Hauling the Malt

The present rushes back with the weight of a stone slab.

I stand alone in the vault, my fingers buried deep in the black barley.

Ten years. The boy who took the whip has become the beast who holds the whip. The scars on his back are silver ridges now, but the possessive hunger in his eyes has only calcified into iron.

I jerk my hand out of the grain sack.

Enough reminiscing. Reminiscing does not boil wort.

I grab the ash-wood grain shovel leaning against the wall. The scoop is wide, polished smooth from years of moving tons of barley into the elevator hoppers.

To produce three hundred gallons of Maltar with the proper enzyme density, I need six hundred pounds of malt. That means six sacks hauled up twenty-two granite steps to the mash tun on the main floor.

Without Skirn, every pound falls on my back.

I hoist the first hundred-pound sack off the cedar pallet. The burlap is coarse, biting through the linen of my apron into the meat of my shoulder. My spine compresses with a sharp twinge.

I lift with my legs, steadying the load against my neck, and haul it toward the doorway.

Step one. Step two.

The granite stairs are steep. My calf muscles burn as I climb, my breath coming in ragged, shallow gasps. The tallow lamp at the bottom casts long, shuddering shadows up the wall.

I reach the brewhouse threshold, drop the sack beside the copper intake hopper with a heavy thud, and pause to wipe the sweat from my forehead with the back of my sleeve.

One down. Five to go.

I turn around and head back down into the dark.

By the third sack, my hands are blistered raw, the rough hemp grinding against the calluses on my palms. The air in the stairwell feels thick, heavy with the stench of coal smoke drifting from the boiler vents.

I reach the fifth sack on the pallet.

I bend down, locking my arms around the coarse burlap, and heave the sack toward my hip.

A sound scrapes in the corridor above.

The noise is faint—a leather boot sole shifting across granite grit.

I freeze, the hundred-pound sack suspended against my knees.

The brewhouse door is locked from the outside. The only other entrance to this sublevel is the emergency maintenance flue that runs behind the high-pressure boilers.

The draft in the doorway shifts.

The single tallow lamp on the cedar pallet flickers violently, the flame drowning in melted fat before snapping out entirely.

Total, pitch-black silence.

I drop the sack. The grain hits the floor with a muffled crash.

My right hand moves instantly, sliding across the cedar wood until my fingers wrap around the smooth ash handle of the grain shovel. I lift the iron-edged scoop, holding the heavy ash haft across my chest in a two-handed guard.

"Step out," I say into the dark.

My voice is steady, flat, stripped of the tremor running through my arms.

No reply.

The air in the vault changes. The scent of roasted barley is smothered by something sharper—cold steel, fresh horse leather, pine resin, and the metallic tang of dried blood.

Vargun.

He is inside the room.

I listen to the air currents. The ventilation flue pulls from the northwest corner toward the stairwell. If someone stands between me and the door, the draft breaks across their chest.

The draft is broken three paces to my left.

I pivot on the balls of my feet, swinging the ash handle in a tight, vicious arc toward the shadow.

An iron-clad arm shoots out of the blackness.

A heavy gauntlet catches the ash haft in mid-swing. The impact vibrates through the wood, jarring my wrists and shoulders.

"A shovel, Thjora?" Vargun's voice murmurs from the dark, barely two feet from my face. "You defended the vats with a spanner. Now you downgrade to garden tools?"

"A shovel has better reach," I answer, refusing to let go of the haft.

I twist the ash handle, attempting to lever the iron edge into his ribs.

Vargun does not budge. He is an anvil planted in the granite floor. He steps forward, closing the distance between us until his armored chest presses against the wooden haft, trapping the shovel between our bodies.

His right hand slides up the ash wood, moving over my white-knuckled fingers.

His bare palm is calloused, burning with an intense, unnatural heat. The heat radiates through the skin of my knuckles, hot as fresh boiler plate.

Then I feel it.

Beneath the unyielding grip, deep in the tendons of his forearms, a tiny, rapid vibration pulses through the wood.

A tremor.

Not fear. Not exhaustion.

Metabolic shudder.

The altered cells in his muscle tissue are beginning to starve. Vargun has gone forty-eight hours without a stabilizing draught, burning his adrenal reserves to conquer Hrafnsker, execute Fjalar's captains, and secure the perimeter. He is standing on the edge of the chemical cliff.

If he misses tonight's ration, his nervous system will begin tearing itself apart before dawn.

My heart hammers a triumphant rhythm against my ribs.

He is not invincible. He is a dying wolf holding a sword.

"You are shaking, my lord," I whisper in the dark.

Vargun's grip tightens on the shovel haft until the ash wood creaks under the pressure.

"I do not shake," he rasps.

"Your liver says otherwise," I say, leaning into the tension between us. "How many hours since your last dose? Thirty-six? Forty? Your blood sugar is crashing. Your glycogen stores are empty. In four hours, the hallucinations begin. In six, your heart goes into arrhythmia."

He does not deny it.

Instead, his left hand reaches out in the blackness, his fingers finding the side of my neck.

