MHHC Chapter 134

Lost Claim

Anklam was the third most prosperous land in Schleicher Territory—or it had been, before the monsters came. Now its streets exhaled a different kind of air entirely, contracted and gray, the quiet stillness that settles over a place when hope has quietly gathered its belongings and left without a word.

Refugees from the north had overrun the village entire. Shattered ruins stood where they had fallen, untouched, waiting for owners who were not coming back to claim them.

At the village center, the displaced had spread what remained of their lives across the bare ground, their faces worn down to something ancient and without expectation. Everything they had managed to carry from what had once been home lay arranged before them in the dirt—and as the expedition column passed, they waved their arms and shouted, their voices climbing over one another in desperate counterpoint.

"Look at our things before you go! Barely used, all of it!"

"Everything here—everything—thirteen silver pieces for the lot!"

"Don't push! This is my spot!"

"Knights! Please, show us mercy!"

Adelheid opened the wagon's small window and looked out.

The expedition had halted before the village's only inn some thirty minutes ago and had not moved since. She had been sitting still all this while—listening to someone cry, listening to someone plead—and the discomfort had been accumulating in her like water filling a vessel from the bottom: slow, and then all at once.

A faint smell of earth and water brushed the air. Sleet before long, if the sky held its intentions.

"Your Grace. Is something the matter?"

Lena materialized at the window before Adelheid had fully registered her own restlessness, positioning herself so that her body blocked the worst of what lay outside—practical, attentive, and only partially effective.

The press of people surged and tangled at the edges of Adelheid's vision regardless. Arms extended toward the column with a kind of desperate, indiscriminate reaching, as though mercy were a thing that could be seized if one only stretched far enough.

The sight conjured a devotional painting she had seen once, years ago—a depiction of hell. She had not understood it then.

She was beginning to understand it now.

"Why are they still here?" she asked, her voice quieter than she intended. "If they mean to go south, wouldn't it be better to move as quickly as possible?"

"Ah." Lena glanced around with practiced caution and drew nearer to the window. "The road south has been closed, apparently. By His Imperial Majesty's order."

"Closed? But—"

The question forming in her mind—but His Majesty's knights are in the north, isn't the Crown Prince himself here—dissolved before she could speak it.

She knew well enough by now how badly the Emperor had wanted Mikhail removed from sight.

But what of the other lords and knights who had answered the call and come north for the subjugation? To seal the road before anything had even begun would send a message to every one of them: you might be abandoned. Your lives are already counted as spent. It would be an intimation of betrayal delivered at the outset, like a sentence read before the trial.

"There's some kind of monster barrier line, or so they're calling it. Crossing it as a civilian apparently requires a great deal of money. Knights arriving for the subjugation are the only ones permitted through freely—so the guards open the line for those convoys, and at those moments, they'll let civilians slip across in exchange for payment."

Lena pressed her thumb and forefinger into a circle.

Adelheid watched the heaving, tangled mass of people—haggling, quarreling, begging—and understood. Every desperate transaction in that square was aimed at accumulating a few more coins to press into a guard's palm.

She turned her eyes away from the outstretched arms, all sinew and hollow bone, with deliberate effort.

"I suppose we won't be staying long in this village," she said quietly. "More refugees are still arriving. Even here—even this—"

The words failed her. Lena's expression had shifted into something that mirrored her own unease.

Anklam was the southernmost village in Schleicher Territory. If things had deteriorated this badly here, at the very edge—then what lay waiting for them as they drew closer to the northern wall was something she could not bring herself to imagine.

"Looks like we'll be moving again the moment the meal is done," Lena muttered, letting her voice drop into the register of private complaint. "No hope of resting somewhere comfortable."

Adelheid swallowed her own reluctance along with Lena's. But their circumstances were, all things considered, a great deal more fortunate than those of the skeletal children who could not get close enough to a fire to feel its warmth.

She began calculating what gold she had immediately at hand.

Then she stepped down from the wagon.

"Are you going to the inn? I don't think the food is ready yet."

Lena's eyes widened—she had been gazing toward the inn with naked longing, drawn by the rich savory smell drifting through its walls—and blinked at the sudden movement.

"I want to see if I can buy something privately. Soup, or bread."

She could not look away from those children any longer and tell herself she hadn't seen them. Lena followed Adelheid's gaze and her expression shifted into something careful and worried.

"You mean to give it to them?"

"Only the children. If I pay in advance and arrange for distribution after the expedition leaves, it should minimize any disruption."

"I'll come with you."

As they drew nearer to the inn, knights began to outnumber common soldiers—Ansgar knights who had been warming themselves at the fire in the courtyard, who recognized Adelheid and inclined their heads as she passed.

She studied the ones gathered at the steps with a mildly uncertain look.

"Sleet is coming, it seems."

She hadn't realized the words were addressed to her until she caught the gaze of the knight who had spoken—direct and unhurried, aimed precisely at her face. She blinked.

Senior knights did not, as a rule, speak to her first. Not openly hostile any longer—but the prevailing manner had remained something closer to how one might regard a valuable and rather uncommon creature than a person. She had grown accustomed to the particular quality of that distance.

This was something else.

"Is that so," she replied.

The knight rubbed the back of his neck with a faint sheepish expression.

"Please, go ahead. The warm food will be ready soon, they say."

She was forming the words to thank him for stepping aside when the inn door swung open without warning.

A shaft of deep amber light poured across the darkened courtyard—long and sudden, like the opening of a wound. The man who stepped through it paused on the threshold, arrested by some surprise.

