Chương 5: Chapter 6: Room To Ruin

I woke late for the first time in years and nearly panicked when I saw grey light spilling through the loft boards. My body felt wrong. Heavy. Not injured exactly, though the bite near my wrist still pulsed dully beneath the bandage and the bruise along my thigh had spread into a deep ache whenever I moved too quickly. It was exhaustion more than pain.

Three days of labour followed by hunting at night had hollowed something out inside me, and for several long breaths I lay staring upward while the sounds of the timber yard drifted faintly below like noises from another life. The men were already at work. The absence of their bodies around me made the loft feel abandoned, as if I had slept through the end of something and woken after the sensible world had moved on without me. The pouch beneath my mattress felt heavier than the axe now. That frightened me.

Until recently, coin had been simple: you earned enough to eat or you did not. But once numbers began growing, they changed shape inside the mind, so that every purchase became a wound, every expense became a question, and every coin saved began whispering about all the ways it might still be lost. FUNDS CONFIRMED Your current funds are 2 copper and 12 iron pieces. I had crossed two copper and instead of feeling rich, I felt hunted by arithmetic. The yard was already awake by the time I climbed down from the loft.

Men hauled wet timber through the mud while river fog clung low across the Greywash like pale smoke. Somewhere near the lower stacks, a foreman was screaming about warped blackpine lengths left uncovered overnight, and the smell of damp bark, sweat, and river water sat thick in the air, familiar enough that I hated how quickly it began to feel temporary. I worked poorly that morning. Not weakly, which would have been easier to explain. Poorly.

My body still moved well enough, perhaps too well, but my thoughts wandered between the forest and the pouch beneath my bedroll, and I kept measuring the day against hunting without meaning to. Nine iron. One bad ridgefox hide nearly equal to a day's labour. An Iron kill worth almost a week. Numbers circled endlessly through my head until even the rhythm of the axe seemed shaped by them. The overseer noticed before midday.

Henrick was a broad man whose face always looked faintly disappointed even when satisfied, and he had worked the yard long enough to tell laziness from injury, injury from fear, and fear from the sort of distraction that got men crushed between rolling trunks. I had worked under him since I was old enough to lift kindling, and he rarely wasted words unless they carried weight. When the meal bell sounded, he jerked his head toward the far stacks rather than joining the others near the cookfires.

I followed him through the yard in silence. The blackpine pile stood near the river edge where the mud deepened and the heavier timber could be dragged straight toward the barges. Rain had darkened the bark nearly black. Henrick rested one boot against a split length and studied me for a while before speaking.

"You're cutting differently," he said. I said nothing, because men like Henrick did not usually ask questions they had not already started answering. He looked from me to the blackpine and back again.

"That last stack should've taken you and Dorrin near half the afternoon."

"You did it before midday," he continued. I kept my hands loose around the axe haft.

"The grain was cleaner." Henrick made a low sound through his nose, and the sound carried more suspicion than agreement. For a moment I wondered whether Talvek had spoken to him. I wondered whether the guards had been asking questions after the Crimson Elf, whether my healing had become noticeable enough for men to whisper about it when I left the yard, and whether the charcoal veins beneath my sleeve had already become someone else's story.

Instead, Henrick sighed through his nose and rubbed a calloused hand across his jaw.

"I'm moving you permanently to the blackpine crews." I blinked once. Henrick did not wait for me to speak.

"They earn more. Twenty iron a day. Harder work, better timber, same board upstairs, and meals stay reduced through the yard." Twenty iron. The number struck me harder than it should have. A month earlier I might have accepted before he finished speaking, and most men in Dunmere would have done the same. Twenty iron for steady work was not wealth, but it was safety, or close enough that poor men learned not to question the difference. Warm meals. A roof.

A place in the yard that did not depend on whether something in the forest decided to tear your throat open before dawn. And yet all I could think about was the tusk-hare. Fifty-nine iron. One hunt. One miserable, bloody, nearly fatal hunt. My thoughts shamed me even as they came. I looked around the yard at the bent backs and swollen hands of the men hauling timber through the mud. Honest work. Endless work.

