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Chapter 1246: The Ship to the South

As White had said, nobody waited for Manfeld once the coach pulled away. He stood in the dock crowd surrounded by strangers and felt nothing in particular about it — he had not helped them for gratitude, and their absence did not change what he had done.

He found the registration desk by following the banner that stretched above the processing lane, a flag visible from fifty paces. The crowd was large but the flow was orderly: iron bars segmented the queue into a temporary passage, a single channel that pushed people forward slowly, shoulder to shoulder, toward the desk and through.

A Graycastle soldier received him. All the clerks wore the same uniform. It was easy to pick them from the crowd.

“Name?”

“Manfeld Castein.”

“Identity? Criminal record? Expertise?”

Manfeld answered cleanly, omitting his family background, keeping to facts. He had barely begun to describe his skills — he could read, he could write, he had spent years in his father’s blacksmith workshop and understood metalwork — when the soldier cut him off at the first two items.

“That’ll do. Trestle No. 6. This is your boarding pass. Don’t lose it. Next.”

Someone’s elbow was already in his back and he was out of the queue before he understood that the process was finished.

He stood on the dock side of the barrier and looked at the iron plate in his hand. Small enough to fit his palm, with a rope threaded through a hole at one end so it could hang around the neck. Numbers and symbols engraved on the surface, pressed with a precision that required proper dies, not free-hand work.

A blacksmith could make one such plate from scrap in an afternoon. To make a thousand, you needed a thousand afternoons — or proper tooling and a systematic operation. He had grown up in his father’s workshop. He understood what volume production of metalwork required. The materials alone, the dies, the stamps, the labor — for the number of people moving through this port each day, the quantity of these plates being produced and distributed somewhere implied resources on a scale he could not fit to any single merchant house or noble treasury he had ever heard of.

This was Graycastle’s wealth made visible in the simplest possible object: an iron plate hung from a rope.

The Kingdom of Dawn had once been the richest nation on the continent. Manfeld filed that thought away without knowing quite what to do with it.

He boarded a three-masted ship at Trestle 6 and was shown to a cabin shared by ten people. He had expected a warehouse floor. The cabin was cramped and the smell was immediate and unpleasant, but there was a bunk with his number stenciled above it, and that was more than he had anticipated.

He lasted perhaps two minutes before the smell drove him out.

On deck, catching cold sea air, he heard it: a voice — two voices — muffled, from somewhere below. A sound of struggle, something being dragged against resistance. The deck was half-empty, the sailors all working aloft, nobody else nearby. Manfeld stood still and listened to make sure.

He went toward the sound.

The hallway below led to a storage room at the far end. He pressed his ear to the door and heard it clearly now: movement, the sharp intake of breath that came with restraint, something being forced down. He stepped back and put his shoulder into the door.

It opened.

The middle-aged noble from the coach stood at the center of the storage room. His two servants had two young women pressed toward the floor, their wrists being bound, strips of cloth already tied across their mouths. The women’s eyes found Manfeld and stayed there.

“Well.” The noble looked at him with mild amusement, as though he had walked in on a card game. “The righteous fool from the coach. I’m Mick Kinley. And you’re — ?”

“Manfeld Castein.” He had said his name three times today. He said it a fourth. He watched the hope in the women’s eyes falter at the word noble, watched their struggles slow.

“Castein. Never heard of it.” Mick Kinley shrugged. “Since you’re here, I’ll share. You’ll have to wait your turn.”

“Release them.”

“They’re escaped slaves,” Kinley said, voice dropping to the reasonable tone of a man explaining self-evident facts. “Found them on the ship. Their master obviously didn’t mean to let them go. Escaped slaves are property. Property has no recourse. You understand this.” He spread his hands. “Or are you going to tell me that everyone doing it doesn’t make it right? I heard that speech already.”

Manfeld kept his voice level. “This ship is sailing to Graycastle.”

“Yes.”

“The Wimbledons abolished slavery. The moment these women stepped aboard, they ceased to be slaves.”

A beat of silence.

“And the second screening,” Manfeld continued. “A witch who detects lies will be present. If I tell them what happened in this room, they will believe me. Will you risk that?”

“What are you going to do if I refuse?” Kinley’s voice was quiet now, and quiet was worse.

“You’ll have to beat me first.” Manfeld rolled up his sleeves. “I’m a kn—”

Kinley threw himself forward before the word was finished.

It was quick, and it was not a fair fight. The storage room was barely large enough for three men to stand in. Kinley’s servants had formal training and used the walls and corners against him. By the time it was over Manfeld was on the floor with his back against a crate and one cheek pressing against the rough planking, and Kinley was standing over him, breathing controlled, adjusting his cuffs.

“All that fine rhetoric.” Kinley crouched to look at him eye-level. “Swords only as sharp as your words, apparently.” He rose, turned to his servants. “Leave the women. This fool can have them. Slaves will always be slaves, wherever they wash up.” He stepped over Manfeld’s legs. “What a waste of a morning.”

The door slammed.

The storage room was quiet. The three of them — Manfeld on the floor, two women still crouched against the far wall — sat in the stuffy dark for a while without moving.

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