The Iron Collar

Thjora

The brass key-token burns cold against my right thigh.

Through the split-leather pocket of my apron, the cast metal feels as thick as a horse's rib, four inches of solid brass stamped with Hrokkr's jagged triple-wolf sigil. The dead patriarch's blood has dried into the engraved grooves, stiffening the grease on the teeth.

If Vargun searches me, he will slit my throat and toss my body into the spent-grain chute.

If he does not, I have a way through the lower sluice gates.

I grip the heavy wire brush with both hands and scrape the copper cooling plates. Dried protein flakes peel off the metal in thin brown curls, dropping into the floor trench where cold rinse water swills toward the drain. The brewhouse smells of wet soot, scalded malt, and the copper tang of the arterial blood Vargun tracked across my threshold.

Below my boots, the stone floor vibrates.

It is a dull, rhythmic thrumming that rises through forty feet of solid granite.

The inmates in Tier Four are waking up.

They can smell the slaughter from the courtyard above. When ninety-four surgically altered metabolisms miss their noon dose, the hunger does not begin in their bellies. It starts behind their eyes. A blinding, chemical migraine that strips away language by dusk and turns men into biting, tearing beasts by midnight.

I rinse the copper brush in a bucket of cold lye.

My left forearm throbs where the stray drop of boiling wort scalded the flesh.

A minor price.

I reach for the dry linen rag on the workbench, but my fingers freeze as the iron ventilation duct overhead rattles. A blast of cold mountain air cuts through the cellar steam, carrying the sharp stink of scorched pine and wet iron.

The exact same smell that filled my lungs ten years ago.

·  ·  ·

Ten years ago, Hrafnsker was not a fortress in transition. It was an open slaughterhouse.

I was ten when Hrokkr's raiders dragged me through the southern barbican in an iron neck collar. The chain was five feet of rusted links, clamped to the tailboard of a grain wagon. My wrists were raw meat, scraped bloody by the iron cuffs every time the cart hit a rut in the granite road.

They shoved me down the slick stone ramp into the lower courtyard.

The mud in the yard was knee-deep, foul with horse dung, spilled mash, and coal slurry.

"Move, little brewer," the guard behind me barked, slamming the butt of his spear between my shoulder blades.

I went down on both knees into the muck.

The iron collar jerked tight against my throat, choking off my air.

Across the yard, tied to a split-oak whipping post beside the pig pens, was a boy.

He was eighteen, broad across the shoulders even then, his bare back a crisscross of weeping scabs and fresh purple welts. He had no boots. His trousers were shredded wool, plastered to his thighs with dried mud and black blood.

Vargun.

The patriarch's bastard. The son Hrokkr kept in the dirt to remind the legitimate captains what happened to bloodlines that failed his tests.

He did not look like a broken dog.

He had his hands cuffed behind the post, his dark hair plastered to his forehead with freezing rain. His lips were split and swollen, but his eyes were wide, black, and completely feral.

He was watching me.

Not with pity. Not with curiosity.

With the hungry, assessing stare of a wolf deciding which sheep in the pen has the softest throat.

"Get up, stray," Vargun rasped across the mud.

His voice was already rough, ruined by shouting over iron chains.

I pulled myself onto my hands and knees. The collar cut into the skin of my collarbone, but I did not cry. My master had taught me three rules before Hrokkr's men burned our valley brewhouse to the ground: measure twice, never rush the boil, and never let a killer see you weep.

I reached down into the filth, found a three-inch iron mason's spike buried in the gravel, and palmed it.

The guard stepped up to kick my ribs.

I did not wait for his boot. I drove the spike straight down into the leather bridge of his left foot, putting all my weight behind the thrust.

The guard screamed, hopping backward in the mud, clutching his impaled foot.

A dry, cracked laugh echoed from the post.

Vargun was grinning through his split lips. Blood coated his teeth. He pulled against his chains until the iron links bit into his wrists, straining toward me like a hound testing the leather.

"That one has teeth, Father," Vargun shouted toward the stone balcony where Hrokkr stood watching. "Put her in my yard. When I break her collar, she brews for me."

Hrokkr had not answered his bastard. He had simply signaled his enforcers to throw me into the sub-level vats.

That was the first time Vargun claimed me.

He had nothing to his name except twenty feet of rusted chain and a back full of scars.

·  ·  ·

The iron latch on the upper brewhouse door clicks.

The memory burns out of my head like steam off cold copper.

I drop the linen rag and slide my hand toward the four-pound spanner on the mash tun frame.

The heavy oak door swings inward.

Vargun stands in the doorway.

He has washed his face, but a streak of dark grease stains his temple. He has discarded his wolfskin cloak. He wears his studded leather brigandine over a dark wool tunic, an iron broadsword sheathed at his left hip. His knuckles are raw, scrubbed clean of his father's blood, but his dark eyes carry the exact same predatory hunger from the yard ten years ago.

Behind him stand two garrison veterans in chain mail, both carrying heavy crossbars and short spears.

"Out," Vargun tells them without looking back. "Guard the top of the stair. If anyone from the east wing comes down without my token, drop them."

"Yes, my lord," one veteran answers.

The door shuts. The iron bar drops into place from the inside.