Harrowmere · the Lake Market

The giant who put the carters' champion on his back

A spear-hand who wanted the terms in writing, a healer who wanted a name, and a giant ox-driver the crowd laughed at. Three friends signing on with a caravan — and planning a company of their own.

Oswy, bloodied and huge, taking the ring-keeper's silver while the carters crowd the rope — Dawn in the carters' ring: five silver, counted into a giant's palm.

Tamas Vey, spear-hand, human — Tamas Veyspear-hand, human

Ilse Marrow, herbalist, half-elf — Ilse Marrowherbalist, half-elf

Oswy, ox-driver, giantkin — Oswyox-driver, giantkin

Every mercenary company in the Rimewild started as a few people who were tired of being hired. Tamas Vey, Ilse Marrow and Oswy aren't there yet. They came up the south road together with a caravan, and they want what every hired hand wants: a banner of their own, and their own contracts. First, they need to eat.

Tamas has a dented ash spear and three coppers. Ilse is a half-elf herbalist with a satchel of salves. Oswy is giantkin — enormous, gentle, and the man who drives the lead ox-team. In Harrowmere's Lake Market at dusk, the Tallow Company was hiring guards for an ore caravan, a carter was offering five silver to anyone who could beat his champion, and a hooded stranger at the inn was paying silver for the road to the high ridges.

Terms in writing

Tamas has been a hired spear long enough to know how hired spears get cheated. His first order:

Tamas’s order: Tamas shoulders his dented ash spear, strides across the square to the Tallow sergeant, and bluntly offers his services for the ore caravan guard, demanding the company's terms in writing before he signs anything.

Ilse, on the same turn, had the same instinct from another angle: ask whether her healer's satchel could earn the pair of them a better contract than a line of guard duty. It did — for her. Sergeant Garran Holt wrote a healer's line beside the spear-hands: a silver and a half a day to Tamas's one. He scrawled the terms on a torn sheet under the Tallow seal, and they both signed.

Ilse and Tamas at a table in the Drowned Lantern with the signed hire paper between them — The hire paper, signed under the Tallow seal.

The ring at dawn

Oswy's evening went differently. A scarred carter called out that a giant's strength is a story told to children, and the crowd laughed. Oswy didn't argue. He named his terms instead: the five silver posted where he could see it, and his oxen stabled out of the rain. The ring-keeper counted the silver into a purse and tied it to the post. Oswy slept on straw beside his team.

Oswy’s order: Oswy grips the ox-goad in one fist, ducks under the rope into the ring, and plants his heavy feet on the wet sand while he yells for Pell to come close so the bout can start.

Pell comes in fast and drives an elbow into your ribs, then tries to hook your leg. You do not give ground. You take his wrist in one hand and his belt in the other and lift him off the cobbles.From Oswy's turn

Pell Dunmore went down on his back and stayed there until the fall was called. Five silver — five days of hard hauling — went into Oswy's palm, and the ring-keeper added a warning with it: Pell's cousins drink in the Sinkward, and they won't like this.

The ring-keeper counting silver into Oswy's hand as Pell picks himself up from the cobbles — Oswy collects. Pell's cousins are already watching.

A stranger on the stairs

Back at the Drowned Lantern, the hooded woman came up the stairs before dawn, asking for the spear-hand who'd signed for Garran. Tamas laid his spear across the top step: 'Speak your business here, where Ilse can hear, and keep your hands away from my coat.' She wanted a guide to the Spire Ridge, and offered five silver up front. He told her he was bound to the caravan. She smiled without warmth and told him to find her when the wagons were rolling.

Ilse did the quieter work. She stitched a carter's split hand at the back door for a copper, bound Oswy's ribs for two, and then sat down beside the stranger with a healer's easy smile to ask which of her people had been hurt on the Ridge road. Two men in spring, the woman said, and one came down without his hands. One more copper to the innkeeper got Ilse what the stranger wouldn't give: the name in the book. Marit Enn.

Ilse sliding a copper across the bar to the innkeeper, the guest book between them — A copper for the name in the book.

Where it stands

The muster is at first light. Tamas is at the Tallow yard with the hire paper buttoned inside his coat, and Ilse's name is on the sergeant's roll. Oswy's isn't. He spent the night under a boathouse in the Sinkward with five silver in his pocket and a cut on his scalp from a bottle, because he'd crept up to the cousins' shutter and heard what they were planning: to take his oxen out the stable's side door before the carters' bell.

Oswy crouched under the boathouse stilts in the rain as a cousin stands on the planks above with a bottle — Under the stilts in the Sinkward, with the cousins' lamp still burning.

So the free company isn't founded yet. But look at what three hired hands built in one night: a contract in writing, a healer's line worth half again a spear's, five silver won in front of the whole market, a stranger's name, and a warning in time. Whether the wagons roll with all three of them — and with Oswy's oxen — is the next turn's problem.

Bring your friends.

In The Churn you write what your character tries, in your own words, and the world answers — honestly. Begin beside a friend and you start as allies, in the same place, on the same turn. No class, no script: whatever you build, you build.

Begin your own life — free