Oren did not sleep well that night.
He lay in the dark, listening to the house’s familiar sounds; the creak of wood as it cooled, a distant dog barking, Marin’s calm breathing from the next room.
He tried to convince himself that what had happened before Koren’s shop was a passing incident, something that would fade as many things had faded in this war.
But every time he closed his eyes, he saw the guard asking for her name.
He woke with the first light, his body carrying that heaviness he knew from nights of guard duty at the front, when a man sleeps without truly sleeping.
He sat on the edge of the bed for a long while, thinking not of the man himself, but of himself.
The night before, he’d advanced two steps and then fallen to his knees in the dirt.
Had it concerned him alone, he would have accepted it, as one accepts any defeat.
But the thought that wouldn’t leave him was simpler and harsher than any personal defeat: what if that man looked at Marin one day the way he’d looked at Koren’s daughter?
He tried to lay the matter out in his head as he would a military task.
Four guards he’d seen with his own eyes, and perhaps others he hadn’t.
The man himself didn’t seem to fight with his own hands, but he didn’t need to, with those around him who did it in his place.
Oren didn’t know his name, nor the source of his power, nor the law he leaned on when he said “this is my right” with that calm that made objection itself seem foolish in his eyes.
He asked himself: could he face four men?
No.
Not alone, and not with his current skill on the Theft path, through which he could barely move a knife on a table, or an empty cup, a few steps.
Could he stay beside Marin every hour of every day?
No, for he would return to the front within a few days, and leave the village behind him as he had before.
The thought, when he finally arrived at it, was simple enough that it nearly seemed trivial: he did not have sufficient strength.
There was nothing to be ashamed of in that, no use denying it.
The real question was no longer how to defeat a man like this, but how to find someone who could stand in his place when he himself was not there.
He came down to the kitchen and found Marin already awake, kneading something on the table, her hair still tied with the carelessness of early morning.
She didn’t ask him directly about the night before, but watched him as he sat, with that look by which she knew when he was hiding something from her.
“You’re still thinking about what happened,” she said finally, without lifting her eyes from the dough.
“A little.” “You told me enough last night.
I won’t ask more if you don’t want.” She paused a moment, then added more quietly: “Just don’t do anything foolish because of it.” He smiled despite himself.
“I won’t.” He didn’t tell her what he was thinking.
It wasn’t the right time, and he wasn’t yet certain the idea circling in his head would become anything real.
He went out after breakfast under the pretext of stopping by the market, leaving Marin to finish her work at home.
The man’s name had come back to him during the night, from an old layer of memory he hadn’t thought of in years.
He remembered being a boy, perhaps nine or ten, when the village had gone through a period of unrest over a land dispute between two large families, and his grandfather had feared for a while that it might reach their own house.
Oren hadn’t understood the details of the dispute at the time, but he remembered his grandfather bringing in a man from outside the village, a fighter he’d hired with money to stay near the house for a few weeks, until things settled.
The man wasn’t a friend to his grandfather, nor anything more than paid work, but Oren remembered his face vaguely; a broad-shouldered man, with a scar over his brow, who used to sit sometimes before the house in the evening, sharpening a long knife.
If his grandfather had done this before, then perhaps this solution still existed.
It wasn’t a brilliant idea, only a simple recollection of a solution someone else had used in a harder time.
He asked around the market for hired fighters, and one of the vendors, who knew everyone who passed through the village, pointed him toward a small inn at the northern edge, away from the main market’s traffic, where men of this kind sometimes stayed between one task and another.
The inn was a low building of stone and wood, quiet at this hour of the morning, smelling of cheap tobacco and cold soup.
A lone man sat at a table near the window, sharpening the blade of a long knife with slow, repeated motions, and beside him a sword rested carefully on the table, no farther from his hand than a fist’s width.
He wasn’t the same man Oren remembered from childhood, but something in the way he sat, in his calm alertness, reminded him of that old fighter.
“Are you one who works as a hired guard?” Oren asked, approaching.
The man raised his eyes to him, studying him from head to foot before answering.
“That depends on who’s asking, and why.” Oren sat before him without being invited, and the man gave a faint smile, like someone appreciating the boldness more than resenting it.
“I’ve been at this over fifteen years,” the man said, in the tone of someone used to presenting himself to those wanting his services.
“I’ve guarded merchant caravans along roads most men fear, and protected travelers from bandits more than I could count.
I’m not the cheapest in this region, but I’ve never lost anyone under my protection.” He spoke of his prices in a practical way, of the difference between guarding a caravan for days and guarding a single person for weeks, without seeming arrogant, but as a man who knew the worth of his own work and saw no need for modesty about it.
He stopped suddenly in the middle of his talk, and studied Oren’s face again, with sharper attention this time.
“Your face reminds me of someone,” he said slowly.
“Are you from this village?” “I was born here.” “Whose son?” Oren gave his grandfather’s name, and saw something stir in the man’s eyes, not a direct recollection, but a kind of inner searching, like someone turning through old pages.
“I guarded his house once, many years ago,” he said finally.
“An old man, strict, but he paid generously and without delay.
