting on tumbling back, and his hand went to the blade at his waist. A thug with a sword? Rooster understood this. He closed the distance between them, and his left hand took Marcello’s right wrist, forcing the thug’s hand down to keep the blade sheathed. Then Rooster punched him, a haymaker that sent Marcello crashing to the floorboards. From there, Rooster advanced on the two others in the attic, the astrologer and Alee; whatever this horror, Alee still wailed and Rooster meant to stop it.

Behind him, Marcello got back to his feet, pulling his sword free. He screamed in rage. The inadequacy Alee caused him was there in that scream. All his thwarted desire, too, everything he wanted so nearly his. The anxiety from his small betrayal of Cat-a-Weeping, changing her plan to his benefit. The greater worry he might fail entirely. Now some stranger had struck him, a humbling blow that sent him to the floor, and moved to bring everything crashing down. For Marcello, every fear and frustration came to the fore: an enraged cry, a reckless charge, surging anger drowning all reason.

But Kissy Marcello was no fighter. He was a hired lover who extorted coin and secrets from those ashamed of their need or who mistook his purchased favors for fondness, even love. Rooster was faster and stronger, and a skilled armsman, besides, who killed as a profession. When the screaming thug charged, Rooster spun to meet him. He stepped into Marcello, again grabbing his wrist. Twisting around, he slipped his arm under the thug’s, pinning the shoulder, his hand at Marcello’s elbow. Still trapping the wrist, Rooster levered the thug’s sword arm out of joint. With an anguished cry, Marcello let drop his short sword. Rooster stooped, sweeping up the discarded blade, and as he came around, the short sword snicked out in smooth, curving cut. Rooster sliced across Marcello’s throat, killing him.

Rooster’s backhanded swipe sent a spray of blood toward Alee M’longue. The blood splattered across the circle where she was bound, the dark stuff smearing the white chalk and smudging the runes; and then she was free, her forlorn wail becoming a frenzied cry. The last of the dusty stuff wound out of her mouth, the final strands snapping into the flask with a pop, and as Edom corked the flash, Alee leapt at him.

Her leap took the small man to the ground, Alee reaching desperately for the flask. Edom squirmed below her, the astrologer tangled in his robes and trying to keep hold of his prize. When Rooster came to stand over them both, Marcello’s blood-smeared blade in his hand, Edom froze. He relinquished the flask to Alee and held up both hands, surrendering. Alee rose from the floor then, her eyes fixed on the flask cradled in her hands, and Rooster cleared his throat. When she looked at him at last, he said, “My friend over there . . . .” Behind him the Grin’s proprietor nudged dead Marcello with a foot, a look of fright on his face, and the shipowner cowered near the hatch to the attic. Rooster turned back to Alee, continuing, “The one by the hatch, I mean. He has a business proposal I think you should hear.”

Epilogue

Standing at the rail of the Grin’s roof terrace, Alee M’longue breathed in the early morning air, the stench of the river Cerne overwhelming. The waters were more than four stories below, but the river’s smell was a vile thing in her mouth, palpable enough to chew. The air was warm and muggy, but in her chest it felt cold and sharp. She breathed deeply for the first time since her husband’s death—there was no heaviness pressing on her chest, making her breaths shallow—and the air was a painful chill in places it hadn’t been for months. In her hands was the flask, blood red syrup visible inside through the cloudy glass. She turned it this way and that, letting the heavy liquid ooze back and forth, up and down. She tried to discern what part of it was her love for her dead husband.

Cat-a-Weeping had just left with a tentative agreement for the tax-farming rights along the northern road. Alee couldn’t remember why she’d balked before—some recollection of her husband’s feelings about partnering with criminals affecting her, perhaps—but now she judged the deal profitable. From the loud crashes and yells down below, on her way out Cat-a-Weeping broke up Rooster Vane’s celebration. The thugs accompanying the racketeer were no Kissy Marcello—the two were huge and brutal—and no doubt the sounds of struggle were Rooster being overwhelmed. Intellectually, Alee felt like she should intercede; she reasoned that she owed Rooster a debt. No guilt or feeling of obligation spurred her to action, though, so she remained at the rail.

Behind her, Alee could hear the shipowner (she had rejected his business proposal, the man clearly incompetent) and Edom of Wasurru haggling. Somehow it had come to light that Edom bottled love for sale, and the shipowner told him that he had love to sell. The price the two haggled around was not enough for the shipowner to pay his debts, but if he sold his love for his plump wife—and his dumpling’s love for him, too—he would have a stake to start again. In truth, Alee thought, the astrologer should be happy to be alive, but in the end he had kept all his different promises. Cat-a-Weeping got her rights to collect taxes along the northern road. Alee M’longue was reconciled with her dead husband. And now she felt the same for dead Marcello as she felt for her dead spouse—nothing at all.

No longer of interest she let the flask with her love slip out of her hands and tumble into the river below. It bobbed to the surface, carried away by the slow-moving current. Alee M’longue tried to keep it in sight, but soon lost the dark flask in the murkiness of the river’s muddy waters. And then she wondered why she tried to keep sight of it at all, turning away from the rail to leave the Ratter’s Grin and return home.

Rooster Vane will return in “The Quiet Smoke of Sleep Street.”

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The Sour Wines of Westmost © 2026 by Allen Thomas (Chap. 5; 2401 words)

Alee M’longue and Marcello rendezvous with Edom of Wasurru; everyone wants something from the meeting and the astrologer is no exception . . . .

In the night sky the remnants of a broken moon turned gradual revolutions like a millwheel pushed by some slow cosmic wind. Spiraling through the lifeless gray rocks were pinpricks of sparking color, smaller lunar fragments that refracted the light into golds and silvers, reds and blues. A microcosm of the cosmos, Edom of Wasurru said to himself, where lumbering bodies turned clumsy cartwheels within a nebula of swirling brilliant stars. Hyrkoon too, he continued to ruminate, as he walked along the roof terrace. As above, so below. Cat-a-Weeping, Kissy Marcello, Alee M’longue—all three, to the astrologer’s mind, no more than crude bodies, grubbing in the dirt, while he himself was the light of heaven swirling amongst them. With the sigh of one unhappily interrupted by everyday fiscal necessity, Edom exited the terrace to return inside, his client having arrived.

Crimson-robed and slender, Edom pushed through the knotted cords that hung in the archway and went inside to the attic loft where he conducted his work. The loft had dormer windows and a pitched ceiling, the roof’s trusses visible up above. Wavering candlelight lit the room, candelabra spread haphazardly throughout, and among them were tables and low stools, every flat surface holding a half-rolled sheet of papyrus or laid-open book. The single homely furnishing was a narrow cot pushed out of the way against a far wall. At the attic’s center was a space cleared for tonight’s work, and nearby was a table cluttered with instruments and devices, among them a crystal flask with a cork stopper, a mirror of polished brass, and stubby pieces of white chalk on a pewter tray.

Unbidden, Alee M’longue and Marcello entered the loft, climbing up the ladder from below, Marcello closing the hatch behind them. The lady stood stiffly, with cold eyes and a steady gaze; her hired lover stood close behind, possessively, his thuggish posture an implied threat. Edom invited them forward, deeper into the room, and asked if she were ready to begin. They had already discussed the ritual, everyone knew what need come next, and when Alee nodded, Edom took a piece of chalk from the pewter tray. He crouched to mark two circles with confident, practiced sweeps—one within the other, the smaller circle just large enough for Alee to stand inside—and then in the ring between the two, he chalked runes. The summoning circle was mostly a bit of showmanship, but not wholly.

Edom had promised to call forth Alee’s dead husband for a final meeting. Alee M’longue was educated, well-read, and reasoned, but he had convinced her—so desperate to believe, she was little challenge—that he could bring her husband’s soul out of the afterlife, at least for tonight. Unbeknownst to her, Edom had also promised Marcello that whatever his lady felt for her husband, she would feel for him by morning. The former was more a lie than the latter, but both promises hid untruths among their terms. Edom’s promise to Cat-a-Weeping was wholly true, though, the crime lord too dangerous to risk a lie, and the Weeper would get the tax-farming rights to the northern road, should all go as planned.

The circle complete, Alee unwound the black shawl from her head and shoulders, holding the length of muslin out for Marcello to take. The kept man bristled at the casual command, a reminder he was only a servant. Yet still, he served as her maid, taking the scarf and then unwrapping the silk sash from around her waist. He put both scarf and sash atop a tome lying on a table, returning to unclasp Alee’s gown. The gold brooch unpinned, he slid the emerald silk down her body, emaciated as if she were some starveling. Under the gown she wore yet more silk, a narrow band around thin breasts and a loincloth around slender hips and between lean thighs. These came off next, and now naked, she stepped into the circle, careful not to smudge the chalk marks. Marcello stepped behind her and pulled gold pins from her hair, letting the tight curls of ruby red fall past her shoulders.

The layers of elegance, each removed to reveal another. The single piece of jewelry, a solitary brooch so substantial no further bejeweling was needed. The precious materials for hairpins and underclothes, maybe never glimpsed by any but a maid. This was the grace of wealth Marcello yearned for—the least part, perhaps, but simple enough for Marcello to recognize and want. As he undressed her, envy and resentment again rose in his heart; lurking below was self-loathing, a despite for himself because of what he lacked. There was no lust; he was not aroused as he undressed Alee M’longue, and in those moments so close to achieving his goal, he didn’t even pretend. She was beautiful, but held no allure, any hold over him lost once he understood what she bought from him.

Sex with Alee M’longue was always the same, her gratification demanding an unvarying ritualized act. First Marcello would bind her with soft cord, so tight she couldn’t move. Then a third person, a groom usually because what came next required a measure of strength, bound Marcello the same. The groom lifted her atop him, putting him inside her, and bound them chest-to-chest, her chin on his shoulder, so that neither could move or see the other; then the groom left. Marcello felt the merest tickle by flexing or squirming, and he imagined she must feel the same, the slightest brush of sensation. Together they sat, her atop him, the two of them eventually falling supine, while Marcello struggled to stay erect. One time she had whispered, to herself he believed later: bound by position, trapped in grief, just on the cusp of release, as through a haze, only the barest wisp, pleasure so remote as to be unobtainable. She had gasped that melancholy creed in his ear, and the explanation made him feel perverse. She remade sex into grieving, subverted pleasure to a funereal purpose, and for the only time since he first sold a kiss, Marcello felt used (or so he told himself).

While Marcello struggled to keep his composure—his desire welling in him, the end so close—Edom of Wasurru had taken up the brass mirror from among his instruments. By a sleight of hand the mirror, pinched between forefinger and thumb, turned a quick spin, candlelight glinting from the polished brass. Each spin ended with the barest breath of a pause, the mirror’s face reflecting Alee’s own before it spun away. Edom told his subject of a place beyond all emotion or discomfort. He described a refuge deep within from the world without, over and over, and all the while his usual sing-song voice was a magnetic monotone. He said at last that when the mirror stopped, she would retreat to that refuge, unaware of the world except for his voice, not moving until commanded to awake. The mirror stopped spinning then, and all at once, Alee M’longue went stock-still.

