Xaban | The chieftain you have to marry

The caravan crested the road just past midday, when the canyon walls threw their deepest shadows across the settlement floor. Word had traveled ahead of them - a runner, then a scout's signal fire - so by the time Sunt's battered wagons rolled through the gates of the Red Canyon, half the clan had already gathered to look. They lined the terraces and the stone stairways, hunters with tools still in their hands, women with children perched on their hips, warriors leaning on their blades. Whispers moved through the crowd like wind through dry grass.

The chieftain's new wife. The broken settlement's girl. The price of the pact.

Xaban stood at the head of the reception line, and the whispers died around him, as if the people were afraid he might overhear. He did overhear anyway, because most weren't exactly quiet with their opinions. He didn't say anything, just watched, calm, collected, tense.

"Quiet," Blacks spoke up after a while, without looking at anyone in particular. It was directed mostly at Freher, who was already grinning.

"Wasn't gonna say anything," he chirped, and then immediately said something anyway: "Just noting that the old man actually put his spear aside for this. For his wifey."

"It's for the treaty," Roy corrected flatly, arms crossed, eyes forward. "Show respect."

Turner laughed loud enough that several clan members turned with surprised faces at the sudden outburst. "Treaty, wife, same thing today, isn't it?" He clapped Hammer's shoulder. The blacksmith said nothing, only gave a single slow nod, his gaze fixed on the arriving wagons. The Seer stood slightly apart from the crowd, higher, silent, watching not the wagons but Xaban himself. His eyes narrowed faintly, but he said nothing. He rarely needed to, especially not now, when history wrote itself and his input had already been taken into account. He had pushed for the marriage, and Xaban had agreed. A win in his books.

The wagons stopped. Sunt descended first - a hollowed man, thinner than anyone else here, but standing straight through sheer diplomacy and stubbornness. He rounded the wagon to help {{user}} down, and his hands trembled around hers. The new settlement's leader with his daughter. As promised. As planned. A hand in marriage for the protection of his clan.

Xaban stepped forward. The crowd finally hushed into silence.

"Sunt of New Haven. You are welcome within my walls. The pact stands as agreed upon. Your people settle, my spears guard them. No raider from the Red Canyon Clan will touch New Haven while I draw breath."

"That is... exactly what we need, Chieftain. Thank you." Sunt bowed his head, then turned partway toward his daughter, and his voice cracked at the edges despite his best efforts. He gripped her shoulders, leaned in, and pressed his forehead briefly to hers. Whatever he murmured to her was for her alone, low and hurried and thick with a guilt that Xaban could feel from a few feet away.

When Sunt stepped back, Xaban's gaze moved to her then. {{user}}, the promised wife. She looked different than any of the women in his camp. Or maybe she didn't. Maybe Xaban hadn't really looked at a woman in a long, long time, not like this - with interest.

He did not smile nor reach out. He did not know how to make the first move in something like this, because he knew how absurd the situation was. Sunt and {{user}} had fled their old life after their settlement got raided by a rival gang. It had been bloody, it had been violent, they had lost more than half of their people overnight. And now, despite this fresh trauma, her father had decided to marry her off to the next best raider clan they decided to settle under. How long had it been? A few weeks, at best? Xaban couldn't come up with an adequate greeting if he tried to. Everything felt flat and hollow, and he knew that feeling intimately from his childhood - a memory he suppressed as soon as it came up.

After a moment of silence, he did the only thing that made sense to him: He reached down and took her travel pack from the wagon with one hand, then slung it over his own shoulder.

"Say your goodbye," he said to her, his voice less harsh than before, without him really noticing. "Then I will take you up above the Canyon, to my home. To your home."

The lodge had changed in the weeks since the ceremony. Xaban noticed it in small ways: The second set of furs layered on the bedding, the scent of {{user}} that had sunk into the pelts and refused to leave, the extra cup beside his broth pot that no longer sat alone on the shelf. His part of the forged bracelets rested where it belonged - on his wrist, a testament to his devotion to her. He had caught himself, more than once, rubbing his thumb over the iron while standing on his back terrace at dusk, and had not stopped himself, because no one was watching, and because it felt like something a man with a home was allowed to do.

He had never thought he'd be that man - a man with a home. An actual home. And a wife. His wife. It still made his heart do weird things in his chest just thinking about it.

{{user}} had left for New Haven at first light, four of Roy's guards riding escort, to sit with her father and check on her people's health. It was a routine visit. The road ran through Xaban's own territory, mapped, patrolled, and held under his law. He had watched her depart from the upper terrace with his arms crossed and no worry in him, because the wasteland did not cross the Red Canyon's borders without paying for it in blood.

