A Runaway Noble in a Town of Lonely Wives

Callis finished his steaming oats and pushed up from the bar, intending to head straight for the Ash Forge. The road-clearing from yesterday had settled deep into his joints over breakfast, and the blister on his heel forced him to pause in the hall to adjust the stiff laces of his new boots. He stood in the narrow corridor that connected the common room to the rear wash-house and the dry-stores. The air here carried a freezing draft, smelling of old root vegetables and damp floorboards. Leaning his shoulder against the timber wall, Callis pulled the leather lace tight with a grimace, bracing himself against the frantic spinning in his own head.

The reality of what he had initiated the night before—what he had done sitting within earshot of a sleeping husband—was catching up with him. He was a runaway with two silver marks to his name, unqualified for the frontier, and dangerously entangled with Mara. He let out a long, ragged exhale and dropped his head back against the wooden planks.

"You are thinking too loud."

Callis started, his head snapping up. Mara stood in the open doorway of the dry-store pantry, resting a woven basket of dried apples against her hip. Her stained canvas apron was tied tight at her waist, and her chestnut hair was pinned back against the day's labor. In the dim, slanting light of the corridor, her face offered no clues.

"I am not," Callis countered, his defensiveness flaring before he could stop it.

"You are," she replied softly. "I can hear the gears grinding all the way from the kitchen ovens. You are trying to calculate whether you are already a dead man or simply a fool."

Callis looked down the hallway toward the common room. He could hear the faint, echoing clatter of Derren shifting wooden kegs near the bar. "It is the daylight," Callis murmured, stepping closer to drop his voice to a whisper. "In the dark of the kitchen, the encounter felt inevitable. Standing here in the light, I realize how dangerous this situation is. For you. For me."

Mara studied him. The tension sat at the corners of his mouth. His shoulders would not settle. His eyes had the raw, sleepless look of a man trying to calculate his way out of a fire. That habit might have impressed tutors. Out here, it would get him killed.

She set the woven basket of apples onto the floorboards. Reaching out, she caught the front fabric of his linen tunic in her fist and hauled him into the pantry, letting the heavy wooden door click shut behind them.

The dry-store was dark except for a thin sliver of grey light bleeding through the warped shutters. The space was cramped, smelling of flour dust and dried sage. There was barely enough room for the two of them to stand upright between the wooden shelves. Callis’s back hit a tall stack of burlap grain sacks, his heart launching into a hammering rhythm against his bruised ribs.

"Mara, we cannot do this," he breathed. "Derren is standing right out there."

She pressed two fingers against his lips. "You are spinning out of control, Callis," she whispered, stepping into his space until her heavy wool skirts brushed his knees. "You are trying to solve the logistics of the entire world before breakfast. You cannot do that. You simply have to survive the morning."

"I understand that, but—"

"Hush," she repeated, her voice dropping a full octave to adopt that low authority that made his knees feel weak.

She offered no reassurances. No soft promises. She simply dropped straight to her knees in the dark of the pantry.

Callis stopped breathing. His hands flew downward to grip her shoulders, his fingers clutching the rough wool of her dress. "Mara. Mara, what are you doing?"

She ignored the panicked question, her hands going straight to the fastenings of his tailored trousers. She undid the heavy horn buttons and pushed the rough fabric down his thighs, taking his linen smallclothes along with it. The freezing air of the pantry hit his bare skin. He was already hard, the sudden thrill of being pulled into the dark with her stripping away his polite restraint. The moment her warm hands wrapped around his bare thighs and pulled his hips forward, he strained against her grip.

Mara looked up at his face in the narrow sliver of grey light, running her thumb up the underside of him. Callis released a strangled sound, his hips jerking forward. He bit down on his own knuckle to keep the noise from traveling through the thin door.

"You think too much," Mara whispered against his skin. Her breath was hot, sending a shiver of electricity up his spine. "Let me empty your head."

She opened her mouth and took him in. Callis’s head fell backward against the stacked grain sacks with a dull thud, his eyes rolling shut as the heat struck clean through the noise in his head. She did not tease him. She did not hesitate. She took him deep into the back of her throat, her lips sliding down the rigid length with a heavy suction that nearly took his legs out from under him.

