Ryn's palms itched with the memory of the rope sliding under them, lines humming to the same ugly tune as his blood. The weir's run made a low, constant music that could have been called peaceful if you didn't know what men were planning over it. Dusk folded into full night. Smoke drifted low. A band of cloud slid across the sky and left the creek bed in a pocket of deeper dark. Somewhere far behind them, the tollhouse creaked like old wood in wind. The air tasted of ash, old iron, wet stone.
"Lantern," Tamsin breathed.
Sereth grunted and covered the small hooded flame with his hand, pushing the light down, letting it seep along the ground rather than spill across faces. The glow picked out lines and shapes: the low stacked brush on their side, the loosened earth on the plank seam, the rope across the shin height, now darker where ash had settled. Ryn crouched by the near anchor, hand on line, breath slow. His ribs complained at the angle. He acknowledged the complaint and filed it under later. Pain Gate didn't erase; it filed.
"They'll come low," Sereth said, voice barely a vibration. "A man who knows to drown quiet. There." He pointed with his chin toward the weir's far side where the water lipped over the stone and made a slick that would carry a man across if he hugged it and slid, shoulders and hips making less noise than boots. "And there." He indicated a shadowed path cutting down from a willow clump—a deer track that men would pretend was theirs.
"They'll hate your art," Tamsin murmured.
"They don't know it yet," Sereth said.
Ryn's fingers tightened on the rope. The shard under his skin answered with a faint thrumming. He had learned that it liked lines when he touched them. The System did not sigh. It waited. He felt the wait like a held breath.
"Listen," he whispered, because that's what the world needed now. "Don't look for faces. Look for change."
The weir water ran. The clouds shifted again. The wind bent dry grasses. Ryn let the sound of the water be a wall, and listened for holes in it.
Scrape. Not stone. Leather. A breath he couldn't tell himself he had imagined. A tiny splash not at the weir but at the bank, knee-deep, a man testing with a hand and a boot and a choice. Someone hissed low—shut up, stay down.
"Three," Tamsin mouthed.
Sereth added a snake of a sound. "Two more," he whispered. "Farther right."
"Watch the left," Ryn said. The spear-woman had limped away from the bridge earlier, but that didn't mean she wasn't here now. She might favor the weir simply because she'd said she'd come this way. He found the thought ridiculous in a way that comforted him. Not every decision was art. Some were promises to yourself you kept for your own pride.
Something bumped the weir. Subtle, almost tender. Ryn pictured a man's belly sliding over slick stone, a palm splayed against algae, fingers searching for purchase that wouldn't jab. He feathered the rope, only enough that it tightened or loosened a hair. The anchored stake answered, a small vibration up his fingers. Movement at the far bank. A shadow slithered. A shape rose up to a crouch and flattened. Another came behind. A third stayed on all fours, a crawl that left a ribbon of darker wet on stone.
"Now?" Tamsin's voice was air pressed through teeth.
"Not yet," Sereth answered. "Let the bad kind of brave step."
The spear-woman's voice came from the dark. Not close. Not far. "Hold there," she murmured, amused. "They're patient. Don't reward it."
Ryn almost liked her for that, in the mean way you like a good opponent for making sense. He went cold inside the liking and let it pass. He pulled his hand off the rope, flexed his fingers, then put his palm back over the line, barely touching. The hum returned like a cat rubbing.
The first man committed. Ryn felt it—a shift in weight, a line tug, enough. He yanked the rope and the anchor on the near bank gave exactly the way he and Sereth had set it to. A buried loop halfway between planks and weir came up like a snake. It caught at ankle height. A curse, muted. A flail. Another man reached to help and his wrist hit a second line. Skin on twine rasped. He didn't cry out; he learned too fast. He rolled. The line rolled with him. He was in it in a blink, bound across forearm and neck. He went still rather than thrash into worse. Clever. Bad for Ryn's plan.
"Left," Tamsin breathed.
Ryn looked and saw nothing. He lowered his chin to feel rather than see. The ground vibrated once through his knees. He turned his head, slow, toward the willow track. A shape detached itself from the deeper black and slid. The spear-woman. No spear now. Knife in hand, blade along her forearm like Tamsin hides hers, leg dragging a hair, breath steady. She came down the deer path and put her foot exactly where Sereth had made the earth look the same as the rest.
