Merrick Ternwell's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Merrick Ternwell had crossed four provinces hunting the soldiers who burned his family, and he had learned to hear trouble before he saw it. Tonight his wolf heard it first. The lean gray beast stiffened at the fire's edge, old scars ridging under its fur, ears pricked toward the dark. Merrick set down his cup. He trusted that growl more than any town watch. A man staggered out of the trees and fell. Blood soaked his side. He was young, maybe a deserter, and the horses behind him in the dark meant someone wanted him badly. Helping him could bring the same soldiers Merrick had spent a year dodging. Turning him away was cleaner. Merrick had buried enough strangers to know the difference between cruelty and caution. He chose wrong, or right. He knelt and pressed his cloak to the wound. "Guard the tree line," he told the wolf. The animal melted into shadow. Merrick worked fast, stitching with a trader's thread. The man's hand opened as he fainted, and a ring rolled into the firelight. Merrick picked it up. Silver, heavy, a regimental crest stamped deep. He knew that crest. He had seen it on the collars of the men who torched his home. His hand shook. The fugitive wore the mark of Merrick's enemies. Shouts rose beyond the trees. Torchlight bobbed closer. Merrick could not move a bleeding man alone, and he could not fight a company. He needed a door that opened for no one and a man who owed him his life. He took out a small brass whistle and blew three short notes into the dark. It carried farther than any shout. Then he waited, blade across his knee, the ring burning cold in his fist. The man who answered did not come quietly. Rodrick Greybanks shoved through the brush, white beard jutting, a lantern in one fist and a pistol in the other. He had run contraband past every port in the region before age grounded him. He had also pulled Merrick from a flooded hold years back, and Merrick had returned the favor twice over since. "You pick fine nights, Ternwell," Rodrick snapped. His eyes found the blood, the fugitive, the torches. He did not ask questions a smuggler already knew the answers to. "Soldiers?" "A debt," Merrick said. "Yours. I'm calling it." Rodrick spat, then grinned without warmth. "Then stop bleeding on my ground and lift his legs." They carried the fugitive into a culvert Rodrick knew, out of the torchlight, as hooves pounded the camp Merrick left burning behind them. The soldiers would find a dead fire and nothing else. By dawn the fugitive breathed steady in Rodrick's cellar. Merrick sat beside him, turning the ring. The man carried the crest of the regiment that killed his family. When he woke, he would answer for it. Merrick's hunt had just found its first thread.