I remember there was a small boy in the house then.” He looked at Oren with a small smile.
“Is that you?” “Probably.” The man shook his head, as though the matter seemed natural to him rather than worthy of surprise.
“How is he?
Does he still have that face that seems to judge everyone who looks at it?” “He died.” The man’s hand paused in sharpening the blade for a moment.
There was no grief in his expression, but something closer to a quick relief that passed and vanished, as though some old account had finally been closed.
“Some illness, I imagine?” he asked.
“Yes.
They found no cure for it.” “That happens often at that age.” He returned to sharpening the knife with a slow motion, as though the news had been nothing more than a piece of information to add to a long list of similar news he’d heard, of men he’d once known and never seen again.
“Why did you come?” the man asked him after a brief silence.
“I don’t think you came to ask after your grandfather’s news.” “I want to hire you.” The man raised an eyebrow.
“To guard what?” “Someone.” “Who?” “My sister.” The man asked him the reason, and Oren explained, in terse sentences, what had happened over the past days; a man strange to the village, finely dressed, with guards, who’d taken a tavern-owner, and taken a girl who’d been selling flowers, then taken the daughter of a man Oren knew before his very eyes, and no one had been able to stop him.
Oren said what he’d seen: a man taking whomever he pleased, and those around him keeping others from objecting.
“How many guards with him?” the man asked, with a greater seriousness than at the start of the talk.
“Four, at least.
Perhaps others I didn’t see.” The man’s features changed slightly.
He stopped toying with the knife, and set it aside.
“This isn’t guarding against passing thieves,” he said.
“If he’s a man with this much influence, this many guards, and this much boldness to take people before an entire village without anyone objecting…
then he’s no ordinary man.
Work of this kind deserves a different fee.” He named a sum that made Oren fall silent for a moment, calculating in his head what he had of the money he’d saved from his army pay and what he’d saved before that.
The sum was large, larger than he’d expected, and meant he would have to give up a great part of what he owned.
He tried to negotiate, to lower the amount, or shorten the guard period for a better price.
The man listened to him patiently, then said simply: “I can come down a little on my price.
But understand something: protecting a sister from a man of unknown strength, whose limits no one knows, nor who stands behind him, is a greater risk than guarding a caravan of merchants from known bandits.
You’re asking me to put myself in a potential confrontation with something whose scale I don’t know either.” His words were reasonable, and Oren had nothing to answer with.
He sat silent a moment, thinking of the sum, of Marin, and of the guard who’d asked her name in the dark.
“For a month,” he said finally.
“That’s all I can afford now.” The man asked him why, and Oren answered honestly: he didn’t know if that man would even stay in the village.
Perhaps he’d come for some passing matter and would leave soon.
Perhaps he’d never come back.
One month seemed a reasonable estimate for what he could do now, with the money and the limited information he had.
The man thought a moment, then agreed.
They settled the details; that the man would stay near Oren and Marin’s house without drawing more attention than necessary, that he would watch the place especially at night, and intervene directly if anyone tried to approach Marin by force.
Oren gave him a description of the house and its location, and they agreed on a place and a way he could be reached if needed.
Oren paid the full amount.
He felt the weight of the money as he drew it from the pouch he carried, that saving he’d gathered for other things, for things he’d thought would be his priorities once the war ended.
He didn’t hesitate long, but felt the emptiness the sum left in his hand as he handed it over.
Oren asked him his name, and the man answered: “My name is Hilden the Fighter.” He left the inn with the sun risen a little higher over the village rooftops.
He walked the same road he’d walked that morning, but it seemed different to him now, not because anything in it had changed, but because his own gaze had changed.
He passed the market and saw the women haggling over vegetable prices, and two children running between the stalls sharing a single piece of bread, and the grain-shop owner weighing a sack for a regular customer.
Everything ordinary, familiar, as it had always been.
But he knew now that this calm was not real safety, only a quiet surface over something he didn’t understand.
He thought of Marin kneading dough in the kitchen that morning, unaware of what he had just done, nor of what he had agreed with a strange man at a distant inn.
He didn’t know whether he would tell her about it at all, or let her discover the guard’s presence herself, should the need ever arise.
One month.
He kept repeating the number in his head as he walked home, as though repeating it made it a greater certainty than it truly was.
Perhaps it would be enough.
Perhaps the strange man would leave before the month ended, and the village would return to what it had been.
Perhaps not.
He had no certain answer, no way to know.
All he had was this decision, this sum he had paid, and this man who would remain in the shadows near his house for four weeks.
As he neared the house, he saw Marin had come out to hang some clothes on a line strung between two wooden posts, her hair fluttering slightly in the light wind, humming something whose words he couldn’t make out.
She stopped when she saw him, and smiled.
“Where were you all morning?” “Walking,” he said, coming closer.
“Thinking.” She looked at him a moment, as though wanting to ask more, but didn’t.
She went back to hanging the clothes, and he stood beside her, helping in silence, watching her hands move in their familiar motions, listening to the sound of the wind in the fabric, and trying to convince himself that what he had done today was enough, even if he wasn’t truly certain of it.