It gave under her heel. Her weight shifted. She did not fall. She stepped through bad footing smoothly, found purchase on the next patch, and kept coming. "Pretty," she said softly. "Not pretty enough."
"Arrows," Sereth said very quietly, not an order, a suggestion, then loosed one at the man on the weir who'd rolled into the line. It thudded into the plank behind his head, close enough that the man chose not to lift it again. Ryn had a stupid thought: Sereth was a polite killer. He saw the thought, let it go. No time for poetry.
Ryn snapped the second line up nearer the weir. It bit the ankle of the man behind the bound one. He went down, and his face hit the slick with the sort of sound a nose makes when it stops being a nose and becomes meat. The bound man flinched and then went still again. The water took thin veils of their blood and pulled it across the stone.
The spear-woman paused at the bottom of the track, just long enough to let her legs decide if they would hold tight for another burst. "Fire?" she said, interested.
Ryn answered her question instead of her voice. "Wet," he muttered, and the oil jar in his hand hesitated. A thrown jar would splash; water would take it fast. He'd get more smoke than fire. Smoke would fall and sit. It would blind him as much as them. He needed them off the stone. He needed them to hate where they were enough to choose his lines instead.
"Don't," Sereth said, breath only. "Wait them dumb." He loosed one more arrow. It went into a man's calf on the bank. The man made the choked animal noise of someone whose body just betrayed them. Tamsin's knife flickered, not from her hand this time—it never left her hand. A second knife came out of somewhere Ryn couldn't place. It went end-over-end with the economy of a woman who had practiced in private for years. It hit a man at the deer track in the throat—not deep enough to kill, deep enough to stop his forward. He put his hand to it and looked surprised.
The spear-woman exhaled, a sound almost too soft to hear. "Pull back," she said, not angry. "These are not worth theirs." Her men obeyed. A rope flicked out from the far bank—some clever boy—threw itself around the bound man's wrist and bit. They hauled. The man wriggled like a fish, ribs in and shoulder out and the line scraped his neck till it burned a red welt that looked like a promise, and then he was free and rolling slippery over stone, coughing blood and creek.
She looked across the water at Ryn. They could see each other because their eyes had learned how to map edges inside dark. "You know your work," she said. "Tell your old man with the bow: that was polite. Don't do it again."
"Next time," Ryn said before he could stop himself, "bring a better creek."
She laughed. Low and true. "Next time," she said, then melted back up the track. The men in the water went with her. The one dragging the line stumbled and snarled but did not cry out. Ryn had a sudden, ridiculous impulse to apologize to the water for the blood. He had no gods to apologize to. He steadied the line under his hand until the hum sank to a steady note. He breathed, realized he had been holding air like it was his hoard, and let it go slow.
Sereth put the bow down across his knees again. The lantern's hood flickered and he shut it to a hair's slit. Tamsin moved ghost-slow back to their brush, favoring a toe that must have hit something wrong in her dance. She said nothing about it. The creek's voice came back into the front of Ryn's hearing, small and persistent.
"They'll come at dawn, proper," Sereth said. "Garron likes to look at a thing when he breaks it."
"Then we run before," Tamsin said.
"We move," Ryn corrected. "There's a difference." He looked at the bridge and the lines he could reset. He looked at Sereth's face, tired under the flint. He looked at Tamsin's eyes, sharp and flat. He looked down at his hands. "We'll shift along the ditch after midnight. Two bends, then up. The old mile-marker ruin has a tunnel. We can rest with a wall at our back."
Sereth's breath scraped. "You find a hole, half-elf? Be sure what else likes it."
Ryn nodded. "I found it. It hummed. It cut me when I pulled the shard out of its teeth. It will hold against men. It will not hold against what is hungry enough to learn a line without being shown. We'll make do for an hour."
Sereth grunted. "Hour could be a day if your hands are true. We'll see." He eyed Ryn's wrists. "Those are going to fester if you don't keep them honest."