Behind Alee, Marcello dumped a stack of small volumes from a stool and dragged it near the hatch to sit. Edom shot him a disapproving look, for both the noise and the careless treatment of his books. Then he took up the chalk again, and starting at her feet, marked Alee with runes, a match for those in the circle. The wood floor creaked as he moved around her, beginning on his knees, and then crouching to mark her thighs and mid-section, and finally standing for the rest of her body, up on his toes to reach the taller woman’s forehead. Through it all she did not jerk or flinch, no matter how brusque Edom’s stroke or rough the chalk against her skin. When he finished, every part of her was covered in runes, the white marks barely legible against her wan complexion.

Marcello asked, his rough voice disturbing a pregnant silence, “Why all the trouble? Why all the marks? Just tell her what we want and be done with it.”

“The runes are for what I want,” he said, his voice a sing-song, every second syllable pitched up but the last three—what. I. want.—coming in staccato. “She is written, a passage to be read, words that give me command over her heart. Everything we want she will give. Even she will get what she wants. In a way.”

What Alee M’longue wanted was her dead husband. For ten years they had lived a romance, an idyll from a story, and then came a quotidian catastrophe. A chill on the northern road during a tour of the garrisons; by that year’s rainy season her husband was dead of an incurable fever. His death, so unexpected and sudden, left her overwhelmed by an inexorable melancholy. It left her coldly satisfied when her hired lover drove away others with threats of crude violence. Twisted sensuality into frozen grief and mourning. And brought her here, where she now stood helpless and naked, the willing subject of occult influence.

So many wanted so much from Alee M’longue: the neighbor with his sudden plea for her patronage; Marcello her hand in an inconceivable marriage; Cat-a-Weeping the rights to tax passage on the northern road. Yet she wanted only to be reconciled with her dead beloved, to hear his thoughts one last time, to tell him how dear he was to her, to ensure that he knew. And so, she came to Grin seeking the help of an astrologer. No one, though, had asked the astrologer what he wanted, Marcello and Cat-a-Weeping believing him a mere swindler, and what he wanted was sinister. He wanted Alea’s love for her dead husband—to possess it and its tragedy. There was a insatiable market for forlorn love, to weep another’s tears, and he would bottle it for sale to a connoisseur, whoever bid the highest.

Edom began to mime pulling something from Alee M’longue. His hands and arms were level with her chest, and he moved as if he were drawing something forth, arms gently sweeping toward him, stroking fingers teasing whatever was meant to emerge. Rhythmically, steadily, he continued the motion, accompanying it now with a coaxing whisper, and Marcello shook his head at the absurdity of it all. Notwithstanding this apparent mummery, he saw tears forming at the corners of Alee’s closed eyes.

Alee, still without volition, convulsed as if coughing up phlegm from deep within. One hacking cough, then another. A few heartbeats later her throat bulged and rippled, and then her mouth gaped, head thrown back, and from within came a streamer of blood-red particles, like a cloud of dust blown from a locked cabinet, long unmoved and never disturbed. The single streamer winded out of her, growing thicker before it split into slender strands. The strands bent in curlicues and spirals, reluctant to come forth and struggling to return. But Edom had hooked this thing, and he worked the line as well as any fisher along the river Cerne, drawing forth his catch. One arm still pulling the strands toward him, Edom reached back to take up the flask, pushing the cork out with his thumb.

Alee’s tears flowed freely now and her body spasmed with sobs, wracked by sorrow. Her wet eyes snapped open, horror and loss shining darkly. She had freed herself from Edom’s mesmerism, yet still could not move. Some sorcery held her, the sympathy between the runes on her body and the floor binding her. Edom continued to direct the strands into the flask, the bloody particles gathering inside like syrup. Since her husband died, Alee had cried quiet tears most every day, but she had never grieved like this, not even at his deathbed. The despair at losing her love, and her grief, too, was more dire than losing only her husband, and Alee wailed then, an inhuman, heart-rending cry.

Chapter Five

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The Sour Wines of Westmost © 2026 by Allen Thomas (Chap. 4; 2001 words)

As Rooster Vane settles in to drinking his stolen wine, others depart for the Ratter’s Grin with a less Bacchanalian purpose . . .

To call the Ratter’s Grin a flophouse and wineshop was to fail to name its enterprise or describe its clientele. No one patronized the Grin for the watered wine or thin, tasteless soup or to sleep with the fleas and louses. Its patrons came for secrecy and to meet with the weird or outré, things unsavory or scandalous even in degenerate Hyrkoon. It was shop of rendezvous and assignations, and everyone had a different purpose in coming, making it a place filled with reasons to come, as many reasons as it had patrons. That was the Grin: a shop of intriguing, mysterious encounters.

One of the Grin’s soon-to-arrive patrons was Alee M’longue, of House Stelé, and right then, two bearers set down a palanquin outside the gate of her estate. The palanquin was a well-crafted upright box, thrice as tall as wide, with a narrow door that opened for the passenger to sit inside and curtains in the windows for privacy. Across the way was a row of townhouses, newly built among Hyrkoon’s old money estates for a grasping merchant class of prosperous traders and other strivers. At one of the doors was a group of cudgel-wielding men; their leader banged on the door, demanding the resident come out. The prosperity of one striver, at least, was in decline.

From out of the estate’s gate came a handsome, youthful man of medium height with dark eyes and thick dark hair. He had a neatly trimmed mustache, the ends gently curled, and a goatee cut, combed, and oiled to a point. He wore a medium blue tunic, its trim embroidered with glimmering gold thread, and on his fingers shone thick gold rings, begemmed with colorful glass. On his waist was a short sword, more for style than from need, yet the blade was sharp nonetheless. A judging eye of discerning taste would rate him a modestly successful lowlife, a card sharp perhaps. His name was Marcello—Kissy Marcello to the people he grew up with and a few more besides—and he believed he looked a bon vivant. He had a softly spoken reputation as a shakedown artist and widely shared one as a lothario.

Marcello served as the lady’s hired lover, a reliable purveyor of physical pleasure and a sometime guide through the underworld, when Alee M’longue had an itch for sex or ventured into Hyrkoon’s more notorious neighborhoods, like the night just embarked. That she kept a lover was no secret; to see him exit by the gate, no great scandal. She was a widow, her beloved husband dead young and not long ago, and a second daughter of the Stelé. Patrician sons and daughters must marry once, but customarily a widow or widower need never marry again, and for a second daughter, one not in line to be head of the house, there was little disrepute from taking a paramour. The prudish might call her a rake, especially given Marcello’s obvious provenance, but this was Hyrkoon, not chaste Westmost or stiff-necked Ularn. No one here gave a fig for what the prudish thought.

Marcello came out of the manor ahead of his lady, at his insistence, to ensure that the street was clear of any danger. He thought such pretentions gave him a dangerous, mysterious air. The shouting and banging from across the way caught his attention. Debt collectors, he judged the men with cudgels, and then smirked a little when he saw a man slinking down a dark breezeway between two of the homes. Still in shadow, the fugitive spied on the noisy gang at his door, shiftily looking around the corner. Then, certain they looked away, he came out of hiding in a quick-stepping trot, exaggeratedly careful not to make a sound.

Judging the fugitive no concern, Marcello bid the lady come out and he took Alee’s hand as she emerged. Tall and thin, Alee M’longue glided from the gatehouse. She wore a sleeveless emerald gown of draped silk, clasped at the shoulder by a gold brooch set with a black opal. A black sash was wrapped twice around her waist, and pulled over her head and around her neck and shoulders was a shawl of black muslin. Her hair, dyed a vivid ruby red after the latest fashion, was tucked under the shawl except for two tight curls that hung over an eye to her cheek. Was she graceful by virtue of her beauty, Marcello wondered not for the first time, or did her grace make her beautiful? And why did beauty and grace, that elegant combination, belong only to the wealthy? Was it wealth that brought both together?

Marcello was never modest, but he believed that some missing quality made him less than Alee M’longue and her peers. He lacked an enigmatic je ne sais quoi, felt its absence with a deep certainty, and it haunted him. These questions of how and why a patrician was more beautiful burned in his heart. His appearance, the attraction others felt for him—this was how he exerted power over others and controlled his world, and the insecurity consumed him because his appearance was so essential. Watching Alee with hooded eyes, he tried to disguise his envious hunger as mere sexual appetite.

Escorting her from gate to palanquin, he slaked his craving with thoughts of what would come later, the grace of wealth soon within reach—everything arranged, everything planned. But he was startled out of his reverie by the fugitive, the man from down the way who fled his creditors, when he begged for an audience. Puzzled and a little stunned by the sudden entreaty, both he and Alee M’longue stopped to look at the man, who took their attention as his cue to plead for Alee’s patronage. By the time he introduced himself as a shareholder in a shipping venture, Marcello had recovered enough to shove him away. He then opened the palanquin door and urged his lady inside.

Stepping into the palanquin, Alee M’longue smiled thinly at her lover’s rough handling of the would-be petitioner. She didn’t recognize the fugitive as a neighbor, but his fine clothes marked him as no lout to be pushed around in the street. To her, Marcello was uncouth despite his posturing, maybe more so because of it. Yet his small acts of aggression satisfied her, like a little yapping dog, snapping at every stranger, pleases some masters. Custom demanded civility, but the pet was not so bound, and the dog’s nipping became an expression of her master’s interior hostility. So it was for Alee, Marcello’s growling threats expressing her own alienation. Besides, she told herself, the fugitive was no one to her and this night was not for courtesy. Dire deeds awaited; she had best get to their doing.

Marcello closed the palanquin’s door behind Alee and commanded the bearers to depart. With a quiet grunt, they hoisted it up and set off toward downriver, Marcello walking beside. Behind them, the fugitive followed. Sometimes, pathetically, he caught up, pawing at Marcello’s arm and begging for an audience. “Her patronage is all I—” he would start before Marcello gave him a baleful look and raised his hand to threaten a humiliating slap. This sent the fugitive stumbling back, though it wasn’t enough to dissuade him from approaching again. Three times, four times, the pitiful spectacle played out, passers-by having a laugh at the procession, before all of them arrived at the Grin.

The Ratter’s Grin was a three-story building; large sections of plaster, stained dirty yellow from humidity and moisture, had broken away from the walls to expose crumbling mud brick. Hard up against the river embankment, the place stood amidst empty lots, overgrown with faded wildflowers and weeds. Set in the steeply pitched roof were squat dormer windows, and recessed in the gable, running the roof’s length above the eave, was a narrow terrace that looked out over the river. Up there Marcello glimpsed a small wraith-like figure standing where it could watch the road. As the palanquin trundled up to the Grin, the figure moved away from the rail, its turn little more than a twist of shadow, and seemed to fade from view.

Inside, the Grin was crowded and loud, and Marcello was immediately suspicious. Usually a few solitary souls occupied the hall, each sitting by himself, hunched over a bowl of soup or doggedly finishing a jug of wine. Small groups might sometimes conspire in whispers, maybe on a busy night. Tonight the place was remade as a feast hall and Marcello was ill-at-ease. Anticipation of what was soon to come; the pleading fugitive who had followed them inside; now the Grin’s crowd, its laughing and loud talk filling the place with a bon homie so out of the ordinary—it all served to put him on edge.

