Marga arrived on the second day with a pack slung over one shoulder and a scar running from her left ear to her collarbone that she wore like jewelry.
Brynn saw her coming up the estate road and let out a whoop that damn near rattled the windows, and then Brynn was laughing, and then Marga was laughing, and it was all very jolly, and Katarina stood on the steps and watched her mother become a completely different person in the span of ten seconds.
The others came in ones and twos over the next three days. A woman named Dagna who was missing two fingers on her left hand and didn’t seem to notice, and a pair of twins called Pia and Lotte who finished each other’s sentences and shared a single expression of cheerful menace. Then there was Torrens, who carried a spear taller than Brynn and hadn’t said a word to anyone since arriving.
Katarina respected that enormously.
Because the others... oh, they were loud. Also, they were scarred. And they drank Ottavia’s cooking wine on the first night because nobody had told them it was cooking wine and they didn’t care when they found out.
Three of them arm-wrestled on the dining table until Seris walked in and gave them a look that turned them all into good little school kids.
[Heh. These professional killers are that afraid of Seris?]
In any case, Brynn was transformed.
She stood in the courtyard with a map pinned to a board and her crew around her, pointing at terrain features and assigning sectors like she’d done it a hundred times before and had missed it every single day since she’d stopped. Her voice was different, deeper and clipped, no wasted words. She drew sight lines and kill zones and fallback positions, and her crew listened, and when she said "we move at dawn," like they were heading into the war-torn trenches, nobody questioned it.
Katarina watched from the balcony and internally adjusted several assumptions about her mother.
[Brynn Montecardi. Former merc. Current muscular housewife who flexes when pretty girls look at her. I have been drastically undervaluing this asset.]
While Brynn handled the muscle, Katarina worked the other half.
The Duccetti representative was a woman named Costanza who sat across from Katarina in the estate’s meeting room and radiated skepticism from every pore.
"... You’re thirteen," Costanza said.
"I am."
"And you’re offering us an alternative trade corridor."
"I am."
"Through the Greypass."
"Once it’s cleared, yes."
"The Greypass that nobody has successfully operated in three years."
"Which is why nobody else is offering you this."
Costanza looked at Seris, who was sitting off to the side in the role she’d settled into over the past year: present, authoritative, and increasingly willing to let Katarina talk. Seris gave a small nod that said "she speaks for us."
That was her job, after all. Kat still couldn’t quite get the respect she deserved due to her being tiny and cute (albeit less so than when she was flopping on her face some years ago). So, she needed Seris here to give her words validity.
"The terms are simple," Katarina said. "Route your goods through our corridor. Fair rates, no exclusivity clauses, no termination fees. You can leave whenever you want. We make money because the volume makes the route profitable, not because we’ve trapped you into staying."
"And what about our contract with Cabrian?"
"Your Cabrian contract covers supply, not distribution. He controls what you buy. He doesn’t control how you ship it. Route your outbound goods through the Greypass and you’ve cut your distribution costs by enough to offset whatever he’s charging you on the supply side."
Costanza stared at her for a long moment. Then she looked at Seris again.
"She’s thirteen," Costanza repeated.
"She is," Seris confirmed, and took a sip of tea.
The Parenna representative was easier. Signora Parenna’s niece, a woman named Giulietta, showed up looking like she hadn’t slept well in four years.
"Whatever you need," Giulietta said. "When can we start?"
"As soon as the route is clear. Weeks, not months."
Giulietta nodded and just like that, she signed the preliminary agreement.
Then Katarina did something that Stellara Brevaine, for all her patience and strategic brilliance, had not anticipated.
She reached outside the district.
The human merchants she contacted were small operations from the central kingdoms, traders Seris had met on her travels who’d been priced out of the established coastal routes by Valdari houses that charged foreign merchants premium rates for port access.
They were hungry, they were scrappy, and they’d never been invited to the table before.
So, Katarina invited them. Tariff-free passage through the inland corridor! No premiums, no foreign-trader surcharges. The same rates she offered the Valdari houses.
It wouldn’t make her much money. The volume was too small and the margins too thin. But that wasn’t the point.
The point was the message.
A Valdari merchant house, actively courting outside trade partners, offering them equal terms on a route that bypassed every piece of infrastructure Stellara controlled. It told Stellara exactly one thing:
The asset you didn’t buy is the one that’s going to cost you.