There was nothing submissive in the way she worked. She had found the panic in him and put her mouth exactly where it would stop being useful. She swallowed around the thick ridge, her tongue swirling hot over the weeping slit, catching the salty pre-come and dragging it down the shaft.

Callis’s hands tangled in her pinned hair, gripping the chestnut strands. He couldn't control the reaction, his hips finding a short, desperate rhythm, pushing upward into the wet heat. Mara allowed the movement, holding his hips steady with her hands and pressing her thumbs into the sensitive skin where his thighs met his groin to anchor him. She sucked him hard, her cheeks hollowing, the wet, obscene slurping sounds loud in the quiet pantry.

Every time she pulled back, the freezing air hit the spit-slicked skin. Every time she swallowed him down again, the stark contrast of her tight throat drove him closer to the edge. The smell of raw flour and dried sage mixed dizzyingly with the musky scent of his own rapid arousal. The sounds she drew from him were bad enough. The sounds her mouth made were worse. Outside the shuttered window, a merchant cart rumbled past. In the common room, Derren shouted at the scullery girl less than fifty feet away.

Callis bit harder into his knuckle.

Mara’s rhythm quickened. She bobbed her head faster, saliva gathering and shining in the dim light. She dragged her teeth lightly along the underside of him, providing a tiny scrape of friction that made Callis’s body arch off the grain sacks. He was dangerously close to the edge.

"Mara," he gasped, his grip on her hair tightening. "I cannot—I am going to—"

She did not pull away. She clamped her lips tighter around the base of him, sealing her mouth over him, and sucked hard.

Callis broke, hips driving forward before he could stop them. He came silently, one hand clamped over his mouth hard enough to hurt, his release pumping thick and hot into the back of her throat. Mara took every drop, her throat working rhythmically to swallow him down without gagging or flinching away from the mess. She kept her mouth sealed around him as he pulsed and twitched against her tongue, her hands gently stroking his thighs to help him ride out the last shudders moving through him.

Slowly, she pulled off of him, the wet sound of separation loud in the small room. A thin string of saliva connected them for a second before breaking.

Callis slumped against the grain sacks, chest heaving. Before she could stand, he reached down and caught her by the waist.

"Mara," he rasped. She looked up, and he pulled her to him and kissed her. Hard. He tasted himself on her mouth and did not flinch from it. If anything, the proof of what she had done to him only made the kiss rougher.

Mara made a soft, wrecked sound against his lips, her hands closing over his bare shoulders. For a moment the pantry held nothing but flour dust, cold air, and the heat of their mouths. When he finally drew back, his forehead rested against hers, and the panic was gone.

Mara touched the corner of her mouth with the back of her hand, then stood back, smoothing the front of her apron. She reached out, tucking him back into his linen smallclothes, and pulled his trousers up his thighs. She fastened the horn buttons for him because his hands were shaking too badly to manage the simple task himself, then patted his chest over his bruised ribs.

"Do you feel better?" she asked softly.

Callis opened his eyes and looked down at her. He noted the flushed color in her cheeks and the dampness remaining on her lower lip. "I am at your mercy," he whispered.

Mara’s mouth curved into a private smile. "Good." She picked up the basket of dried apples from the floorboards. "Now go to the Ash Forge. Purchase your armor. And try very hard not to get kicked by any large beasts today." She opened the pantry door and slipped out into the hallway, looking as if she had merely gone inside to fetch routine supplies.

Callis stood alone in the dark for another long moment, listening carefully to the soft rustle of her wool skirts fading away toward the kitchen. He leaned his weight against the grain sacks, waiting for his trembling legs to remember how to support his body weight. When he finally stepped out into the freezing mud of the main street, the cold air felt different against his skin. The inherent terror of Hartsgate remained present, but the paralyzing panic was gone. Mara had short-circuited his noble anxieties, leaving him with a sharp focus on his immediate survival.

He needed reinforced gear. He needed to survive the contracts. He turned and walked toward the forge district.

The Ash Forge announced itself before he reached it: hammers, bellows, coal smoke, hot iron. Leather bellows groaned like dying beasts. Heavy iron hammers struck steel anvils in a rhythm that vibrated up through the soles of Callis’s new boots.

