Freyeís’s apothecary sat in a converted grain warehouse on the garrison’s eastern edge—big doors, thick beams, windows set high so nobody could peek in unless they brought a ladder and a strong desire to be stabbed with a pestle.
Eirik had walked past it a thousand times and never cared.
He cared now, because the door opened before they knocked.
Freyeís stood there like she’d been waiting since before dawn. Sturdy. Grey-streaked hair cut short. Hands that had done work for decades and weren’t ashamed of it.
At first glance she looked like a woman in her forties.
At second glance she looked like someone who could choose to look like anything she pleased.
Eirik’s Touch brushed her without meaning to—dense presence, pressed down hard and held there. Not like Bj?rn’s careful discipline. Not like Skeggi’s lazy “I’m tired of pretending” suppression.
Freyeís’s felt like I don’t care what you think I am, so I’ll be small until I need to be big.
Her eyes went straight to Leif. “You brought books.”
“Yes,” Leif said.
Her gaze dropped to the stack. “All of them.”
“I didn’t know what you’d want so I—”
“Come in.” She stepped back. “Put them on the table. I’ll tell you which ones are going to cause trouble.”
Leif brightened in the exact way a normal boy would not brighten.
Freyeís looked at Eirik. “Skeggi’s boy,” she said.
Eirik answered quick, because this was one of those moments where slow got you pinned. “Student. Not blood.”
“I know.” She tipped her head, studying him like a craftsman judging a knot in wood. “He wrote about you.”
Skeggi wrote letters like he admitted mistakes: rarely and only when forced.
“He said you were learning the brine,” Freyeís continued. “Didn’t say you were big enough to carry a grown man’s sword for fun.”
Eirik grinned. “It’s not fun. It’s suffering with purpose.”
“Charming.” She moved into the shop. “You can watch. Touch nothing unless I say so.”
Leif strode in like a boy entering a temple.
Eirik followed like a boy entering a place full of jars he very badly wanted to touch.
· · · ? · · ·
The first days set a rhythm.
Leif worked the main benches—sorting dried bundles, learning what looks the same but isn’t, grinding, weighing, heating, cooling, and listening to Freyeís talk the way soldiers listened to a captain with a sharp stick.
He was good.
Freyeís noticed on the first morning and punished him for it by making everything harder before noon.
On day two she started writing in his books.
Leif saw the first margin marks and went a little pale.
“That note says my definition of channel-saturation is wrong,” he said.
Freyeís didn’t look up. “Imprecise.”
Leif blinked. “Isn’t that the same as wrong?”
“No.” She set down the pestle and finally looked at him. “Wrong is clean. Imprecise is how you become wrong without noticing until something explodes.”
Leif, honest as ever, said, “Cultivation materials don’t usually explode.”
Freyeís stared at him until the word usually began sweating. “That word is doing heavy lifting.”
Leif wrote it down word for word.
Freyeís saw him do it and decided not to comment, which somehow made it worse.
Eirik did what he’d been told: watched, quiet, hands behind his back, Touch kept low—only the faint, passive read that sat in him like breath.
The shop was dense with signatures: hundreds of jars, layered ?nd, old wood soaked with decades of remedies. It took him most of the first day to learn the room the way you learned a training yard—where the danger was, where the useful things lived, where you could move without knocking something expensive off a shelf.
On the morning of day two Freyeís said, without turning around, “Third cabinet. Deepstone compound. What’s wrong with it.”
Eirik answered immediately.
“Realm Two, mid-quality. Eight months old, still in the good window. Binding looks clean.” He paused, then added, because he couldn’t not. “But there’s oil contamination in the bottom third. Shelf drip from above. Not fresh—older than a month.”
Freyeís went to the cabinet, opened the jar, tilted it to the light, and saw exactly what he’d said.
She set it down like she’d just found a new kind of problem.
“How long have you had Touch?” she asked.
“Since I was five.”
“And it reads that.”
“Materials don’t wiggle,” Eirik said. “People wiggle.”
Freyeís went still. Recalibrating. “Skeggi didn’t mention this.”
“He doesn’t mention things.”
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
“No,” she said. “He really doesn’t.” She closed the cabinet. “Come tomorrow after morning work. I want to show you something.”
Leif’s head snapped up like a hunting dog hearing a bell. “Is it a basin?”