Most would never touch silver in their lives, and most would break slowly and call it surviving because there was nothing else to name it. Henrick mistook my silence for uncertainty.

"You've got the strength for it now," he said.

"Or close enough. Few more months and you'll be leading crews instead of dragging behind them." His voice softened only slightly, which made it worse. He thought he was offering me a future. A few more months. I imagined the loft above the yard, the smell of wet wool and old boots, and the endless splitting of timber from dawn until dusk while my axe grew sharper and the forest grew farther away.

I imagined myself at thirty with ruined shoulders and steady wages, grateful each winter merely to still be useful, and it was not a bad future by Dunmere standards. That was what made it so difficult to breathe around. My chest tightened unexpectedly. Not fear exactly. Weakness. A kind of inward collapse that came whenever pressure gathered too heavily around me.

I could feel it clearly now, the same thing that had nearly frozen me before the Crimson Elf, the same thing that made difficult choices feel like standing knee-deep in river current while the water pulled harder with every second. Part of me wanted Henrick to decide for me. I wanted the roof, the meals, the certainty, and someone older and wiser to say this was enough. I wanted to be relieved of choice before choice could become my fault.

Instead, exhausted and aching and half-drunk on the memory of fifty-nine iron, I heard myself say, "No." Find this and other great novels on the author's preferred platform. Support original creators! Henrick stared. The yard noise seemed strangely distant for a few breaths.

"You refusing?" I nodded before I could stop myself, and his face settled into the weary shape of a man watching a familiar mistake arrive in a younger body.

"Boy," he said slowly, "do you understand what I just offered you?" I swallowed, because I did understand, and that made the refusal worse.

"Yes." Henrick's eyes narrowed.

"Then why in the frozen pits would you refuse it?" Because one hunt paid more. Because the forest had changed me. Because labour suddenly felt too small for the hunger growing inside me. Because I was tired and young and my will bent under pressure instead of holding steady against it. I said none of those things. I only looked past Henrick toward the blackpine, the carts, the river mud, and the timber stacks that had raised me without ever intending to free me.

"I'm leaving the yard." Henrick looked at me for a long while after that, not angry, which would have been easier, but tired, as though he had seen boys make foolish decisions before and already knew how most of those stories ended.

"You've got until sunset to clear the loft," he said finally, and then he walked away. The reality of what I had done settled over me slowly across the rest of the day. Every familiar thing in the yard suddenly felt temporary. The cookfires, the stacked timber, the shouting by the river carts, and even the loft above the workshop where I had slept half my life now seemed to belong to someone else already.

I worked until my shoulders ached, accepted the day's wage without trusting myself to look at Henrick, and packed my few things into a bundle small enough to insult the years it represented. Orven's gloves went into the bundle first. The knife and broken spear followed. The pouch stayed beneath my shirt, where each step made it remind me what I had chosen instead of certainty. PAYMENT RECEIVED You received 9 iron pieces for your final day of labour in the timber yard.

Your current funds have increased from 2 copper and 12 iron pieces to 2 copper and 21 iron pieces. The river crossing had changed while I worked. I noticed it first through the noise. Dunmere was rarely quiet, but now the town seemed swollen beyond itself. Strange accents drifted through the market lanes, bargemen shouted over one another near the ferries, and merchants argued beside overloaded carts trapped along the eastern road.

Part of the main dock had splintered during the night storms, leaving only a few crossings operational, and eastern traffic had begun piling into the town faster than it could leave. The taverns were overflowing before sunset. Every room, meal, stable space, and patch of floor had become something men with coin would fight over. I had chosen independence on the very day shelter became expensive. I saw elves before I reached the market square. Not nobles.

Not the pale silver-haired figures from travelling songs and carved temple walls. These were common folk, road-worn and mud-stained like anyone else. One woman with ember-red hair sat sharpening a curved skinning knife beside a cartwheel while faint warmth shimmered above her hands each time the blade passed the stone. Two men nearby argued in clipped eastern accents over ferry costs while unloading bundles of woven reedcloth from a wagon.

