29. Scouring
Scouring
A fist pounded on the door before dawn. Five loud strikes that demanded entry.
I rolled off the cot before the noise could wake the others, feet hitting cold stone, every muscle tight from last night’s spar with Ygritte. The bruises along my ribs had settled into a dull ache, and my knuckles throbbed where they’d split against her guard. Good pain. Earned pain.
The door creaked open to reveal one of the main house servants.
Gray hair pulled back tight, hands that only delivered messages now, face pinched like she’d bitten into something rotten.
The kind of servant who knew her place and resented every bastard who might rise above it.
She thrust a bundle of clothing into my arms.
“Lord de Blaise expects you dressed and presentable within the hour.”
The words came out measured for maximum disdain while maintaining the technical minimum of courtesy.
“Within the hour,” she repeated, as if I might be too stupid to understand. “The men will arrive shortly to ensure you’re adequate.”
Then she vanished, quick footsteps on stone, eager to be away from bastard quarters and back to wherever servants felt clean. I watched her go. Didn’t bother responding. People like her weren’t worth the breath.
Maise sat up, rubbing sleep from her eyes. “The fuck is that? ”
“Finery, looks like.” I shook out the garment. A high-collared coat in deep charcoal, the wool so fine it felt like water between my fingers.
Silver thread embroidered the cuffs in a pattern I couldn’t quite make out in the poor light. Beneath it lay a black linen shirt and trousers cut close for movement. No House sigil, but the quality was unmistakable.
Perrin whistled, now awake and peering over my shoulder. “That’s worth more than everything we own combined. Thought we weren’t due at the main house until evening.”
Grit said nothing from his corner, but the way his hand had moved to the knife under his pillow when the door opened said plenty.
I ran a thumb over the coat’s lining. Silk-wool blend, thick enough to stop a glancing dagger, soft enough not to restrict movement.
The kind of armor nobles wore to dangerous dinners.
Henrik didn’t waste resources on sentiment.
If he was having me dressed like legitimate get, it meant an audience where appearances mattered more than usual.
“Plans change.” I set the clothes aside carefully. “Whatever this is about, we should be ready for anything.”
The door slammed open again, no knock this time.
Two burly men-at-arms entered, their faces bearing the impassive scars of veteran soldiers.
Between them they carried a wooden tub, the kind used for laundry or drowning small animals.
They set it on the cold stone floor with a heavy thud that promised no gentleness to come.
A third man followed, sloshing buckets of steaming water. The scent hit immediately: lye soap harsh enough to strip flesh if left too long, boiled herbs that stung the nostrils .
“Lord’s orders,” the first man grunted. Built like a siege engine, hands that could crack skulls like eggs. “You’re to be made presentable.”
“Presentable for what?” Maise’s voice carried the edge that meant she was calculating angles, distances, how many steps to her sword. “An execution?”
The men ignored her. One unrolled a bundle containing a block of harsh gray soap, a stiff-bristled brush that looked better suited for scouring pots, and a straight razor sharp enough to flay skin from bone.
“Strip,” the second man ordered, his hand resting on his sword hilt. Not a threat exactly, just a reminder that this would happen easy or hard, but it would happen.
I met his eyes for a moment. Held them until he looked away first. Then I peeled off my sleeping tunic.
The cold air raised gooseflesh across skin marked by training scars.
The men studied me with the same detachment butchers showed hanging meat, checking for obvious deformities, visible weakness, anything that might embarrass the house.
“In.”
◇ ◆ ◇
The water was painfully hot, just short of scalding.
I bit down on the sound that wanted to escape, settling into the tub with as much dignity as a naked thirteen-year-old could manage.
The heat seared every cut, every bruise, every place Ygritte’s blade had nicked during our fight.
Pain was just information. I’d felt worse.
They descended on me like they were scrubbing barnacles off a hull.
The brush scraped across my back hard enough to draw blood in places, the lye soap burning into every scrape.
One man held my head steady while the other attacked my hair with the same brush, then yanked a bone comb through the tangles with enough force to tear out chunks.
“Fuck’s sake,” I heard Perrin mutter. “They trying to clean him or skin him?”
“Quiet,” the first man growled without looking up from his work.
They scrubbed until my skin was raw and pink as a newborn’s.