A cheerful voice invited them to come share the wine, and Marcello grit his teeth, tamping down the impulse to lash out at the voice, at all of the people celebrating who made the Grin so threatening because of its strangeness. He turned instead on the fugitive, still dogging their heels and begging for Alee to hear him out, and he struck him—a sharp, cracking slap with the back of his hand. Marcello’s knuckles raked across the man’s cheek, raising a bruise, and his rings left swollen, shallow gashes. The fugitive fell back with a whimper, and Marcello gripped the hilt of his sword, threatening to kill him if he followed any further. His hand possessively on the small of Alee’s back, Marcello hurried his lady to the stair leading up. Upstairs was his future, and he was anxious to arrive in the what’s-to-come, believing he would soon unveil what end his life’s last two decades had wrought.

Twenty years past Marcello first sold a kiss for a sweetmeat, honey dripped on a date mouthed with his lips from swollen-knuckled fingers. The kiss was long and deep and more sensual than was right between an old washer woman and a boy, almost (but not yet) a man. Candy led to coin, only a clipped piece of silver at first but soon more pristine specie, and kisses on the mouth became caresses and kisses elsewhere. Once word spread, everyone started to call him Kissy; only then his mother learned about her son selling kisses. In a temper she went to the neighborhood boss, whose thugs beat the washer woman for leading Marcello astray, and who made himself Marcello’s pimp.

That first pimp long dead, Marcello was now independent, yet no criminal in Hyrkoon was without a boss. In his tryst with Alee, Marcello served the racketeer Cat-a-Weeping, and it was she who put him with the second daughter of the Stelé, his own connections inadequate to seducing a woman of her status. Cat-a-Weeping was a cunning plotter, and in introducing the two, she did more than curry favor with a patrician house. Alee M’longue had the right to tax the northern road, the only overland route between south-lying Hyrkoon and the other cities of the Far Shore, and Cat-a-Weeping wanted tax-farming rights. But Marcello had failed so far, which necessitated tonight’s gambit.

Marcello and Cat-a-Weeping brought a third person into their conspiracy, this time a confidence man, a self-styled astrologer named Edom of Wasurru. For his livelihood, the astrologer charted the stars’ movements and plotted the course of the Far Shore’s broken moon and the planets in the heavens; and in an exotic sing-song, he told a client’s future. For a handful of coin, he made a horoscope, tracking what quadrant a constellation of stars lied in at the hour of the client’s conception, of birth, of marriage, of pregnancy—any moment worthy of memory. He aligned the past with the recorded position of the stars and made his readings of the client’s future. His prophecies were always correct, at least once he explained why a seeming mis-telling was the client’s mistake, not his.

Cat-a-Weeping had said in her stilted, off-handed way, so full of menace, that Edom of Wasurru, whatever his true origin and however hammy his accent, was an excellent liar. He had promised he could sway Alee M’longue to give the Weeper the contract at an excellent rate. Marcello need only lay the groundwork, extolling the astrologer’s virtues, and make the connection. But Marcello had changed the plan. Slightly. Because the astrologer promised he could do more than merely make Alee give Cat-a-Weeping what she wanted. He could make Alee give Marcello what he wanted, too.

Chapter Four

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The Sour Wines of Westmost © 2026 by Allen Thomas (Chap. 3; 2101 words)

Buoyed by his stolen make-good wages, Rooster floats away from The Dumpling and deeper into degenerate Hyrkoon . . .

Thieving was a fitting first act for Hyrkoon, and Rooster’s intended second, dead drunk on stolen wine, was more apropos still, for Hyrkoon had a reputation for degeneracy. Not the largest city of the Far Shore; more people called Westmost home. Nor the wealthiest; that privilege fell to Eelswher. Well- and widely known were Hyrkoon’s scarce virtues, and so the city was the Far Shore’s most decadent.

Yet lowlifes and the poor didn’t make Hyrkoon a fallen city, no matter how dishonest, larcenous, or murderous. It was instead the city’s corrupted civic order, a vortex of rising and falling fortunes, where underworld bosses and patricians whirled and churned, soared and swooped for position and status. Racketeers and lords worked together openly (and against each other secretly) to multiply their wealth at the expense of every other, and it was, as one philosopher described, a war of all against all. And after leaping from the deck of The Dumpling into the river, Rooster found himself carried on the Cerne’s lazy currents into the vortex of one of these rising and falling fortunes.

Like many rivers the Cerne’s waters smelled of dank and mud, but more pungent than either was the acrid stink of a well-used latrine, and Rooster worked his tongue around his mouth, spitting sometimes, to try to rid himself of river’s foul flavor. The Dumpling receded behind him as he floated and bobbed, buoyed by his cask of wine, deeper into the wharf-side neighborhood. Locals referred to it by its direction, rather than a particular name, simply calling it downriver. Beyond the wharfs and riverside warehouses, the place was a slum, where only sailors without a berth and the destitute lived.

In downriver Hyrkoon, tumbledown walls were repaired with sheets of cheap fabric, hung more to assert ownership than for shelter from the weather in sultry Hyrkoon. Cracked bricks or broken glass were never replaced, and a hole in a roof might be papered over with oilskin, but more likely those inside just walked around the falling rain. And if a building became too broken-down, too dangerous to live in, the squatter tossed a few belongings in a blanket, slung the bundle over a shoulder, and moved to the burnt-out hulk next door. Yet still, downriver wasn’t without its visitors and attractions.

The river carried Rooster toward one such place. Up ahead, jutting from a high embankment of dressed stone was a wooden platform, planking discolored from rot and slick with river scum; a rickety, narrow stairway went up the embankment to a three-story building above. He had passed other places where he might get out of the river, jetties and landings where he saw his crewmates exiting the water with a cask or two of stolen wine, but he hadn’t been able to reach any of them, his swimming so poor, before the current carried him by. He was dead-set on reaching this platform, though; the overpowering stink, the water’s revolting taste—it was past time to get out of the river. So he splashed and kicked and paddled furiously, keeping a hand on the cask to pull it with him and keep himself afloat, too.

The platform stood level with the river, and on it were a man and two women wearing tunics stained from grease and wine and sweating from the humidity, heat, and toil. One woman, the older, tended a large kettle of boiling water, as the two others rinsed bowls and cups in the river, dunked them in a tub of clean water (so-called), and then wiped them dry with a rag. Sometimes the woman at the kettle pulled out steaming rags, sheets, and clothes with a length of wrought iron, a hook on the end, and then pushed other, soiled laundry in, before turning to wring out the clean and toss it in a basket. All of them stopped to look when they heard Rooster splashing toward them.

At the platform, finally, gulping for air after the clumsy, unfamiliar effort, Rooster first pushed the cask of wine up onto the wood planking, getting it right-side up, and then pulled himself out of the river. On the platform, after he ducked his nose under an arm and flinched away, he started stripping off his clothing, first unslinging his sword rolled in his cloak and leaning the bundle against the cask. Then he pulled his long-sleeved shirt over his head, letting it flop to the platform with a wet slap, and next his boots, hopping on one leg to pull off the last one and anxious he might slip on the river scum. The idea of going back in the river Cerne nauseated him. Finally, he plucked at the wet knots of his breeches’ drawstring, but noticed by then he had an audience, the other three on the platform staring at him.

The younger woman didn’t seem to mind his undressing, but the other two were nonplussed, and finally the older woman asked what he thought he was doing, getting naked right then. Not that they minded, the younger woman interrupted to add. Rooster was tall and well-muscled and handsome, but they did wonder, she told him sweetly, what he planned to do once he had his trousers off. She finished with a raised, inquiring eyebrow and giggle. The man beside her scoffed, saying that he minded and didn’t want to know. He leaned in and squinted at Rooster, trying to tell whether he was delirious from smoke or drink, or maybe a lunatic from too many knocks to the head.

Rooster said with a shrug, “I smell foul.” He kicked his wet shirt and pulled at the waist of his trousers. “Hoped you might wash these, too.”

When the younger woman asked about the cask, Rooster said with a grin, “To drink!” The man threw up his hands, about to curse Rooster for a drunk, but stopped when Rooster invited him to drink, too. Settled that he was no threat, only a young fool and maybe a drunk, common enough in these parts, the older woman rolled her eyes and clucked her tongue, putting out her hand for his clothes. Rooster pulled off his breaches and gave them to her with his shirt, a wet stinking pile, and as both went into the kettle, the older woman told everyone to get back to work.

Later, after introductions—the younger woman was Jilly, the man Tibor, and the older woman, the proprietor’s wife, told him to call her Becca, never mind she was married—Rooster was leaning back against the stone embankment, letting his wringed-out clothes dry. The sun was only then going below the horizon, days running long in the months before the rainy season, and Rooster could hear voices and kitchen noises coming from above. Jilly and Tibor had taken the dishes up the stairs, leaving Rooster alone with the older woman. Becca had taken out a small pipe, sneaking a break before returning to work herself. He asked her if the place upstairs was someplace he could drink his wine, and she snorted, pale smoke streaming from her nostrils, before confirming that it was. After a final puff of her pipe, she gave the bowl a sharp rap against the heel of her palm, knocking out the burning embers, and told him, “Drink your wine and get up to all sorts of things, too, at the Ratter’s Grin.”

Taking the basket of laundry, Becca then went up the stairs and back to work, leaving Rooster to wonder what sorts of things she meant. He got dressed, leaving off his boots, still sopping wet, and pushed the cask on its side to roll it over to the stair. There, lifting it a couple of stairs at a time, balancing it on a step for a breath or two to rest, he made his way up to the Grin; going back downstairs once he got the cask to the top for his boots and kit, slinging the rolled cloak and sword over a shoulder.

Rooster entered through the small, crowded kitchen, rolling the cask in front of him. He was greeted by outraged shouts and curses to leave, and was pulled and shoved to an archway that led to the Grin’s main hall. The large room beyond was dimly lit by a banked fire in the hearth, only faint light coming in through the open windows, and in the room stood ranks of long tables, empty benches on either side. In the semi-darkness, it seemed a glum place with grimy walls and drifts of soiled rushes across a packed dirt floor, but Rooster resolved to cheer it up by starting to drink. He lifted the cask of wine onto a table, banged on the top head until it came unsealed, and called for a cup, before changing his order to cups for everyone.

Jilly soon brought out an armful of cups, crouching down to set the bunch on the table, and Rooster swiped one up. He dipped the stubby wooden cup—too small and shallow for his purposes, he judged it, but reassured himself it would fill more than once—into the dark red wine sloshing around in the cask, opened as if gutted by some barbarian, and gulped down the sour, mouth-puckering stuff in one swallow. All the work to get the cask from The Dumpling to here—the thieving, the lifting, the damned swimming (so much harder than it looked)—made the wine the best he’d ever tasted. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, dipped his cup again, and called for others to join him. Jilly took a furtive sip, but no one else answered the call, the hall empty right then, and as she returned to the kitchen, she told him not to worry—the place would fill up soon enough. Then he would see firsthand, Rooster thought to himself, what “all sorts of things” people here got up to.