"I'll clean them again," Ryn said. He wanted to sleep until a sun he couldn't guarantee rose. He wanted to eat a hot thing. He wanted to sit with a dirty ledger and write down what had happened so it would be real. Instead, he reset lines and collected nails and counted jars and made himself breathe.
The System came then, not unkind and not kind, with a cool finger to write a tidy note he didn't have paper for.
[Milestone: Defend under pressure (3/3).]
[Class Options Unlocked: Scavenger, Runner, Trapper.]
[Recommendation: Trapper — Path synergy 54%.]
[Secondary Path Potential: Field Control (Rook) — Conditions: Area denial x5, mobility techniques x2, group defense x1 (partial).]
[Status Update available.]
Tamsin's eyes cut toward his face the way a knife slides. "What did it say, in your head?"
He hated that she could tell. He hated more that she had asked in a way that didn't give him room for a polite lie. "Choices," he said.
"You like those," she said dry.
He shook his head once. "No. I like anchors."
Sereth's mouth tilted. "Same," he said.
Ryn crouched and pressed his palm into cold dirt and thought about classes as if they were jobs in a little town where people needed names for who did what, so you knew whose door to bang on when a wheel needed fixing in the rain. Scavenger was the man with the bag who found coin under rot and bits of wire in mud. Runner was the boy with good lungs who fetched help when your mother fell. Trapper was the old bastard who set teeth so wolves would limp forever. He put his finger on the last one. It fit; not with comfort; with a knowledge like finding your knife in the dark where you put it yourself.
He shut his eyes. He did not pray. He told the world what he was doing.
"Trapper," he thought, not out loud, not to a god. "Yes."
The System acknowledged with its clean little nod.
[Class chosen: Trapper (Rank I).]
[Bonuses: +5% efficiency to trap assembly; +5% trigger placement; +Passive awareness of pressure changes in 3m radius when anchored.]
[Technique seed: Snapline Step — Unstable (practice to stabilize).]
[Status:]
Name: Ryn
Race: Half-Elf (Unregistered)
Class: Trapper I
Level: 3
Strength: 7
Agility: 10
Vitality: 9
Mind: 8
Perception: 9
Tenacity: 8
Corruption: 4% (Shard Sync: 9%)
He felt the change as a small set in the bone above his ears, as if a craftsman had planed a rough edge smooth so that a board would meet another board without a gap. He did not feel stronger. He felt truer.
Snapline Step. He had tasted it earlier when he'd flung the cord and followed the tug like a fish runs a line. Unstable, the System had said, like a rope with a fray you ignore at your knuckles. He would have to practice it somewhere he could break an ankle without dying of it.
"Congratulations," Tamsin said, meanly musical. "You're officially the man who ties knots."
Ryn huffed a sound that might have been a laugh in a better life. "Someone has to be," he said, rubbing the line that sat under his thumb. "Better me than the man who hates them."
They waited until true night. The creek's pitch deepened. The damp climbed out of the water and into their bones. Ryn's cut cooled to a dull pressure. He unwrapped his wrists, cleaned them again with water and poppy tincture's bitter ghost, rubbed a smear of fat into the skin around, not over the worst of it, tied clean linen, grimaced. Tamsin pressed a little of some stinking salve into the laceration under his ribs, one eye squeezed shut against mustard gas stink. Sereth stretched his leg until the old scar tissue complained, then settled into a posture that would let him roll and rise without a yes from his knee.
When the clouds thinned and a swath of ugly stars showed, they moved.
They went along the ditch, hugging shadow, stepping carefully on the places where cattle, long-ago, had pressed the ground into something like memory. Ryn threw the rope over low branches ahead of them and used it to lead Tamsin across one bad spot—Snapline Step insecure and tugging him forward too hard, almost throwing him face-first into stinging nettle when his brain expected ground and found air. He bit a curse and corrected. The shard warmed, interested.
[Technique Learned: Snapline Step — Unstable. Reposition along a preset line with reduced footing time. Caution: Misuse risks sprain or fall.]
He managed two more steps without falling. After the second, he had to sit and rub his ankle while Sereth clicked his tongue with that old-man patience that doesn't need years.
"Later," Sereth said, not unkind.
