The Conscripts
Dust kicked up by horseshoes seeped through the cracks in the plank walls.
I did not stop the hand that was slicing herbs. The dulled blade of the herb cutter rang against the tough, dried stalks of wild ginger in a steady rhythm — *swish, swish* — each cut even and precise. My fingertips never wavered. I slowed my breathing and listened, tracking the sounds outside and the drifting patterns of the dust through the wall.
"Hey! Anyone in there!"
Along with the rough shout, the plank door rattled violently.
Unbarred, the door gave way easily under the man's heavy boot. The smell of sweat, half-dried horse dung, and the metallic tang of rusted iron came pouring into the narrow herb room.
Filling the doorway was the captain of a private conscription squad.
The man wore a leather armor slick with old grease, and in his hand he carried a barbed iron whip. His hostile gaze swept the room in turn — the piles of dried herbs stacked in the corner, the rabbit pelts hanging on the wall, and finally me, hunched over the herb cutter.
"So there was a young one after all."
He lifted his chin and rapped the table roughly with the tip of his whip.
"Get up. You're subject to the lord's conscription same as anyone. The imperial martial law means the southern defense force needs bodies, so spare me the excuses and come along."
I set down the herb cutter's handle slowly and rose from my seat.
I bent my spine into an exaggerated stoop, shifted my weight onto my right foot, and staggered upright like a man losing his balance. Then I released the itch I'd been suppressing at the back of my throat and let out a dry, hacking cough.
*Kholk, kholk.*
I pressed a worn scrap of hemp cloth from my leather pouch over my mouth. As I crushed my lips against the bandage on my palm and wheezed for breath, the man's brow furrowed, open disgust written across his face.
"What is this, a lung-rot case?"
"I'm sorry, sir. I've got a chronic ailment — my lungs are rotting away. They drove me out of the Imperial Capital over it. I came here to recuperate."
I kept my voice low, letting out a coarse rasp.
"I can't march, can't train with a sword — I can't even stand for half a day at a time. Drag me to the camp and I won't last three days. I'd be nothing but dead weight."
"Damn it all. Looks fine on the outside, rotten through the middle."
The man spat on the floor. In his eyes I was nothing more and nothing less than a frail herb-gatherer wasting away with sickness. To a conscription officer, a consumptive who would collapse face-first on the road mid-march was a useless burden — nothing but a mouth stealing rations from better men.
Just then, urgent footsteps sounded outside the herb room, and the village chief's voice came rushing in.
"My lord! Not Toma! That young man is an invalid — he takes to his bed every other day, he's too sick to work!"
The chief came bursting into the herb room, panting hard. Behind him trailed old Goran and three or four of the village men, faces drained white. The chief dug through his breast pocket, scraped together two crude silver coins and a handful of copper, and pressed them into the conscription captain's hand.
"Take this, my lords — buy yourselves a round of drinks with it. I beg you, spare the young man at the herb room. Without him, the village elders have no way to get their medicine."
The conscription captain turned the silver coins over in his palm, then curled his lips into a vicious sneer.
"Trying to buy your way out of conscription with a few coins? Do you take the lord's decree for a joke?"
Shoving the silver into his belt pouch, the man raised his whip high.
"In exchange for sparing this sick wretch, I'll take three more men from your village. Fail to fill the quota, and I'll burn this whole village to the ground. Keep that in mind."
"M-my lord! What are you saying! All we have left are two able men to work the fields!"
"Silence!"
He shoved the chief roughly in the chest and strode out the door.
Outside, on the village commons, the residents were already kneeling in the dirt, trembling in terror. The conscripts were loading sacks of grain and livestock onto their wagons, seizing whatever they could lay hands on. In one corner, a boy of fourteen or so — bound hand and foot with thick rope — was sobbing.
Old Goran's grandson. Badol.
"Grandfather! Save me! I don't want to go!"
"Badol! My lord, please — not my grandson! He's never even held a sword in his life!"
Old Goran crawled across the ground and clutched at the captain's leg.
*Thwack!*
The captain's iron-shod boot drove into the old man's chest without a shred of mercy. Goran shrieked and rolled across the dirt.
"Fourteen is plenty old enough to haul carts in a mine! If you can't fill the quota, then hand over your kin — that's the law!"
The captain picked the boy up and hurled him into the back of the wagon like so much cargo.
"We camp tonight at the valley's mouth! If two more able-bodied men aren't dug out of hiding by dawn, this little runt goes straight to the slave mines in the south!"
Hooves thundered as the conscription squad withdrew toward the edge of the village, dragging off their plundered grain and the boy.
What filled the commons afterward was nothing but the wailing of a mother robbed of her child and the anguished groans of the old.
I stood in the doorway, staring at the scene in silence.
The village was paying the price for my survival. The step I'd taken back, wielding my sickness as a shield, had come back around as a child's shackles.
Beneath the bandage wrapped around my right palm, three dark red lines of blood pulsed.
* * *
Deep in the night.
The darkness of Barum Valley lay thick and heavy, as if ink had been poured over the world.
At the village's edge, beneath a sheer granite cliff, the conscription squad's camp was pitched. Around the bonfire hung the smell of meat roasting on iron spits and the acrid bite of strong liquor.
"Hwahaha! This valley turned out worth the trip. Hand that little runt over to the mine slavers and I'll pocket a good twenty silver easy."
"Snag two more bodies tomorrow morning and this month's quota is done."
The seven conscripts clinked their bottles together, snickering.
Ten paces from the bonfire, lashed to a wagon wheel, the boy lay slumped in exhaustion, a gag stuffed in his mouth. Dirt clung to his tear-streaked cheeks.
