Chương 302: 65. Uninherited Legacy, Noose on Neck, and Blood of Brothers 3

I knew the road to Iron Fir Town the way I knew my own hands. Every stretch of dirt path that turned to mud after rain. Every mountain hollow where the wind hit hardest. Every point along the way where you could first make out the silhouette of the old iron fir at the town's edge. Memory does that sometimes. It lies flat and still in the corners of your mind like something dead—and then you actually come back, and one by one the dead things climb out of their graves, line up, and stand in front of you.

Chris and Boris were tied to the back of the cart, the procession moving at a pace that was, by no stretch of the imagination, merciful. That was deliberate. I wanted them to watch, the whole way, exactly where they were being taken. And I wanted every village, every watchpoint, every supply station along the road to see it too—that something had gone very wrong at Thornhold. Not something small. Jessi rode just behind me on the left, uncharacteristically quiet the entire way.

Not until the outline of Iron Fir Town began to take shape ahead did she finally lean over and murmur:"I'll say this much—you've got a real talent for picking locations."

"I didn't pick it," I said, watching the gray-white silhouette of the town grow clearer ahead.

"Fate, sometimes, is awful in a very tasteful way." She choked on that, then, reluctantly, nodded.

"... That was almost cool."

"Shut up." There were more people at the town entrance than I'd expected. News traveled fast—and news like two young masters of House Rosa are being publicly executed hit a border town the way a lightning bolt hits flat ground on a clear day. Quite a few people had gathered. Old soldiers. Merchants. Villagers with bundles of firewood on their backs. Women holding children. And a handful of faces I vaguely recognized but couldn't name. Some of them had recognized me.

Their eyes went through the full journey—first shock, then something harder to name. The look of people watching a man who should have died in the snow years ago come back with a blade and a pulse, and incidentally bring the people who kicked him out in the first place along for the hanging. Fate really did have a talent for writing the kind of story where the karmic payoff was thick enough to choke on.

Beside the old iron fir at the center of town stood a weathered wooden frame—used for public notices, occasionally for hanging bandits. Today, it was exactly right. I swung down from the saddle and reached up for the coil of rope someone passed me. Rough hemp. Old. The edges had long since frayed from use. I'd carried this rope with me for years—for tying packs, bundling equipment, lashing down weapons. Practical. Unremarkable. But only I knew what it had actually started as. Malice.

One of the small, deliberate cruelties passed along when someone disposed of me like a piece of furniture past its usefulness. It had never occurred to me, back then, that it would end up being used for exactly this. I looked down at the rope in my hands, and a short laugh slipped out before I could stop it.

"Came all the way around, and here we are." Jessi was standing nearby. She heard it. She didn't say anything. Even she understood this wasn't the moment for jokes. That was rare. I walked to the frame, turned, and looked out at the crowd. The wind was up. It snapped the edges of my cloak and stripped the last of the color from Chris and Boris's faces.

"Chris Rosa. Boris Rosa." I didn't need to raise my voice. At a moment like this, people go quiet on their own.

"In the midst of Thornhold's defensive crisis, you ordered the withdrawal of the outer line and the consolidation of the inner ring. You delayed reinforcements, falsified reports, and showed contempt for the lives of your garrison and your townspeople. You placed the private interests of your household above your duty to the border. The evidence is complete. The witnesses stand. The confessions are on record." I looked at the two of them.

"This public execution in Iron Fir Town is not to give anyone a spectacle at House Rosa's expense."

"It is to ensure that everyone still alive understands—" The wind came in from the town's edge, carrying the dry cold particular to iron fir trees. I finished it slowly.

"Thornhold was not first destroyed by its enemies."

"It was first destroyed by the people sitting inside it, eating its meat." In the moment those words settled, the crowd went so quiet there wasn't even a cough. Chris stared at me with eyes that had finally stripped away the eldest-son shell, the noble bearing—leaving nothing but the purest hatred of a man about to die.

"Cedric… you rabid dog…"

"Mm." I nodded.

"Not bad. Unfortunately, today isn't a day anyone survives on words alone." Boris had completely fallen apart.

"No! No! I was wrong! I was truly wrong! Cedric! Little brother! I'll kneel for you! I'll kowtow to Fina! I'll tell you everything! I can still help you—""The only thing you can help me with right now," I said, looking at him, "is dying cleanly. Stop making noise." I split the coil of rope in two. The hemp dragged across my palm with a rough, almost abrasive texture. I tied the knots myself. Not for show.

