Chương 24: Chapter 25: The Cook in The Town

The road back into Dunmere no longer felt like returning home. I realised it somewhere near the southern gate, where the carts gathered so thickly that the road disappeared beneath wheels, hooves, mud, and the slow misery of people arriving with nowhere left to arrive from. These were not merchant caravans rolling in from the river crossings with grain, lamp oil, and gossip from distant settlements, but refugee wagons stitched together from panic and exhaustion.

Burned timber had been tied back into shape with rope. Household goods sat beneath wet blankets lashed hurriedly against the rain. Children slept in cloaks too large for them while their parents stared ahead with the hollow patience of people who had spent too many nights listening to things move beyond firelight. The guards at the gate looked worse than the eastern trench line: too few, too tired, and too practised now in the art of pretending exhaustion was discipline.

One still wore dried blood across the front of his gambeson where nobody had found time to clean it properly; another leaned heavily against the wall while pretending not to favour one leg. They waved the arriving wagons through with the slow mechanical gestures of men whose fear had become routine enough to resemble boredom. Dunmere smelled different too. Smoke lingered everywhere, drifting low through the narrow streets alongside wet wool, river mud, sour bodies, and too many people pressed too close together.

The town had always been rough around the edges, but it had once possessed the familiar rhythm of a frontier settlement that understood itself. Men worked the Greywash crossings. Farmers shouted prices at the square. The Cataract served watered ale to guards pretending they were harder than they really were. Now every street felt tightened beneath strain, as though Dunmere had clenched itself around the river and forgotten how to open again.

I walked through it carrying my axe across one shoulder while rain drifted softly over the rooftops. Nobody looked twice at the weapon anymore. Too many militia moved through town now for armed men to stand out. What drew attention instead were the altered bones of the town itself. Barricades split the larger streets into controlled choke points. Wagon frames reinforced weak intersections near the market quarter.

Rope-supported beams crossed between buildings where fire or beast damage had weakened old timber foundations. Field Rigging. My work had spread all the way back into Dunmere proper, and that should have pleased me. Instead it left me with the uncomfortable sensation of seeing my own thoughts nailed into the town like warning signs. Two militia workers near the square were tightening one of the rope tension systems beneath a leaning support beam when I passed. One glanced up immediately.

"There's the rope fellow." The other grinned while adjusting the anchor line.

"Careful. He'll knot the war shut if you annoy him." I kept walking. The jokes no longer irritated me as much as the approval beneath them did. Field Rigging had become useful almost instantly. Workers trusted the systems. Guards asked me about tension loads and support angles. Even Wade had stopped treating the skill like an accident and begun treating it like proper work. That was the problem. The skill felt dead inside me: useful, efficient, hollow, a way to postpone catastrophe without changing its destination.

The thought followed me toward the Cataract district through streets crowded with displaced families and overworked militia patrols. Refugees filled every dry corner of Dunmere now. Canvas shelters had appeared beside warehouses and along the riverside where old fishing frames once stood empty through winter. People moved constantly, though rarely with purpose. Waiting seemed to have become its own occupation. I did not know what to do with any of it.

A crying child near the market square made me instinctively look away. An older woman sat wrapped in blankets beside a wall, staring blankly at nothing while two younger men argued nearby over ration distribution. Somewhere farther down the street, somebody shouted about missing livestock before the sound dissolved into another dozen overlapping voices. The distress sat badly against me, not because it hurt emotionally exactly, and that was the part that bothered me most. I understood these people were frightened.

I understood they had lost homes, roads, farms, perhaps entire families. Yet standing among them left me feeling more trapped than sympathetic, as though the sheer weight of everyone else's fear pressed inward until breathing itself became work. I found myself wanting the frontier again, and the thought arrived suddenly enough that I slowed. The eastern line held beasts, blood, exhaustion, and death, yet at least the danger there moved in straight lines. Something attacked. You killed it or failed to kill it.

Timber collapsed or held. A wall broke or survived another night. Here the suffering simply lingered. A woman near the square was trying to calm a little boy who screamed every time a wagon wheel struck loose stone because the sound reminded him of collapsing timber. Two men carried another refugee through the rain wrapped in bloodstained blankets while nearby townsfolk pretended not to stare. I looked away again, and guilt followed immediately afterward. I hated that too.

The Cataract stood near the river road exactly where it always had, though the inn no longer resembled the place I remembered. Canvas shelters crowded the yard outside while the lower windows had been boarded halfway with reinforced timber against stray attacks. Smoke drifted from every chimney vent and side opening simultaneously, carrying the smell of stew thickened far beyond what the ingredients probably deserved. Inside, the front room looked worse.

Tables had been pushed against the walls to create floor space for bedrolls and blankets. Refugees occupied nearly every corner while tired militia guards sat near the hearth eating in exhausted silence. Children slept beneath patched cloaks beside the far wall, and somewhere upstairs someone coughed with the deep wet sound of winter sickness settling into lungs. This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

Garron Vell stood behind the serving counter ladling stew into bowls with the grim endurance of a man too stubborn to collapse properly. He looked older, not dramatically, not in the foolish way stories aged men overnight, but worn thinner around the eyes and shoulders, as though the town itself had been slowly sanding him down over the past weeks. The innkeeper glanced up while handing a bowl to one of the militia.

