Ren asked her on the road back from Kharos.
They were camped on the second night in a dry gully, out of the wind, with the rest of the escort asleep around a low fire. Brannoc was snoring, his tied hands folded on his chest. Hana sat on a rock at the edge of the firelight, sharpening the huge square blade of her sword with long, slow strokes of a whetstone.
Ren sat down across from her.
"The Empress told me to ask you something," he said.
The whetstone stopped.
Hana didn't look up. She looked at the edge of her blade, at the firelight sliding along it. For a long time, she didn't say anything. Then she started sharpening again.
"The other eleven," she said.
"Yes."
"She told you to ask me." Hana's mouth twisted. "Of course she did. She doesn't like to say it herself."
Ren waited.
"There were twelve of us," Hana said. "On a night bus from Seoul to Busan. A Tuesday. It was raining. I was going home to see my mother. I was asleep against the window with my headphones on." She drew the stone down the blade. "When I woke up, the floor of the bus was glowing, and then I was lying on red stone in Kharos, and there was an old man on an iron throne smiling at me."
"Iskra's father."
"The Emperor Aurel Ardent." Hana said the name like it tasted bad. "He was very kind, at first. Rooms in the palace. Food. Teachers. Armor made just for us. He said the Empire was in danger and we'd been sent to save it." The stone scraped. "For a year, we believed him. We fought for him. We were good at it. The war turned. Varenhal was losing."
"Then what happened?"
"Then two of us decided we'd done enough." Hana's voice stayed flat. "Park Ji-ho and Lee Sun-young. They were engaged. They'd been planning a wedding before the bus. They wanted to leave. Find a village somewhere far away and stop killing people." She set the whetstone down. "They left in the night. The Emperor sent riders after them. They came back in sacks."
The fire crackled.
"After that, he put the iron on all of us," Hana said. She touched her throat, where the band was hidden under her collar. "The Iron Oath. The Empire's own version of the Church's seal. It can't be taken off. If you disobey the throne, it tightens. If you run, it doesn't stop tightening."
Ren didn't say anything.
"Four of us died in battle over the next three years," Hana went on. "That was normal. That was the war. And then the war turned back again, and Varenhal started winning, and the old Emperor got scared." She picked up the whetstone and turned it over in her fingers. "There were six of us left by then. He called five of them to the palace one night. He said he had a special mission. Very important. Very secret."
"And?"
"And nobody ever saw them again."
Ren looked at her face in the firelight. It hadn't changed at all.
"Why not you?" he asked.
"I was on the front. At Tollan. I was killing Varenhal knights for him the night he called them in." She shrugged. "I was too useful to waste. I'm still useful. That's why I'm still here."
"Who were the five?"
Hana looked at him for the first time.
"Kim Do-yun. Choi Ara. Oh Jae-won. Han Seul." She paused. "Seo Jun."
Ren waited.
"My little brother," said Seo Hana. "He was on the bus with me. He was nineteen. He'd come along to keep me company." She went back to sharpening the sword. "He liked basketball. He had a girlfriend in Daegu. He was terrible at fighting. He hated every minute of it." The stone scraped. "I've looked for him for three years. In every room of that palace. Every dungeon. Every grave. I asked Iskra. She swears she doesn't know. She was eighteen when it happened. Her father didn't tell her things."
"Do you believe her?"
"I don't know." The stone stopped again. "I don't think she knows how to lie to me. But I don't think she's looked very hard, either."
They sat there for a while. The fire burned low.
"Why didn't she put iron on me?" Ren asked.
Hana looked at him with something that was almost a smile.
"Two reasons," she said. "First, she thinks you'd break it. The same way you broke the Church's seal. If you broke the Iron Oath in front of the army, it would be very embarrassing for her." She slid the blade back into its harness. "Second, she wants to know if you'll stay without one."
"Will I?"
***
The decree came four days after they got back to Fort Calder.
This reproduced chapter came from the author's story page without permission; the official posting supports the author.
Sergeant Brisa rode in with it at noon, on a lathered horse, straight from Kharos. The whole fort came out to watch. Brisa didn't take it to the Marshal's tent. She rode down the hill to the Ninth's stockade, swung off her horse in front of Ren, and handed him a long scroll with the crowned flame pressed into red wax at the bottom.
Old Hob read it out loud, standing on a barrel so the whole camp could hear.
"By order of the Ember Throne. For the holding of Greywater Bridge against superior numbers, and the destruction of the enemy depot at Halden's Ford, and the rescue of forty three subjects of the Empire from bondage." Hob's voice cracked a little. He cleared his throat and kept going. "The Ashen Ninth is hereby struck from the roll of penal battalions. It is reformed as a line battalion of the Imperial Army, with full pay, full rations, full arms. It is granted the right to recruit." He looked up. "It shall be known as the Black Ninth."
The camp went silent.
"And Kuroda Ren," Hob read, "is hereby raised to the rank of Captain in the Imperial Army, in command of the same."
Nobody cheered at first. They just stood there, two hundred and sixty of them, in their gray tabards, like they didn't understand.
Then Garrick started laughing. A huge, booming laugh, like a rockslide. And then Sable started screaming, and somebody threw a helmet in the air, and then the whole camp went up at once like a fire catching.
Rank attained: Captain.
Skill gained: Rally (Active). Restore stamina and steady the nerve of every soldier under your command. Once per day.
Ren stood in the middle of it and let them pound him on the back.
Across the camp, through the open gate of the stockade, he saw a figure on the walls of Fort Calder above them, looking down. A barrel shaped man with a scarred face and one milky eye. Watching.
Vex turned and walked away.
***
They came the next morning.