Because I wanted this ending to carry, from start to finish, every ounce of the meaning it was supposed to carry. The first place I'd set foot after being thrown out. The rope that had been sent with me as a parting act of contempt, finally finding its true purpose. And the people being strung up with it were the same ones who'd put it in my hands. If that wasn't fitting, then nothing in this world was. Chris was still cursing as they brought him up.

He cursed me, cursed Fina, cursed Rosalind, cursed the whole family—by the end he was nearly dragging our father into it too. I listened for a while and thought: this man will probably die without ever genuinely understanding what he did wrong. Boris went up on soft legs, weeping messily, snot and tears together, still trying to sit down on the ground. Honestly, if the setting had been any different, I might have asked someone to bring him a chair. It would have saved him the trouble of making such an effort.

Unfortunately, that wasn't a service we offered. I raised my hand. The soldiers on both sides pulled the ropes at the same moment. The wooden frame gave a low, grinding creak. The next second, both bodies were hauled sharply upward. The wind at the town's edge kept blowing. The old iron fir's branches swayed gently, casting shadows across the ground—and across the two contorting faces above us. I stood where I was and watched, expressionless. No savage satisfaction. No grief threatening to shake me loose.

Just something cold and very clear. Like a debt that had been dragging for years, finally crossed off the ledger by my own hand. Jessi drew a quiet breath beside me, but said nothing. No joke. Ignicia stood on my other side, arms folded, crimson eyes watching the two figures gradually go still. Her expression was as flat as someone watching two pieces of wood finally finish burning.

"That looks like something now," she said.

"Which part?" I asked.

"The rope. The location. The dead men." Her tone didn't shift.

"All well chosen." The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.... That assessment was exactly her. I didn't respond. I just looked up at the old iron fir. Years ago, when I'd stood here, I had no blade, no companions, no destination—nothing but a stomach full of the ugly will to survive. I could never have imagined, standing in that same spot, that someday I'd be standing here watching the people who threw me out swing in the wind. The place where it started. The place where it ended.

Too fitting, indeed. I stood in silence for a moment, then turned and walked away. The wind in Iron Fir Town had finally blown two names clean.

"Three days on the frame. Then let the public cemetery take them." I gave the order in the same tone I'd use to tell the kitchen to go easy on the salt. But in moments like this, the flatter the words, the longer they tend to stay with people. The entrance to Iron Fir Town had gone uncannily quiet. Wind moved through the branches of the old iron fir with a dry, papery rustle. Two bodies swayed gently in the air—like two rags that had finally outlived any use. No one spoke up for them. No one wept.

Not because border people were particularly cold-blooded, but because in a place like this, everyone understood one thing very clearly: some deaths aren't tragedies. They're simply settling accounts. I swung back into the saddle, pulled the reins, and took one last look at the old iron fir. Years ago, I'd crawled out of the Rosa household like a dog with a broken leg, dragging myself along on sheer spite. The first night had been spent somewhere near here.

The rain had been heavy, the air colder than today, my stomach hollow as a rusted tin—every breath felt like my lungs were being frozen shut. Now the wind was the same wind. The tree was the same tree. Only the person standing here was no longer the one who'd had nothing.

"Move out." I pressed my heels in, and the column started moving again. Hooves struck the packed dirt of the town entrance, sending up a low, steady beat. The crowd stepped back to either side. Some kept their heads down; some looked up at me sideways; a few stared steadily at the coil of rope re-wound at my saddle, as if they were trying to read some lesson about the turning of fate from the thing itself. Unfortunately, fate doesn't usually have a lesson.

Most of the time, it's just remarkably petty, and it holds a very long grudge. Once we cleared the town, the road gradually opened up. Border dirt roads were never pleasant going—especially in this cold, damp weather, where the ruts left by cart wheels alternated between frozen solid and churned to mud, rattling your teeth with every step. But I knew this stretch the way I knew my own hands: which roots crossed under the surface, which patches pooled water, which stretches fogged over by late afternoon.

We hadn't been riding long before I saw the tree. It was still there. Leaning crookedly at the road's edge, its trunk split nearly in half by what must have been a lightning strike years ago, bark scorched black—and yet still alive. The scrub grass around it had grown thicker than I remembered, as if even this stretch of road had learned, in the years since, to keep its uglier memories out of sight. Without deciding to, I slowed my horse. That night, I'd camped here.

More accurately: I'd nearly frozen to death here. My cloak had been in roughly the same condition as a vagrant's last remaining scrap of dignity. After a long search, this half-dead tree was the best windbreak I could find. Couldn't get a fire going. My teeth were chattering so badly it felt like someone had packed two castanets into my jaw.