He navigated the crowded, soot-stained streets, keeping Mara’s directions clear in his mind. Taking the third narrow alley down from the main bellows, he located the side street. Tucked between a roaring open-air furnace and a pile of discarded iron slag sat a narrow, heavy-timbered shop. Hanging from a rusted chain over the wooden door was a cracked iron anvil. Callis pushed the door open and stepped inside.

The shop smelled of chemically tanned leather, hot linseed oil, melted beeswax, and stale sweat. The workspace was crowded with half-finished leather breastplates, hanging racks of boiled hide greaves, and rolls of dark material stacked haphazardly all the way to the low ceiling. A woman stood at a stout wooden workbench in the center of the room, using a mallet to pound a brass rivet into a thick leather pauldron. She did not look up when he entered the shop.

"We are out of steel rivets," she announced. Her voice was a rough, practical bark that easily cut through the noise of the forge outside. "If you require iron hardware, it will take two days to source. If you want cheap bone closures, go to the outer market. I do not work with bone."

"I do not need rivets," Callis said, stepping further into the cramped shop. "I need complete armor."

The woman hit the brass rivet one final time, setting the metal flush with the thick leather, and turned around to evaluate her customer. Callis blinked in surprise. Yselle Harrow was built of industrial angles. Where Mara possessed the banked warmth of the hearth, Yselle belonged to the forge. She was taller than Mara, broad through the shoulders, with arms corded from work and marked by tiny white burn scars. Her ash-blonde hair was shaved close at the sides and tied back in a short knot. A leather apron split high at the thighs hung over soot-stained trousers, and a smear of black grease cut across her left cheekbone.

Her eyes moved over his clean face, fine linen, and the soft aristocratic posture he had not yet learned to kill. She let out a blunt snort of amusement.

"You need a miracle," Yselle said, tossing the mallet onto the workbench. "Unfortunately, I only sell leather goods. What kind of armor are you looking for? Heavy escort work? Beast culling? Or just something decorative so the local barmaids think you are dangerous?"

Callis stiffened his spine. He was growing tired of being assessed as a walking joke by the locals. "I am taking Bronze-rank contracts in the Green March," Callis said, keeping his tone level. "I require something practical. Boiled leather, perhaps. Furthermore, I need a cloak that will not shred into useless strips the first time something grabs the fabric. Mara sent me to your shop."

Yselle stopped moving. She was in the process of wiping her greasy hands on a scrap of canvas, and at the sound of the name, her hands stilled. Her pale, sharp eyes flicked upward to Callis’s face. This time she was not pricing him as a tourist. She was measuring whether he was worth keeping alive.

"Mara," Yselle repeated the name slowly.

"Yes."

Yselle looked him up and down a second time. She scrutinized the width of his shoulders, the line of his waist, and the stubborn way his jaw was set.

"Mara Vell does not send people to my shop unless she wants them to survive," Yselle murmured, tossing the dirty canvas scrap aside onto the bench. "Which implies she likes you. Which means you either possess deep pockets or a skill worth mentioning."

Callis felt a flush of heat rise to his face, remembering the pantry. "I possess two silver marks. And a small handful of coppers."

Yselle burst out laughing. It was a loud, unselfconscious sound that filled the cramped shop. "Two silver," she chuckled, walking around the workbench toward his position. "Well. It is not the deep pockets, then. It must be the skill."

Callis’s flush deepened. "Can you outfit me for two silver marks or not?"

"I can put you into a set of second-hand boiled hide that will stop a glancing claw strike, yes," Yselle confirmed, her tone snapping back to business. "However, I need to know what frame I am building the armor around. Take the linen shirt off."

Callis blinked in confusion. "I beg your pardon?"

"The shirt. Take it off." Yselle pulled a flexible measuring tape constructed of marked waxed cord from her apron pocket. "I do not fit custom armor over bulky linen. I need to see your shoulders. I need to see how your muscles move. If I cut the armholes incorrectly, you will be unable to lift a spear, and you will die horribly in the mud."

Callis hesitated, suddenly aware that he was standing in a cramped shop with an intimidating woman staring at his torso with clinical impatience. He reached up, grabbed the bottom hem of his tunic, and pulled the garment over his head. The freezing, drafty air of the shop hit his bare skin.

Yselle stepped into his personal space without hesitation. Her touch had none of Mara’s reverence. Yselle handled him like material: useful, flawed, and expensive to cut wrong. She wrapped the marked waxed cord around his chest, pulling the line tight.