With the firelight behind him, his expression could not be read.

She was still tracing the outline of him with her eyes when his scent reached her first—familiar, arriving before his face resolved itself in the light.

"Adelheid."

Valentin came down the steps in a few long strides.

His face said he had not expected to find her standing there—not in any calculation he had made for this moment. And yet he had moved toward her immediately, without hesitation, as though crossing the distance between them had been the only natural response available to him.

He stopped.

He hesitated, and then held out his hand—slowly, as though even this small gesture required something he had to gather from somewhere far inside himself.

"I was actually about to call for you. There's something I need to speak with you about."

Adelheid took his hand with care.

"What about?"

He was wearing iron gauntlets. No warmth passed between them at all—only the cold press of metal through which she could feel the rigid structure of his fingers beneath.

And yet Valentin flinched as though he had touched something burning. A long, unsteady breath moved through him, swallowed before it could escape.

He didn't move.

She had expected him to lead her somewhere at once, but he had gone still entirely. His thumb traced slowly across her knuckles—careful, as though he was measuring something—through the barrier of the gauntlet.

For a long moment, he looked as though he had forgotten how to breathe.

The look in his eyes was something she had no name for: a terrible unease, coiled and luminous—like a prophet seized without warning by a vision of what was coming, unable to look away from what only he could see.

The attention of the surrounding knights was sharpening around them, drawn toward the stillness. Adelheid felt it gathering and lowered her voice to almost nothing.

"Valentin?"

He raised his head at the sound of her whisper.

The expressionless mask had been drawn back into place—she could see the seams of it now, and had learned to look for them—but the unease didn't fully disappear. It settled instead somewhere behind his eyes, patient and watchful. She found she could not stop searching for it.

At last, he drew the corner of his mouth into something that might have been a smile.

"It's nothing to worry about. I wanted to show you something."

He gestured. From behind him, a man appeared—the innkeeper, from the look of him—bowing repeatedly with the compressed urgency of someone who has been given more money than expected and hasn't yet secured it at a safe distance. He snatched one of the torches from the inn's entrance and held it aloft.

"The stable is this way."

"The stable?"

"His Grace purchased a horse. Watch your step—the ground is all mud from the sleet."

Adelheid turned a questioning look toward Valentin. He shook his head in a way that meant: you'll understand when you see it.

The stable was around the back of the inn. The innkeeper hung the torch at the entrance and disappeared inside, emerging shortly with a chestnut mare. She was smaller than the horses Adelheid had seen the knights ride—compact, clean-limbed—and even in the dimness, her coat caught the torchlight with a quiet luster that spoke of careful keeping. Something about the way she stood was gentle without being meek.

"Exceptionally fine breed. Docile too. There's no better horse for Your Grace to ride, I'd say—and clever as they come, takes direction beautifully."

The innkeeper delivered this with the authority of a man completing a sale, and extended the lead toward Adelheid.

"Come, Your Grace—come closer and have a look."

She approached with curiosity and wariness in equal measure. When she extended her hand as the innkeeper guided her to, the mare simply held still and offered her neck. Adelheid gathered her courage and raised her other hand to stroke the horse's nose, lightly, testing.

The mare exhaled—a warm, soft pfft of breath against her fingers—and accepted the touch without so much as a twitch.

"She's taken to you, Your Grace. Chosen by a great lady rather than a knight—this one's fortune has just improved considerably."

"She's mine?"

The realization arrived a beat behind the words. Adelheid stepped back in genuine surprise and turned toward Valentin, who stood leaning against the fence, watching them both with an expression she could not quite name.

"But—I've never cared for an animal before. I don't even know how to ride."

Without a word, he turned and held out a heavy purse to the innkeeper.

The innkeeper received it with a bow so deep and rapid it was almost comic, then flushed a vivid crimson and bolted back toward the inn at a pace that made plain he was very concerned about the possibility of having the money reclaimed before he cleared the threshold.

Valentin approached the mare. She snorted—pfrrr—and tossed her head, not frightened, only acknowledging him on terms of her own choosing.

"Your will reaches animals too. When you resonate, you can receive information from birds. You can tame a wild predator you've never encountered before. For a creature that has already known human hands—that would be simpler still."

Will. Resonance.

Every time he returned to those words, guilt moved through her in a wave—the feeling of a task set aside and quietly forgotten while more immediate things demanded her. She had been too occupied with what was directly in front of her, and the practice had fallen away by degrees.

'But.'

She furrowed her brow and tried—with genuine, concentrated effort—to transmit her meaning toward him through will alone.

Nothing came back. Not even a tremor.

She gave up and let her voice carry it instead.

"It's still difficult without you there to guide me. I've tried to 'resonate' a few times on my own, but I've never been able to reach the same place as that day. Not even close."

He said nothing.

"Would it be possible—the way you helped me before, guiding me until I could feel it—could you do that with me regularly? So I could grow accustomed to it?"

"That isn't possible anymore."

"Not possible?"

"It was always going to happen." A pause, absolute and weightless. "Losing the qualities of a god."

The shock of it moved visibly across her face—her pale eyes going wide, and then slowly narrowing as something colder and more careful moved in behind them.

"That—what do you—"

She had been about to ask what he meant.

He stepped forward, into the ring of torchlight.

Dark, reddish veins had risen along Valentin's pallid throat and cheek—livid, tracing the pale skin in branching lines that stood raised against the surface.

Like the fractures she had once seen before.