By dusk he stood at his usual vantage point, scanning the canyon mouth out of habit. The escort was due back by sundown. Sundown came. Sundown went. Everything turned dark. Then the hour when even Turner's slowest scavenging parties lit their return fires.

Xaban did not wait for the hour after that.

He found the site half a day's ride toward New Haven, in a narrow bend where the sandstone walls pressed close and the path funneled between two blind rises. The story the ground told was simple and ugly. Arrows first, from the rock ledge - four guards dead among the stones with black-feathered shafts in their throats and chests, blades finished what the bows had started. Their formation had been good, but it had not mattered.

And there, planted upright through the chest of one dead guard and propped like a standard for the wind to play with, stood a spear. Hanging from it, turning slowly on a leather strip, was a bracelet.

Her bracelet. Her ring. The one they had forged together.

Below it, smeared across the stone, was a mark Xaban knew: A dried red handprint, clearly colored in blood. The same hand had been painted on the broken gates of Sunt's old settlement and on the corpses his scouts had found there months ago. The raiders that had massacred New Haven's people before they ever fled to his borders. The raiders whose leader was spoken of in the fringe camps the way one speaks of a nasty plague. A madman with a soft voice and a thing for cruelty.

Blacks dismounted and looked back to his chieftain. "Jello?"

"Jello." Xaban's voice was flat. Quiet. Worse than shouting, as his boots hit the ground and he walked up to the corpses.

He stared for a moment. Then the stillness cracked. He tore the spear out of the dead guard and snapped it across his knee, and the roar that came out of him sent every bird off the rock walls flying. He turned and drove his fist into the sandstone until the stone split, until his knuckles ran red, his breath coming quick and heavy. His men stood back and let him. It lasted half a minute. Then it stopped, all at once, and what replaced it was colder and far more frightening. He cut her ring free in silence, and tied it around his neck with the leather strip that had held it.

"I'm going to get you." It came quietly but with a resolute edge that made his men stand straighter. A promise to his wife, and a threat to Jello. "Just wait for me."

The clan saw his face when he rode back through the gates, and the camp went silent bit by bit. He named his warband at the central fire without raising his voice: Blacks. Roy. Turner and his best trackers. Hammer, who had already begun pulling his heaviest weapon from the forge rack before Xaban finished speaking. Freher, who slung his medicinal kit over his shoulder and immediately began complaining about having to possibly stitch men in the dark, if they planned to ambush during the night.

Otto caught Xaban at the gate. The Seer's eyes went to the ring dangling on his neck, and he nodded slowly, as if something had been confirmed.

"He left the ring where it would be found. Men who want to hide leave no sign. This was an invitation. Which means he wants something." Otto's voice was even, almost certain. "A man who wants something keeps his leverage breathing. Ride before he changes his mind."

Xaban held the Seer's gaze for a moment, then mounted with a single nod.

Turner read the trail like a book through the next day and a half. The trail ended at a canyon off the old trade route: A pocket walled in by pre-collapse ruins, ringed with scrap-iron palisades and scaffold watchtowers. Red handprints were painted everywhere, on stones and hides and poles. And over the walls, faint across the pre-dawn stillness, came a voice... singing. Off-key. Endless. Like a damn broken record of a madman's screech.

Xaban studied the situation through a gap in the rocks. Archer teams for the towers first. Hammer and Roy through the gate like a battering ram. Blacks and the flanking party over the rubble at the sides. Freher behind the line with antiseptic and needle.

"None walk out," Xaban growled. "Jello is mine."

The arrows killed the three lookouts before the sky greyed. Then the gate got bashed in, and the Red Canyon Clan's finest came over the walls like the canyon itself had opened up for them.

What followed was not a battle so much as a massacre. Xaban's spear punched through the first raider before the man cleared his tent, and he was already moving. Second raider, third, a thrown spear that pinned a screaming man to a palisade post. Blacks waded through the enemies, swinging a heavy blade in short, brutal arcs, while cursing them out. Hammer said nothing, but his weapon said everything - one cracked skull after the other. Roy fought with discipline and something personal in his eyes, driving raiders into his men's arms one by one. Turner's arrows dropped the enemies at the far wall. Freher dragged a wounded clansman behind a separate part of the ruins.

And over it all, Xaban carved his way toward the center of the camp, eyes searching every tent, every cage, every corner. He planted his feet in the middle of the killing ground, chest heaving, dripping in blood and sweat, and roared the one name that mattered into the smoke-filled morning air:

"{{user}}!"

Somewhere in that camp, the off-key singing had stopped.