Chapter Thirty-Two: Across the Eastern Sea
The merchant’s purse was heavier when he left than when he came, and his smile was the cautious kind of quiet that comes to men who have measured a man and found him useful. He returned to you at dusk, the wagons stalled and ropes coiled, and spoke with the easy courtesy of a trader who knows the value of steady hunters.
“I travel east,” he said, fingers idly touching the crowned boar at his breast. “My company sails beyond the eastern sea to a string of markets. I fetch wares for a lord who buys by ship; I trade for hides and iron and other things men in those harbors want. Your hands add meat to our fare and your knowledge keeps men from straying. Will you guide us on the runs back to the coast? A week’s wage and cabin space aboard the next passage. You will be out of Oakhaven’s press for a time, and paid well for it.”
You watched him, feeling the old pull of a road that led to water and the quiet, old suspicion that a boar-pin never sat on a man’s chest without a reason. Crossing to the seaports would put you beyond the Hall’s immediate sight and deeper into currents where trading houses masked politics. It would also put you closer to where goods move by ship—the very route the scions might use to spread the blight farther than any market road could carry it.
That night you held the question as a live coal. You met Heyshem by slate and spoke with Elara and Theron at the Hall in a small knot of sober counsel. Heyshem’s answer was not a refusal but a measure: go, if you must, but take not only coin but a purpose. Take two riders, he said; let one pass for a simple hand in the hold and the other ride
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as a merchant’s aide. Theron insisted on a ledger kept close and the finest of questions asked by way of innocent curiosity—names of ports, captains, the origin of iron bowls. Elara, sharp and patient, asked that you secure any seals, crates, or manifest slips for the Hall before any outward hand touched them.
You accepted the merchant’s work with conditions—routes flagged, two trusted kinsmen at your shoulder in guise, and a sealed pocket for artifacts. You would not go alone; you would not take passage without an agreed signal back to Three Pines should trouble appear. The merchant agreed, perhaps because the coin and the cover of a guide both served him. He promised a cabin and the discretion of a captain who ships rare hides for rare buyers.
On the road to the eastern quay you walked with a twin silence: the familiar weight of your disguise and the awareness that the sea takes what harbor hands call bargains and leaves names in the dark. The wagons rolled toward the docks; the merchant’s talk turned to sail, to tides, to the way his lord’s house preferred cargo stowed and labeled. You listened, letting ordinary details fall into your ledger while testing for anything that might twist like a hidden seam.
When the gangway rose and the ship’s lines creaked you felt the border shift. Oakhaven’s stones faded behind you and in their place came gull-cry and the tang of salt—an honest salt and another, coppery tang that made your teeth ache. You tucked your tusk dagger deeper, hid the jack under common blankets, and reminded your kin of signal and place: move as trappers, speak as merchants, mark what should be marked, and bring what you find to Elara in secret. The merchant’s hand lingered once on the rail with an inattentive familiarity toward his pin; you met it with plain, cool courtesy and a mind already summing routes and risks.
The passage would be long. The eastern markets might be rich with leads—or rich with traps. Either way, you would not cross that sea as a man who had lost his name; you would cross it as one who wore another for necessity and held his true blade for when the hunt showed itself across the waves.