"Breathe in fully," she ordered.

Callis inhaled deeply. The purple-black contusion inflicted by the Mud-Borrower stood out in stark relief against his pale ribs. Yselle paused her measurements without gasping in shock or offering verbal sympathy. She simply reached out with two grease-stained fingers and prodded the outer edge of the bruised flesh with firm, testing pressure. Callis winced, his abdominal muscles jerking away from the touch.

"Mud-Borrower?" she asked, marking a knot on the waxed cord.

"Yes," Callis grunted through the pain.

"You are lucky the impact did not snap your floating rib," Yselle noted, stepping around behind him. "Your neutral stance is terrible, by the way. You favor your right side. Are you a trained fencer?"

"Yes," Callis admitted, surprised by her accurate deduction.

"That training is useless out here on the frontier," she stated flatly. She ran the measuring cord down the center line of his spine. Her calloused knuckles dragged down his bare skin. It had none of Mara’s heat. That almost made it worse. Yselle measured him without hesitation, as if his body were simply another difficult pattern to solve.

She stepped around to face his front again and dropped to one knee. Callis tensed his muscles. Yselle didn't even bother to look up at his face. She slapped her hand flat against his thigh, over the outer edge of his trousers.

"Spread your legs wider," she commanded. "I need your inseam measurement for the hanging tassets."

Callis awkwardly widened his stance on the floorboards. She ran the waxed cord up the inside of his leg, her hand brushing close to the bulge in his trousers that had only recently been satisfied in the pantry. She did not linger on the contact or tease the proximity, pulling the measurement taut, noting the corresponding knot, and standing back up in one fluid motion.

"You are soft," Yselle announced, looking him in the eye. "However, you possess good underlying architecture. You have wide enough shoulders to carry the weight. You will put on functional muscle fast once the March stops trying to kill you every five minutes."

Callis stood motionless in the center of the shop, half-naked, shivering in the draft, and feeling dismantled by the rapid assessment.

Yselle walked back to her cluttered bench and pulled down a heavy cuirass constructed of dark, boiled leather that looked like it had seen better days on the road. The armor was dark with oil, scarred by claw marks, and smelled of rendered beast-fat and hot iron.

"This piece was originally made for a local tracker who eventually decided he liked his legs remaining attached to his body and retired back to the inner provinces," Yselle explained, tossing the heavy armor onto the wooden bench. "I will need to recut the shoulders to fit your frame. I will add a reinforced, high collar to protect your neck from bites. Furthermore, I will throw in a waxed-canvas half-cape. The fabric will not keep you warm, but the material will not tear when a crawler grabs you from behind."

"How much for the entire set?" Callis asked, pulling his linen shirt back on with fumbling hands to escape the cold.

"One silver mark and eight coppers," Yselle said. She leaned her hip against the bench, crossing her muscular arms across her chest. She evaluated him again, her sharp eyes dropping deliberately to his bruised jaw, then traveling down to his scraped hands. "That leaves you with two coppers for a cheap ale. Which you look like you need."

"That is fair pricing," Callis said.

"I told you the reason. Mara sent you here." Yselle’s mouth curved into a sharp smirk devoid of any softness, yet rich with a knowing amusement. "I owe Mara Vell a favor. She keeps Derren from buying my cheap, low-grade steel components and selling them to drunk mercenaries." Yselle picked up the mallet again, signaling the end of the transaction. "Come back to the shop at sundown," she ordered, dismissing his presence. "The armor will be fitted. And Vale?"

Callis stopped with his hand on the door latch. "Yes?"

Yselle hit the leather pauldron with the mallet, producing a cracking sound that echoed in the small room. "Try very hard to survive the afternoon. I hate cutting custom leather for a dead man."

Callis stepped back out into the roar of the Ash Forge. His head spun. The morning had started in the dark of the pantry and ended in the heat of the armor forge. Before noon, two women had stripped him down in different ways. Hartsgate did not only take coin. It took blood, pride, sleep, modesty, and whatever illusions a man had managed to carry through the gate. Callis adjusted his collar against the cold, took a deep breath of the soot-filled air, and began to walk. For the first time since arriving, he did not feel like a tourist badly dressed for the weather.

He was broke, bruised, and terrified.

But he was in the system now.