Blood and Belief

A horn blast shattered the dark.

For a breath Cael didn't know where he was. The smell told him before his eyes could—old straw, unwashed men, the sour closed-in reek of a hundred bodies under one low roof. Then the cold came, the shut-in kind that rose through the timber of the bunk and into his spine. Around him men groaned and stirred in the black. Someone coughed, a wet rattling sound that went on and on.

"Up, everyone up!" Sergeant Arvik banged a stick down the row of bunks as he walked the aisle. "Five minutes to the courtyard. Anyone late gets ten lashes."

Cael sat up, and his ribs screamed. The bruise from yesterday's spear butt had spread across his whole left side, purple gone to yellow at the edges. Three days in, and he already knew his body was going to keep getting worse before it got better.

Around him the conscripts scrambled from their bunks, most still in the clothes they'd been taken in. Harvest smocks, a cobbler's apron. One man in the good coat he must have worn to market when the press-gang found him. Cael was no different—salt-stained canvas trousers and a tunic that still reeked of the sea, though three days of this place were fast burying that smell under the rest. Three days ago he had stood at the helm of the Salt Daughter with the wind coming off the water.

Mira was already up—knife tucked away, boots laced, watching the door. She caught his eye and jerked her head. *Move.*

He swung his legs down careful of the left side and stood, palm flat on the bunk until the bruise quieted. The bunk frame creaked. He moved.

***

Outside, the cold bit down hard. The courtyard swallowed them—hundreds of men herded into ragged lines under a sky still black at its edges, their breath rising in a low fog that hung over the yard and wouldn't lift. Frost had set in the churned mud overnight and cracked underfoot. Along the walls a handful of torches guttered.

Cael found a place in the middle, Mira on his left, a thin shaking man on his right. Cold, or fear. Probably both. He kept his shoulders loose, ready for the next shove.

The army moved like a ship with no rudder. Men drifted and crashed into one another, took an order and lost it three steps later. On the Salt Daughter he had run a crew of twelve, stations and tasks, men who knew where they stood when the weather turned. Here men just piled into each other and waited for the next shout.

"Welcome to the Army of Valorheim's Northern March."

Captain Drest stood on the platform above them, his armor polished, every buckle in its place.

"Today, you begin training. Most of you have never held a weapon. That ends now. You have two weeks to learn everything you need to survive. Two weeks before you meet Karthia's invasion at the border."

Two weeks.

Cael's gut dropped. Two weeks to make killers out of fishermen and farmers. On the Salt Daughter it took six months to turn a boy into a deckhand you'd trust in a storm. He figured half these men would be dead before the second week was out, and he didn't count himself clear of that half.

"You'll be sorted into squads. Six men each. Your squad is your family now. You eat and sleep together. You fight together. If you're lucky you don't die alone." No one laughed. "Sergeants, sort them out."

A hand closed on Cael's shoulder and shoved him toward a knot of five strangers. He caught his balance without looking and went where the shove sent him.

"You six are Squad Two," Arvik said. "Learn the names. You'll be shouting them." He moved on down the line.

Cael took their measure and didn't like the count.