Freyeís looked at him. “You don’t know what it is.”
Leif said, very small, “I was hoping.”
Freyeís went back to work. “Finish grinding. Stop hoping.”
Leif resumed grinding, hopeful.
· · · ? · · ·
Day three, after the morning session, Freyeís took Eirik to the back room.
He’d known it was there from the first hour—different heat through the wall, deeper warmth, like a spring that had learned to hold its breath. He hadn’t asked. Skeggi had taught him that some doors opened faster if you didn’t paw at the handle.
Freyeís opened it herself.
Inside: a stone basin sunk into the floor, about the size of a bath. A narrow channel fed it from below. The liquid in it wasn’t just water. It was work. Years of it. Adjusted, layered, maintained.
The room smelled like minerals and clean rot and something quietly alive.
Freyeís pointed at it. “You’ve been doing body tempering with brine on the skin.”
“Yes.”
“That gets you started.” Her tone suggested congratulations for crawling. “You’ve hit the ceiling.”
Eirik didn’t argue. He’d felt it—maintenance, not growth.
“Full immersion,” she said. “You run the work inside it, and you stop trying to bully the current. Let the basin do what it was made to do.”
Eirik hesitated exactly long enough to be honest. “It’ll hurt.”
“It’ll work,” Freyeís corrected.
So he got in.
The first minutes were fine—warmth pushing into his channels with a steadiness his home batches couldn’t match. He sank into his usual method: pull ?nd into bone, tendon, the deep interfaces. Hold. Endure. Let the slow heat do the slow change.
At fifteen minutes the discomfort arrived.
Not sharp. Not burning.
Pressure. Everywhere. Like the basin was politely asking his whole body to make room all at once.
Eirik clenched his jaw and tried to force through it.
Freyeís snapped, “Stop pushing. You’re fighting it.”
Eirik breathed hard through his nose.
“Hold steady,” she said. “Let it come.”
He adjusted—less shove, more anchor.
The pressure shifted. It stopped feeling like a wall and started feeling like a tide finding its path.
His channels opened in a way he hadn’t known they could.
He held forty minutes.
When he climbed out, his legs wanted to fold like wet rope. He sat down on the stone floor because pride didn’t catch you when you fell.
The Wyrd came quietly—small acknowledgments stacked together, the system noticing a threshold crossed that had been building for months.
He opened his status, full read.
Year 9 · Late Winter · Járnvik
Class: Unassigned
Líkami (STR) 21 [↑4]
Ferd (AGI) 23 [↑3]
Trek (END) 30 [↑6]
Hugr (INT) 36 [↑2]
Skyn (PER) 35 [↑3]
Tróttur (WILL) 31 [↑4]
Tokki (CHA) 14 (no one asked but yes it slid a bit)
Level — (Unassigned)
Earthroot Blár · Lv.5 (was Grár · Lv.20 ? GRADE CAP)
?nd-Channeling (Basic) Blár · Lv.2 (was Grár · Lv.9)
Appraiser’s Touch Blár · Lv.3 (was Grár · Lv.10)
?nd-Sense Grár · Lv.15 ? hybrid: passive baseline / active extension (was Lv.13)
Blade Sense Grár · Lv.14 ? hybrid: passive read / active layer (was Lv.13)
Rune-Reader Grár · Lv.7 (was Lv.6)
Dreamer’s Memory Blár · Lv.8
Ancestral Tongue Blár · Lv.13
Toughened Channels Grár · Lv.13 (was Lv.12)
Keen Eye Grár · Lv.15 ? hybrid: passive baseline / active focus (was Lv.14)
Post Conditioning Grár · Lv.6 (was Lv.4)
Herbalist’s Eye Grár · Lv.5 (was Lv.4)
Tracking (Basic) Grár · Lv.5 (was Lv.4)
Unarmed Fundamentals Grár · Lv.18 ? hybrid: internalized / active in combat (was Lv.16)
Body Tempering (Basic) Grár · Lv.4 (new since Steinvik)
? Wanderer’s Child (birth gift — origin unclear)
? Young Cultivator (first deliberate ?nd use — Year 5)
? Foundation-Builder (foundation before application)
? Unsupervised (solo cultivation period — noted)
? Against the Grain (unusual build order)
? The Hard Way (Grár — Common)
? First Steps (S?fnun: minor)
? Still Waters (S?fnun: minor)
? Early Riser (S?fnun: minor)
? Eye for Value (spirit stone identification — S?fnun: minor)
? First Blood (genuine combat — S?fnun: significant)
S?fnun: 62% [↑5%] · Vessel filling.
