Iron band. Black stone.

My Love,

Rike of Brambleford, a hired blade came into the tavern at dusk, same grin he wore back when I was a squire and he was earning his coin gutting smugglers in the marshlands east of Derwick.

They used men like him for that sort of work. Places where you didn’t want survivors or records. Townships too poor to bribe but too loud to ignore. He’d ride in laughing, and the next day the counting would start; fathers, sons, sometimes whole families, depending how drunk they were when the work began.

He hadn’t changed. Same gait. Same habit of throwing his weight behind his voice like everything he said should echo. He drank first, talked second, and never paid. I watched him lean on the bar like he expected the taproom to thank him for not setting it alight. When he turned his hand to scratch his jaw, I saw the ring, iron band, black stone.

And my mind… my mind did what it always does. Noted it. Quietly. As if it were any other detail. Iron band. Black stone. Same ring.

Same words you’d breathed when the light was leaving your eyes. You could barely speak, but you managed that much. I didn’t move. I watched him laugh and lie and drink someone else’s coin. Because I wanted him to keep smiling. I wanted him full of ale, warm, off guard. I wanted the last thing he ever saw to be something he didn’t expect.

Because I saw my son, broken like something worthless and cast aside when they’d finished with him. I saw the way his head lay wrong on the stones, the way the blood matted his hair so it looked darker than it ever had in life and he had believed me when I told him monsters weren’t real.

He believed you too.

And I saw you.

Not how you were when I first took you from your father’s gate, not laughing, not flushed with the foolish bravery of a woman who thinks love is a shield. I saw you on the floorboards with your hands slick and your breath catching in your throat like it meant to stay and simply couldn’t.

I followed him when he left.

He went down to the river where the willows knot their roots, and he pissed in the water as if the river owed him thanks, and then he stood there alone and rubbed his hands. They always think they’re alone, until they’re not. Men never know when they’re being hunted, and the mercy in that ignorance is the only mercy most of them ever earn, because it lets them laugh while they still have breath for it, lets them quaff their ale and boast of conquests and coin, thinking the dawn would grace them with another morning.

The river took his piss and kept its counsel, the willows whispered to themselves, and the dusk thickened just enough that the last of the light sat low and red along the water like a warning no one had asked for.

I stepped out from the trees without sound and let him hear me only at the end, one foot on gravel, just enough to turn his head, because fear is sharper when it has a face to look at. He smiled at first, the same easy grin he had worn in the inn, and he opened his mouth to speak some nothing of greeting or insult, and that was when I put my hand on his shoulder and felt him stiffen under it like a horse that knows the bit.

“Easy,” I said, because men listen harder when you sound reasonable. “I’ve a question.”

He laughed, short and careless, and tried to shrug me off, which told me he still thought this was a misunderstanding he could charm his way out of. I let him turn enough to see my face properly, and watched the smile falter as he took in the set of my eyes and the way my other hand stayed low and patient.

“Six months back,” I said. “A cottage by the lake. A woman and a child.”

His mouth tightened, then loosened again into something that wanted to be a sneer. “You’ve got the wrong—”

I pressed my thumb into the soft place just under his ear, enough to remind him that bodies have weak points whether a man believes in them or not. His breath caught, and the river kept on moving.

“You were there,” I said. “You remember it. I can tell by how fast you stopped lying.”

He swallowed, eyes flicking toward the trees as if the willows might rise up and take his part, and then he gave me a look that tried to be brave and failed. “Orders,” he said at last, and there it was, laid out plain as a coin on a table. “We were told the place was clean. No names. Just a job.”

“Whose,” I asked, because the answer mattered only in the way a last knot matters before you cut the rope.

He hesitated, and I shifted my weight, letting the river lap higher around his boots, letting the cold do a little of the talking for me. His jaw worked, and then he gave a thin, ugly smirk, the kind men put on when they think cruelty might still buy them a sliver of power.

“The baron,” he said. “Came down through his steward. Paid well. Said it needed to be quiet.”

Something in me went very still then, not like calm, or restraint, but like a blade finding its balance point. I nodded once, because I had what I came for, and there was no reason to keep pretending this was a conversation.

“That’s all I needed,” I told him.

He opened his mouth again, maybe to bargain, maybe to boast, maybe to spit the baron’s name like it was a shield and tried to twist away, quick for a big man, but I was already close and the riverbank was slick. He slipped and I went with him, my weight behind his back, my forearm under his jaw, and I brought him down into the shallows where the water runs cold even in summer. He thrashed then, boots scraping, hands clawing at my arm, and I could feel the strength in him, the same strength that had made other men laugh when he laughed and follow when he walked, and I took a certain satisfaction in how little it mattered.