From the shadow of a boulder atop the cliff, I looked down at them.
The hood of my old brown robe was pulled deep over my face.
Intervening here was a direct violation of the fundamental principles of isolation duty. A hidden one is supposed to quiet the breath and wait for the moment — because whenever one of us steps into external violence, traces are always left behind.
But I could not let them live.
If they trampled the village tomorrow morning and dragged the boy away, the peace of Barum Valley would be shattered beyond repair. The villagers would scatter, and the lord's watch network would come raking through this valley on a regular schedule.
And above all else —
A memory surfaced, unbidden: something Seraphina had said to me during the campaign, on those nights when I bandaged her wounds by firelight.
'Even at the moment your own body breaks and you cough up blood, the instant you see someone moaning before your eyes, you will always reach out to soothe their wounds. That is simply who you are.'
Perhaps she had been right.
The foolishness of being unable to turn away from another's pain, even as I fell. It was the flaw carved into my soul — and its limit.
I stepped down onto the crevices in the rock face and descended in silence.
Not a single branch cracked under my feet.
One of the conscripts, gnawing at his meat beside the fire, stopped mid-bite and tilted his head.
"Huh? What's with the wind?"
The temperature was plunging. The bonfire's red flames guttered and dimmed to a bluish pall, and a sheet of white frost came racing across the grass at their feet.
"Wh-what the hell? Why is it suddenly freezing?"
The men scrambled up, clutching their sword hilts.
Out of the darkness, a shadow in a brown robe walked slowly forward.
"Who goes there!"
The conscription captain drew his longsword.
I did not answer.
I tore the hempen bandage roughly from my right hand. Of the three curses sealed beneath the skin of my palm, the mana of Absolute Zero — the one that froze blood in the veins — surged up along the sacred mark and broke through to the surface.
Reverse-release of the curses sealed within — Absolute Zero unleashed
The sole means of expelling another's curse, once taken into myself through atonement, back out into the world.
I peeled back the first layer of the suppression line within my body. The skin of my palm bleached bone-white, and a frigid chill bloomed upward like rising mist.
Paaaa—
There was no sound. Only an absolute silence, in which the space for a hundred paces around froze over, white and seamless.
The near-black cold crept along the ground and closed over the conscripts' ankles.
"Kgh—!"
The scream died inside the man's throat, his very vocal cords frozen solid.
The conscription captain, eyes rolling white as he turned to flee, hardened into a white ice statue with his longsword still raised — frozen mid-swing. His flesh frosted over, his blood crystallized, and a thick rime of frost-flowers bloomed across the surface of his iron armor.
The span of three breaths — no more.
The bonfire froze solid into a hunk of blue ice, and all seven men, along with the horses they'd ridden in on, froze without a single flicker of life left in them. Only the rear of a wagon, shoved by the shockwave, skidded out beyond the freezing line and smashed apart in the brush.
*Crrk.*
I shook out my hand lightly.
The frozen statues of men, unable to withstand the expansion within, crumbled like shards of fine glass and collapsed to the ground. A cold, quiet erasure — not one drop of blood spilled.
"Hiik!"
Beside the broken wheel, the boy Badol was tied where they'd left him, drained of all color, shaking like a leaf.
I walked over to him. When I touched the rope with my frozen fingertips, it snapped apart with a limp sigh, crumbled by the cold.
"Go home."
My voice came out low and sunken from within the shadow of my hood.
"You saw nothing. A beast of the forest passed through — that is all."
The boy rose on trembling legs, scrambling up like a crawling thing, and bolted into the darkness toward the village without once looking back.
The camp stood empty.
All that remained on the ground was a vast, white circle of frost — a mark that would never be erased.
* * *
"Khehk!"
The moment I slipped into the crevice between the cliffs, a hundred paces from the camp, the price I had held back crashed over my whole body.
The feeling drained completely from my fingertips and toes, and my knees buckled. Both hands, braced against the ground, shook as if in seizure.
A cold like an ice pick drove up from the deepest reaches of my lungs.
*Kholk! Kholk!*
With every cough, frozen clots of blood scattered across the gravel, riding clouds of white breath. My lips had gone livid and stiff, and my heartbeat slowed to an abnormal, laborious thud.
This was the price of reverse-releasing Veronica's curse.
Every time I dragged the malice sealed inside me out into the open air, the fusion line within my body was drawn violently taut.
With shaking hands, I pulled the bottle of painkillers from my coat.
The third bottle — the last one left.
I pulled the stopper and let two drops fall beneath my tongue. As the numbing, acrid juice of the poisonous herb slid down my throat, the searing agony in my frozen veins slowly sank into a dull, distant ache.
Gasping, I looked down at my right hand.
My fingers had stiffened and would not open fully. The last joints of all five fingers were locked rigid, twitching with fine tremors.
I couldn't even promise that I'd be able to grip a pestle and grind herbs tomorrow morning.
My calculations — that I could hold out until this autumn — had come apart entirely.
There was no telling how much time a single Return had burned away. I knew only this much for certain: one layer of the fusion line within me had collapsed, and the limit of my remaining time had leapt from the far side of autumn to just before my eyes.
I leaned back against the rock face and steadied my breathing, slow and even.
With fingers gone wooden, I rewrapped the hempen bandage around my right hand, cinching it tight as if wringing it out.
It felt like having lost a finger.
But there was no regret.
The village was safe, and the valley's hiding place would go undisturbed for the time being.
I hauled myself upright and, facing the night wind that funneled between the cliffs, set my heavy steps toward the herb room buried in darkness.