They reached the old mile-marker ruin near midnight. The stone leaned. The crack where Ryn had pulled the shard free looked wider, but it was only the night and his knowledge making new shapes. He found the rope he had left tied to the iron ring. He ran his fingers along it and felt it hum. The line's song matched the shard's in his palm for the smallest of breaths. He went cold down the spine and stepped back. He didn't like it when two separate things liked each other in his space without asking.
"In," he said. "Quiet. Rats that wanted to be rats but aren't. Things that wanted to be something else. Watch the water."
They slid through the crawl. The web he had cut earlier had been re-spun at the edges. He snapped it with a wrist flick and a twist of knife. The stench of ammoniac was stronger. He swallowed and breathed through his mouth and kept moving, counting his elbow shuffles—eight, nine, ten—then the tunnel opened enough to sit.
The faint scraping started again, just on the edge of sound. Tamsin lifted her knife and then lowered it. Sereth exhaled, a tiny hiss. "Wrong rats," he said.
"They smell salt," Ryn said. "They dislike it."
"Hold," Sereth said. "Talk later. Listen."
They listened. The scratch and scurry moved away. Ryn let his shoulders come down a hair. He tied off the rope around the old lantern bracket and checked the knot by feel. The space looked as he'd left it, literal but not exactly safe. He did not want to be here: a burrow, old water, something's nest. He wanted to be in a barn with low beams and stale hay and a mule's breath for warmth. He wanted. Wanting is cheap in bad places.
"Hour," he said. "No more. Then we move to the tollhouse. Tie it down. He'll come at dawn to the bridge. We won't be there. We'll be in the window of the tollhouse when the light is wrong for looking in."
Tamsin tipped her head against the stone and shut her eyes. She slept immediately in the way of people who do not assume tomorrow. Sereth stayed awake, watching Ryn the way a man watches a field for sparks. After a little while he said, "You have that look that means you're carrying something you shouldn't."
Ryn raised one eyebrow. His face ached. "What am I carrying? Aside from a house I don't own and a line I can't put down?"
Sereth chewed slowly on an old piece of cured root. He didn't look away. "Guilt," he said. "Like it weighs less if you climb a hill wearing it. You'll die of it if you don't learn to set it down at the last bend."
Ryn disliked the image because it was too close to the way he felt—the stupid little kid inside him staggering under a sack of stones he'd picked up at each mile because someone had to. He said nothing for a breath and then: "Marla taught me not to drop things because my hands got tired."
"Marla wouldn't tell you to carry her," Sereth said. "Not if it made you stupid."
Ryn flinched. He swallowed anger and shame and something bigger. "I know," he said, softer than he liked.
The System took that private moment as an excellent time to poke his attention with its thin polite stick.
[Status Check updated.]
[Directive: Secure a defensible shelter (completed). Reward: +Small Stamina Regen when within anchored space (stacked).]
[Warning: Corruption strain increasing under continued Shard proximity. Current: 5%.]
He ground his molars together until they ached. "Not now," he whispered. Sereth looked over, amused. "You talk to yourself the way I talk to my knee," he said. "We're both fools."
They slept in turns. When Ryn's eyes closed, his brain gave him back the image of the spear point flicking toward his eyes and the moment Garron's expression changed when he saw the shard glint in Ryn's palm. He woke biting his tongue. Tamsin put a hand on his shoulder and pushed him back down without any softness. "Sleep," she said. "You get kind when you're tired. I prefer difficult."
He slept again because he was good at doing hard things in bad ways. He woke to Sereth's fingers on his shoulder—two presses that said No and Yes at the same time. Ryn rolled, grabbed the rope to pull himself forward, and came into the cool night air with a head that hurt and hands that wanted to hold something and nothing both.
They moved.
The tollhouse leaned against the gray. The road beyond it was empty at this hour, the kind of empty that made sound travel. Ryn slid in the back window again, gathered the lines he'd left with a speed that was not hurry, reset the jangle high and low, shifted the mattress, poured another thin stream of oil on the threshold. He checked the cellar door. The salt had been disturbed. Tracks dotted the thin white line—small, twin-toed, wrong. He pushed the hatch hard and felt something press weak from the other side and then give. He set the chair leg and tied a line to it.