He made a sound, a wet, choking plea that tried to turn itself into a word, and I held him there and watched his reflection break and reform on the surface of the water. I brought the dagger under his jaw where the skin is soft and the bone does not interfere, and slid it in as clean as I could manage. The blood came at once, hot and eager, running over my knuckles and down my wrist, and he made a choking sound that might have been a name, might have been nothing, and his whole body tried to argue with what had already been decided.

When the struggle stopped, I did not move right away.

I loosened my grip and let his head roll to the side, cheek pressing into mud, mouth slack, and I listened to the night as if it might speak sense into me; there was only the rustle of reeds, and the scratch of claws on bark as a raven shifted in a tree, waiting for me to be finished so it could begin.

“Keep your beak shut,” I told it softly, not because it could understand, but because speaking keeps a man steady when the night wants to crawl inside his skull.

I washed my hands in the shallows until the water ran clear, though the cold only made the blood sting harder where it had dried in the creases of my knuckles, and I stood there with my fingers clenched and unclenched like I could work the feeling out of them by force. His ring was still on his hand. I took it. It resisted at first, the skin swelling already, and I had to cut the finger to free it, which felt fitting, because men like him never let go of what they’ve been paid to do unless something tears.

Iron band. Black stone.

I held it in my palm until the iron warmed, and I thought of you lying there on the floorboards with your breath going thin, and how you had used that last shred of it to give me this, as if you were still trying to keep me upright even as you fell. There is a kind of cruelty in love like that, not the sort that hurts on purpose, but the sort that leaves you no excuse to stop, no clean way to lay down and let the world take you too.

I walked back toward the road with the ring tucked against my skin, and the night felt wider than it had any right to, as if the dark had taken a step back to watch. Somewhere behind me the river kept moving, indifferent as ever, carrying his blood away the same way it carried his piss, and I hated it for that, for how easily it accepted everything men poured into it.

Rike was not the heart of it. He was a knife. A hand. A man who took coin and made himself useful to someone richer, which is the oldest trade in the realm, dressed up in different colours depending on who is paying. Still, he spoke the name, and names matter, even when they come out of a bastard’s mouth.

The baron.

I said it aloud once as I walked, quietly. The ring pressed against my chest as I moved, a small hard thing that felt like a brand, and I found myself thinking, not of the killing, but of the cottage by the lake, of the way you would stand in the doorway at dusk and watch the water, not dreaming of grand fortunes, only counting the quiet blessings you thought we had managed to steal from a violent world. I thought of our child’s small fingers, the way they used to clutch at yours and mine as if we were the only solid things in a life still learning what could break.

I had wanted to be the solid thing. I had wanted to be the man who came home, who sat at the hearth, who lived long enough to grow old and bitter in peace. Instead, I have become a man who writes letters to the dead because the living have nothing to offer him but empty counsel and frightened eyes. There was a time, after you were gone, when I imagined that if I killed the right man, the hollow in me would fill, that something would mend, that the world would balance itself out like a scale finally set right. I know better now. The world does not balance. It only takes, and then it watches what you become in the taking.

Still, I will not pretend I regret it. I regret many things. I regret leaving that morning. I regret believing our lake and our walls could hold back a realm built on greed and spite. I regret every small delay, every moment I told myself there would be time later, that I could make up for absence with tenderness when the road quieted. But I do not regret Rike. If there is any mercy in me left, it is not for him.

So, I am telling you, plain, what I did.

And I am telling you what I will do next, only in the way a man tells himself the road ahead exists even if he cannot yet see its end.

The baron’s name is in my mouth now and I will not write the rest of it, not because writing it would make it feel like a vow, and vows are dangerous things for men like me. They turn into chains. They make you predictable. They give the gods something to laugh at.

But the ring is against my skin, and the anger is back, patient as a debt.

You would not like the man I am becoming. I know that. You loved a man who believed in small things. A lake. A hearth. A child’s laugh. You loved a man who thought walls meant safety and that hard work could earn peace. That man is thinner now. Harder. He measures people the way he measures distance and steel.

I sometimes wonder whether you would look at me and see a stranger. Whether you would step back from the things I have learned to do without shaking.

There are moments, after the blood cools, when I almost step back myself.

Almost.

But then I remember you on the floorboards. I remember our son’s eyes open and empty. And whatever softness remains in me goes quiet again.

I do not know what waits for men like me. The priests speak of gates and reckonings, of scales weighed and books opened. But if there is any justice beyond this one, any mercy not bought with coin or steel, then perhaps there is a corner of it where a woman who loved too fiercely might stand and wait for a fool who learned too late.

Yours still. Whatever I have become.

L.