Chapter Three

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The Sour Wines of Westmost © 2026 by Allen Thomas (Chap. 2; 1663 words)

She was called The Dumpling, and to see the fat-bellied ship beside the shipowner’s plump wife, the resemblance was suggestive, if not striking. Right then, though, the married pair were far from the river wharfs of decadent Hyrkoon where The Dumpling was moored. Nowhere to be found, in fact, when the port master and his men came to collect the wharfage and every other tax due. An accounting of amounts payable tucked behind his belt, the port master had instructions to seize the ship, a trading vessel for the Far Shore Coaster Company, and its cargo if the shipowner weren’t there to pay.

At that late afternoon hour, the shipowner and his wife were on different floors of their home, the place soon to be foreclosed, just as The Dumpling was now being seized. He sat at a writing table reading and re-reading letters of credit, all of them overdrawn, a ledger of accounts open before him. Crumpled in his hand was a manifest from The Dumpling, a list of what she carried in her hold. His sweet spouse waited for him in the bedroom upstairs, where before long she hoped to celebrate with her husband, no cause beyond love and joie de vivre. Unfortunate that such a gulf stood between the two, because after today the wife never again hoped to celebrate in the same way, let alone for the same cause.

Some of The Dumpling’s crew were old hands at the trade along the Cerne, a river that flowed west out of the highlands, the eastern edge of most maps, to the Far Shore and ocean beyond. With knowing eyes, they watched the standoff: the captain and his three mates at one side of a narrow gang plank; the port master and his men still on the wharf, not ready to dare the plank for it could mean a dip in the muddy waters of the slow-moving river. The port master called on the captain to guarantee that if he stepped from the wharf he would not be dumped from the plank. The captain played coy, affronted that the port master required such a guarantee, yet never offering the sought-after promise. And overhearing the parley, all the old hands knew their pay was in jeopardy.

A quick conference, and the working men of The Dumpling decided to take the matter of their wages into their own hands. The Dumpling’s trade voyage took her as far north as Ularn before she returned here, and all along her route the captain never once made a profit. The captain’s lack of discernment, his inability to find worth and value in trade goods, was an outsized reason for the shipowner’s financial difficulties. Whale oil from across the Eventide to Ularn, a northern city on the edge of the Still Sea, where whales were hunted and blubber cheap. Or linen fabric to Eelswher, where the woolmonger guild levied an exorbitant tax on textiles imported by sea, the duty falling on the importer. The goods aboard right then were similarly worthless for Hyrkoon’s markets, their lack of trade value an object of ridicule for the amateur luxury aficionados among the crew. Yet there was one item of cargo a sailor at loose ends might find a use for.

The crewmembers swiftly reached a consensus about what in the hold was worth stealing: wine from Westmost, stored in regular-sized casks, as big around as a small man’s chest. The plan was straight-forward: carry the casks to the rail and toss them in the river—the casks would float—the sailors throwing themselves overboard after. Then a castaway need only hang onto as many casks as he could gather, kicking to the opposite shore, and from there, away to find a new berth. Every man could sell however many casks he snagged (good luck finding a buyer, wiser heads muttered, for Hyrkoon preferred to smoke), or drink the wine himself, saving the cost of a good drunk. It couldn’t make up for lost wages, but everyone agreed that something was better than nothing.

Working quietly, the sailors formed a line, the men standing shoulder to shoulder, that led from the hold, where the casks were stored, to the ship’s rail. It went away from where the captain negotiated passage across the gang plank with the port master (the talks having grown complex, because the captain hoped to secure his pay from the soon-to-be-seized cash box), the shade cast by the setting sun stretching from mainmast to prow. The captain’s last order was to furl the sail, and the sailors had stopped halfway when the captain and port master began to parley. Now unsecured, the sail’s bottom flapped quietly in the breeze, forgotten, and the line of men was hard to see from where the captain stood, the sailors obscured in the wide shadow of the half-furled sail.

With a hushed hup . . . hup . . . hup . . . to hold the pace, the casks went down the line from hand-to-hand. Each sailor turned to his neighbor—hup . . .—to take a cask and turn opposite to deliver it—hup . . .—to his other neighbor, and then turned back again—hup . . . . The casks moved in a steady stream—hup . . . hup . . . hup . . .—like ants carrying crumbs from kitchen to nest. The only hitch in the line’s smooth progress was a ladder, a span or two longer than a tall man, from the hold to a hatch in the deck. The job of hoisting a cask up the ladder fell to the tallest, below decks, and the strongest, braced above.

The strongest was a middle-aged man named Cole, red-bearded and mostly bald, thickset with rounded shoulders. Not the biggest crewmate, yet no one disputed he was the strongest, not after months sailing with him. They had seen him brace a falling mast by himself, a storm near to tearing it away, and lift a big man off both feet with an uppercut. At the end of the voyage, everyone agreed he was the strongest man they’d ever known. Cole worked with a cargo hook, and when the man below raised a cask just above his head, the hook swooped down to sink into the wood. From there Cole braced the cask with his other hand and lifted it to the deck in a single pull, and the line continued—hup . . . hup . . . hup . . . .

Rooster Vane was the tallest, and he stood below deck at the base of the ladder. A young man, he had broad shoulders and a narrow waist, and his longish brown hair was tied back with a string to keep it out of his face. When a cask came to him (yet another cask, he soon thought of them), he got his hands hands under it, and with a blow of air, pushed it up. When Cole took it away with the hook, Rooster took a deep breath and did it again. Hup . . . hup . . . hup . . . the man next to him went, and Rooster’s face turned red from the effort to keep the pace.

Before they began to move the casks, the old hands warned everyone to get anything precious from their berths, because they might not be back, and Rooster had slung his kit, a heavy cloak rolled around a longsword, across his back before getting pushed into position at the bottom of the ladder. Sometimes during a doldrum, a bored sailor would point to the sword under Rooster’s bunk and ask him to tell again the story of his hire: how a recruiter in Ularn had told him he would be paid extra if he drew his sword in defense of The Dumpling. As everyone started to grin, the sailor would act out fighting a sea serpent with a sword, slashing and cutting, as another pretended to be the monstrous creature.

Rooster always smiled at the teasing. He had many flaws—cocksure, naive, and guileless, to name three; shirked responsibility and lacked foresight, to name two more; averse to reflection, especially self-reflection, to name yet another, and still not the last—but none would call him ill-tempered. Every time at the end of one of these pantomimes he held out his hand and asked for five coin more, the hold erupting with rough laughter. On the inside of his forearm, though, was a puffy scar in the shape of a double-bitted axe, the brand of a Free Soldier, and mockery aside, he was skilled with the sword he carried (though likely still not skilled enough to kill a monster bigger than a ship, not even he believed that . . . or if he did, would never admit it aloud). And now in Hyrkoon, he planned to earn his way as an armsman if he could find the work.

Hup . . . hup . . . hup . . . the casks kept coming, until Cole shouted to stop and Rooster looked up to see the big man waving for him to come up the ladder. Rooster let the cask in his hands fall, wood staves splitting a little to leak rank-smelling wine, and shouted down the line that it was time to go; then he scrambled up. Setting aside the cargo hook, Cole grabbed Rooster by the wrist and pulled him up on deck as easily as he had the casks of wine. Then the two together stood at the hatch, doing the same for rest of the sailors in the hold until none remained below.

Meanwhile, the captain and his mates were moving away from the gang plank, a self-satisfied saunter. Glancing over their shoulders in the direction of crewmembers, they grinned at the thievery (except for the second mate, an overly serious man, who shook a fist at the half-furled sail, angry at the work not done). To step aside the captain had negotiated a rate of half his commission, a third for each mate, and none for the crew (to no one’s surprise), and so he felt no responsibility for what happened next, his commission discharged. Commanded to seize the goods aboard, the port master felt the opposite. When he saw what the sailors had done, he and his cudgel-wielding gang shouted desperate cries of “thieves!” and “villains!” as they gave chase to the fleeing crew.

Cole and Rooster were the nearest, and at the outcry they turned to face the port master and his gang, the sailors behind them hurrying to make good on their escape. Rooster reached for his kit to unsling his sword, but Cole stopped him. “No one’s paying you five coin to murder the port master,” he said with laugh. “Go on, now,” he told him, inclining his head toward the rail. “I’ll give you some time.” Then, raising his fists, bunching his shoulders, and tucking his chin, he started toward the on-coming gang.

Rooster clapped Cole on the shoulder before turning to run, a long-legged lope that carried him quickly away. The port master had time to shout for him to stop, but no more, as Cole got to him first. The big man took him by his tunic, lifted him from the deck, and tossed him overboard, not far from where he had come aboard. Despite the captain’s promise, the port master ended up dunked in the Cerne’s murky waters after all. And then Cole turned to the first of the gang, blocking a cudgel’s clumsy downstroke and laying out the clubber with a hooking punch, before throwing himself at the rest of the gang.

Rooster reached the end of the deck, and without breaking his stride, put two hands on the rail and vaulted it. He hit the water feet first, plunging deep, but didn’t know how to swim—he was from the far north where water was often frozen over and being soaked might lead to a shivering death—so when he came sputtering to the surface, he slapped his hands and arms uselessly. In a froth of churned water, Rooster paddled hard and loudly splashed to a bobbing cask, hugging it to his chest, and then he kicked away from The Dumpling. Despite his furious effort, it was mostly the gentle current of the slow-moving Cerne that carried him away, but he escaped into the Hyrkoon early evening nonetheless.

Chapter Two

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The Sour Wines of Westmost © 2026 by Allen Thomas (Chap. 1; 2089 words)

The opalescent fish scale trade goes on along the Mad River, the muddy waters called crazy because of the river’s frequent switchbacks. The sharp bends come every two or three miles between the city of Eelswer and Lake Everben, and that’s too often for any river to remain sane. Living along a river so twisty makes everyone crazy. Fishermen, fishwives, fishskinners, fishmongers, even the opal fish themselves—none of them of sound mind. I should’ve known better than to get involved, because fishing is for food, but not along the Mad River. No one eats an opal fish, not fileted and fried, not salted and smoked. From all reports it’s a foul-tasting meat, no matter how it’s cooked, and that alone should’ve told me to stay away.

The opal fish is an ugly creature about the size of a trout, a little more stout around the middle. It has a face like an old man’s—an old man in pain and pulling an ugly face like maybe his joints ache, his back aches, and he just drank something sour like beer gone skunk. The fishwives tell me I have a face like an opal fish, but even if that’s true, it didn’t stop Widow Feely from putting me up in her home in Mudshore, a fishing village on the banks of the river.

The opal fish’s compensation for its ugly face and crazy-brained nature is its large scales, nearly as hard as crystal and shining like opals. Tailors use the scales to decorate ladies’ bodices, and the style fashionable in Eelswer is to stitch a triangle of scales from a woman’s bosom down her stomach. The panel of fish scales catches the light, glistens with a rainbow of slick colors, and a lady of Eelswer can’t resist drawing attention to her bosom and setting a man’s eyes on the path below her waist.

I’m a tinker by trade, and mending old pots and kettles is my usual work, but sometimes I get a notion to invent something new. While sitting in Widow Feely’s kitchen, I had an idea to make some coin from the opal fish trade—the idea involved poles, something I’d later call fishing poles—and when the widow’s son Hudge came back from the river, I took a sounding for my invention.