"Well," he muttered, "the frontier hasn't killed you yet." I stopped near the counter.

"Trying hard enough." Garron pushed another bowl across the counter.

"That's usually its preferred strategy." Garron noticed the axe properly then. His gaze lingered briefly on the darkened edge of the blade, where faint heat sometimes shimmered beneath the steel after heavy fighting.

"You look different," he said quietly. I frowned slightly.

"How?" He studied me with the practical concern of a man deciding whether a roof would hold one more storm.

"Like somebody stretched you tighter." That felt unpleasantly accurate. Before I could answer, movement burst from behind the kitchen curtain near the back room, and Lysa crossed the inn carrying folded blankets almost too large for her while loose curls escaped from the tie holding back her dark hair. She looked thinner than before and significantly more tired, though the bright restless energy beneath her movements remained stubbornly alive.

"There you are," she said immediately.

"Father said you'd probably died in a ditch." Garron corrected her without looking away from the stew.

"I said it was possible."

"You implied ditch." Garron ladled another bowl.

"I implied frontier." Lysa dumped the blankets onto one of the nearby tables.

"That means ditch eventually." She finally noticed the mud and dried blood across my coat.

"You look awful." I rubbed rain from my jaw.

"That's also becoming popular feedback." Lysa nodded once.

"Well, it's accurate." Despite the words, relief softened her expression briefly before she looked away toward the crowded common room again. The Cataract had changed around her too. Children sat near the hearth wrapped in donated blankets while tired families occupied most of the floor space between tables. The inn had become something halfway between shelter, kitchen, and triage station. Garron moved constantly between all three roles without complaint, though exhaustion followed him like another shadow.

"You feeding all these people?" I asked. Garron kept working.

"Trying." Lysa glanced at him.

"That means yes. He says trying when he means yes because it sounds less dramatic." Garron snorted softly while wiping his hands on a cloth.

"And you say too much because silence frightens you." Lysa lifted her chin.

"That feels deeply personal."

"It was intended personally." A small child near the hearth began crying after somebody outside dropped timber against one of the barricades. Several refugees flinched instinctively at the sound, and I felt the entire room tense around me. Again the discomfort returned, not empathy exactly, but pressure: too many frightened people pressed too close together, each carrying their own panic into the same enclosed space until the air itself felt tight.

Lysa moved toward the child immediately while carrying one of the folded blankets. Garron watched her go.

"She's been like that since the south road fires," he said quietly once she was gone.

"Loud sounds mostly." I nodded without knowing what else to do with the information. The innkeeper studied me for a moment with the same practical sharpness he used when measuring whether a stew pot would stretch to another dozen bowls.

"You don't like this part." The bluntness caught me off guard.

"This part?"

"The people part." I frowned immediately.

"That sounds worse than you mean it." Garron leaned both hands against the counter.

"Probably because I mean it exactly." He watched Lysa calm the child near the hearth.

"You understand walls. Fighting. Work. Things that can be fixed with enough effort." His eyes shifted back toward me.

"But you don't know where to put yourself when people are simply frightened." The accuracy irritated me immediately.

"I know they're frightened." Garron's expression did not change.

"That isn't the same thing." I almost argued, then looked around the room again. Refugees sat shoulder-to-shoulder beneath patched blankets while exhausted militia guards ate silently near the fire. A woman slept upright against the wall with one hand still resting protectively over the child beside her. The whole inn felt heavy with waiting, and I still did not know what to do with any of it. Lysa returned moments later carrying empty bowls toward the kitchen.

"She stopped crying," she announced. Garron answered at once.

"That's because you threatened her with your cooking." Lysa looked offended.

"I would never waste good threats like that on children." Then, more quietly while setting the bowls aside, she added, "He promised me a pony after the war." I blinked once.

"What?" Lysa looked toward Garron with theatrical betrayal.

"You said not to tell people."

"You tell people everything." Lysa shrugged.

"Only interesting things." The innkeeper sighed heavily.

"When she was ten, she decided surviving frontier winters deserved rewards."

"And he said when we finally had enough coin, I could get a pony." Garron gave her a tired look.

"You wanted to keep it in the inn." Lysa folded her arms.

"That was a practical issue, not a dream issue." Despite myself, I almost smiled. Almost. Then I realised Garron had actually promised her one, not jokingly, not abstractly, but as a real pony, some small stubborn future reward waiting beyond the war as though the man genuinely believed Dunmere would still have a future to bargain with afterward. Something about that lodged uncomfortably beneath my ribs. Outside, the warning horn sounded from somewhere near the eastern quarter.

Every person inside the Cataract froze immediately. Children stopped speaking. Guards reached instinctively for weapons. Even Garron's shoulders tightened before the second horn clarified the first. Single blast. Patrol warning. Not breach. The room exhaled collectively afterward. I realised I had not reacted at all: no fear, no tension, only immediate assessment. Direction. Distance. Response time. The absence frightened me more than panic would have. Lysa noticed me watching the door.

"You'll go back out there soon, won't you?" I looked toward the boarded windows.

"Yes." She nodded like she had expected nothing else. The rain continued softly against the boarded windows while the Cataract settled once more into its exhausted rhythm of feeding, sheltering, and waiting. Garron returned to the stew pots. Refugees lowered their voices again. Somewhere upstairs, somebody coughed through the silence, and I sat among all of it feeling useful nowhere except the walls.