The marsh road was a ribbon of drowned earth and half-rotted timber planks, shivering beneath the hoofbeats of Garran's warhorse. Cold fog clung to the reed-beds, grey as old wool, and the stink of sodden peat and stagnant water was thick enough to sour the throat.
Ahead, the battered palisade of Dreg's Hollow hunched low against the mist, its crooked timbers stitched with old bones and sodden banners. A single tower leaned like a drunk man in a storm. Crows wheeled above it.
Garran of Holtmark reined his gelding at a rise of muddy earth where the road split around a bog pit. His warcloak was spattered, his beard stiff with dried blood and mist sweat, but his pale grey eyes were clear. Behind him, Rannic the Pike-sergeant drew up, a scarred man with one dead eye and the reek of stale wine about him.
"You'd swear by the gods that heap was abandoned," Rannic muttered. He spat into the mud.
"It was," Garran said, watching a scrap of banner flap limply against the tower's roofline. A red handprint on black linen. The old mark of the Hollow's last captain, a mercenary lord dead five winters gone, throat opened in a meat hall over a half-claimed ransom.
The banner should've come down. No one'd had the coin, or nerve, to claim it since.
Garran turned in the saddle, surveying his column.
A hundred and thirty-seven men. A mix of old hireblades, peasant levies, marshland deserters, and one-eyed sellswords. Two battered wagons with grain sacks. Three half-broken mules. One priest.
Brother Harrow, the hedge-priest, rode with his tallow-streaked bone talismans rattling at his belt, muttering gutter prayers to dead saints of the marsh. Garran nodded toward the palisade.
"Take half the men. Strip what's useful. I want those gates shut by sundown."
Rannic grunted. "And if the bastards holding it won't yield?"
"Hang two and burn their kin's cart," Garran said, voice flat. "Spare the girls."
"Kind of you."
"Coin's coin. Raping our own tithes leaves us hungry later."
Rannic grinned, showing a toothless gum. "That's my captain."
They rode into Dreg's Hollow as the mists began to lift.
The village inside the walls was little more than a slop of wattle huts and dung heaps. A few twisted trees, a dry well, and a shrine to some long-dead harvest saint. A line of barefoot villagers stood before the cracked main hall. A squat timber lodge leaning to one side, watched by four surly men in patchwork armor.
Ash Vulture colors.
Garran recognized the bone-stitched grey on their sleeves. Hired blades of Captain Veln, a rival mercenary lord. Garran's coin ran to the Duke of Varrow's Reach; Veln's to a lesser baron of the marches. The two captains had played dagger's edge games along the border for seasons.
One of the Vultures, a bald pike-man, stepped forward. "This is Ash Vulture holding, sellsword. Clear the road."
Garran slid from the saddle, stretching his legs in the mire.
"Funny," he said, "I thought it was the Duke's contract that kept this dungheap fed."
"No Duke here, bastard."
"Captain Garran of Holtmark now. By right of coin and banner." He gestured to his standard, a crude thing. A white antler on blood-black cloth, carried by a peasant lad half his size.
The Vultures hesitated. Garran caught the flicker in the bald one's eyes, the weighing of numbers. Garran's men outnumbered them three-to-one.
A woman's voice cracked from the hall. "Enough."
A figure stepped from the shadows.
Lady Avice, widow of Lord Renmere, once holder of these lands before the Black March feud. She wore a torn grey cloak, her hair plaited in mourning, and the hard look of one who'd seen too many pyres.
"Captain Garran," she greeted, voice dry. "Come to rob us too?"
"Lady," Garran inclined his head. "I come by order of Duke Renald, Warden of the South March, bearer of the Iron Seal, and coin-right holder to Dreg's Hollow."
Her mouth twitched. "Show me the seal."
Garran pulled a thin leather pouch from his belt and drew out the strip of lead stamped with the duke's mark: a crowned stag, one antler snapped. He let it hang before her.
Avice's gaze lingered on it. Then she turned to the Ash Vultures.
"Drop your arms and leave."
"But"
"I'll not have blood on my land. Not until frost."
The Vultures scowled, but the odds were plain. Garran's men had strung longbows, the shafts barbed and black-fletched. One by one, the mercenaries backed off, moving toward the broken palisade.
"Tell Captain Veln," Garran called after them, "next time he posts his dogs in my yard, I'll send their heads back in a sack."
By dusk, the gates were shut, and Garran's men claimed the crude barracks by torchlight. The air stank of old straw, piss, and damp timber.
Brother Harrow built a crude altar from stone and bone fragments near the well, his prayers thick with mud-cursed names. The peasants whispered of ghost lights in the marsh. A man found an old soldier's bones in the well bucket. Garran had them tossed in a ditch.
Rannic brought him the count. Thirteen sacks of moldy grain, two casks of sour ale, and a half-dozen usable spears.
"Better than nothing," Rannic grunted. "Peasants can boil shoe leather."
A low whistle sounded from the palisade.
A sentry pointed toward the mist-drenched marsh.
A single figure approached, a rider under a torn white banner.
Garran's stomach tightened.
Only one man rode with a white banner after sundown in these marches.
Parley. Or blood-oath challenge.
And in the marches, they meant much the same.
He gripped his sword hilt and watched the rider approach, the fog parting in tattered threads, as the dead marsh called its own.