Leif appeared in the doorway the instant the screen faded, notebook already open like a weapon.
“What did you get?” he asked.
Eirik, still seated, said, “My legs are cooked.”
Leif’s pencil hovered. “That’s not a number.”
Eirik sighed and told him the important parts: END jumped, ?nd-Channeling rose in grade, the basin changed the depth of the work.
Leif nodded, wrote, then—because Leif couldn’t help being Leif—said, “Your Tokki is fourteen.”
Eirik stared at him. “Leif.”
“That’s low,” Leif insisted.
“Thank you.”
“I’m not judging. I’m noting.”
“You’re noting with your face.”
Freyeís leaned in the doorway behind Leif, amused in a way she didn’t let out often. “He’s right. You have the charm of a blunt instrument.”
Eirik brightened. “That’s my best kind.”
Freyeís pointed at him. “Bring me your current brine tomorrow. You’re going to ruin it if you keep mixing for skin-depth when you’ve started working at bone-depth.”
Eirik took the jar she offered. It smelled like something older than the garrison.
“What is it?” he asked.
“A start,” Freyeís said. “Now get dressed before you fall asleep on my floor.”
· · · ? · · ·
On the seventh day, the garrison did its weekly inspection.
Captain áskell. Senior soldiers. And an officer from the regional cultivation office—Geirr—wearing a coat too fine for mud and a look that said he believed frontier air was contagious.
Bj?rn wore his good boots. He owned two pairs. The good pair came out maybe half a dozen times a year, and he’d checked them the night before.
Halfway through áskell’s patrol summary, Geirr’s expression changed.
Not obvious. Just… a slight tightening around the nose.
A smell had arrived that didn’t belong in inspections.
Not smoke.
Not sweat.
Not leather oil.
Brine.
A very specific brine. The kind that clung to a room for three days and a man for six.
áskell’s gaze flicked to Bj?rn’s boots.
Bj?rn kept speaking like nothing in the world was wrong.
Sigrid walked past on legitimate business, took one breath, and very deliberately did not look at anyone.
Skeggi was nowhere to be found.
Neither was Rí.
Which was suspicious, because Rí was always where she shouldn’t be.
After the inspection, Sigrid found Rí in the yard, practicing with her dowel like she’d been born holding it. Rí met her mother’s stare with bright innocence that would have convinced nobody who hadn’t raised her.
Sigrid said, very softly, “Did you know about the boots.”
Rí didn’t miss a beat. “I knew they came out of the wardrobe.”
“And then?”
“And then I was helping Skeggi with the jars,” Rí said, perfectly true and absolutely not helpful.
Sigrid closed her eyes for one moment.
Then she opened them and said, tiredly, “You are only a little over a year younger than your brother.”
Rí smiled. “Yes.”
“That is not reassuring.”
Rí’s smile widened like she’d been complimented.
· · · ? · · ·
On the last morning, Freyeís handed Leif his stack of books back.
There was now more Freyeís in them than the original authors.
“Write to me,” she said, “when you’ve answered the margin questions.”
Leif nodded like this was a vow. “Yes, ma’am.”
Freyeís paused at the doorway as they left. “And tell Skeggi he still owes me for Drengsmark.”
Eirik blinked. “Does everyone have a job he owes them for?”
Freyeís’s mouth quirked. “Everyone who lived long enough to work beside him.”
The door shut.
Outside, Leif held his books like treasure.
Eirik held the jar Freyeís had given him like a challenge.
They started back toward the garrison.
Leif said, thoughtful, “If Skeggi owes everyone…”
Eirik snorted. “No.”
Leif frowned. “No what?”
“No lists.”
Leif’s eyes narrowed. “A list in your head still counts.”
Eirik grinned. “Deniable list.”
Leif sighed—deeply, like a man burdened by family—and then nodded. “Fine. Deniable list.”
They walked on, both of them carrying something that mattered.
And somewhere behind them, in a warehouse full of jars and quiet danger, Freyeís went back to her work—content as a woman who had just met two boys who were going to make the world complicated in exactly the ways it deserved.
· · · ? · · ·