Dirt I didn’t know existed sluiced away in gray water, then dark water.
The dirt of the training ground, dried sweat, blood both mine and others’.
All of it stripped away. My back felt like it had been worked over with a rasp, my scalp tingled from the brutal combing, and the lye had found every small cut and made it sing.
I didn’t flinch. Didn’t make a sound. Let them do their work while I kept my face blank as stone.
The razor came next. One man held my head immobile while the other scraped the blade across my scalp, trimming the ragged mess into something respectable. Each stroke precise, professional, utterly without care for my comfort. Hair fell like black snow onto my raw shoulders.
“Turn,” one commanded, and they attacked my face with the same efficiency, scraping away any hint of softness, leaving my jaw feeling naked and cold.
When they finally hauled me from the tub, I was a different creature than what went in. Cleaner than I’d been since birth, probably. They wrapped me in a scratchy towel that felt like coarse linen against abraded skin.
“Stand.”
◇ ◆ ◇
I stood dripping while they dressed me. The linen shirt first, so fine it felt obscene against my scoured skin.
Then the trousers, cut to allow for sword work but tailored to display the lines of someone trained to kill.
Finally the coat, heavy with quality, silver buttons fastened by hands that had probably gutted men in their time.
As the last button clicked home, I felt it.
The Knight Brand between my shoulders went from warm to burning in the space of a heartbeat. Not the steady pulse of combat awareness. This was a warning, the kind that made my spine go rigid and my teeth clench against nothing.
Movement at the window caught my eye.
A raven perched on the sill. Its head cocked at an angle that birds don’t move. One black eye fixed on me with intelligence that had no place in any living thing. The other eye socket was empty, and something pale flickered in the hollow where an eye should have been.
The men continued packing their implements, oblivious. Maise was saying something to Perrin, their voices suddenly distant, muffled, like I’d plunged underwater. Even Grit, always watching, stared through the raven as if it weren’t there.
Colors bled out of the room. The stone walls turned gray as old bone. The air grew thick, tasted of copper and frost. My breath came out in clouds despite the summer heat.
The raven’s beak parted.
What came out wasn’t sound. Hel’s voice scraped along the inside of my skull like a blade drawn slowly across wet stone.
「The Hierophant moves his pieces. Soon. 」
The raven’s form split open.
Not cracked, not broken. Split. Like something was wearing it from the inside and had stopped bothering to hide. The feathers peeled back, revealing not flesh but a window into somewhere else. Somewhere cold, dark, and older than the stones beneath my feet.
I saw Hel’s domain through that wound in the world.
The River of Dead stretched beneath a sky that had never known stars.
The water was black and thick and full of faces, thousands of them, all of them screaming silently as the current dragged them toward the Wheel.
I could hear them anyway. Not with my ears.
The screams came in through somewhere deeper.
「Look. See what waits if you fail.」
The vision shifted. Wrenched sideways in a way that made my stomach lurch.
I stood in a great hall I didn’t recognize. Banners hung from the rafters. A tournament, judging by the armor and the sand. Bodies littered the arena floor. Not fighters fallen in honorable combat. These had been butchered. Throats cut. Eyes gouged. Some still twitching.
A figure in white robes walked among them, stepping over corpses like a man picking through a garden. A chalice in one hand, tipped, spilling black sand that ate the light wherever it fell.
I couldn’t see his face. The hood covered everything. But I felt him. The wrongness of him, something that shouldn’t exist wearing human skin like a borrowed coat.
He stopped. Turned.
Even without seeing his eyes, I knew he was looking at me.
「He seeks what I gave you. He has torn the brands from three of my children already. Ripped them screaming from the spine while they still breathed.」
The vision shifted again.
Now I saw myself. Older by a few years, maybe. Face gaunt, eyes hollow. Chained to a table in some stone room that stank of old blood. The White Cardinal stood over me, one hand pressed to my spine, fingers sinking into my flesh like it was warm clay.
The Knight Brand was screaming. I could hear it. A sound like steel being tortured.
「He will take what I gave you. Strip it from your bones. Leave you empty and broken. And then he will use your power to finish what he started.」
I watched myself die on that table. Watched my body arch and convulse as something essential was torn out through my spine. Watched the light go out of my eyes.
「Unless.」
The vision shattered.
