The Gembound: The Price of Keeping Chapter 96: Volume 4: Chapter 88 – North

Read chapter 96 of The Gembound: The Price of Keeping by Taliorn on NovelPedia.

Volume 4: Chapter 88 – North Days 56–63 | The March The road north out of Saltwhistle cut through the Ferric heartland like a scar: straight, stone-capped where it mattered, rutted where it didn’t. For three days, the army filled it—regulars, Enhanced, beasts, bears, Chainwolves, Iron Defenders moving in a layered geometry that had become its own language. Fields lay fallow at their passing. Villages watched through shutter cracks and loft windows. Once, a boy stood in the road and stared until Bruno barked a word, and the column parted around him like water. He didn’t move. His mother hauled him back by the collar, eyes wide and white, and slammed the door. No resistance. No skirmishers. Whoever might have fought had either fled ahead or was waiting at Ironhold. The rat flees to its wall. Let it. Walls keep meat from running. Sapphire traced cold lines over her vision: roads converging on a single, fortified knot. The capital’s gravity was real; she could feel even Harry leaning into it. Daryl had insisted on point duty the moment the column left Saltwhistle’s walls. He ranged ahead with Shadow like he’d been born for the gap between sight and safety. Smoke-step carried him through sparse trees and abandoned outer hamlets; he vanished into scrub and reappeared beside the next milestone with a report half-spoken, half-laughed. “Everything’s empty,” he said on the second day, pacing alongside the command wagon for exactly three heartbeats before moving again. “No patrols. No outriders. I’m offended.” Yara walked today instead of riding. The ground felt more honest under her boots. Shadow moved on the ditch side, No Trace keeping her presence a suggestion rather than fact; Mist flowed in her wake, a shadow with claws. “They’re pulling in,” Yara said. “You know that.” “Sure,” Daryl said. “But they could at least send a few scouts so I don’t die of boredom before we get there.” Shadow drifted closer, voice dry as ash. “That’s the point. If we had to kill something every mile, we’d arrive with half an army.” Daryl threw his hands up. “You hear this? Wisdom. Responsibility. I hate it.” “You like it,” Shadow said. “It means you get to be loud later.” That got a grin. “I do enjoy a good later.” He blurred forward again, smoke-step carrying him through the next knot of brush. Shadow and Mist melted into hedgerows and ditch-shadow, unseen but watching. The countryside stopped pretending not to see them on the third day. Women stood by wells, buckets abandoned halfway up, bodies rigid with held breath. Elderly men took off their hats as Sam passed and didn’t put them back on until the last of the siege-elk had gone by. Children peered over stone walls with the stunned curiosity of small creatures watching a storm walk on legs. Some bowed. Some spat after the column. Most did nothing at all. Eliza rode the command wagon today, ledger open in her lap. Gayle walked nearby with Renn, eyes sharp and new, watching how people looked at them. Not with faith. With calculation. Yara caught fragments: “Ferric?” “…no, worse…” “Those are hers—” “…the dragon—” Calm, she thought, but not peace. A held breath before something breaks. As the column rounded the next bend, a pair of elders stood in the road. Not armed. Not kneeling. Just waiting. A woman with hair in a tight gray plait. A man leaning on a cane, he clearly didn’t trust anymore. Bruno moved to wave them aside, but the woman raised her hand. Not in threat — in request. “Commander,” she said when Yara drew near. Her voice shook, but her spine didn’t. “We heard what you did in Saltwhistle. How you made the broken walk again?” The man cleared his throat. “We’re not much good like this. But we used to be. Forty years as a farmhand, twenty years in the militia. We can still pull a bow if our backs aren’t screaming at us.” “You want enhancement,” Yara said. The woman nodded. “Want? No. We ask. There’s a difference.” Yara studied them. They weren’t naive. She could see it in their eyes. They had out