Ingrid had walked six miles through the bog to reach the tavern, and she smelled the trouble before she saw it. Two horses stood tied outside, saddles stamped with the lord's iron mark. She stopped in the reeds beside the door. A woman her own age crouched nearby, gathering rushes into a bundle, hands raw from the water. The woman did not look up. That was answer enough. Ingrid had come to buy a guide north to Haalas, where her sister Helga waited in the mountains. She had no papers and no coin. She had a knife and the last of her mother's copper ring wrapped in cloth. She had planned this for a year. Two others had tried the swamp before her. One came back missing three fingers. The other never came back at all, and no one asked where he went. The ridge keeper two miles east would take her through for a price she knew the shape of. She had come to the tavern first because she wanted any other road. Ingrid pushed the door and stepped inside. The barkeep stood behind the counter with a ledger open. Three men in mail sat at the long table. A boy of maybe fourteen knelt on the floor between them, wrists bound with wet rope. The barkeep read a name from the ledger. One of the soldiers counted coins onto the wood. Ingrid understood at once. The barkeep was selling serfs who had run, or serfs he claimed had run. His guide trade was a lure. The barkeep looked up. His eyes moved over her face and settled on her hands, checking for calluses, checking for the mark of the land. She kept her hands loose at her sides. She said she had come the wrong way, looking for the fishmonger. She apologized. She stepped back toward the door. One of the soldiers stood. "Wait," the barkeep said. He asked whose land she worked. He asked for her name. Ingrid ran. She shoved the door and cut left along the boards, then dropped off the planks into the muck. Her feet sank to the ankles. She pushed through a stand of reeds and into the tangled weed beyond, the kind that hid a woman if she stayed low. Behind her a soldier shouted. She heard the wet slap of boots on the dock, then a curse as one of them missed the step. She crawled under the roots of a leaning tree and lay flat. A snake slid off a mossy log two feet from her hand and vanished into the water. She did not move. The boots passed. The boots came back. After a long time, the boots went inside. She waited until dusk in the mud. Her name was in the tavern now. The barkeep had seen her face. By morning the lord's men would ride the low road looking for a woman traveling alone. That left one road east. Ingrid crawled out of the weed and started walking toward the ridge.

Ingrid walked east through the reeds until the ground turned soft and the trees leaned lower. The ridge was still a mile off. She meant to reach it before moonrise, pay the keeper what she had to pay, and be gone by dawn. Then she heard the horses. Not one rider. Four, maybe five, moving fast along the low road behind her. The barkeep had sold her name already. She cut north off the trail into deeper water. Mud sucked at her boots. She pushed through a wall of tangled shrub and dropped flat behind the roots. A whip cracked once, sharp as a snapped bone, and a voice carried across the bog. Short words. Flat. He told his men to spread out and take her alive. He said the village needed to watch what happened next. She knew the voice belonged to the lord himself only because the men answered without question. Ingrid crawled. Green moss and low ferns hid her back. She kept her face near the water and moved toward a stand of dead willows where the ground rose. A horse passed close enough that she smelled it. Fresh droppings steamed on the path six feet from her hand. She held her breath until the rider was gone. She reached the willows and looked back. Lord Byron sat his horse at the edge of the reeds. Grey armor, spiked helm, brown cape wet at the hem. He was not searching. He was waiting. His men were driving her toward him, the way dogs drive a hare. She turned and ran the other way, into the wet. Water rose to her knees, then her thighs. A stone basin sat half-sunk in the muck, old and cracked, vines choking its rim. She used it for cover and pushed past into open water. Something long slid off a log to her left. She saw the ridged back, the yellow side, the slow curl of the tail. An alligator, not ten feet away, watching her the way the lord watched from the bank. She froze. Behind her the men crashed through the shrub. Ahead the animal waited. She had one choice and she made it. She unwrapped her mother's copper ring from the cloth at her belt, drew her knife, and cut her palm. She smeared blood on the ring and threw it hard to her right, past the alligator, into the deeper pool. The animal turned. The water broke white where it struck. Ingrid went left while it fed. She reached a mud bank on the far side and pulled herself up into the swamp grass, shaking, empty-handed. Behind her a soldier shouted that they had lost the track. Lord Byron's whip cracked again, farther off now. She had escaped the net. She had also thrown away the only thing she could have traded to the ridge keeper. The east road was closed to her now. Only the deep swamp was left.