2. Chapter 2
What a fucking mess.
The word from the Jakadi scouts was that there were stores of precious metals being mined in the kingdom of Kalkoa.
Gold, silver, maybe even iridium if the rumors held weight.
Enough to fund another year of expansion and keep Valen's forges burning through winter.
Eskil had taken those reports at face value because the Jakadi had never steered him wrong before, and he'd committed three weeks of sailing, forty of his best warriors, and a ship full of provisions to this venture on the strength of their word.
He knew from the moment they landed at the bay that this was the saddest shithole of a kingdom he'd ever stepped foot in.
The civilians in the surrounding villages are downtrodden farmers and blacksmiths trying to scrape out a living while the castle and its city prosper on their backs.
The fields are fallow, half of them, untended or over-farmed until the soil turned to chalk.
The livestock are thin. The people are thinner.
Children watched them from doorways with the kind of hollow curiosity that comes from having nothing left to fear, because the worst has already happened and keeps happening and no one has come to stop it.
The miners, what few remain, do pull metals from the mines, but the mines are dilapidated and in dire need of closing.
The tunnel supports are rotting, the ventilation nonexistent, and the metals are few, and not precious, and come at a great cost of lives and limbs.
Eskil had one of his men inspect the largest shaft and the report came back grim: iron, mostly, and low-grade copper, with veins so thin they'd barely be worth extracting even with proper equipment.
Which they don't have. Which no one here has.
Normally Eskil would conquer the overseeing power and implement his own trade and reform.
Install a steward, reorganize the labor, open negotiations with neighboring territories.
It's what he's done in six other regions across the eastern coast and it's worked every time.
But there's nothing here to work with. This kingdom is dying a slow death, with no prospects and no future, and leaving it to its demise would be a greater kindness than trying to fix it.
He stands in the courtyard of the castle, and castle is a generous word for the crumbling stone heap before him, and watches his warriors herd the last of the guards into a line along the wall.
The morning sun is barely cresting the battlements and already Eskil is tired of this place.
The air smells of rotting thatch and animal waste, and the stones beneath his boots are slick with something he chooses not to identify.
The castle itself holds enough wealth to help fund the journey home.
The king has been stealing from his people long enough that the treasury is robust. Not spectacularly so, but enough.
Gold and gems and fine fabrics that have no business being in a keep where the servants wear threadbare rags and the walls are green with damp.
Eskil sends two men to clear it out while the rest put everyone else into line.
The guards, if that's what he wants to call them, are half-trained boys and old men past their fighting years, armed with blunted swords and wearing armor that doesn't fit.
They don't put up much of a fight. Most throw down their weapons and surrender before Eskil's warriors even reach them, falling to their knees with their hands up and their eyes averted.
Several of the younger ones practically trip over themselves to disarm.
Or worse, ask to come with them. One boy, barely sixteen by the look of him, asks Bohdi in broken fragments of their language if there's room on their ship for someone willing to work.
Bohdi tells him no and the boy's face crumbles.
This kingdom. These fucking people. Abandoned by their own ruler and desperate enough to beg passage with foreign invaders.
When they bring Armond before him, Eskil understands why.
The king is dressed lavishly, silks and furs that would feed his outer villages for a year, but riddled with Granger's Disease.
Eskil can see it in the pallor of his skin, the slight tremor in his hands, the way his weight shifts on bones that clearly ache beneath him.
The distinctive web of darkened veins visible at his wrists and throat.
He knows this sickness. He's watched it take men twice Armond's size and reduce them to nothing in a year, maybe two.
And yet Armond stands before him, imperious as a man in full health, and demands that Eskil identify himself and explain by what right he's entered his kingdom.
Even in defeat, the man is pompous and entitled and refuses to admit he's a tyrant choking his kingdom to its last breath.
Eskil watches him bluster with something between amusement and disgust. Armond is smaller than him by a head and a half, softened by years of indulgence and inactivity, and Eskil could put him through the nearest wall without breaking stride.