Hudge was a tall boy without enough meat on his bones, and he was all pointed shoulders, pointed elbows, and pointed knees. He had a pinched face, a sad sight on one so young, and sunken eyes with blue-black bruises under them, like he used his thumbs to push those tired eyes back in their sockets every morning.

I asked Hudge what he thought about something that would make his fishing easier, but his answer was oblique, maybe not an answer at all.

“I don’t much care for you staying here with my Ma, Kirdy Deel.”

“Well, Hudge, an old woman has needs, like a young woman has needs, like the same needs you’re discovering Tole’s daughter has, you two spending so much time together from what I hear.”

Hudge wasn’t too quick. He fixated on a woman’s needs rather than making his work easier. “Don’t talk about Ma’s needs,” he said. “Don’t talk about Tole’s daughter neither.”

“Then let’s talk less about a woman’s needs, and more about a fisherman’s, and something that would make those needs less needful.”

Hudge took a seat, hunching down at the table, and he rubbed his left hand, trying to get some feeling back in his fingers. To catch an opal fish a fisherman uses a line of catgut, a hook on one end with a minnow for bait. He winds his end of the catgut tight around his palm, and with the other hand he holds the line out over the water, jerking it up and down to make it seem his bait is still alive because an opal fish has an aversion to eating dead fish.

It’s tedious work and a net would catch more fish, but like I said before, the opal fish is crazy. When it’s caught in a net, it thrashes—thrashes so hard it breaks off its scales, scraping them hard against the hemp. The fishskinner, the dreary fellow who descales the fish, pays by the quality of a catch’s scales, and an opal fish without scales is worthless since you can’t eat the damn thing.

I pointed at Hudge’s sore hand and told him, “Now my idea would solve that business with your hand. You’d have both hands to explore the needs of Tole’s daughter, and two hands are better than one, just ask your Ma.”

Hudge began to rise from the table. He was serious about not wanting to hear about a woman’s needs and unappreciative of an old man confiding in a young one, what some folk might call man talk.

“You sit back down,” I said before Hudge could stand up. “I’m going ahead with my idea and I’ll make it a gift to you. Don’t you decline it. When the others see how much easier it makes your fishing, they’ll line up to give me some coin.”

For the next few days I sat out back, staying in the shade and whittling on some saplings, long pieces of cedar wood perfect for what I intended. The widow had no use for idle men, and she clucked her tongue at me whenever she came out. She reminded me she had pots in need of mending, and with a wink I told her I’d plug the hole in her pot after my work was done, she needn’t worry about that. I passed the days like that—my knife scraping away curving slices of wood, my mouth full of innuendo for the widow—so when Hudge got back from the river one afternoon, I had his poles ready for him.

Each of the five poles was four feet long, and I’d punched a hole through the tip where I’d tied some catgut. That might not seem like much, but there’s one last thing that proves my brilliance. In the catgut, near where I tied it off to the pole, I’d knotted a handful of small bells, hollow balls of tin with a pebble inside. The bells rattled more than rang, but they still made a noise good enough for my purposes.

Hudge, being slow, didn’t understand how the fishing poles would help him. “I’ll still need to sit there,” he complained. “Now I’ll just wave a pole up and down. And I’m not sure what I’ll do with five of things, Kirdy Deel. I’ve only got two hands—I can’t hold a pole in my feet and mouth, too.”

“Now you be quiet, Hudge, and let me explain. Tomorrow morning I’m going with you to your boat, and I’m going nail in a bracket for the pole—five brackets for five poles, you see? This wood is supple.” To prove my point I flexed the pole. “The natural movement of the river will get it swaying up and down, and you won’t have to do anything but wait.”

“That sounds a mite tedious, waiting for a fish to bite with nothing to do. I don’t see why you’ve got to change things, Kirdy Deel. Hook and line was good enough for my father and my father’s father—probably his father, too.”

“I have to change things, because I have a mind to improve things, and if you had more of a mind, you’d feel the same as me. Now you listen to this.” I gave the pole a sharp jerk and set the bells to jangling. “When the opal fish bites and starts to thrash, the bells will jangle. Do you think those bells might wake you up? Maybe if you were napping while waiting for a fish to bite?”

Hudge thought and thought, his hand massaging his forehead like something there was sore and strained, before he finally recognized my brilliance. After he did, he jumped up from the table and danced a clumsy jig, all elbows and knees flinging out at sharp angles. Then we went to the Fish Belly, the only beer house in Mudshore, to celebrate the invention of the fishing pole. That night was a good one, me and Hudge filling our bellies with drink and coming home arm in arm as drunk as could be. Later on, Hudge wouldn’t have a nice word for me, so it’s good he gave me so many that night, else I might think him ungrateful.

The next day Hudge had five poles, all of them working to snag an opal fish while he lay there sleeping. He didn’t catch five times as many fish, but he caught more than the other fishermen, snoring all the while, and before long all the others lined up for five fishing poles each. After a handful of weeks they all had poles, and my pouch was so full of coin I had to buy another. Then the Brotsky Brothers started their new pole tax.

The Brotsky Brothers took coin from the fishermen to protect them from harm—harm the Brotsky Brothers inflicted if a fisherman didn’t pay. They were big boys with wide sloping shoulders and heads too large for their bodies—hard to believe considering their size. They were known to lick their lips at the thought of doing violence, and the only explanation a man needs for taking someone’s coin is size and a hunger for doing harm. When the Brotsky Brothers saw those five poles wagging from each rowboat, they decided to charge by the pole, not the man.

The fishermen soon realized they made less coin than before. They paid five times as much to the Brotsky Brothers, but didn’t catch five times as many fish, not to mention the coin they paid me to get the poles in the first place. One fisherman got wise and started using one pole, but when he showed up at his rowboat the next morning, his eye was black, his nose crooked, and all five poles were back in their brackets. After that the fisherman started giving me evil looks, and things went from bad to worse when the Brotsky Brothers found me one night at the Fish Belly.

“We’ve been talking . . .”

“Talking about you . . .”

“Talking about you and your fishing poles.”

They always talked that way, like one brother alone didn’t have enough words to finish a sentence, so all three had to scrape their words together to get anything said.

“We’ve decided you’re going to make . . .”

“Make more fishing poles . . .”

“Make five more poles for each fisherman.”

I blew out a sigh. “I don’t know if that’s wise, boys. Making a fishing pole costs coin, those tin bells don’t fall from the sky like rain drops, and I haven’t heard one fisherman say he wants—”

One brother put his meaty hand on my right shoulder, the other put his hand on my left, and the last one bent down to look me in the eye. “These poles,” he told me, “we’ll give away as a gift . . .”

“A gift to your customers . . .”

“A gift because they’ve paid you so much coin.”

I saw where this was going, me coming to harm if I kept saying no, so I nodded my head. “A token of my appreciation is what you’re saying, and I do have a lot to appreciate, Mudshore being so friendly to this old tinker. Thank you for reminding me of my manners. If not for you, people might think me a greedy and rapacious man, not one who appreciated their generosity, and that would be a terrible burden to bear. I’ll get to whittling those poles tomorrow, you can trust me about that.”

The Brotsky Brothers smiled and said that sounded just fine . . . just fine indeed . . . just as fine as could be.

The next morning I made another fishing pole and that afternoon, done with his fishing, Hudge came around back of his Ma’s house. “What are you doing, Kirdy Deel?” The poor boy’s eyes were wide with dread, and he was trembling at the sight of the newly-made fishing pole. “I don’t need more poles! The pole tax is too steep!”

I sucked on a tooth, admiring the pole I’d made, and gave it a good jerk to jangle those bells. “Well, Hudge, the Brotsky Brothers want to give you fishermen a gift, so they’ve commissioned me to make you twenty new poles each.” I gave the bells another jangle to drive home my words. “Or maybe it was thirty. I’d better check with them. You know how hard it is to understand a word they’re saying, all that three brothers sharing one sentence nonsense.”

Hudge let out a scream, and I smiled as he ran off, wailing and tearing at his hair like I’d prophesied his doom in the guts of a dead sheep.

That night I skipped supper to the sound of Widow Feely’s clucking tongue, her not approving of man who didn’t eat. A hard working man always eats supper, and my not eating was proof of my lazy ways. She reminded me the bottom of her pan was getting thin if I needed work to get my appetite up. Her bottom was far from thin, I told her—it was plenty thick to get an old man’s appetite up. I promised to tend to it later as I left for the Fish Belly.

When I got to the beer house, I didn’t go inside. I just waited in the shadows across the way and kept an eye on the place. Its four plank walls loomed inward at the top like it was about to collapse in on itself. Firelight spilled out the open doorway and crawled across the muddy road like it’d had enough to drink and was trying to stagger home. The beer house was quiet, and I could imagine the tired fishermen inside, huddled over their cups and despairing at the thought of thirty more fishing poles.

For a heartbeat or two I thought my plan hadn’t worked. I wondered how far down the road I could get before someone noticed I was gone—making fishing poles for free did no one any good, especially not me—but then I heard someone shout, “Thirty!”

About then the Fish Belly experienced indigestion. Some folk ran out and came back with others, until every fisherman in Mudshore was stuffed into the place, the beer house a hurly-burly of screaming and shouting. I couldn’t make out any words—just “thirty” shouted over and over—but when I saw the Brotsky Brothers shambling up the road, I figured pretty soon I’d know what those fishermen were saying, judging by what happened next.

The Brotsky Brothers went in and I heard:

“There they are!”

“Thirty fishing poles!”

“Get them!”

My problems solved, I went back to Widow Feely’s intent on keeping my promise to deal with her bottom, and I’d just gotten my appetite up when rough hands grabbed me out of bed. Those hands hauled me outside and tossed me to the ground, me hitting the mud face first with a slurp.

When I picked myself up and got my breeches up around my waist, I didn’t see who I was expecting. I thought it’d be the Brotsky Brothers, unappreciative of the thirty fishing poles I’d told Hudge about, come to teach me numbers by pounding me five times, then thirty to illustrate the difference.

But it wasn’t the Brotsky Brothers. It was all the fishermen in town instead, Hudge standing in front of them, each holding a fishing pole. Some were swinging a pole back and forth like it was a switch. Some gripped it with both hands and were giving it a good wag up and down. All that swinging and wagging sent up a terrible clamor from the tin bells, but I didn’t figure they were trying to make music. Those fishermen were intent on doing violence with poles never intended to do any harm, except to an opal fish, and they were testing the fishing poles to see how much harm they could cause an old man, especially an old tinker named Kirdy Deel.

Hudge set the matter straight. “We’re here to sell you back these fishing poles.”

The fishermen added a chorus of grumbles to the noise they made with the bells, and I realized where my plan had gone wrong. Give a man a taste of what he can accomplish with violence and he learns it makes life easier—less expensive than buying something and less work than thinking something through. By pushing those fishermen into violent acts against the Brotsky Brothers, I’d gotten their blood up and made them believe inflicting harm was a good way of solving a negotiation.

The fishermen started to crowd close, Hudge nearest of all, and I could see the meanness and spite gleaming in his eyes.