Sereth set up on the rear window where his bow could speak across the yard. Tamsin crouched under the mantel with that stillness that made her look like part of a house.
Dawn came, the kind the road gets—chill and blue and promising heat with no kindness. Ryn's chest felt tight. The shard's hum rose a hair. He rubbed at it with his thumb, which did nothing. He stood behind the door and placed his palm on the grain and felt what the wood had to say about the men who walked up to it.
He didn't wait long.
Voices, not loud, not careless. "Quiet," the quiet voice from yesterday said outside. A pause. "Back hinge is gone. They fixed it from nothing. Good hands. Go slow."
Boot steps to the side window. Pause. A breath. The shutter jiggled, then went still. The tin he'd hung on a line there gave a tiny, mean little chime. Someone swore softly. Men like to be clever more than they like to be careful. The moment of embarrassment a small thing gives can pierce armor.
Someone sniffed. "Smoke," a man said. "Old."
Another voice. He knew it before he saw him. Garron. Calm, close. "Set. No fun today." He didn't sound disappointed. He didn't sound excited either. He sounded like a man adding a column of figures in his head and deciding whether to cut off a thumb now or later.
Ryn's mouth went desert dry. He licked his teeth and tasted salt and the metallic tang of anxiety. He shifted his grip on the short sword, felt the familiar lies it told in his hand, put it down. He picked up the pry bar and felt more honest. He kept the buckler on his left arm. The stolen shield leaned within reach. He was not fool enough to pretend the pry bar would answer all questions. He would take any help.
Garron tapped his knuckles against the door. The sound moved through wood, into Ryn's bones.
"You're awake," Garron said. "Good. I hate waste." He paused. "You fixed your bolt earlier. Good hands."
Ryn said nothing.
"Marla's dead," Garron said, matter-of-fact. His voice didn't try to be gentle. It didn't try to be cruel. "She was mouthy. I don't mind mouthy when it buys me information. She didn't have any I needed."
Ryn's teeth clamped down before a sound could leave his mouth that would give him away. He let breath out through his nose. He didn't trust his hands for one second and then he did because he had to. He checked the line at shin height against the table leg. He put his shoulder into the bar gently to feel its give.
"She would tell you to pay me," Garron continued, conversational now. "She wanted to keep her people fed and her wheels round. She didn't understand how thin roads are now. She wasn't a fool. She did things. I respect that."
Tamsin's lip curled. She shook her head once, very small. "Don't let him teach you about your dead," she breathed.
Ryn swallowed and tasted old metal. "What do you want?" he said. He tried to make his voice boring.
"Your hands," Garron said. "And your calm. I can use both. You give them to me and you work and you eat and you live. You try to give them to the Guild, you starve slower while they steal the bones under your flesh to make papers out of. You try to give them to yourself, you die in a smaller room. I am that room, too. I can make it bigger."
"You talk too much," Tamsin muttered, surprise in her voice that she hadn't said it louder.
Ryn said, "You offer employment at my own door, with men behind you."
Garron huffed a laugh. "I offer you a reasonable choice."
Ryn let silence be his answer. He put his right hand over his left where it gripped the buckler strap. The rope burn stung. The shard under his skin hummed up one pitch as if it were pleased to have an argument. The System slid in.
[Directive: Parley or Defy?]
[Option: Accept "employment" — Branch triggers: Allegiance (Bandit), Survival + short-term; Long-term Consequences: High.]
[Option: Defy — Branch triggers: Hostile engagement, Reputation (Rogue).]
[Note: System neutrality maintained.].
He almost jabbed the empty air with his finger to dismiss it. He couldn't afford to deceive himself about what he was choosing; he wasn't fool enough to pretend that the System had never been shoved down a man's throat before. He breathed.
"Defy," he thought at it without ceremony, which was as close to a prayer as he was going to get.
"Alright," Garron said outside, voice still even. "Open. Don't." He let both hang. "Do it and I break one man finding out your art and then I break your art. Don't do it and I break three men and then your art. Up to you who dies for your stubborn."
