Chapter 553

Kharnek looked back at the fire again, silent, chewing on the idea like it was tough meat.

Then he muttered, half to himself, “Underwater war…”

Ludger watched him, patient.

Finally, Kharnek spoke, voice low, no longer dismissive, just grim.

“If you make my people drown,” he said, “I will break you.”

Ludger nodded once, accepting the threat as a normal part of leadership.

“If I make your people drown,” Ludger replied, “it means I planned poorly. We will train for a while before putting the plan into practice.”

He held Kharnek’s gaze.

“I don’t plan poorly,” Ludger said. “I plan until the world runs out of surprises.”

Kharnek stared at him for a long moment. Then he grunted, the closest thing to agreement Ludger was going to get on the first discussion. Kharnek still looked like he was chewing on the idea and finding bones in it.

His fingers tapped against his knee. His eyes kept drifting toward the darkness beyond the firelight, as if the forest itself might offer a better alternative than “underwater war against runic golems.”

Ludger was about to press again, carefully, the way you pressed on a bruise without making it worse, when a sound hit the camp.

A loud female voice. Not loud like someone shouting across a field. Loud like someone trying to

win an argument with the air itself.

The voice echoed between houses, rolled over the fires, and made several northerners visibly flinch. A couple of younger warriors near the racks straightened so fast their bones probably cracked.

Ludger frowned immediately. He didn’t know why, not at first. Just instinct. The kind that had kept him alive since he’d started wearing responsibilities like armor. Bad feeling. And worse, he couldn’t just leave.

Not without Kharnek’s cooperation, not when he’d just laid out a plan that needed northerners and northerner Rage Flow and northerner stubbornness. Fleeing now would be… dumb. And Ludger hated that almost as much as he hated being cornered.

The voice came closer. Closer. And closer. Then it broke into view between two buildings like an oncoming storm wearing a person’s shape. A female northerner.

Broad-shouldered, strong-backed, hair pulled tight, eyes like she’d decided the world was made of problems and she was going to hit them until they behaved. She was marching through the camp with the pure momentum of authority, scolding every young northerner in her path.

Most of them were just sitting around, “chilling”—as much as northerners ever chilled, with a mug or a chunk of meat or nothing at all, acting like they’d earned their peace. She disagreed.

“You!” she thundered, pointing at a boy. “Sit like a dead fish again and I will

make

you a dead fish! Where is your spine? Where is your dignity? Where is your brain?”

The boy flinched so hard he dropped his food.

The sound of her voice was almost eardrum-tearing. Ludger honestly wasn’t sure whether it was volume or intent that made it painful. A few of the young northerners tried to laugh it off. She turned on them. The laughter died like it had been stabbed.

Kharnek’s shoulders sank a fraction, like a man who’d just heard his own doom announce itself in advance. Ludger didn’t have to guess.

Not with the timing. Not with Kharnek’s earlier sigh. Not with the way the entire camp suddenly found urgent reasons to be somewhere else. That was Kharnek’s wife. And the moment Ludger realized it, a dry, unwanted thought flickered through him.

A match made in heaven.

Because Kharnek, when he drank, was loud enough to shake walls.

His wife sounded like she could shake continents.

It made sense in the cruel way the world often made sense: the noisiest man in the north married the only woman who could drown him out. She marched toward their fire like it was a battlefield she intended to conquer.

Ludger’s frown deepened.

Kharnek glanced at him once, just once, with the exhausted look of a man silently begging for help from someone who definitely couldn’t help him.

Ludger didn’t move. He couldn’t. Not without starting a new war. So he sat there, calm on the outside, calculating on the inside, as the approaching voice grew louder and the air around the camp seemed to shrink.

Whatever Kharnek decided about the labyrinth… Kharnek’s wife was about to decide something too. And Ludger had a feeling it would be worse. The woman’s march finally ended at their fire.

She stopped so abruptly the air seemed to tighten around her, like even the wind didn’t want to interrupt. The nearby northerners went suspiciously still, mugs halfway to mouths, hands frozen mid-gesture, like prey pretending to be furniture.

She stood in front of Kharnek first. Looked him up and down. Her eyes carried the kind of calm disappointment that could peel paint.

Kharnek, massive, loud, feared, somehow looked… smaller under that gaze. Then her attention slid to Ludger. It wasn’t a casual glance. It was an assessment. Like she was measuring weight and weakness and deciding which one of them required more scolding.

Her eyes settled on him.

“So,” she said, voice still loud enough to make the fire flinch, “you must be Ludger.”

Ludger didn’t move. He just met her eyes.

“I am,” he said.

She was tall for a northerner woman, which was something, still, not quite Kharnek’s height, but close enough that most men still had to look up a little. Her build wasn’t the soft “kept” strength of someone who trained for show. It was work-strength: broad shoulders, thick forearms, a back that looked like it had hauled timber and dragged wounded people out of snowstorms. Everything about her said

endurance first, elegance later.

