As Jensson studied our maps, I found myself studying him in turn.

  His uniform was simple—adorned, yes, but only in gesture. The proud Gustavian blue was dulled by panels of black, fashion formed by doctrine. God created light, and God alone owns it. Their theologians had repeated that creed since the first split, since they chose to wrap austerity around themselves whenever the unexplainable drew near. His coat bore that philosophy like scripture stitched into thread.

  No plate on him. No cuirass, no breast of steel. Only layered cloth. It spoke plainly of their art of war: armour slowed the line, caught mud, made men clumsy in the press of fire. Against musket shot, against cannon iron, plates were a false, heavy safety. Better to have speed. Better to meet the storm as a moving wall, not a glittering statue waiting to be shattered.

  And no gun. Only a sword—polished, but too fine, too ceremonial to be sweat-stained in battle. The truth was written there: Jensson did not kill. Not anymore. He led. Perhaps from the front, perhaps under fire, but always with command in his hand, never powder or blood.

  He bent over our spread parchment with the slow care of an old hound catching scent. Chin resting against his fist, eyes moving deliberate across ridges and river-lines, marking borders, weighing our scrawled assumptions with a patience that felt more like judgment. To me these were points of interest, rumors of enemy presence. To him, they were familiar roads. His roads.

  “Here, your assumptions are wrong.” His other hand moved at last, finger pressing into the rear of our map.

  “None of this is there. Your supposed stockpiles are nothing but our road of march. It brings supplies, yes—but it does not keep them.”

  “We both know there are many errors. I hoped you would rectify them.” My words were measured flat, the tone chosen like a hammer—not meant for debate, but to end it.

  “There is much to rectify.” Jensson’s voice held no strain, only chill. “But redrawing maps is not chief among them. Terrors and struggle press upon us, and we have no unified defence planned.” His eyes carried the words further than his tongue did—cold, unblinking, a judgment that left no corner of me unmeasured.

  Only he and I remained seated. The table between us was a plain altar of ink and parchment. To the north, my officers stood in a row, posture rigid, boots planted, not one daring a twitch. Opposite them, his staff mirrored the stance, their coats trimmed in the same blue and black austerity. The air between the two lines was taut, as if the timbers of the room themselves bent under it.

  Their eyes betrayed them, though. They flickered—first to him, then to me. Measuring. Weighing. Waiting for which voice would claim the air. None dared interject. And rightly so. I would have lashed the first tongue that spoiled this first crossing of words. A whip on the back is a lighter wound than a whip on the company’s discipline.

  “The shape of our reckoning is clear.” I leaned back in my chair, the wood creaking under the weight of words I knew would scour the room. My hand rose, slow, deliberate, as though I were marking the tally of our undoing in the very air.

  “The terrors from yestereve remain a probable threat. They must be repelled, or they must be exterminated.” One finger, lifted sharp—a digit counting dread.

  “Your kin, you inform us, is mustering.” I raised the second. “The civil war is ending. It has been won by force. And force is coming.”

  Jensson inclined his head, the motion solemn, wearied. The look of a man who had already seen too many reckonings carved into flesh and paper alike.

  Then came his own offering to the ledger. His voice did not lift, but the words cut cold.

  “Grave reports arose. A great stirring. Our honored Baron of Gottingen deposed—his lordship and lead being the only strained line to mutual peace.”

  I watched as his officers stiffened. Their eyes fastened on him, sharp as blades pressing into a weak seam. A silent prod: Do not speak this aloud.

  He blinked once, slow, deliberate, and chose to continue anyway.

  “He was flayed,” Jensson said, “in the manner of a stag. Alive. His wife drowned in a barrel. His youngest—thrown from the city hall until she met her end. The eldest… had to be thrown thrice.”

  The words hung like entrails across the table. The room did not breathe. Even the dust in the light seemed to halt, caught in the pause after cruelty too detailed to be mistaken for rumor.

  “A barbaric notion for a people of true believers,” I answered, voice low enough to feel more confession than reply.

  “It is unprecedented,” Jensson intoned, each word dragged out like iron across stone. “The pinnacle of barbarity. An end unfit even for the vilest beast.” His cadence carried weight not of outrage, but of weary certainty, as though he had recited this litany to himself too often already.

  “This tells us much,” rasped Brandt, his utterance hardly more than a sigh escaping lungs scarred by smoke and age.

  It was met at once. A burly Gustavian officer from the far side of the table leaned forward, voice booming against the hush. “Do tell, Grenzlander—what you have learned of a people you have never understood.”

  Jensson raised his hand. That simple gesture was command enough. The man snapped back into silence, spine ramrod straight, jaw locked tight.

  My gaze fell on Brandt then, hard as the edge of a blade. He had opened his mouth before my leave; his next words had better buy their keep, or he would taste the lash.

  If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  “Unprecedented violence arises from unprecedented times,” he said at last, his voice sharpening with each syllable, lifting out of the rasp. “They needed to quash resistance fast—and mercilessly. They had no time for courtly dillydallying. Things are moving fast.”

  At that, his old wolf’s eyes locked with Jensson’s.

  “Are they not? Do you not have intelligence pointing to this very fact?”

  “We saw a rider arrive at your camp in great haste,” I interjected. “Before the Blemmyes. Before everything went where the rooster kicks.”

  Jensson let out a chuckle—but it was laughter hollowed of humour, stripped to the sound of air dragged through old iron. “You have keen eyes. It was our first report of the fate of our Barony.”