I was back in the barracks, standing in the fine coat, the men packing their implements, Maise mid-sentence about something I’d already forgotten. The raven still perched on the windowsill, but it was just a bird now. Just a bird with one eye and a knowing tilt to its head.
Its beak opened one more time.
「The tournament. Be ready. Kill the White Cardinal before he kills you. Or watch your second life end worse than your first.」
The raven spread its wings. In the shadows between its feathers, I saw glimpses of things I’d carry for years. White robes stained with something dark. A chalice overflowing with screaming faces. The River of Dead, patient and hungry, waiting for me to join it.
One black feather detached, spinning through the air. It landed at my feet.
Sound crashed back. Colors returned, sharp and too bright after what I’d seen.
◇ ◆ ◇
“Can’t believe they dressed you like that,” Maise was finishing.
The feather lay there, invisible to everyone but me. Already smoking. Already curling at the edges. I stepped on it and ground it into the stone until nothing remained but a small char mark that could have been anything.
My hands weren’t shaking. I wouldn’t let them shake. But somewhere deep in my chest, in the place where the Knight Brand lived, I felt my own death rattling against the bars of what hadn’t happened yet.
“One hour,” the first man reminded me, hefting the tub after they dumped it. “Don’t be late.”
Then they were gone. Leaving me standing in clothes worth more than lives, skin still burning from the scouring, Hel’s warning carved into my brain.
The Hierophant. The White Cardinal. The tournament. My hands clenched into fists, the fine fabric creaking.
“Well,” Maise finally said, studying me with those sharp green eyes. “You clean up nice. Though you look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“Something like that,” I managed, forcing my hands to relax.
She frowned, stepping closer. “You alright? You went pale there for a moment. ”
“I’m fine.” The lie came easily. What could I tell them? That Hel herself had just showed me my own murder in vivid detail? That there was something at this tournament that wanted to rip my spine out?
“Just thinking about what Lord Henrik might want from me.”
“Whatever it is,” Perrin said, flipping a coin between his fingers out of habit, “it’s important enough to scrub you raw for it. That kind of preparation means people who matter will be watching.”
If only he knew.
The White Cardinal was watching. Had probably been watching since the Palisade, since the Knight Brand first flared in my back. And now he was coming to collect.
Grit moved from his corner, circling me once with the careful assessment of someone checking for weaknesses. “They took off more than dirt,” he observed quietly. “You look like them now. Like you belong in that coat.”
I did. The boy who’d rolled out of bed was gone, replaced by something that could pass for nobility if you didn’t look too close. If you didn’t see the training scars, the calluses that no amount of lye could remove. If you didn’t see the dead mercenary behind the young lord’s eyes.
“You all should get ready too,” I said, ending the moment.
But the fine clothes and the formal preparation had created distance where none existed before. I could see it in the way Maise held herself, suddenly careful. How Perrin’s easy grin turned forced.
“Guys, I’m the same person underneath.” The words came out harder than intended. “Just cleaner.”
Grit tilted his head, studying me. “Are you? ”
“Nothing changes between us,” I said, meeting each of their eyes in turn. “We’re still a team. Still watching each other’s backs.”
“Even if you smell better than the rest of us?” Perrin asked.
“Especially then.” I tugged at the coat’s collar, already missing my training leathers and sparring armor. “When we get back from this, you can knock the polish right off.”
Maise snorted. “Deal. Though I might enjoy messing up that pretty hair too much.”
The tension cracked. We were still us.
But in the back of my mind, Hel’s vision played on repeat. The White Cardinal walking among corpses. His hand sinking into my spine. My own dead eyes staring at nothing.
I was going to kill him first. Whatever it took.
◇ ◆ ◇
「Hel’s Ledger」
Vessel: Danarre de Blaise | Year 828 | Age 13
House de Blaise | Status: Bastard (Unacknowledged)
Location: de Blaise Estate, Stone Yard Barracks
「Knight of Swords」 — Burning
「Emperor」 — Sleeping
「Magician」 — Sleeping
Active Charge: Find the Hierophant. End what was begun.
Hel showed the vessel his own corpse tonight. He didn’t flinch. Didn’t beg. He clenched his fists in a dead woman’s son’s coat and started planning. The thread hums with intent. Good. Fear would have been disappointing.