[I have something valuable that you can’t purchase anymore, Signora Brevaine. And I’m giving access to everyone you’ve been squeezing.]
Katarina went to watch the clearance operation on the fourth day.
Brynn had insisted she stay back. Katarina had agreed and then followed anyway, keeping to the ridge above the Greypass with a clear sightline to the canyon floor.
Seris would have killed her if she knew. Brynn would have carried her home on her shoulder. Neither of them was here, so Katarina sat on a rock and watched.
The monsters in the Greypass were called goreclaws, and they were, by any reasonable standard, horrifying. Six-legged, armored, low to the ground, with mandibles that could shear through timber. There were about two dozen of these nightmares waiting patiently in the narrows where the canyon squeezed tight enough that a wagon could barely pass. Like they’d been placed there by game devs or something.
Marga went in first.
She was fast. The spear in her hands blurred and a goreclaw twice her size got folded sideways with a sound like wet timber splitting. Before it hit the ground she was already past it, driving the spear into the next one, and the one after that, each kill clean, precise, and completely unhurried.
Brynn hit the center of the pack like a boulder dropped from orbit. She didn’t use a weapon. She didn’t need one. Her fists glowed with qi and the first goreclaw she punched left a crater in the canyon wall behind it.
[Whoa.]
The twins worked the flanks, pushing stragglers toward Torrens, who stood at the far end of the narrows with her spear braced and put down everything that came within reach without changing expression.
It was over in approximately four minutes.
Twenty-three goreclaws in four minutes and not a scratch on any of them.
Brynn stood in the middle of the canyon floor with goreclaw blood up to her elbows and chunks of something Katarina didn’t want to identify in her white hair. Her chest was heaving and her skin was flushed dark red with exertion. She was grinning, wide and feral, with her fists still glowing faintly at her sides. Marga climbed onto a dead goreclaw and raised her spear and the whole crew started whooping, and Brynn threw her head back and laughed, and the sound bounced off the canyon walls and came back three times.
She looked like a war goddess who’d taken up gardening as a brief hobby and had just remembered what she actually was.
[... Well, damn.] Katarina smiled. [Glad she’s having fun.]
Katarina sat on her rock and looked at her mother, really looked at her, and for the first time got a glimpse as to why Seris married this woman.
[She burns breakfast twice a week. She got her horns stuck in a doorframe last month. And she just killed six armored monsters with her bare hands in under a minute. I need to fundamentally re-evaluate... several things.]
She couldn’t sleep that night.
The estate was quiet except for the mercs’ campfire in the courtyard. Katarina could hear them from her window, low laughter and the clink of bottles and someone telling a story that kept getting interrupted by Marga calling them a liar.
So she went downstairs and found Seris on the terrace.
Seris was in a chair with her legs curled under her and a glass of wine resting on the arm. She was watching the campfire below and she didn’t look up when Katarina sat down next to her.
They sat in silence for a while. The fire crackled. Dagna said something and the whole group erupted, and Brynn’s laugh carried up through the dark.
"Why didn’t you go with them?" Katarina asked.
"Hm?"
"To the Greypass. You could have. You’re stronger than anyone down there."
Seris took a sip of wine. The pause was longer than it needed to be.
"That would awaken an itch I don’t need back in my life."
She said it lightly, the way she said everything she meant the most. Katarina waited. She’d learned that Seris talked more in silences than in conversations.
"I used to be very good at breaking things, piccola," Seris smirked at Katarina, before turning her eyes back to the fire. "And the problem with being good at breaking things is that you start looking for things to break. I don’t want to break anymore. I want to build."
She didn’t elaborate. She didn’t say what she’d broken or who she’d been when she was breaking it.
[Sable. The visitor. "The others." There’s a whole person underneath my mother that I haven’t met yet.]
"Brynn looked happy out there," Katarina said instead.
Seris smiled.
"She did, didn’t she? She’s been waiting for this. Good to get her out in the field every now and then."
[Like she’s a horse or something?]
The campfire popped and sent sparks up into the dark. Below, Brynn was demonstrating something with her fists while Marga heckled her.
Katarina leaned against Seris’s arm and they sat there together and watched the fire until Katarina passed out.