Oops, I Tamed the Commander Everyone Dreaded novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Wagons
Lyra refuses the army's price at Karsk gate and pins the Commander's hand to her wagon, and he does not flinch while she screams.
The army's price for a wagon of grain was twenty-two silver crowns.
Mine was forty, and I said so to a captain with two hundred soldiers watching.
"Forty," I repeated. "The grain is clean, the sacks are sealed, and my mules walked nine days to get here."
The captain looked past my shoulder at the fort gate, and his face went the color of old candle wax.
"Miss, I would stop talking."
"I'm a hauler, not a miss. And I'm not stopping until somebody pays me."
Behind me, Finola muttered, "Lyra, the whole yard went quiet."
I had noticed. Two hundred men in grey coats stood in rows around the gate of Fort Karsk, and none of them were breathing loud.
Then a black horse came through the gate at a walk.
The man on it wore a black commander's coat.
He was big, broad through the shoulders, with cropped black hair and a scar along his jaw.
His eyes were the flat grey of a river in January.
I knew the name before anyone said it. Everyone in the north knew it.
Commander Aldric Eisenhart, the Butcher of Karsk Pass.
They said he had hanged forty deserters in one morning and eaten his breakfast under the tree.
They said he had never once flinched at a blow, a whip or a blade.
He swung down from the horse without hurry and stopped in front of my lead mule.
"What is the delay, Captain?"
"The hauler wants forty crowns, Commander."
"The army pays twenty-two."
His voice was low and even.
"The army pays twenty-two for grain it can't get anywhere else," I said. "That's why I came north."
He turned his head and finally looked at me.
The yard went so still I could hear a mule chewing.
"You are refusing the army's price," he said.
"I'm naming mine."
"Wagons that enter this fort belong to this fort."
"Then I'll turn my wagons around."
"You will not."
He reached out and took my lead mule's bridle in his gloved hand.
My mule's name is Biscuit. She is eleven years old and has bitten two men for less.
"Take your hand off her," I said.
He didn't. He looked at me.
So I knocked his hand away with my forearm, hard, in front of every soldier in the north.
Somebody in the ranks made a sound.
The Commander took a slow step toward me. I did not step back.
"Do you know who I am?" he asked.
"A man with his hand on my mule."
His gloved fingers closed around my arm above the elbow. They were not cruel. They were just absolute.
"Let go of me," I said.
"No."
He started to pull me toward the gate.
I had one hand free, and in that hand I had the knife I used for cutting rope and cheese.
I did not think about it, because thinking would have gotten me dragged inside a fort.
I slammed his other hand flat against the rail of my wagon and drove the knife through his glove.
The point went through the leather, through the meat of his palm, and into the oak.
Blood ran down the rail. A soldier dropped his spear.
I waited for the roar. I waited for him to rip it free and for the swords to come out of their sheaths.
The Commander looked at his pinned hand.
Then he looked at me.
His face did not change at all. Not a twitch, not a blink, not a breath.
He did not flinch.
And then the pain hit me.
It tore through my left palm, a white, ripping heat straight through the bones.
I screamed. I couldn't help it.
My knees hit the dirt and I clutched my own hand, the unwounded one.
It burned like a spike through meat.
There was no blood. There was no hole. There was only the pain, and it was his.
"Lyra!" Finola was on her knees next to me.
Above us the Commander pulled the knife out of the wagon rail, out of his own hand, without a sound.
He stared at me for a long moment. Then his grey eyes dropped to my clenched fingers.
"Captain," he said quietly. "Nobody touches her."
Something in his voice had changed. I was too busy screaming to hear what.
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