Their eyes held strange flecks of green and gold that caught the lanternlight oddly. Under different circumstances I might have stared longer, but instead I kept thinking about the loft. Not mine anymore. The thought followed me all the way to The Cataract. The tavern stood near the western dock road where travellers usually stayed before crossing north. I had entered it perhaps twice in my life before that night, both times carrying messages for the yard.

Warmth struck me immediately as I stepped inside, along with smoke, wet wool, roasting onions, and the thick roar of too many people crammed into too little space. Every table was full. A serving girl squeezed past carrying bowls of stew while somewhere deeper inside a man laughed loudly enough to sound drunk already. Cloaks hung dripping beside the hearths, packs and travel chests crowded the walls, and the entire place felt swollen and restless, like a barge taking water faster than men could bail it out.

I approached the counter carefully. The innkeeper barely glanced at me at first.

"No common room space left." I tightened my grip on the bundle under my arm.

"I need a room." That made him look up. His eyes swept over my patched clothes, the axe at my side, the healing bruises along my jaw, and the bundle tucked under one arm.

"Forty-eight iron." I thought I had misheard him.

"For a night?"

"Dock's damaged," he said with a shrug.

"Eastern road backed half a day already. Includes supper and breakfast." I stared at him.

"Rooms were twenty-four." The innkeeper's expression did not change.

"They were." Something inside me tightened painfully. Forty-eight iron meant nearly half a copper coin, more than five ordinary days of labour after food, and all of it for one night. I stood there too long holding the pouch beneath my cloak while people pressed and moved around me. My fingers found the edge of the copper pieces through the cloth, smooth and cold and impossibly precious. Copper still felt sacred to me. Large. Permanent.

The idea of breaking one apart for a single room made resistance rise instinctively in my chest, irrational and immediate, like being asked to carve flesh from my own hand. I might never see another copper again. The thought came suddenly and with complete sincerity, not because it was true, but because poverty teaches permanence to every loss. Behind me someone swore loudly about ferry delays while chairs scraped across the floorboards.

Somewhere near the hearth an eastern merchant argued about stable fees, and the entire tavern buzzed with movement, pressure, and coin changing hands faster than I could think. Then I looked toward the door and imagined sleeping outside with money in my pouch, an Iron axe at my side, and no yard roof above me for the first time in memory. The cost of the room was obscene. So was the cost of being seen without one. Slowly, painfully, I untied the pouch.

The copper coin landed in the innkeeper's palm with a heavier sound than seemed possible for something so small. He counted out the remaining iron without interest and slid a key across the counter.

"Third floor. End of the hall." I took the change carefully, almost angrily, as though the pieces themselves had betrayed me by becoming smaller. PAYMENT SPENT You spent 48 iron pieces on a private room, supper, and breakfast at The Cataract. Your current funds have decreased from 2 copper and 21 iron pieces to 1 copper and 73 iron pieces. The room was barely larger than the loft cot I had left behind.

A narrow bed stood against one wall, with a cracked washbasin beneath a shuttered window overlooking the river road. Yet when I closed the door behind me and heard the tavern noise dull into muffled vibrations beneath the floorboards, the silence struck me harder than the room itself. I was alone. Not orphan-alone. Not forest-alone. Adult-alone. No yard waited beneath me tomorrow, no guaranteed meals waited because a foreman expected me at dawn, and no older man had the right to tell me where to stand.

Every future night indoors now depended entirely on what I could drag back from the forest before hunger, weather, debt, or something with teeth decided otherwise. I sat on the edge of the bed for a long while turning the remaining copper coin slowly through my fingers. The metal felt smaller than it had yesterday. Eventually I lay back against the mattress, expecting rough straw and splintered boards beneath me.

Instead the bedding gave slightly under my weight, thin, cheap, uneven, yet still softer than the loft above the timber yard had ever been. The blanket smelled faintly of smoke and river damp instead of old sweat and wet boots. Outside, Dunmere roared with stranded travellers and unfamiliar voices while carts rattled endlessly along the flooded roads toward the damaged crossing. Somewhere below, mugs crashed against wood and laughter burst briefly through the floorboards before fading again.

For the first time in my life, the room around me belonged to no one else, and the thought frightened me because it was not safety I felt beneath that silence, but ownership, and ownership had already begun teaching me how much everything could cost.