“Things were better before you came along,” Hudge told me. “And we’re going back to the way things were. Now you buy back these poles and then get out of my Ma’s house, else we’re going to beat you like we did the Brotsky Brothers.”

That didn’t leave much room for haggling, so I told them I’d buy back their damn poles, leaving me without a coin to my name, leaving me with nothing but fishing poles I didn’t need. I even left Mudshore with less coin than when I came, because Hudge sold me back the poles I’d given him as a gift. When I reminded him he didn’t pay for the poles, he told me it was rent for staying with his Ma—like I hadn’t paid her in my own way, giving her what a widow wants in return for her kindness. Hudge still didn’t want to hear about a woman’s needs, the young are so prudish nowadays, and he enjoyed watching me squirm.

On my way out of town I tossed those fishing poles in the Mad River. I watched them float away one by one, five bundles of twenty poles each, but I starting cursing when they came to a switchback and washed up on shore. I tromped on down there, mud sucking at my feet, and then I tied some stones to those bundles and sank the damn things. When the last of the bundles was sunk, I cursed the town and its opal fish. Over the years, though, I’ve spoken a lot of curses. Not one has done me any good, an old tinker can’t count on the gods for anything, so I took matters in my own hands.

I traveled along the Mad River to Eelswer, and once there, I spent my weeks walking the tangle of crowded streets. At every manor I passed, I knocked on the servant’s door and peddled my services mending pots and kettles, the occasional pewter mug. I found plenty of employment since my services came so cheap, because I wasn’t after coin. As I worked, I told anyone who’d listen about my time in Mudshore—told them stories about how an opal fish was caught and the scales were made.

“The scales don’t just come off the fish shining like an opal,” I said. “There’s a process to making those scales. Involves eating the foul-tasting fish, scales and all, and then the fishwife scoops the scales out of the latrine. She pulls up her skirts, knots them at her waist, and jumps in, sometimes with her children in tow, a short-hafted sieve in one hand and a bucket in the other. Something about passing through a man’s stomach and his other parts, if you know what I mean, and then fermenting in a latrine makes the scales shine like that. Nothing much to it, but sure is a wonder.”

The wealthy are prone to believe nasty stories about working folk—the more nasty, the better—and fashion is a fickle thing. Those stories of mine spread from the servants and children to the ladies themselves, and needless to say, opalescent fish scales aren’t fashionable in Eelswer anymore. No where else either, not if I’ve been there tinkering. I haven’t been back to Mudshore, but I don’t give a damn about those fool fishermen. If they don’t have any coin, let them eat opal fish, because fishing is for food and anything else is unnatural.

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Opalescent Fish Scales © 2026 by Allen Thomas (3437 words)

Two feuding brothers and their warriors, with two shepherds and a flock of sheep, were driven into the wilds by a raiding party from a neighbor. One brother was murdered in the night, no one knows who killed him, but some have a suspect . . . .

When the warriors went back along the trail to scout for the enemy, they left the shepherds to tend to the bodies. Rollo dug two shallow depressions in the gravel and sandy dirt where the base of a granite crag met the dark waters of the tarn, as Eunike gathered flat stones, carrying them in panniers on the dead men’s ponies. They then laid each body down and stacked stones in a cairn over them—klok. klak. klak. klik. klak.—the sharp, steady rap of stone set atop stone echoing through the quiet hollow. As they worked, Eunike’s eyes returned to the dead men’s wounds: the narrow slice in the warrior’s neck, so much like the cut across the ewe’s from yesterday, and the gaping wound in Ystling’s, where something had torn out his throat. There were long cuts along his arms and across his face, too, but it was the jagged-edged hole in his neck that had killed him.

Tyrrn had denied it. Again and again, he told them he didn’t murder his brother, and to convince them, he recreated what had happened last night, fitting the evidence to his story. The Oster men sent out a lone scout, Tyrrn explained. The scout came upon Ystling and the warrior; the two had fallen asleep. Seeing an opportunity, the scout crept up on them, slitting the throat of the warrior. Ystling awoke at a noise—the warrior’s death rattle, a stone accidentally kicked in the dark, something. The two struggled and the scout grew frenzied as Ystling continued to resist, finally hacking away at Ystling’s throat once he had the advantage. The scout hadn’t come deeper into the hollow, because in the dark he couldn’t see where they were camped, especially not amongst all the sheep.

No one offered an opinion on the story, but Eunike wondered why the scout hadn’t returned, if not in the night then the morning, with all the Oster men. One of the warriors instead told Tyrrn, “No one’s judging—” And the other added, “Your father and his brother, it was the same—” Both fell silent at an angry glare from Tyrrn, who then looked to Rollo and told him, “I didn’t kill him, cousin.” Rollo held Tyrrn’s searching gaze for a heartbeat, then two, before he looked away with a shrug. “As your man says, there’s no one here to judge the Varranji.” Tyrrn flinched at the title, a flash of guilt maybe, but he didn’t protest. The freehold entire was his, his brother now dead, and the family name was his by right. “Maybe not a scout, maybe a wearg . . . .” he muttered doubtfully. “Whatever it was, we’ll ride back along the trail to search for my brother’s killer. I won’t do nothing.”

Eunike was frightened. She hadn’t been scared of the Oster men. The violence had made her anxious, truly, but to serve the Varranji or the Oster? It made no difference. She tended the sheep and took her livelihood from the flock: a portion of wool at shearing, some meat and tallow from a culling. Yet the sheep remained the Varranji’s. If the Oster took the freehold, the flock would still need a shepherd, and Eunike would still serve, the sheep now the Oster’s. But this murder, the savagery of it, left her shaken, and Tyrrn’s denial and his implausible story only increased her fear. She asked Rollo if he believed Tyrrn and he only shrugged; then she asked, “What’s a wearg?”

“What did Tyrrn mean?” Rollo asked, and when Eunike nodded, continued, “He meant an outlaw—some criminal cast out of the cities of the Far Shore and pushed beyond the Freeholds to outskirts like these mountains.”

“What else can it mean?”

Rollo’s answer was characteristically elusive—a thoughtful pause, then complexity and detail that obscured meaning. From the stones Eunike had gathered for the dead men’s cairns, now piled haphazardly at their feet, Rollo separated one stone, flipping it end-over-end with the iron-shod butt of his crook until it lay apart. He swept his crook to that lone stone’s left—the Eventide, he said, naming the great western ocean—and then touched the butt to the stone, the pile of other stones, and finally the unfinished cairns to the right of the pile, naming each in turn: Ularn, the Freeholds, and the high pasture where they now buried their dead.

The Peace of Ularn was the jurisdiction of that city—Rollo clinked the iron end of his crook against the lone stone—which continued to follow imperial law, largely unchanged. Taratellum had regulated every part of life, as now the stoic Ularn did, and when a law was broken, a citizen might seek out a magistrate to pray for relief. If his rhetoric and logic were sound, if his story of injustice were compelling and he had a remedy under the law, the magistrate might grant him justice and gather men to see it done. Every soul within the Peace was protected by Ularn’s laws, a citizen having the greatest portion, and none could take the law for his own, as all were governed the same.

In the Freeholds beyond the Peace—here Rollo’s crook circled the pile of flat stones, each making a freehold—custom alone governed the people, and when a person broke with custom it created a grudge. Grudges led to resentment, and sometimes a hard blow or spilt blood. Injuries and hard feelings nurtured retribution and feuds, and this was how customs were enforced in the Freeholds. This was the only law. When the spilt blood was proportionate to an injury, a feud might come to an end. Yet vengeance was rarely so even-tempered and feuds might last a generation or more.

But this hollow the brothers had brought them to—Rollo’s crook now jabbing in the direction of the two half-stacked cairns—it was beyond even the loose rules of the Freeholds. This was the wilds and there was no law here. Even a crime of the first order—family-murder or sister-rape, a strangled toddler or smothered spouse—was no crime at all. The measure of what was permitted was the depths of greed and rage, or overwhelming spite, and the only justice was retribution from one of greater malice. The judge of whether an ill will and intent was warrant enough was the dark spirit of a place like this one, a malevolence that haunted the lands beyond civilization some called a wearg.

“But what Tyrrn meant was not that. He means an outlaw driven mad by years alone in the wilds,” Rollo finished, returning to stacking stones over the dead. Eunike joined him and soon the cairns were finished. As they worked, she thought on her half-remembered dreams from the night before and the wolfish shadow she’d thought she’d seen in the dark. She asked more questions, but Rollo only shrugged; he had told her all he knew, he said at last. Then he wandered off, Rounder trailing after him, and she went her own way, moving among the flock, her own dogs at her heel. Toward nightfall Tyrrn and his warriors returned. They had found no sign of the Oster men, nor of a wearg, and Tyrrn said that in the morning the whole group would return to the prairie.

Eunike was no less frightened by the time she bedded down, but her fright was less livid. The everyday work of shepherding the flock and the peaceful passage of time had soothed her nerves. Rollo laid down behind her, and though she told herself she wouldn’t sleep, she soon fell into a deep and dreamless slumber. Lily’s growls and Naggy’s wet nose in her face woke her up. Both dogs stood guard, tense and alert, and Rollo was gone. There was a man’s yell, a call to arms, and then another, and the flock scattered, panicked sheep bleating as if a wolf were among them. Eunike hurried to stand, taking up her crook, and her dogs moved in front of her protectively, barking and growling. An anguished, dreadful howl pierced the night and made her shiver with goosebumps.

Her dogs beside her, Eunike ran toward the cries, coming from where Tyrrn and his warriors had made camp. A banked fire cast the scene in a dim light. On the ground to her right were unmoving bodies—she couldn’t make out who—and she caught sight of Rounder running in an anxious circle not far away. On the opposite side of the fire a stocky figure loomed over one of the warriors, on a knee and trying to get untangled from his bedroll. The figure swung a blow at the warrior, a savage haymaker, that sent him crashing to the ground. By the size of it, she knew the figure was Tyrrn or Rollo, yet she wasn’t sure which, the two men’s silhouette so similar in the dim light. It stalked toward the fallen warrior, who struggled to get his hanger out of its sheath.

Eunike commanded both dogs to attack; Lily dove at the figure, taking hold of an ankle, and Naggy leapt for its raised arm, closing his jaws around its wrist. Eunike came in behind the dogs, and she swung her crook at the figure’s head, hooking it around the neck. She braced herself, feet wide, and yanked back hard, hoping to topple the figure. It staggered and she yanked again, yet it kept its feet, now turning toward her. Despite her terror, some part of her was desperate to see its face as it came around—to know whether it was Tyrrn or Rollo. But even after it turned, she couldn’t tell. Some terrible image, a nightmare of a spectral wolf, was superimposed on the figure, occulting its face.

She remembered the night before, when a shape had formed from out of the darkness, and here was the same, as if an angry artist scratched the outline of a wolfish thing in black charcoal—violent, frantic strokes making out a bestial figure against a dark background. The pointed ears, the muzzle, the eyes of crimson fire—it flashed over the figure, Tyrrn or Rollo, a wolf given the shape of a man and the size of giant. Wearg, she thought frantically, as it slouched toward her. It tossed Naggy aside, the dog tumbling through the air with a yelp, and it tore the shepherd’s crook from its neck, pulling the staff from Eunike’s grip and breaking it in pieces. Lily still worrying its ankle, front legs stiff and haunches down, the wearg dragged the dog with it as it advanced on Eunike.

