Chapter 3 : The River Rat
Torben's axe hit the splitting block at dawn. The sound traveled through the cottage walls like a metronome — rhythmic, steady, grounding. Dorian had been awake for an hour, lying still on the blanket, running assessments.
Two days in this body. Two days of Elda's stew, careful movement, and stolen moments with the system interface when neither farmer was watching. The poison residue was clearing — his breathing came easier, and the constant metallic taste at the back of his throat had faded to an occasional reminder. His muscles still trembled under any sustained effort, but the baseline was improving. A body that had been dead was remembering how to be alive.
He used the mornings before Torben and Elda woke to test the body's limits. Push-ups — the arms gave out at seven. Squats — twelve before his vision grayed. A dead hang from a low tree branch — sixteen seconds. Pathetic numbers. The kind of numbers that would get a recruit washed out of basic training on the first day.
"Aldric Blackmere never trained a day in his life. I'm starting from less than zero."
But the muscles responded. Whatever Ashblood did to a body, it seemed to include an accelerated adaptation rate. Three days of careful loading, and seven push-ups had become eleven. Twelve squats had become eighteen. The dead hang held at twenty-three seconds. Progress that should have taken weeks compressed into days.
The system's cultural package occupied his afternoons. He studied it the way he'd studied language tapes before deployments — repetition, association, error correction. Left hand extended for equals. Right hand for superiors. The ash-ward gesture when passing a temple: forehead, then heart, two fingers pressed flat. Never ask a noble about their specific Ashblood ability — equivalent to asking someone's salary. Commoners say "my lord" to anyone with visible metallic skin sheen. The five Great Houses. The power tiers: Spark, Ember, Blaze, Inferno, Eclipse.
Broad. Shallow. Enough to survive a casual encounter. Nowhere near enough to fool anyone who'd spent time at court.
"I need a better source. Books. Locals with loose tongues. A library, if medieval empires have those."
On the second evening, Torben shared something useful without realizing it. He mentioned Lord Harren's tax collectors — three men who rode a circuit through the outlying farms every month. Due any day now. The farmers paid in grain and iron marks, and if they couldn't pay, the collectors took it out in other ways. Torben's jaw tightened when he said it. Elda turned her back to the fire and didn't speak.
Dorian logged the information. Tax collectors on a circuit meant a predictable schedule, an established route, and an authority structure he could map. Lord Harren — a minor vassal, probably owing fealty to someone larger, who owed fealty to one of the Great Houses. Every feudal system worked the same way. Pull one thread and the whole tapestry unraveled toward the center.
On the third morning, the hoofbeats came.
---
Three riders. Dorian heard them before he saw them — the heavy, arrhythmic thud of horses not trained for formation riding. He was behind the cottage, working through a set of stretches that would have been embarrassing at any gym on Earth, when the sound cut through the morning quiet.
His body went still. Not a decision — an autonomic response drilled into him by a decade of fieldwork. Freeze, assess, act. In that order. Always.
He pressed his back against the cottage wall and edged toward the corner. The riders came into view on the track from the north. Three men on horses that were built for endurance rather than speed. Leather armor, short swords, the look of men who were comfortable with violence the way a carpenter was comfortable with a saw — professional, routine, nothing personal.
Torben stood in the yard. His axe was by the splitting block, but he made no move toward it. Elda was inside. The door was closed.
The lead rider dismounted. Broad-shouldered, dark-bearded, with a scar that started at his left ear and disappeared into his collar. He looked at Torben the way a man looks at furniture.
"Month's due, farmer."
"I've only got half." Torben's voice was flat. Rehearsed. He'd had this conversation before and already knew how it ended. "Crop came in thin. The—"
The backhand caught him across the mouth. Not hard enough to knock him down — calibrated. The kind of blow that said I can do worse without actually doing worse. The lead enforcer grabbed a fistful of Torben's shirt.
"Half isn't the number Lord Harren gave me."
Behind the cottage wall, Dorian's operative instincts delivered their assessment in the clear, cold voice that had kept him alive across three continents.
"Not your problem. You're forty miles from the capital in a body that can't throw a punch. These men have swords. You have eleven push-ups and a system that tracks political stats. Walk away. Avoid attention. Find the road and keep moving."
Correct analysis. Clean logic. The kind of decision that kept agents alive and assets expendable.
Elda's cry came through the cottage wall. Thin, frightened, the sound of a woman who knew what was about to get worse and couldn't stop it.
Torben's blood hit the dirt. A second blow, harder than the first.
"He fed you when you had nothing."
That wasn't the operative talking. That was something older, something Dorian hadn't been able to train out of himself despite ten years of professional detachment. A reflex that had no place in tradecraft and no respect for risk assessment.
He focused on the lead enforcer. Five seconds of sustained observation.
[NAME: BRECK | TITLE: TAX ENFORCER, LORD HARREN'S SERVICE]
[DISPOSITION: HOSTILE | EMOTION: CONTEMPT]
The second enforcer, still mounted.
[NAME: UNKNOWN | TITLE: TAX ENFORCER | DISPOSITION: NEUTRAL | EMOTION: BOREDOM]
The third.
[NAME: UNKNOWN | TITLE: TAX ENFORCER | DISPOSITION: NEUTRAL | EMOTION: BOREDOM]
"One hostile. Two along for the ride. The hostile is afraid of his boss but not afraid of a farmer. The other two don't care either way."
Dorian stepped around the corner.