I'd genuinely started to wonder whether I'd be found the next morning as a frost-stiffened corpse propped against the trunk, being investigated by a passing stray dog as a potential source of not-very-fresh jerky. The corner of my mouth moved.... Pathetic. But I remember it with perfect clarity. A little further on, the ruins of a half-collapsed monastery appeared through the trees. It was still half-collapsed. One corner of the stone wall had crumbled away. Most of the roof was gone.

The bell tower listed sideways like it had taken a punch and never quite recovered—from a distance, it looked less like a monastery and more like a very stubborn, very large tombstone refusing to fall over. When the wind came through the trees, the broken windows produced a hollow, mournful sound, which was only missing a white-clad ghost stepping out to complete the atmosphere. I was still staring at it when a horse drifted up alongside me. I didn't need to look.

"Young mas—no. My lord." Jessi's face appeared at my shoulder, wearing the expression of someone performing deep sorrow for an audience of one.

"Does this place stir certain memories within you?" I glanced at her sideways and said nothing. This was exactly how she worked. Engage her, she gets momentum; ignore her, she performs the whole thing for herself anyway.

Sure enough, the next second, she pressed one hand to her chest, raised the other in a vague gesture toward the monastery ruins, and launched into a declaration in the mournful register of a bard who'd had too much watered-down wine:"On that stormy, lightning-split night, the righteous blade of Lord Cedric—" She paused dramatically. She actually looked upward, as if waiting for an invisible spotlight to find her.

"—captured the heart of the maiden known as Jessi." The column went quiet for exactly one beat. Then the soldiers erupted. Shoulders shaking, faces buried in cloaks, one man coughing so aggressively into his fist that his entire head had gone red. Several of the Yinglong Guard—normally the most composed people in any given situation—were visibly losing the battle, pressing their lips together so hard they'd gone white.

I looked at her with complete sincerity and thought: the fact that this woman has not yet died at my hands is compelling evidence that my self-restraint is higher than I'd previously estimated.

"You're wasting a genuine talent by not going into the arts," I said. Jessi actually straightened up, wearing the expression of someone graciously accepting a compliment.

"But you know... you really did make my heart flutter back then."

"It was the silver coin that made your heart flutter." I snorted.

"You extorted one silver coin from me just for lighting a fire." Jessi blinked.

"... You still remember that?"

"Of course I do." I opened my canteen and took a drink.

"I was so broke I was basically calculating whether I could sell myself by weight, and you still had the nerve to charge me. That kind of moral bankruptcy deserves to be remembered for a lifetime. It's what my upbringing demands."

"That wasn't moral bankruptcy," Jessi said, looking deeply wronged.

"That was a professional services fee. Do you have any idea how hard it is to get a fire going in weather like that? That was skilled labor."

"Skilled labor that doubled as extortion."

"You paid, didn't you?"

"Because the alternative was freezing to death."

"Exactly." She patted her chest with the confidence of someone delivering a foundational principle of economics.

"I saved your life. You lost one silver coin. That's a win-win."

"That's you winning twice." Another round of muffled laughter from the column. I was about to put the canteen away when she leaned in slightly, eyes lighting up with the look of someone who'd just remembered something.

"Since you remember the coin that clearly," she said, drawing the words out, grinning in a way that was asking to be punched, "you definitely remember the warmth of my body too, right?" I spat water. The horse ahead of me actually startled, ears flicking sharply back.

"What the—don't just say things like that!" I coughed, dragging my sleeve across my mouth, having very nearly inhaled the entire canteen. The column detonated. Even several of the most reliably serious Yinglong Guard had turned their faces away, shoulders jerking in a rhythm that had nothing to do with the road. One soldier was working so hard to maintain military composure that her entire face had gone the color of someone who'd taken an arrow—arguably a more painful expression.

Jessi immediately raised both hands, projecting the innocence of someone who deserved a commemorative plaque in a temple.

"What did I say that was wrong? It was freezing that night, I gave you half my blanket, I dragged you into the corner out of the wind. You were so cold you felt like something freshly hauled out of a glacier—I've never held anything that lifeless in my entire career—""Shut up!"

"But it's all true?"

"Say one more word and tonight you get to go compare rope techniques with the two gentlemen we left in Iron Fir Town."

"My lord, verbal threats constitute an abuse of authority."

"Then I'll demonstrate physically." She pulled her neck in, but her mouth still wouldn't cooperate.

"Honestly, men are so ungrateful. You spent the whole night shivering against me, and now you act like it never happened—""Jessi." It wasn't me. Alvira had been riding on the other side of the column the entire time, barely saying a word. Now her gaze swept over with the temperature of a closed vault.

"If you say one more word, I will personally give you a firsthand experience of what it means to have a truly unforgettable body temperature." Jessi blinked.

