The Quiet Transfers

It began with one.

He showed up near dusk. Wrapped in a patched blanket, boots cracked open at the toe, rations stitched into his belt like smuggled coin. He stood just outside the trench lip and waited—not calling out, not advancing. Just… waiting.

Raive saw him first.

"Either he's lost," Raive muttered, "or he wants something worse than directions."

Darin didn't answer. He stared too long at the man's boots.

They had been court-issued.

But not to his trench.

"Name," Darin said flatly when the man was brought in.

The soldier, eyes downcast, scratched his neck.

"Harlan."

"Unit?"

The hesitation told the truth before the mouth did.

"Fourth ditch, under Sir Gelwen."

Jorah snorted nearby. "Gelwen's trench folded last week. Those men got shipped west."

"I didn't go," Harlan said.

"Why not?"

A pause.

Then: "Because yours didn't fold."

They let him sleep by the fire, but not near it. No weapons. No blankets not his own. Just a flat rock and a chance.

In the morning, he was still there.

He had fixed the pike rack before anyone else woke.

No one asked him to.

The second came two days later.

This one limped. Older. With a scar across one cheek that had not healed clean. Carried no gear but a mess tin and a red cloth tied around his wrist—a symbol of loyalty to a trench already burned.

He didn't say much.

Just:

"I heard you had mud that held shape."

By the end of the week, six more had joined.

Unassigned. Unwanted. Displaced. Not deserters—just left behind by armies that had moved on.

Darin did not welcome them.

But he did not turn them away.

Raive folded his arms near the morning stew.

"This can't go on."

"It already has."

"They're not ours."

"They weren't anyone's."

"Neither were we."

Rumors ran faster than orders.

By the tenth day, Darin received his first scroll—not sealed by nobility, not signed by court.

Just a note from a junior grain clerk in the Eighth Tally Bureau:

"Ration logs show non-standard growth in trench-black population. Please confirm headcount. Avoid disciplinary confusion."

Below that, in much smaller ink:

"Should I pretend not to have seen this?"

No signature. Just a drop of wax.

Green. Merchant-green.

Jorah kept track of the new names. Not with ink—with memory.

"They bring stories," he said over beans. "Some say the barons are watching. Some say you've been knighted in secret."

"I haven't."

"Doesn't matter," Jorah said. "They're not following you because of what's true. They're following because no one else looks like they can keep a trench alive."

By the end of the month, fifteen new men had joined.

Half from dissolved ditches. Half from still-standing ones that no longer fed them.

Then the whisper came:

"DuVaul wants to submit a complaint to Command."

"Not about the men. About the morale."

"Says it's a threat to cohesion."

Darin did not flinch when Raive told him.

"He wants a duel," Raive said. "But dressed in paper."

"Then he won't get one."

"No reply?"

Darin stood, walked to the pike line, and began replacing dull tips with sharpened nails.

"I reply by staying dug in."

Later that night, a soft voice came from the new men's linefire.

It wasn't meant for Darin to hear.

But he did.

"They say he was born in the mud."

"And he rose from it."

"And if the barons want to crush him, they'll have to come through it."

Darin didn't speak.

He simply threw another shovel of earth on the wall behind them.

And didn't stop until sunrise.