  “It came with a demand.” Another officer broke in, thinner of frame, voice lacking the weight of the burly one before him. His words pressed forward but did not bite, like a blade too often blunted. “Fall in, or meet the same fate.” He faltered only a moment, then pushed on. “Any such notion was forgotten when the Blemmyes came.”

  “Aye, and then you ripped them apart by cannon,” Brandt muttered, low, but not low enough for me. A breath I would not tolerate.

  “Enough!” The word cut from my teeth more snarl than sound. The lash in it straightened him, if only by a hair’s breadth. “I recall an officer begging me to blast them asunder myself! Would you presume to be any better, Brandt?”

  His mouth soured, but the fight bled from his stance. Docile, though not at peace.

  “Yes,” I pressed on, turning the heat where it belonged. My eyes fixed on Jensson. “You did shoot them, Commander Jensson. I presume you understand this cannot be repeated.”

  At that, his entourage faltered. Shoulders slackened, eyes darted sideways—every man looking to their leader for permission to hold or break.

  Jensson did not flinch. His reply came plain, unvarnished. “Yes. We shot. I ordered the guns myself. Our standing order has always been thus: kill the others. Parley not with those who have not seen God’s light. And lo, a host of these others came, armed and ready.”

  His gaze found me across the maps. His voice, still flat. “You shot first, Captain Edelmer. Only we gave no parley.”

  “And to think where that would have led you.” I let the words cut with a touch of flourish, sharpened so the edge would linger.

  “Light of God, you say. And what now? Show me a man from your line who speaks with more heavenly authority than they do now.” My finger rose before the table like a blade, silencing any breath of protest. “Do not presume I have not felt the same revulsion. They are Blemmyes—mounds of meat, faces in their chests, minds like stone, bodies hard enough to match.”

  I lowered the finger, let the pause hold. “And now, they are something else.”

  Jensson leaned back, his posture shifting with slow ceremony, as though bracing himself for the third act of our grim council. His sigh carried the sound of iron cooling after strain.

  “And that leads us to the last and most consuming danger.”

  “Gotthard’s words.” I did not allow the silence to linger. I filled it, though it tasted foul on my tongue.

  “A host. An Other. The Storm manifest. Hell returned to claim us.” Jensson spoke it like scripture, dread carried in cadence even as the polish of command never left him.

  My whole line turned their eyes on me. Some wide with unease, some narrowed with thought. Not all had been there to hear Gotthard’s doom. Not all had been made to carry it.

  “He has said he feels a reckoning come,” I began, my own voice rasping against the weight of it. “A host, yes—but not one he can name. More wretched child-things? Perhaps. Something worse? I would wager so.”

  “Any reckoning would have to cross one important hurdle to ever grace our presence,” Jensson replied, every syllable carrying muted certainty.

  He lifted his hand, and his own finger marked the air. All heads followed the motion toward a sun-bleached map in the far corner. Gustavland. Its borders fractured, its union pictured as nothing but splinters.

  “Edelmer,” he said, voice steady, stripped of pretense, “I have no secrets left. My leader is gone. My fatherland stands ready to pounce. Here are the facts. A powerful force is needed to unite this land. A powerful man has met that challenge. Gustav’s blood has taken the mantle again. Some joined him without quarrel. Others were whipped out—bloodlines salted.”

  He let the words settle, then added, slow as a verdict:

  “Your assertion is sound. There is fire behind them. And their fire licks at our backs. We can only guess what manner of fire licks theirs.”

  His blue-pressed assembly sagged—just slightly, but enough to be seen. Shoulders loosened, eyes dropped to the grain of the table, some even closing altogether as though to shut out the map’s verdict. My own officers stood fixed—gaze shifting from the parchment to Jensson, then to me. Jensson himself looked nowhere else. He had opened his mind, and I gave a slow nod in return—solemn acknowledgement of his candor.

  “We face beast, men, and unnamed reckoning,” I said, voice flat with the weight of command.

  “All must be dealt with. Union in peril.”

  I leaned forward, hand on the table’s edge. “Your men cannot linger in the swamps. The village will be fortified. Trenches dug, spikes buried, cannons positioned.”

  “And the villagers?” Vollmer asked. He had felt the turn—sensed that ideas had begun to move like water through loosened stone. His interjection came careful, but with purpose.

  “They will dig as well. Able-bodied Grenzlanders and Gustavians will bear arms. The rest will do what they can.”

  “And the Blemmyes?” It was the hard-faced officer again, the same who had pressed earlier with iron. Yet now his sternness was dulled; the thought of union had settled in him, softened the edge.

  “They will help in their own way,” I answered. “We will see what shape that takes.”

  “And in the meantime, intelligence will have to be collected. You have riders still, Jensson?”

  “We have horses and men, yes.”

  “You will scout your side. You know the land, you know what to look for. The Blemmyes will follow—they will act as guards and weather vanes. And our esteemed guests from the marshes will brief you on the enemy we met last night.” I laid it plain, a plan stripped to its frame. Orderly. Uncomplicated. Yet as the words left me, I felt the squirm ripple through my line—boots shifting, shoulders tightening, eyes darting quick and guilty.

  “Captain—our guests are out of the premises.” Kristoff’s report came thin, almost apologetic, the tone of a man who knew control was loosening under his watch.

  “The bastards left?” The growl tore from me raw, disdain boiling quick. Disruptions I could stomach, disorderly conduct I could hammer back into place—but to lose two drunkards with their breeches soiled and their mouths still running?

  “And where the hell would they go?!”