Ryn wasn't a speech-maker. He tried one anyway, to himself, a thing to make his own brain remember why his hands were going to do the stupid thing. He thought of Marla's laugh, Sereth's careful promises, Tamsin's blunt rules. He thought of the boy under the third wagon. He thought of the way the rope under his fingers had hummed earlier when it liked what he was doing.
He unbarred the door without opening it. He stood back. He looked at Tamsin. She met his eyes. He let the bar down in his loving hands. He held the buckler up. He let his palm rest on the line. He remembered his knots.
He opened the door.
Garron stood on the step like he was at a neighbor's. He filled the space with quiet weight. The chitin along his arm caught the morning light in a dull gleam. He did not look behind Ryn into the house. He looked at Ryn's hands. He smiled a small, true smile that had no warmth in it and no malice either.
"Wise," he said.
Ryn stepped back at an angle so that Garron would have to come in and turn. Garron did not. He stayed on the threshold like a man who knew too many doors to be that easy. He made Ryn make the next move.
Ryn made it. He snapped the rope at knee height with his left hand and kicked the little clay jar he'd wedged under the door through the space. It was small—salt, ash, oil. It broke at Garron's feet and puffed into a ghostly cloud and made the boards slick. Garron stepped back, one shift. Not far. He didn't fall. He looked annoyed at the waste of time, not at the trick.
"Brant," he said, and stepped left.
Two men came into the doorway right then, as rehearsed. The first went for the line at knee height, not to be caught in it, but to kick it out of the way so he could step in strong. His boot slid on ash-oil and he spilled forward. Ryn brought the buckler across his face and felt a cartilage give. Tamsin's knife kissed the tendons at his wrist and his hand dropped the sword he was holding. Sereth's arrow snicked into the meat above the second man's knee and he went down hard, bone thunking wood. The second man didn't scream. Good skill. He snarled.
Garron stepped back another half-step and then to the side out of the doorway entirely. He didn't need to be there. He had men for this. He was learning what the house did, who the house was, and whether it was going to be his.
Ryn moved. Quickstep ate his breath. He slid under the threshold swing, put his hands on the man who had fallen and threw him out the door with a twist that made his ribs grind. The man rolled and took two of his fellows with him. The jangle line sang. The oil smeared. Ryn slammed the buckler into the second man's off leg and then finished the motion with a hook of his elbow around that leg and lifted and the man went down without grace. Tamsin's knife bit his upper lip and turned his curse into a wet noise. Sereth's bow groaned and another arrow hissed, pinning a hand to a plank as it reached for a knife.
It wasn't clean. It didn't want to be. Ryn didn't allow it.
Garron's quiet voice carried over the scuffle. "Stop," he said.
The men did. They weren't puppets; they wanted to live. The way they obeyed made what came next worse. Garron pointed at the second man on the ground. "Knee," he said, mildly. The man flinched even before the blow. Garron looked at Ryn. "Do it or I break two."
Ryn's stomach turned. He didn't like Garron. He liked the calculus less. He did the mean thing fast. He stamped hard on the man's knee and it went where knees shouldn't, sideways. The man screamed once, then bit it off with iron in his teeth. Garron nodded, pleased with the time saved. "Again," he said to no one in particular: the world's lesson.
Ryn swallowed vomit.
"Polite," Garron said again, the way the spear-woman had called Sereth polite. It meant, I can fight you and you won't make me do things I hate. It meant, I might like you if I owned you. "I'll take you later when this nonsense is done."
"You won't," Tamsin said under her breath, strange music in the words.
Garron looked at her and didn't know which box she belonged in yet. He didn't like that. He turned his eyes to Sereth, measuring the old scar and the clean bow and the way Sereth held his jaw like it had been broken and set by a friend. "Scout," he said. "You could eat my bread as well. The Guild would starve you over a paper."
Sereth's mouth tilted into a shape that wasn't a smile. "I like starving where I pick," he said.
Garron shrugged. He stepped back off the stoop, avoiding the slick with the economy of a man who knows his own weight and its edges. He had learned the house's lines. He had learned Ryn's. He had learned enough for this moment.
"Burn it," he said to his men without heat, as if he was saying, The grain's gone bad. Throw it out before it makes others sick.