He didn't rush. Didn't shout. He walked into the yard with the measured pace of someone who expected to be there, and when Breck's head turned — hand still fisted in Torben's shirt — Dorian was already speaking.
"Lord Harren's men." His voice came out level, calm, stripped of emotion. Not the Aldric mask — he didn't need royalty here. This was the voice he'd used in interrogation rooms across three countries. The voice that said: I know things you don't, and what I know should make you nervous.
"Collecting from a farm that's barely solvent." He stopped four paces from Breck. Close enough to establish presence, far enough to avoid being grabbed. "How does Lord Harren explain the shortfall to his own liege when the farms stop producing because his collectors beat the workers too hard to plant?"
Breck's grip on Torben loosened a fraction. His eyes narrowed.
"Who the hell are you?"
"A traveler who's been asking questions about the local roads." Dorian tilted his head. His expression was blank — a mask of absolute confidence layered over a body that couldn't back up a single word he was saying. "I've been asking about Lord Harren's operation. About the arrangement he has with the merchants at the bridge crossing. About the portion of the tax that never makes it to the actual treasury."
Every word was a knife thrown blind. Dorian had no idea if Lord Harren was corrupt. But every lord was corrupt — that was a universal constant across every civilization he'd ever infiltrated. And tax collectors who beat farmers were either following orders from a cruel lord or skimming off the top and covering it with violence. Either way, there was something to hide.
Breck's face shifted. The contempt drained out, replaced by something colder. Calculation.
"That's a dangerous thing to say."
"It's a dangerous thing to do." Dorian didn't blink. "I'm just the one saying it."
Silence. Breck's hand dropped from Torben's shirt. The farmer stumbled backward, blood on his lip, eyes wide.
The two mounted enforcers exchanged a look. Neither reached for a weapon, but neither relaxed either. They were waiting for Breck to decide, and Breck was running numbers behind his eyes — the kind of numbers that had nothing to do with arithmetic and everything to do with risk.
A stranger who knew things. Who spoke with authority. Who wasn't afraid.
Dorian watched the calculation finish.
"We'll be back next month," Breck said. He looked at Torben. "Full payment."
He mounted. The three riders turned north and kicked their horses to a trot, and they didn't look back.
Silver text flared.
[THREAT +3: INTIMIDATION OF LOCAL HOSTILES]
[GUILE +2: SUCCESSFUL BLUFF]
The numbers ticked upward in Dorian's peripheral vision. Cold. Impersonal. A machine that quantified dominance and deception with the same indifferent precision.
He stood in the yard for a long moment, watching the dust settle where the horses had churned it. His hands weren't shaking. They should have been — he'd just bluffed three armed men with nothing but posture and bullshit while wearing a body that couldn't survive a single punch.
"Tradecraft works in any century. Good to know."
Behind him, Torben wiped blood from his lip with the back of his hand. He stared at Dorian. The look wasn't gratitude — it was sharper than that. Recognition. The same look an asset gives when they realize their handler isn't what they pretend to be.
"You're not a traveler," Torben said.
"No," Dorian agreed. There was no point lying about it now. "But I'm not your enemy either."
Torben said nothing for a long time. Then he nodded once, went back to his splitting block, and picked up the axe.
Dorian helped Elda clean Torben's face with a cloth dipped in cold water. She pressed it against the swelling without flinching, and Dorian held the basin and said nothing, because some debts were paid in silence.
---
He left the cottage that afternoon.
His legs were stronger. Not strong — but the difference between "collapse after a mile" and "walk until dusk" had arrived sometime during the second bowl of stew, and Dorian wasn't going to waste it.
Torben gave him a wool cloak. Rough, patched at the shoulder, smelling of wood smoke and animal. Elda pressed a wrapped bundle into his hands — bread, hard cheese, dried strips of meat that might have been goat.
"The capital road forks at the Ashflow Bridge," Torben said. "North fork takes you around the toll. Adds a day, but you won't have to pay or explain yourself."
"Thank you."
Torben looked at him. The recognition was still there — a question the farmer was too smart to ask and too cautious to forget.
"Whoever you are," he said quietly, "be careful in Ironhold. The city eats men who think they're cleverer than it."
Dorian adjusted the cloak, shifted the food bundle to his left hand — left hand for equals, already thinking in this world's grammar — and walked toward the road.
The Ashflow River glinted gray through the trees to his west. Ahead, the land flattened into the wide, fertile sweep of the Heartlands, and somewhere beyond the horizon, the capital waited. A city of half a million people, a dying emperor, three princes who'd murdered their brother, and a court where the weapons were secrets and the currency was trust.
The system pulsed at the edge of his vision. Five stats, most still near zero. A rank that meant nothing yet. An Exposure Meter sitting at one percent because a farmer in the middle of nowhere had looked at him and seen something that didn't match the cover.
One percent. From a single interaction with a man who'd never set foot inside a castle.
"The court is going to eat me alive if I walk in unprepared."
Dorian's boots hit the packed dirt of the road. Forty miles to Ironhold. A dead prince's name to wear. And the cold, professional certainty that the only thing standing between him and a second grave was the same thing that had always kept him breathing.
Not strength. Not magic. Not luck.
The ability to become whoever the next room needed him to be.
He picked up his pace, and the road stretched forward into the gray distance.
Support the Story on Patreon
If you are enjoying the series and would like to read ahead, I offer an early access schedule on Patreon. I upload 7 new chapters every 10 days.
Tiers are available that provide a 7, 14, or 21-chapter head start over the public release. Your support helps me maintain this consistent update pace.
Patreon.com/TransmigratingwithWishes