The first ones were from the Seventh Foot, whose swords Sable had borrowed. Twenty soldiers, regulars, with their packs on their backs. Their sergeant was a short, square woman with a bad haircut.
"We heard you were recruiting," she said. "Captain."
"Why do you want to join the Ninth?"
The sergeant shrugged. "We were on the Burnt Mile the night you came over. We saw what you did for Brisa's patrol. And we heard about the bridge." She looked around at the camp. "And my brother was in the Ninth. He died at Westmarch in the spring, going first. You're the first warden who ever went in front of them instead of behind."
Then more came. A dozen archers from the Third. A whole company of light horse whose captain had been killed at Halden's Ford in the last war. Soldiers whose friends had been in the Ninth. Soldiers who'd been in the Ninth once, and gotten out, and wanted to come back. Refugees from the border villages. Men and women from Felling and Marrowby who'd heard that the Demon Captain had opened the cages at Halden's Ford.
Ren told every one of them the same thing he'd told the Ninth on the first day. The truth. That the Marshal hated them. That the Church wanted him dead. That he couldn't promise anything except that they'd live longer with him than without.
Not one of them left.
By the end of the week, the Black Ninth had doubled.
They swore, one by one, at the main fire. Ren accepted every oath. The doors opened, one after another, and the candles lit, until the inside of his chest felt less like a dark room and more like a city at night.
Sworn souls: 640.
Dominion Share: +25 to all stats.
He stood up from the fire on the last night and nearly fell over. The strength had come too fast. He felt like his body was a size too small for what was inside it.
Kuroda Ren · Hero of Dominion (Mythic) · Level 22
STR 55 · AGI 62 · VIT 49 · INT 42 · WIL 55 · AUT 81
Seven weeks ago, he'd been Level 1, with a Strength of 14.
"You all right, Captain?" Garrick asked.
"I'm fine." Ren put a hand on the tent pole. "I just need to get used to it."
***
Hana helped him get used to it.
She showed up at the practice field the next morning with her headsman's sword on her back and two wooden training blades under her arm. She tossed him one.
"Come on," she said. "Let's see what all those farmers bought you."
The Ninth gathered around the edges of the field to watch. Ren could feel them through the bond. Excited. Nervous. A few of them were taking bets. He could feel Sable taking most of them. Find the original chapter at novelping dot com.
The first time, Hana knocked the sword out of his hand in four seconds.
The second time, it took eleven.
The third time, he saw it coming. He didn't stop it. But he saw it, the way he'd seen Kenta's axe at the ferry, a full heartbeat before it happened. And on the fourth time, when she came in with the same low cut, he was already moving. He turned it. Her wooden blade slid off his, and for one instant her guard was open on the left side.
He didn't hit her. He didn't have time. But he stepped into the gap, and Hana stepped back to close it.
One step.
The whole field went quiet.
Hana stood there with her training sword raised and looked at the ground, at her own boot, a foot behind where it had been. Then she looked up at him.
"Again," she said.
They went until noon. She won every time. But it got harder for her, and both of them knew it, and by the end she was breathing hard and there was a bruise coming up on her forearm where he'd finally caught her.
She sat down in the grass at the edge of the field afterward and pulled off her gloves.
"Six years," she said. "I haven't stepped back from anyone in this world in six years."
"Sorry."
"Don't be." She squinted up at him against the sun. There was something in her face he hadn't seen before. Not quite a smile. Something more careful than that. "It was nice. Being surprised."
She got up and walked off toward the fort without saying anything else.
Sable collected her winnings and didn't stop grinning for the rest of the day.
***
The letter came on the eighth night.
Brisa brought it, again. She didn't ride in at noon this time. She came to his tent after midnight, alone, and stood in the doorway with her hood up and something wrapped in oilcloth in her hand.
"A smuggler brought this across the Mile," she said quietly. "One of the salt runners. Says a man in Solenne paid him a lot of silver to get it to the Demon Hero. Personal." She held it out. "I opened the cloth to make sure it wasn't poisoned. I didn't read it. I couldn't if I wanted to. It's not in any script I've ever seen."
Ren took it.
He unwrapped the oilcloth. Inside was a single folded sheet of cheap paper, the kind the soldiers used to write letters home. He unfolded it.
It was written in Japanese. In pencil. In small, cramped, messy handwriting he hadn't seen since high school, when it used to fill the margins of Sho's notebooks.
Ren,
Ogawa was arrested today. Ferren talked. They hurt him first. Kanzaki made the arrest. Tetsuo tried to stop them. He stood in front of her in the courtyard and wouldn't move, and six knights drew their swords, and Ogawa told him to get out of the way. She said it very calmly. He did. They locked him in his room for a day. Then they let him out because they need him to march.
She hangs at the Festival of Light. That's 22 days from when I'm writing this. The smugglers say it takes five or six days to get a letter across. So you've got about two weeks.
The heroes march for the front in five days. All the fighting ones. Kenta leads the vanguard. He's Level 33. He says he's going to bring your head back to Solenne in time for the festival so they can hang it next to hers.
Sorry. I thought you'd want to know exactly what he said.
Sho
P.S. Yes, I swore. Don't make it weird.
Ren read it twice. Then a third time.
Then he folded it up and put it inside his coat, against his chest, and sat down on the edge of his cot in the dark.
Sixteen days.
He did the math in his head, the way he'd learned to do it on the long walk south. Six days for the letter. Five for the heroes to start marching. They'd left Solenne a day ago, at least. Maybe two. Fort Calder was ten days from Solenne on foot, for an army.
Which meant that right now, somewhere on the road north of the Burnt Mile, Fujii Kenta was coming.
And Ogawa Sumiko had sixteen days to live.