His thumb presses into the hollow beneath my jaw, right over my carotid artery. His fingers are scalding hot, rough as sand, tilting my head back until my throat is exposed to the dark.

"You talk too much about chemistry, Thjora," he murmurs. His breath washes over my lips—hot, bitter, smelling of dried blood and concentrated valerian. "You think having leverage makes you safe."

"It makes me necessary," I snap, refusing to pull away from his touch. "Kill me and you die foaming on the courtyard stones beside your father."

"I am not going to kill you."

He steps closer. His heavy brigandine presses against my linen apron, pinning me against the stacked barley sacks behind my back. The coarse burlap digs into my thighs.

"Why are you down here, Vargun?" I demand. "Did you come to carry my grain, or did you miss the smell of the cellar?"

"I came to see if you would break," he answers.

"Disappointed?"

"Never."

He slides his hand from my throat to my shoulder, his fingers digging through the coarse fabric to find the bruised muscle where the hundred-pound sacks had rested. He presses firmly on the ache.

A sharp jolt of pain shoots down my arm. I bite my lip, refusing to give him a sound.

"You carried five sacks," he says quietly. "One left."

"I can count."

"Your apprentice would have carried three."

"My apprentice is locked in your kitchen because you are an insecure tyrant who cannot govern without hostages."

A dark, dry sound rumbles in his chest. A laugh that carries no humor, only sharp, predatory satisfaction.

"A hostage ensures compliance," Vargun says. "A partner requires trust. I do not trust anyone in this fortress, least of all the woman who knows sixteen different ways to turn barley mash into paralytic poison."

"Then let me brew in peace."

"No."

He releases the shovel haft with his right hand.

He reaches behind him into his belt and pulls something from his leather scabbard. The soft scrape of steel against wood whispers through the vault.

A blade.

The cold flat of a hunting dagger presses against the exposed skin of my collarbone, right above the collar of my apron.

The steel is freezing compared to the heat of his skin.

"Do you remember the night after the whipping post?" Vargun asks, his voice dropping into a dark, gravelly murmur against my ear. "In the malt loft?"

"I remember sewing your back together while you bled like a slaughtered pig."

"You used four drops of nightshade tincture in the chicory wash," he says.

My breath catches in my throat.

The vault suddenly feels ten times smaller.

"What?" I whisper.

"Four drops," Vargun repeats, the tip of the dagger tracing a slow, precise line along my clavicle, never breaking the skin, but pressing hard enough to demand absolute stillness. "You told me it was valerian to dull the pain. But valerian does not make the pupils dilate to the rim. Valerian does not slow the pulse to thirty beats a minute."

My fingers tighten on the ash handle.

He knew.

He knew for ten years.

"You were testing the dose," Vargun murmurs, leaning his forehead against mine in the pitch-black darkness. His dark hair brushes against my brow. "You wanted to see how much poison it took to paralyze an eighteen-year-old boy without stopping his heart."

"You were arrogant," I say, my voice trembling with raw, defiant anger. "You needed a leash."

"And you gave me one."

The flat of the blade slides down to the center of my sternum.

"My father thought you were just a clever girl with a hydrometer," Vargun whispers, his voice vibrating through the steel into my chest. "He thought the Maltar was a simple recipe passed down from the old guild. But I watched you in the loft. I watched you measure the bitter-root to the tenth of an ounce."

He leans in so close his lips brush the curve of my ear.

"You did not just stabilize the inmates, Thjora," he says. "You altered the secondary distillation ratio. You bonded the enzyme directly to the neural receptors in their spinal columns."

My blood runs cold.

"You built an army that cannot obey anyone who does not hold your specific yeast strain," Vargun rasps. "You made yourself the master of Hrafnsker before I even drew my sword."

Silence falls over the dark cellar.

The only sound is the heavy, ragged rhythm of our breathing.

"And now?" I ask, my voice barely a whisper in the blackness. "What will you do with that knowledge, Lord of Hrafnsker?"

Vargun pulls the dagger back.

He slides the steel into the scabbard at his hip with a sharp, definitive click.

His large, callused hands come up, gripping both of my shoulders with unyielding force. He pulls me away from the grain sacks, stepping back into the center of the vault.

"Now," Vargun says, his voice flat and absolute, "I am going to carry the last sack up the stairs."

I blink into the darkness, caught off guard. "What?"

"You need six hundred pounds of malt to begin the mash," he says. "I need three hundred gallons of Maltar before midnight tomorrow. And you are going to brew every single drop while I watch."

He steps past me in the dark, his heavy boots finding the cedar pallet without a stumble.

I hear the rustle of coarse burlap as he hoists the final hundred-pound sack onto his armored shoulder with a single, effortless motion.

He turns toward the stairwell.

"Bring the shovel, Thjora," Vargun calls from the threshold, his voice echoing up the stone shaft. "The fire in the boiler is waiting."

I stand alone in the dark vault for three heartbeats, my hands trembling on the ash handle.

The tremor in his hands was real. The beast is starving.

I grip the shovel, square my shoulders against the cold cellar air, and follow his boots into the light.