Something in Ryn's chest went hot and dry. "No," he said, and then moved, because there was rolling-slick oil at the threshold, but there was also a barrel of water just inside the door and three old fire blankets hung by the hearth because a tollhouse keeper was a certain kind of man. He snapped the high jangle line free, grabbed a blanket, flung it across the threshold, threw his weight on it and smelled the burnt fat when the ember from yesterday that lived under the ash tried to make its small, joyful fire and failed. Tamsin followed, throwing the second blanket at the first lick of flame. Sereth put two arrows into the spinning torch one of the men had tried to fling—one missed; the second hit cloth and knocked it into the ditch instead of onto the dry roof.
Garron didn't look annoyed. He looked interested. "Good," he said. "There are other houses."
He turned away toward the road and whatever larger urgency was calling him there. He didn't leave men for a siege. He didn't surround the tollhouse. He left four men to keep Ryn busy and pulled the rest. The spear-woman's voice came from down the road, a call and answer like old drill.
Ryn had never felt such anger and relief at once. He wanted to run after Garron and put a pry bar through the back of his skull. He wanted Garron gone. He managed neither want. He slammed the door and dropped the bar and leaned his forehead against it, shaking. He had time for one breath. Then he breathed again.
"Two hours," he said, because Sereth had asked for a time earlier and had made it true.
Tamsin looked at the men Garron had left. They looked back, sullen and wary and not as brave as they'd been on the road. She rolled her shoulders. "Two hours is a big creek to cross," she said. "They'll try to make it smaller. Do your art."
Ryn did. He moved the shield rack—because of course a tollhouse had a shield rack; Dorran had laughed at it last winter and then hung his coat on it—nudged it into the floorline where a man would step into it in haste. He reset lines he could reset quickly: shin, knee, throat. He wetted the floor where slick would help, dried it where slick would cost. He opened the cellar hatch and listened. The scratching under there was tired. He fed salt to the fear—thin lines across cracks. He set a jar on the top step with a rock under it and tied a rope from its handle to the back of a chair. If the door moved wrong, the jar would fall and break in a place oil waited ignobly to be told what to do. He closed the hatch.
The System told him what he already knew.
[Approach detected: Hostile (4).]
[Suggestion: Layered trap arrays in confined space. Use Snapline Step to reposition between anchors.]
[Warning: Stamina reserves low. Pacing recommended. Pain Gate effectiveness waning under cumulative damage.]
He imagined snapping the cold rectangle in half with his fingers and laughed under his breath without mirth. "You're late to your own birth," he told it, which meant nothing and meant everything.
The men outside put their shoulders to the work of breaking a small house. The sound of it carried down the hall of Ryn's bones. They hacked at shutters. They levered at angles. They pushed without committing too much at once. One man arranged wood against the wall the way a man with grudges does. Ryn couldn't afford to fight them all. He could make their work expensive.
"Sereth," he said. "Fingers only."
Sereth grunted softly and his first arrow took a man in the hand as he reached toward a seam. The man squealed and pulled back. Sereth put another through the sleeve of a jacket, pinning it to the frame. The man had to choose between cutting off his own sleeve, making noise, or being stuck. He swore stupidly and tried to pull. Sereth put the next arrow through the other sleeve. The man's face did a set of calculations Ryn had seen men make before. Neither panic nor patience; angry, bitter acceptance. He called to his friend. The friend came, moved careful, blade low. Tamsin's knife kissed his kidney; she withdrew before the man could articulate that he was hurt forever now. Ryn poured a thin trickle of water across the floor and made sure his own boots were dry.
"Ryn!" A voice outside. Not Garron's. The quiet one. "We're leaving in an hour. Come then if you intend to live longer than that."
He wanted to spit and found his mouth too dry. He swallowed and spit anyway. It made a dark dot on a pale plank and it was so petty he liked it.
Sereth said nothing. Tamsin snorted softly. "He'll kill the ones who don't make him late if they stay," she murmured. "Or use them less. He likes to keep numbers and scratch names off when they waste his time."
"We'll make him scratch," Ryn said.
He went to the back window and looked through the slat. Down the road, in the wash of early light, he saw dust and smoke moving both ways at once. Garron's column split. One lot went west, toward the village they had just left. Another nosed north. Garron liked roads. He liked keeping them as bridges for his work.