"... Hot iron?"

"Boiling water also works."

"I've just discovered that silence is a virtue."

"You're only realizing this now?"

"Personal growth takes time." I pressed two fingers to my temple, feeling my pulse there. Sometimes I genuinely wondered whether my greatest trial in this life wasn't House Rosa, or the battlefield, or the mountain of rotten ledgers still waiting for me. It was this collection of human beings who generated their own farce wherever they went. And yet— Precisely because of that farce, the road felt considerably shorter.

I re-capped the canteen and hung it back on the saddle, then looked once more at the half-collapsed monastery. That night years ago, Jessi and I had sheltered in what was left of one of its side rooms. The roof leaked. The wind came through the cracks in the walls. Most of the straw on the floor was wet. In the corner sat a mildewed religious icon from some indeterminate era. In that miserable excuse for a shelter, two people had managed to keep themselves alive. I'd disliked her back then.

More accurately: I disliked everyone back then. A woman with a mouth that ran constantly, light fingers, who extorted money from you at your most destitute—nothing about her looked like someone worth trusting. But it's exactly in moments like that when you remember most clearly— Who actually got the fire going on the coldest, hungriest, most wretched night of your life. I found myself turning to look at her. She must have caught the weight of it, because she immediately put on that expression: What?

Have you finally noticed my devastating good looks and profound loyalty? I waited two seconds, then said, calmly:"Did you steal the other half of my dry rations that night?" Her smile locked in place.

"... Why do you remember that too?"

"So it was you."

"That wasn't stealing. That was strategic safekeeping."

"Safekeeping inside your stomach?"

"That's the most secure location available." More laughter from the column. I didn't even bother with a retort this time. I just let one corner of my mouth move and turned my eyes back to the road ahead. After the mountain path curved, the terrain gradually opened up. In the direction of Thornhold, the sky sat heavier than it did elsewhere—not rain coming, just the particular hard chill that belonged to border country, like a bow strung too long, where even the wind was pulled tighter than anywhere else.

But maybe because I'd just come from Iron Fir Town, and just passed that tree and that ruined monastery, when I looked toward Thornhold now, what rose in my chest wasn't only the familiar weight of there's still a pile of things waiting to be dealt with. There was something else. Something more inconvenient. Fina was probably waiting for news. Charlotte would almost certainly check me for new injuries first, and then scold me as a secondary measure.

Alvira had probably organized several more ledgers by now—the kind that, once read, made you want to hang additional people. And Lorelei— The moment that name surfaced, my fingers tightened on the reins, just slightly, without my meaning them to. Tsk. What a nuisance. I was just riding back to the fortress, and somehow my brain had already conjured the image of her standing in lamplight last night, and that softly delivered young master.

If a single word from a single person could unsettle you at a time like this, that wasn't maturity—that was a lost cause.

"My lord?" Jessi drifted over again, but this time her tone was, unusually, level.

"Almost home." I looked at her.

"You're calling that place home?" She thought about it, and for once didn't reach for a joke immediately.

"Not before, maybe." She scratched her cheek.

"But now... at least there are people waiting for you. Aren't there?" I didn't answer right away. The wind moved across my face, carrying away some of the cold and the hemp-and-blood smell that had followed me from Iron Fir Town. Whether someone waiting for you and home were the same thing—I hadn't actually worked that out yet.

But at least— When a place starts having someone who keeps a lamp burning for you, keeps a bowl of hot soup ready, leaves you a word that isn't warm exactly, but isn't cold either—that place has already become something different from a fortress. I let the silence stretch a moment, then answered, flat:"Less talking. When we get back, you're going to forget everything that happened today." Jessi immediately looked devastated.

"Everything? Including the part about fate, the stormy night, the maiden's heart, and the half-blanket? That's a tragedy."

"I mean the part where you say one more word, I'm nailing you to the monastery bell tower and leaving you to confess to the icons."

"... Understood. Amnesia, commencing now."

"Make it permanent."

"Can't do that," she said, with great sincerity.

"Some beautiful memories deserve to be treasured." I kept my eyes on the road ahead.

"Alvira."

"Here."

"Did you hear that? We have a volunteer requesting termination."

"Logged."

"Wait—how is your processing speed this fast?!" The soldiers laughed again. And somewhere inside that laughter, Thornhold's outline finally rose from the horizon ahead. Black walls. Silent towers. A flag standing motionless in the wind. Like a beast that had taken every wound imaginable, and was still breathing. I looked at it from afar, and felt the cold I'd been carrying in my chest since Iron Fir Town finally, very slightly, ease.