Beginning in Guild

The first contract was simple work: three days of caravan escort along the Greyford road, protecting a merchant’s wagons from the usual roadside cutthroats. Raymond kept his mouth shut, followed orders, and put his new short sword where it needed to go when two men tried to drag a mule off the track at dusk. He took a shallow cut across the forearm for his trouble and learned that bleeding in front of veterans earned neither pity nor praise—only a curt nod and the expectation that he would clean and bind it himself before the next watch.

The second job came two weeks later: clearing a nest of river bandits who had been taxing the lower fords. The Hounds went in at night. Raymond was given the rearguard position and told not to die stupidly. He did not. When the fighting closed, he found himself face-to-face with a heavy-set man swinging a hatchet. The exchange was ugly, close, and over in less than a minute. Afterward he sat on a wet rock while the older men counted coin and discussed the next contract. No one clapped him on the back. Someone simply tossed him a small pouch of silver and said, “You’re still breathing. Good enough.”

Those early runs taught him the rhythm of the company: march, fight, divide the take, sleep light, move again. His body hardened faster than his pride. The peasant softness burned away under cold rain, bad food, and the constant low tension of men who expected competence without ceremony.

The first contract that truly tested him came in the high country near the edge of the Northern Marches.

A mining outpost had gone silent. The guild wanted it checked and, if possible, the silver ore shipments resumed. The Hounds sent a half-strength detachment under Sergeant Torren. Raymond was assigned to the forward scouts.

The trail climbed into thin air and constant wind. On the third day they found the first bodies—miners and a pair of hired guards, all of them torn open and left where they fell. Tracks led into a narrow gorge that the maps called Hollow Vein. The sergeant ordered a cautious advance.

They met the problem halfway down the gorge: a pack of rock-beasts, thick-hided and low to the ground, that had claimed the abandoned mine as a den. The fight was loud, brutal, and confined. Steel rang against stone and hide. One of the Hounds went down with his thigh opened to the bone. Raymond found himself locked in a narrow side tunnel with two of the creatures, no room to swing freely. He killed the first with a thrust under the jaw. The second slammed him into the wall hard enough to drive the breath from his lungs. He drove his dagger into its eye and held on until the thrashing stopped.

When the gorge finally fell quiet, six rock-beasts were dead and two Hounds were wounded badly enough that they would need to be carried out. The mine itself still held a partial shipment of silver ore—enough to make the contract profitable even after the losses. Sergeant Torren looked over the battered detachment, then at Raymond’s blood-smeared gear, and simply said, “You held the tunnel. That’s noted.”

They spent two more days extracting the ore and sealing the lower shafts. On the march back toward Greyford, Raymond walked with a deeper quiet in him. The boy who had fallen into Dead Man’s Pass was further away than he had been a month earlier. In his place was a young man who understood that survival in the company was not a single dramatic moment but a series of cold, practical choices made under pressure.

By the time the detachment reached the lower roads again, word of the Hollow Vein contract had already begun to travel among the free companies. Raymond Silverstein’s name was no longer completely unknown.