Eunike shied away, cringing. From behind the wearg, the warrior plunged into the fight, now on his feet with his sword free. He swung his hanger into its side—a wild, frenzied swing—and the curving blade cut deep into the wearg’s midsection. Howling, it turned on the warrior and took his head in both its taloned hands. The warrior cried out in pain and fear, his eyes wide at the wolfish shadow that squeezed his skull in an impossibly strong grip, and he tore his sword free, bringing it back for another swing. Before he could deliver the blow, the wearg closed its jaws on his neck, ripping his throat out. Then, it turned back to Eunike.

Eunike had her knife out. Lilly’s muzzle, its white fur, was stained red with the wearg’s blood, and her head jerked free with a growl, a gory chunk of muscle and tendon from the wearg’s ankle clenched in her jaws. The wearg fell to a knee, its leg useless, and its crimson eyes flickered, the light fading. It howled, still awful and terrifying but now the cry wavered with pain, and it swung at Lilly, who ducked the blow and snapped her jaws on its wrist. Like a shot, Naggy charged from behind Eunike and leapt for the wearg’s throat, the dog’s weight taking the wearg to the ground. It shoved Naggy away, but Eunike followed close behind, dropping to her knees on its chest. She could see the face now, the wolfish shadow fading as the life drained from it, the blood flowing freely from the deep cut in its side. She sank her knife into its chest, stabbing his heart and killing him.

The hollow was still then, the only sound the sheep’s fearful bleating, and Rounder at last stopped his frantic circling, coming to where Eunike knelt. Whimpering, the dog licked the face of his dying master. Rollo’s eyes were squeezed shut from pain and blood bubbled from his lips; he weakly patted the dog’s head before he died in silence. Eunike rose to her feet and staggered away. She started trembling uncontrollably, adrenaline and fear finally taking her, and she crouched, hugging herself tight. Her dogs pressed against her, and once she stopped shaking, she told them to gather the flock. Then she checked on Tyrrn and the warriors, all of them dead. In the morning she gathered the ponies, stringing them together, and she and her dogs drove the flock back to the prairie.

In the coming months a man for the Oster found her. He told her that the flock was the Oster’s now, and she told him it made no difference to her. She stayed quiet about what had happened to the last of the Varranji. In time, she learned of Rollo’s past. His father was the old Varranji’s elder brother, murdered so that the younger brother, Rollo’s uncle, could take the freehold for himself. As a child Rollo had been raised with Tyrrn and Ystling—he knew them well—and when his uncle killed his father, he was allowed to live with his mother’s people as a shepherd. Even before she heard the truth, Eunike knew the story—if not the details, then the shape of it. Rollo had dreamed the same sort of dreams as she that night beside the tarn, but his outrage burned hotter. He had embraced the wearg, at last finding a measure of justice for the wrong’s done to him and his father.

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The Beast Between Us © 2026 by Allen Thomas (Chap. 3; 2363 words)

Two feuding brothers traveled their dead father’s lands, dividing up their inheritance. A party of warriors from a neighbor drove the brothers and their men, as well as two shepherds and their flock, into the wilds . . . .

The hollow was a desolate and lonely place. Putting the flock and all the men to her back, Eunike looked out on the narrow valley, untroubled by life where not even a cloud of midges disturbed the breezeless air. Uneasy at the place’s hard emptiness, she closed her cloak against the chill, hunching her shoulders and tucking her chin against the cloak’s fleece collar. The stony slopes loomed over her, flat planes of granite jutting at sharp angles, the gray monotony only rarely interrupted by yellowish-brown moss. The hollow’s uneven ground, strewn with fallen stones some as high as her waist, was a faded green turf of hardy grasses and dead wildflowers, an early frost killing the late summer blossoms. Even at elevation, the place seemed cold for the season.

Behind Eunike, the brothers fell to bickering, the pattern becoming familiar. Both agreed that a sheep need be slaughtered to provision the party, but disagreed about everything else. (Will you count the sheep against my half of the herd, brother?) Whether they should pick an old one for mutton, or young one for lamb. (Would you kill one of each to make it even?) Or who would pick. (Is the one you chose yours, then? Only fair . . . .) And neither trusted the other not to cheat him. (Just like you cheated me out of the pasture that’s mine be right of my labor!) Having no other way to break the impasse, they left the choice to the shepherds. (Our cousin will be fair—he’s never liked either of us, one brother said with a coarse laugh.) The matter settled, the warriors insisted that all five of them return to where the path entered the hollow in case the enemy followed.

Rollo separated an old ewe from the flock, and Eunike put a fond hand on the sheep’s muzzle. He told her not to be sentimental, a small smile to show he meant no meanness, and she waved him off, telling him the ewe had lambed almost every year when she was younger but not in the last few seasons. From her belt Eunike took a hunting knife, a long blade for cutting and skinning, the same kind every shepherd carried. Once they were away from the flock, she took hold of the ewe’s ear and drew the blade across her neck. Then the two shepherds fell to butchering the sheep, and by mid-afternoon it was spitted and roasting over a fire, the dogs nearby fighting over the last of its entrails.

Near nightfall the brothers returned with their warriors, and the group sat at the fire, shadows stretching out over the valley, as the sun went behind the slope before going below the horizon. The mutton was tough and stringy, and the brothers shared a little salt with everyone to make the meat more palatable. No one spoke and when the meal was over, the shepherds cleaned the bones and packed the meat away for tomorrow. The men set watches: Tyrrn to take the first, Ystling the second, a warrior joining each brother at intervals, so never fewer than two men, one to keep the other awake, guarded the entrance to the hollow. While the warriors made plans and tended to the ponies, Eunike laid out her bedroll near the shore of the tarn, among the sheep. She asked Rollo if he would bed down with her for the warmth, and he said that he would.

Eunike and Rollo lay together, spooning, and the dogs tucked in beside them. The flock closed in around them all, pressing together for warmth, and she asked Rollo if he thought the sheep seemed anxious. If they were, he answered, it was only the unfamiliar pasture and smell of spilled sheep’s blood—they should’ve taken the ewe farther out before butchering her. She didn’t disagree, nor tell him that none of that explained why she felt ill at ease, too. The Oster men hunting them, the brothers constant bickering—she had her own reasons, she supposed, for feeling uneasy.

The Varranji were brutes, Eunike’s father always said, but in truth the farmers and herdsmen had few dealings with the family. The people tended the land and looked after the livestock, with the doings of the Varranji no matter to them beyond only gossip; even if the Oster seized the freehold, for Eunike nothing was likely to change. She agreed with her father about one thing, though: the Varranji did have a brutish look. Though Rollo looked like a Varranji, she liked his stillness and patient way of sharing his knowledge, and in that disquiet moment, his stocky bulk against her back made her feel sheltered, as if she lay in the protective lee of a wall. Plus the mystery of his kinship to the brothers added intrigue to his appeal. She pressed her backside against his front, a thought that maybe quiet sex would ease the uneasy tension she felt, yet his only reaction was to snore. She rolled her eyes, but exhaustion soon overtook her too, her own snores joining his.

Eunike’s dreams were a recollection of wrongs done to her. She dreamed of a time as a child when she was punished for something her brother had done, all four siblings made to sit still and quiet until their father came in from the field. They waited not more than half an afternoon, but to a child it felt interminable, and the whole time outraged burned in her heart. Her brother had broken their mother’s favorite wood ladle—not she, who was always so well-behaved. He had pretended it was a sword, stabbing it into a tree harder and harder until it snapped in pieces; her sister tattled, the brother soon admitting guilt. Nevertheless, all four children had to sit until father came home, then listen to his lecture in silence. The importance of respecting tools; the proper care for another’s possessions; the cost of replacing things when coin was so dear. All the usual complaints parents have. Any protest about fairness was ignored, the child silenced by a hard look from their mother.

She dreamed next of a stolen coin, then a lie that made her look a fool, an untrue accusation that ended a friendship, and finally a broken courtship. Each dream left her more outraged than the last, until her eyes snapped open and she woke up angry—at her parents, at the man she was supposed to marry, at everyone and the whole world, too. Her awareness was hazy with recollected scenes from her past, all of them jumbled up in her mind’s eye. As her head cleared, Eunike realized it was only just midnight, so many dreams making her believe the whole night had passed. Rollo lay behind her, his chest rising and falling against her back. He muttered something in his sleep, the words themselves inaudible, his own dreams seeming troubled. The dog Lily laid against her chest, her head on her paws and black eyes staring out over the tarn.

Lily picked her head up, her body growing tense. She barked a little, more of a huff, and Eunike followed the dog’s gaze. “What’s out there, girl?” she asked, putting a hand on the dog’s back. Lily turned to lick Eunike’s face, quickly turning back as if unwilling to lose sight of whatever had the dog’s attention. Pushing herself up on an elbow, Eunike tried to get a clearer look out over the tarn, and the dog’s tail thumped a few times against the ground. In the darkness the water was almost black, and in the windless hollow its surface was still, like a looking glass. The stars were reflected in the water, perfect pinpoints of clean white light. Yet the longer Eunike looked, the more certain she was a presence watched them, suspended out over the night-dark tarn.

A figure formed from out of the darkness, the rough outline of some obscured thing as if it were hurriedly sketched with charcoal against dark stone. It had stiff pointed ears and a narrow face; Eunike was certain it had hackles and a muzzle, too, and she imagined that it looked like some kind of wolf. But it was no creature out of nature, for its eyes were burning points of crimson light, shining with a plotting malevolence. The eyes stood at the height of a large man, and with that realization, Eunike could now make out a massive, bestial silhouette. Yet despite the animal hunch of its shoulders and back, the thing stood on two legs—Eunike was sure of it. The wolfish shadow’s eyes scanned the hollow, taking in the sheep, the ponies, the warriors, and finally coming back to lock gazes with Eunike. Lily huffed again, this time louder, and Eunike reached back to wake Rollo.

There was a breeze then, from out of nowhere, the first Eunike could recall since entering the hollow. The water rippled, the reflections of stars wavering with the chill wind over the tarn, and the shadow’s burning eyes wavering just the same. Then the crimson lights that were its eyes winked out, and Eunike shook off the foolishness that made her think some spectral wolf-man lay out over the tarn stalking them. Only a reflection from the water and half a dream, she told herself, and then she chided Lily for giving her a fright. The dog wagged her tail at the sound of her name and licked Eunike’s face again, before she settled her head on her paws with a loud yawn. Eunike laid her head down, too, and went back to sleep.

The sound of water splashing woke her. The sun was visible over the tarn, a hazy white disc above the gray slope of the hollow. So small and indistinct, it seemed more distant than it ever had from the prairie. She awoke late, an upset Naggy staring at her, and Rollo was already up and about, his shirt off to bare his hairy belly and broad chest. He crouched at the edge of the tarn, throwing water on his face and rubbing it under his arms, and made a low brrrr with every splash. She remembered the dreams she’d had early in the night, but couldn’t remember what she’d dreamed later, though feelings of outrage and anger still lingered. “Such strange dreams,” she said as she joined Rollo at the side of the tarn. “I lived again every wrong done to me, it seemed like. Even from when I was little.”