Her hair was a pale, sun-bleached blonde that had started going toward steel-gray at the roots, pulled back tight and braided so it wouldn’t get grabbed in a fight. A few short strands had escaped near her temples, less “messy” and more “the world failed to stay neat around her.”

Her face was weathered in the northerner way, wind lines at the eyes, faint sunburn across the nose and cheekbones, skin that had spent years being slapped by cold air and not caring. She wasn’t pretty in a delicate sense. She was sharp. The kind of sharp that made people step aside without understanding why.

Her eyes were the worst part.

A cold, clear color, something between gray and ice-blue, always narrowed like she was evaluating your worth and finding the answer disappointing. When she stared at someone, it didn’t feel like she was looking at their face. It felt like she was looking for

weakness

.

She didn’t wear jewelry. No charms. No pointless decoration. The only metal on her was practical: a thick belt buckle, a knife at her hip, and a few worn rings that looked more like tools than fashion.

Her clothes matched the camp: fur-lined leather, heavy wool, layered for warmth and movement, stained in places that told you she didn’t avoid dirty work. The sleeves were rolled up often, exposing forearms marked with old scars, thin cuts, blunt bruises, one pale line that looked like a burn from a hot blade or a rune backfiring too close.

She tilted her head slightly, studying him as if he were a tool she didn’t trust yet. Then she nodded once, as if confirming something in her own mind.

“Hm,” she said. “I thought you would be taller.”

Ludger blinked once.

Emotional damage already,

he thought.

We’re not even warmed up.

He kept his face neutral and replied in the same flat tone he used for everything from negotiations to murder.

“Well,” Ludger said, “while it’s apparently normal for northerners to be two meters tall at thirteen…”

A few nearby warriors made choking sounds into their mugs, trying and failing to pretend they weren’t listening.

“…the rest of the world doesn’t operate like that,” Ludger finished.

The woman stared at him for a moment. Then, very slowly, the corner of her mouth twitched, almost a smile, like she’d found a small piece of entertainment in the middle of her day.

Kharnek, beside him, let out a quiet grunt that might have been relief. Or fear. Hard to tell. The woman’s gaze flicked back to her husband briefly, then returned to Ludger, sharper now.

“You talk back,” she said.

“I talk accurately,” Ludger replied.

Her eyes narrowed, but it wasn’t anger. It was interest.

“Good,” she said, like she’d just decided that made him more dangerous. “Then you will listen accurately too.”

Ludger didn’t like the way that sounded. But he also didn’t blink. Because fleeing wasn’t an option. And because if this was Kharnek’s wife… Then she was about to test whether the Lionsguard guildmaster could survive a different kind of battle entirely.

The woman drew a slow breath, and the camp seemed to inhale with her, like everyone had learned, the hard way, that interrupting this kind of person was a health risk.

Then she stepped closer to the fire and spoke with the confidence of someone who didn’t care who she offended.

“I am Sigrid,” she said.

The name landed like a hammer. Not because it was famous, because it

fit.

She looked at Ludger again, a flicker of something like courtesy crossing her face for half a second before it hardened back into blunt reality.

“And… I should apologize,” Sigrid added. “For not coming south earlier.”

Kharnek’s jaw tightened. He stared at the fire like it had personally betrayed him. Sigrid didn’t spare him.

“I assumed this alliance wouldn’t last,” she said, voice flat, “and that Kharnek was being fooled.”

She glanced at her husband, eyes narrowing with practiced disdain.

“He has muscles for a brain,” she continued, as if explaining a weather pattern. “And after being defeated, I thought he would cling to whatever story made his pride feel better.”

Kharnek made a sound low in his throat. It wasn’t quite a growl. It was the sound of a man deciding whether dying was preferable to arguing. Sigrid looked away from him and swept her gaze around the camp, taking it in with a sharp, measuring focus.

“So I waited,” she said. “Years. I decided to meet my husband and my daughter again after all that time, to see what they were doing in the south for all these years.”

She turned in place, gesturing at the tents, the fires, the lounging warriors, the scattered mugs, the half-hearted order.

“…Only to see this.”

Ludger’s eyes narrowed. “See what.”

Sigrid’s head tilted slightly, like she was surprised he didn’t understand.

“This,” she repeated, waving a hand at the camp. “A very nice camp.”

She paused a beat, just long enough for hope to spark in a couple of nearby faces.

Then she crushed it without effort.

“That could have been improved,” Sigrid said, voice sharpening, “if the northerners had actually put in the work to help the Lionsguard who have helped them so much.”

Kharnek’s eyes flicked toward Ludger like he wanted backup. Ludger didn’t give it. Not because he agreed with everything she was saying. Because he could already see the truth underneath it.

Sigrid stepped forward and pointed toward a cluster of young warriors lounging near the racks, able-bodied men with nothing broken except maybe their sense of responsibility.

“Instead,” she said, loud enough that no one could pretend they hadn’t heard, “I find a bunch of strong men who only go down to the labyrinth to earn enough money to buy food and booze for a week.”

The camp went very quiet. Some faces hardened with anger. Some dropped with shame. A few tried to look offended and failed, because offense didn’t work when the accusation was accurate.

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