But there's no sport in it. No satisfaction in breaking a man already being broken by his own body.
His advisor speaks enough of Eskil's language to be useful, a gaunt, sharp-faced man called Erlan who positions himself at Armond's elbow with the practiced precision of a shadow with ambitions.
His pronunciation is atrocious, his grammar worse, but he's functional, and Eskil has dealt with worse translators in better kingdoms.
Eskil turns to Erlan and keeps his voice flat. "Tell your king his kingdom is now under Rengaran authority. His treasury is being seized as compensation for a wasted journey. If he has complaints, he can take them up with his gods."
Erlan translates, haltingly, and Armond turns an impressive shade of purple.
He begins screaming, the words pouring out of him in his own tongue, and Eskil doesn't need a translation to catch the gist. Divine right.
Ancestral claims. A dozen other things Eskil does not have the patience to entertain.
He lets him wear himself out. Men who bluster the loudest are always the first to run dry.
When Armond has exhausted his outrage and stands there panting, veins darkened and trembling hands clenched at his sides, Eskil turns back to the advisor.
"How long has he been sick?"
Erlan relays the question and Armond's face goes tight with fury, the acknowledgment of his illness landing harder than the invasion itself. But Erlan answers over him, speaking in his stiff, broken version of Eskil's language.
"Five years. More than five. He has not been well for some time."
Five years is unheard of.
The sickness is slow, yes, but not that slow.
Granger's takes hold in the blood first, then the bones, then the organs, a creeping rot that eats a man from the inside out.
Two years is a generous timeline for even the strongest constitution.
Three, maybe, with the best healers and constant care.
Armond should be a husk of himself by now, bedridden and skeletal, not standing before a conquering king and demanding what's owed to him.
Eskil's eyes narrow. Something is keeping this man alive. Something beyond stubbornness and spite, though he's sure those contribute.
"How?" he asks. "What's keeping him upright?"
Erlan's lip curls, almost imperceptibly, before he answers. "A boy. A healer." The word comes out of his mouth with visible contempt, dressed in the sound of failure rather than skill. "We paid good gold for him. Too much. He keeps the king alive, yes, but he cannot cure him."
Eskil doesn't educate them on the fact that Granger's Disease is incurable.
He doesn't mention that even in Rengara, where healers are trained from childhood and have access to herbs and medicines this kingdom has never dreamed of, Granger's is a death sentence.
Every healer he's ever known would say the same: you can ease the suffering, slow the progression by months maybe, but you cannot stop it.
Keeping this spiteful man alive for five years is practically witchcraft.
He doesn't share that assessment with Erlan.
Instead, he lets the silence stretch while the advisor shifts his weight from foot to foot, and he turns the information over in his mind.
A healer of that caliber, trapped in a kingdom that doesn't know what it has, reduced to nothing by a man who couldn't identify talent if it bit him in the face. A hidden gem in a pile of shit.
"Show me," Eskil says.
Erlan is more than willing. He seems almost eager to be rid of the subject, already calculating how presenting this worthless commodity might somehow offset the loss of the treasury.
Eskil follows him through the corridors, Erlan checking room after room with increasing agitation, a kitchen, a servants' hall, an empty chamber that smells of lye and old blood, muttering under his breath in his own language while his hands flutter with annoyance.
But Eskil moves by instinct towards an ornate door that is cracked open.
He recognizes it as the king’s chamber, and when he opens it he sees the most beautiful young man he's ever laid eyes on.
Dark hair tied loosely behind his shoulders.
A slender form with pale skin that hasn't seen enough sun.
He's dressed in a worn shirt that's too large for his frame and trousers that have been mended more than once, clutching a leather satchel to his chest, and the way his fingers grip it, white-knuckled and desperate, tells Eskil everything he needs to know about what the bag means to this man. It is the only thing of value he owns in the world. He makes the connection immediately that this is the healer they’re looking for.
When the young man turns and sees Eskil, his dark eyes are the most compelling thing Eskil has encountered in a long time.