In his quiet way Rollo considered for a moment, standing up to towel off with his shirt. He wringed out the wet shirt, giving it a twirl; the shirt was soaked. As he twisted out the water, he offered by way of explanation, “The brothers’ bickering over the division of the freehold seems a likely cause, no?”

“That must be it,” she agreed. “But the dreams, all the anger I felt, woke me up and I thought I saw this wolf out over the tarn . . . . Or this wolfish man, I guess. Thing, maybe. And it just seemed so—”

Eunike stopped at the sight of a warrior running back from the hollow’s entrance. The man ran full tilt toward the other warrior and their ponies. Rounder jumped up to turn circles in front of them before running off after the warrior, excited by the urgency. The warrior exchanged words with the other one as he took up his hanger, slinging the baldric over his shoulder and settling the blade at his waist. One hand on the hilt to keep the curved blade from getting between his legs, he ran back toward the pass, urging the other warrior to hurry up. Both Rounder and Lily ran after the warrior, barking excitedly, and Naggy slipped behind Eunike, pressing against the back of her knees. Picking up his shepherd’s crook, Rollo hurried after the warriors, and Eunike followed, telling Naggy to stay.

Coming behind at trot, Eunike caught up to the men at the entrance to the hollow. The two warriors were tense and alert, searching all around for an enemy, but mostly trying not stare at the gruesome sight between them. There, Rollo crouched near Tyrrn, who knelt on the rocky ground. Rollo was checking the body of a fallen warrior, while Tyrrn held dead Ystling in his arms. Both brothers were covered in blood.

Chapter Three

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The Beast Between Us © 2026 by Allen Thomas (Chap. 2; 2085 words)

A whoop went up from the warriors in Eunike’s party, five men in leather cuirass and war kit mounted on ponies like the dead rider’s own. Short-legged, barrel-chested, with a shaggy piebald coat, the ponies were smart, hardy, and sometimes more headstrong than the freeholders themselves. The warriors walked their mounts forward, making a loose line facing the ridge where the dead rider had fallen. Behind them were Eunike, her fellow shepherd Rollo, and a flock of sheep, more than a hundred head kept in a tight herd by three vigilant dogs. The warriors nocked arrows against the strings of their recurve bows, ready to lose a second flight, and tense moments passed as everyone waited for more riders to appear. In the hushed silence the sheep bleated and the dogs growled low in their throats, the beasts picking up on their masters’ anxiety.

When no more horsemen crested the hill, two of the five warriors fell immediately to bickering. They were brothers, well-known to everyone, but even if strangers, their appearance left no doubt to their kinship. Both were stocky with round chins and broad faces topped by thin brown hair. Faded freckles on weathered skin spread across their flat noses and rawboned cheeks. Moreso, they had the same mannerisms—each emphasized a point with an angry cut of the hand, or cocked his head and grimaced when his brother said something that struck him as especially absurd. The three others kept an eye on the ridgeline, frowning at the brothers’ sharp words and rising voices. The enemy hunted them, the dead rider one of twenty or so men, and the warriors knew that now was the time to plan, not fight amongst themselves. But they also knew there was no help for it.

The Varranji was dead, and beyond the Peace of Ularn, in the far corner of the northern prairie called the Cravelands, two sons feuded over the old man’s estate and the family freehold. So alike in appearance, the brothers couldn’t have been more different in temperament. Tyrrn had an active vigor. He jumped to move decisively; sometimes this won the day, an advantage seized before any was the wiser. The younger Ystling had passive insight. He saw far and imagined consequence others were blind to; sometimes this prevented disaster, an unforeseen danger averted. Yet still, Tyrrn might be too reckless or his brother too lethargic. Born less than a year apart, they had never agreed and were always competing—for all their lives, but a short part of the elder’s infancy, this was true. Among the freeholders, though, family was sacred. And so, through the squalls and storms of their brotherhood, the loyalty of one to the other was unimpeachable. Then their dead father and his final testament put an injustice between them, and now the two were irreconcilable.

Eunike gave Rollo, the other shepherd, a friendly smile and asked in a whisper if this was how they’d been for the whole trip. The two brothers were traveling the freehold, dividing it between them according to their father’s last testament. Their aunt had explained how the Varranji wanted the pastures and ranges divided, and then told them that he hoped they would reach an accord so the holdings stayed whole. The brothers ignored their father’s dying wish. At Eunike’s question, Rollo frowned and shook his head, and she put a familiar hand on his forearm, he seemed so serious about the discord between the brothers. He had the same features as them, but patience abided in his dark brown eyes, a leashed desire that contrasted with Tyrrn’s and Ystling’s bold, entitled gazes. Rollo had only journeyed with them to this pasture, where he would take half the flock for Ystling, but for his time with them, he answered, “More often tense silence and glares. They hate each other now.”

As the brothers argued and shepherds gossiped, one of the warriors had dismounted and crawled up the slope of the hill, dropping to his belly as he neared the ridge. He peeked over, studying the glen beyond, and then popped up to his feet, jogging back to tell the group the enemy was nowhere to be seen. A day before, they had come across the party, twenty men in the colors of Oster, a freehold to the south; then managed to get away before being seen. Tyrrn believed the Oster men here to raid and rustle livestock, but Ystling wondered aloud if maybe they had a more significant prize in mind. The brothers disagreed about the enemy’s intent, but both agreed the Varranji’s death had incited the trespass, and there was no dispute that twenty men stood between them and safety. Putting Rollo on the back of a pony, the group had ridden hard for Eunike’s flock.

The brothers disagreed—loudly, vehemently—on every particular and reason why, but both agreed about what to do next. The solitary rider was a scout from the raiding party. (War party, one brother corrected. This is an invasion!) Killing the scout had bought them time. (How much? Not much, but maybe enough.) When the rider didn’t return, though, the rest of the party would search for him here. (Not searching. They’ll know he’s dead, but will come here looking for his killers nonetheless.)

They needed to take the flock to the high pasture. (No pasture, that—not even in our hold—only a wilderness of sparse forage and rocky soil.) The path into the hills was treacherous and narrow, a rough path that wound through rocky crags to a defensible hollow. (Path? Barely a deer trail.) If the Oster men found the trail, forced into single file to enter the hollow, it would eliminate the advantage of their numbers. (We should bait them into following—it would be a good ambush!) And if the enemy doesn’t find the trail, the flock is safely hidden away, leaving the brothers free to return to the freehold’s keep. (An ambush is too risky! We must survive to rally our men.) At the keep, they would gather men to punish this trespass; on this, the brothers agreed.

Tyrrn ordered the group to move out, and Eunike and Rollo got the flock moving. The shepherds spread their arms, holding out their crooks, to drive the sheep toward the path leading deeper into the hills and up to the high pasture. The three dogs trotted out to the flock’s flanks. Two were Eunike’s. The one named Lily was wholly white, rare for sheep dog whose thick shaggy coat was usually a mix of white, gray, and blue merle; the white was as pure as a wildflower’s petal, hence her name. The other she called Naggy, because he loved a routine and any deviation—late to wake, a delayed meal—caused him to stare at Eunike with hurt black eyes or push his wet black nose anxiously into her palm. The third dog was Rollo’s and he called him Rounder; when the dog wanted something he cantered in a circle instead of sitting pretty. Excited to be moving again, the dogs jumped to the task, driving the flock and keeping sheep from straying, and soon the party reached the trailhead.

The warriors dismounted then, to spare their mounts, and led the ponies across the uneven ground. Ystling and two warriors dropped back; Tyrrn and the remaining warrior went forward, scouting ahead. The brothers out of earshot, Eunike asked what had happened to make them so bitter and hateful. Rollo explained that four years ago Tyrrn and a small crew had drained a marsh to create a new pasture. By all accounts, it was back-breaking work: digging ditches to drain the water, levering boulders out of the clay with harnessed ponies to even the ground. The work had taken longer than expected, leaving Tyrrn and his crew to pass a hard winter in the wilderness. To balance the division of the Varranji holding, the father had given the new pasture to Ystling.

“A piece of land?” Eunike was skeptical. “They’ve argued for years without hating each other, and now a pasture puts this rancor between them? It seems so petty. They’re family.” She stressed family as only a freeholder would.

“Not the land,” Rollo corrected her. “The unfairness of giving away Tyrrn’s labor to his younger brother, who did nothing to earn the pasture. The injustice.” He said the last wholeheartedly, with conviction and sympathy, and then fell silent and thoughtful. He soon moved away, following after a sheep who lingered behind. He caught the sheep around its neck with the hook that topped his shepherd’s crook and guided it back to the flock, but didn’t return to Eunike’s side. She looked after him, wondering why he was so withdrawn, but let him have his solitude. Besides, the path had narrowed and demanded all her attention to navigate the flock safely along it.

The path wound away from the prairie, up through low green hills and then higher into rocky crags. At a cutback where the trail broke free of the enclosing heights, Eunike paused to look back at the Cravelands, and Rollo came up beside her. “A savanna of distant horizons that envy the heavens its infinity,” he said quietly. “So the Tellene called it in days of empire.”

“More like a song than a place,” Eunike said about the name, and Rollo explained that imperial custom was to name a significant geographical feature with a descriptive verse. In Tellene envy meant a combination of want and challenge for possession, Rollo continued, and so in the centuries since Taratellum abandoned the Far Shore, the verse had become the vulgar Cravelands. After he explained, she looked again to the prairie; now it seemed the land raced the darkening sky to the horizon, where the sun was setting.

Ystling came upon the pair, the rear guard catching up to the shepherds, and like Rollo before him, he quietly murmured the prairie’s old Tellene name at the sight of the vista. Then he said to Rollo, “Come, cousin, we must not let my brother get too far ahead, no matter the beauty of our just departed home.”

Before getting moving, the shepherds took horn lanterns from their packs. They lit the tallow candles inside from an ember Eunike for making fire and hung the lanterns from their crooks to cast a wavering light on the path. As she got back to work, her thoughts returned to the encounter. Ystling’s calling Rollo cousin, the shepherd’s scholarship—she hadn’t known he had such close kinship with the Varranji. His appearance marked him as having their blood, but the freehold was filled with bastards and distant relations, a mother sometimes throwing a child with a strong resemblance. To call him cousin was something else, a title of close kinship almost like an honorific. But Eunike hadn’t the opportunity to ask about it—nor was she certain Rollo would explain, he seemed so distant—as the work of guiding the flock along the path became still more difficult with nightfall.

The group traveled through the night, the land growing more mountainous in the faint light from the stars and the Far Shore’s broken moon, and for much of the next morning, too, before the path finally debouched into a hollow—the place Tyrrn called the high pasture, while Ystling described it as a wilderness. Enclosed by rocky slopes and granite outcroppings, inaccessible except by the path they’d followed, and with a tarn at one end to water the flock, the place was defensible but allowed for no retreat. No matter, though, for in the coming days the group would encounter no enemy but the one already in the hollow and the ones they brought themselves.

Chapter Two

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The Beast Between Us © 2026 by Allen Thomas (Chap. 1, 2090 words)