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Chapter 339: Assassins

When Vader stripped off his patchwork coat and pulled on the new uniform, the warmth settled into him at once.

The outer layer was stiff, oil-dark leather; the lining was cotton, dense enough to keep the cold from finding a seam. Together the two materials cost several silver royals at any market he had ever worked. The uniform’s cut echoed the city hall clerks’ — same fitted silhouette, same close collar — but the color was worlds away: pure black, with white piping at shoulder, cuff, and throat. When the fifteen of them stood in rank again, chests lifted without a word being spoken.

“Not bad.” Carter smiled — a rare, satisfied expression on his usually neutral face. “Now. Follow me.”

Snow was still coming down.

This was Vader’s first autumn snowfall, and he had not yet accustomed himself to it. In Valencia, snow came perhaps once a year, a shallow dusting that lasted two days at most. The children loved it. They would line the streets with lopsided snowmen and ambush each other with volleys of packed ice, and the whole neighborhood smelled of wet wool and wood smoke. For the children it was a holiday.

For the adults it was a week of wet shoes and moldy leather, empty shop fronts, and roofs groaning under accumulated weight. The patrol teams would lock themselves in the nearest tavern and pass the shift by the fire, warming their hands on clay mugs and flirting with the barmaids. No one could blame them.

None of that had any place in Border Town.

Every street was cleared of snow by midmorning — scraped to the cobbles and swept to either side of the road. The city hall had been hiring for this since autumn, daily and monthly contracts both, and the men who did it took the work seriously. Even now, in a steady snowfall, the streets were full: cloaks, straw hats, quick purposeful steps. The town smelled of coal smoke and fresh bread and cold stone, the ordinary smell of a place going about its business. If someone had lifted all that snow away and set it down somewhere else, you would have taken the scene for midsummer.

He would not have believed it if he had not walked those streets himself. A frontier town at the edge of the kingdom had no right to feel more alive than Valencia. Except for the absence of a chapel and its bell tower, he might have convinced himself he was in a real city.

The wharf came into view quickly. Ten or more sailboats were tied along the Redwater, and several hundred people already clustered near the shore. Vader recognized the scene before he could name it — the same press of bodies, the same hunched shoulders and uncertain faces, the same smell of long travel and thin clothes. He had stood on that dock himself once, arriving from the Eastern Region, a refugee like any other.

There’s no such thing as once. You become the same person as many times as the world requires.

“Permission to speak — are those people—”

“Refugees from the South and the North.” Carter’s voice was crisp, matter-of-fact. “His Royal Highness sent teams to bring them in so they survive the winter. Your job is to assist city hall in maintaining order and process them through the inspection checkpoint — name, origin, skills, literacy. Once that’s done, quarantine and register them. The police are still few in number; the First Army will back you up. But this work belongs to you going forward.”

“Yes, sir!”

It sounded straightforward enough — direct people into a queue, hand out porridge, keep the line moving. Vader posted himself at the front of the checkpoint and raised his voice until it carried over the crowd’s low murmur.

“What’s your name? Where are you from? What are you good at? Can you read?”

Each refugee who reached him was routed through a brief interview with the city hall clerks, who transcribed the answers in rough shorthand. Everyone understood the record was preliminary — once people were settled, the clerks would circle back to verify. Those with particular skills or learning would be moved into the inner city on priority. Vader had gone through exactly this intake himself, so he knew how it felt from the other side of the table, and he kept his voice even.

Then — commotion behind him.

He turned. A man in a fur-lined gown was making his way onto the dock under the escort of a small group of guards. Grey hair blowing in the snow. The people in fine clothes clustered around him would be the city hall seniors. The feudal lord himself — Roland Wimbledon, fourth prince of Greycastle — had come down to the wharf in the middle of a snowfall to watch the intake.

Vader had never once imagined a high noble rising before dawn in a blizzard to observe something a clerk could have reported in two sentences. Most of the nobles he had served under would sooner have spent the morning in bed, warm, letting the servants worry.

He made a note of it and turned back to the line.

“My name is Jockmau. I’m from the Northern Lands. My — my speciality is farming. I can’t read.”

The city hall clerk checked the box without looking up. “Okay. Pass on.”

But Vader had seen the man’s eyes.

He had watched enough faces over six years in the Valencia patrol to know the difference between reverence and its opposite. The man called Jockmau glanced at the prince the way a knife-thrower sizes up a target — not afraid, not curious. Just measuring.

“Hold it.”

“W-What’s the matter?”

“You’re a farmer. Tell me: which month does winter wheat go in?”

The clerk looked up at last, mildly exasperated. “I’m running a preliminary registration. I don’t have time to distinguish truth from fabrication for every single one of them. Didn’t Sir Carter explain the process clearly? You’re here to maintain order.”

Jockmau closed his mouth the moment the official spoke — relief too quick, too practiced. Seriously. An idiot would have held his ground.

Vader pressed on, ignoring the clerk. “The way you speak — that’s not a Northern accent. It sounds like the middle kingdom, somewhere near the capital. Which town in the North did you say you were from? I know the region.”

Jockmau said nothing. The silence stretched.

“Your clothes are wrong, too. Even if you somehow didn’t freeze in the North wearing that, your fingers would have frostbite by now. The cold up there doesn’t forgive thin gloves.” Vader reached out and caught the man’s right hand. The fingers were intact, unswollen, the skin smooth and dry. “Where are your gloves? Did you throw them away because you noticed it was warmer down here?”

By now the checkpoint staff had gone still. Lying about a skill was one thing — men lied about skills to get better assignments. But lying about your origin was a different order of problem.

“Where did you come from?”

Jockmau’s jaw tightened. His hand moved to his breast pocket. He produced a small red pellet, slapped it into his mouth, and dropped his shoulder like a man stepping into a brawl.

“Out of my way.”

Heat erupted from Vader’s wrist — scalding, sudden, wrong. His reflexes fired and his hands tried to drive the man to the ground, but his body went nowhere. Jockmau’s shoulder came up and Vader left the earth entirely, his whole weight thrown sideways by a single shrug, as though he were made of straw.

He hit the ground hard. Pain cracked up his back — damn it, the wound — and he tasted copper. He spat, shook the grey from his eyes, and rolled upright. Jockmau was already gone from where he had stood.

Four or five more men erupted from the crowd. They moved like nothing human — vaulting the temporary railing the city hall had set up, covering ground in quick, clean strides, threading between the frozen refugees with the ease of demonic beasts that knew exactly which direction to run. Their destination was obvious. The prince, his guards, the city hall officials standing behind him.

Vader had seen what the berserker pills did to a man’s body. He knew what those hands would do when they reached the prince’s detail.

They didn’t reach.

A volley of shots cracked across the wharf — that dry, definitive percussion he recognized from the First Army’s exercises against demonic beasts. White smoke bloomed in the cold air ahead of Roland Wimbledon, drifting and dispersing. When it thinned, Jockmau’s head had burst open like a lantern struck against stone.

The others went down in the same volley.

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