The shard in Ryn's palm buzzed, a little too eager, like a dog that had learned to recognize the sound of the pantry. He pressed his thumb into it until it hurt, as if he could push it back under his skin and out of his life. It didn't go. It didn't apologize. It waited for his next bad choice.
He had one ready.
"Dorran," he said, and he didn't know until he said the name that he had been waiting to say it. "We go get him."
Tamsin's head snapped toward him. "He bleeds slow well, you said. He's good at it. He'll still be there or he won't. Garron left men at the bridge to make you run that way. If you go, you die and he gets your hands while you're still warm. If you don't, you can cut him later."
Ryn stared at her until she made a face at him like a cat bothered by a child. "You want me to be patient?"
"I want you not to be an idiot," she said. Then, a beat softer: "You liked his stories. So did I. Don't make his last one stupid."
Sereth put a hand on Ryn's shoulder, not squeezing. "We can move in an hour," he said. "We go to the village and bring who we can. We cut their rear in the night. We make him pay for each foot of road. Your old man would like that."
Ryn closed his eyes. He saw Dorran under the wagon, hands pressed to his side, eyes too bright. He saw Marla's hand giving him the buckler without apology for bossing him all morning. He saw the child Tamsin dragged from under a wheel. He saw Garron's men in the yard. He saw the bridge and the weir and the ruin and the mile stones counting down to something only the System could read.
He wanted to go east. He wanted to go west. He wanted to go somewhere with good bread and a clean ledger and no men who wanted his hands.
He opened his eyes and picked up the pry bar and set it against the jamb where the door met the frame. He looked at Tamsin and Sereth. He said, "We hold for an hour, then we go. We go to the village. We make the road hurt."
Tamsin tilted her head. "And Dorran?"
Ryn swallowed. "If he's alive, he'll still be alive. If he's not—" He stopped. The sentence was an edge he didn't want to dull by saying it. "We'll still go."
Sereth's mouth moved into that almost-smile again. "Good," he said. "The road teaches. You listen, you live."
The tollhouse shook under a new assault. Smoke dripped down the shutter seam. The thin line of salt under the cellar door glittered. A rat that wanted to be a rat scratched and stopped, having learned a small, hard lesson about brine.
Outside, a horn blew from farther away, three notes again. The spear-woman's response came faint. Garron's lot had a language. Ryn was learning it. He did not like being bilingual in this way.
He braced the bar. Tamsin took position. Sereth bent his bow. The men at the door made one more push for pride. Ryn's lines held. Two hours is a long time to spend in a small room with men who want you dead and can't quite make it happen. It stretches into something like truth. It breaks into pieces and you line them up with nails.
At the end of the first hour, the men outside cursed them with fatigue rather than hatred. At the end of the second hour, no one came to the door. The yard went quiet except for flies and the small sounds things make when a morning gets hot. Tamsin lifted her head like a dog who hears a cart. "Gone," she said.
Sereth peered through the slat. "Pulled off. West."
Ryn let the bar down slow. His arms shook. His ribs ached. His wrists burned. He set his hand on the door to say thank you to a piece of wood and then hated himself for it and did it anyway. He turned to his two, his only.
"We go," he said.
He did not know that the village elder would greet them with folded hands and a plea that would twist his choices ugly. He did not know that the Guild factor's paper would arrive at the same time as Garron's spear-lieutenant's blade. He did not know he would stand at a cart with powder and nails and think, I could make this go now and save my own, or I could wait and maybe save more I don't know yet. He didn't know he would pick the second and hate himself for losing the first.
He only knew the road. He shouldered the shield. He tucked the brass whistle deeper into his pocket. He looked once toward the bridge and the place where Dorran could be dead or not dead. He did not look a second time.
The System put one last note in his head as if to bless, or damn, what came next.
[New Directive: Evacuate civilians under pursuit (High Difficulty).]
[Reward: Experience, Reputation (Local), Cleansing (Minor).]
[Warning: Resource scarcity ahead.]
"Later," Ryn said, but he knew it was now. He stepped out into a morning that had been paid for. He put his feet in the ruts. He ran.