They left the tollhouse with the door barred from the inside, lines set to bite latecomers. Ryn looked back once, the way you glance at a cart you loaded by feel and leave in a storm—trusting the balance you set with your own hands. He pressed his palm to the rough wood, felt nothing but the memory of vibration, and then dropped his hand. The shard under his skin hummed once and settled. That little sound made him feel watched. He shook his arm out as if to fling it away.
"Move," Tamsin said. She went low through the scrub and cut across the ditch, eyes cutting along the road like a knife. Sereth fell in behind them, not so much following as keeping a different line that would let him see what they couldn't. The morning had gone hot fast. Dust hung in the low places. The sun pressed on the back of Ryn's neck like a hand that did not care whether he moved faster or slower, only that he felt it.
They didn't talk much. Ryn counted in his head—footfalls, breaths, the clicks of Sereth's bow as the older man made sure the string sat right in its nocks and the wood hadn't picked up too much damp. The rhythm kept the ache under Ryn's ribs from deciding when he would breathe.
When they crested the rise and looked down at the village, the road turned into a choice.
The village crouched against a low brook, its cottages built of mud and daub, roofs of reed and rag. A field of half-cut barley waved beyond, already robbed in places by those who thought the Guild took less if you had less. Chickens scattered at the sight of them, then settled, uncowed. A handful of people stood on the green: the elder with his stick, three women with baskets, a boy with his arm in a sling, an old man whose eyes went to the road and stayed there. A black dog lay in the shade and watched Ryn without moving its head. Ragged bright cloth hung from a pole where someone had once thought a festival would be possible again. It looked obscene.
Garron's men weren't there. The smoke on the far side of the village said they had been, or would be any minute.
The elder saw Ryn, Sereth, and Tamsin and lifted his hand as if the gesture could conjure hands out of them. He stumped forward. "You're the ones from the road," he said without breath. His eyes were bloodshot with weeping or sleeplessness. "Marla's lot."
Ryn went cold. He didn't know yet what story had run ahead of them. He put words in a simple line. "We held them for a time. She's gone."
The old man closed his eyes as if Ryn had named a wind he'd known all his life. "She fed us in winter," he said. He opened his eyes again and looked at Ryn's hands, the way Garron had. He nodded once. "You have them. Good. I need them."
"What do you need?" Sereth asked, dry, as if he already knew what the answer would cost.
"Everything," the elder said, and laughed, an ugly sound. "I need to move those who will move and shut up the ones who always talk too much. I need to carry a woman who can't walk and I need to be rid of a man who won't. I need someone to tell me where to put my feet while I do it." His gaze snagged on the shield strapped to Ryn's arm. "And I need that to look like we can hold until we can't."
"Garron's back in an hour or two," Tamsin said. "At most. Your choice is go now or die trying to count plates."
The elder didn't flinch. "We go." He pointed with his stick toward the north. "Down that way, there's the old charcoal path. It runs behind the ridge. The Guild used to have a shed there before the Calamity. No one uses it now. We run that way, we might split away from the road long enough to see the next sun."
Sereth nodded. "Good path," he said. "Barley will mask us for a stretch. But it's not made for carts."
The elder's face flinched, just a little. "We have one," he said. "Half-stocked. We'll take it for the little ones. The rest walk or don't."
A woman with raw rope burns across her shoulders stepped up to the old man's elbow. Her jaw had the set of someone used to telling people what to do. Her voice was clipped to save breath and patience. "You're going to tell them that," she told the elder, not a question. "Not me. I'm done telling men with full bellies what's for dinner."
The elder's mouth twitched. "You always had my respect, Hana," he said, as if saying, You've always said my words better than I do. He looked at Ryn. "If you can buy us a half-hour more, we'll spend it well. If not, tell me now and I'll send them into the barley now and tell them to run and not look back."
Ryn bowed his head once before his mouth did anything clever. He listened to the sound of the road—the absence of hoofbeats, the birds not yet startled into flight, the way the air over the barley moved. He looked at Sereth. Sereth's eyebrows dipped. He looked at Tamsin. She lifted her chin a hair. It meant, I'll do it if you do it.
"Half-hour," Ryn said.
The elder nodded, as if that half-hour had been in his head already and Ryn had just agreed to pay the price. He turned and shouted, his voice cracking with the authority of a man who had been trying to keep three fires from going out for ten years. "Take the cart! Children and Jarla in first! No arguing! Pigs stay! If you try to put the pigs in the cart, I'll break your leg and make the pig pull you!"
The woman, Hana, clapped her hands and made a circle with her arms over her head. "This way!" she barked. "Buckets in the cart go out, children go in. I don't want to see a bucket on a cart, do you hear me?" The way she said "buckets" made it sound like a sin with historical precedent.
Ryn went into the in-between space where his hands moved faster than his head. He took one look at the cart—two wheels, one slightly out of true, a bed of boards with gaps he'd lose a child's foot through—and set to. He grabbed a hammer and a handful of pegs from the shed and shoved pegs in the gaps and hammered wedges into place until you couldn't see daylight through anywhere a tiny ankle could slip. He tied a waist-high line along both sides and told the older children, "Hold this and don't let go until someone says your name two times and you can smell bread." He put a loop in the front rail and showed the two men who would pull with the donkey how it would save their backs if they ran the rope low across their hips and not in their hands.
Hana watched him and nodded once like a person counting in a ledger. "Good," she said, and handed him a folded cloth—old, clean enough. "You're bleeding. Don't bleed on the children."
He tied the cloth around his ribs and the dried blood cracked like old clay. He hissed, and the shard under his skin warmed, offering something with gloved hands, and he shook his head. Later. Maybe. He hated that the 'maybe' was closer.
Sereth went to the edge of the barley and drew lines with his foot. He set two of the older boys to carry a length of rope between them low and invisible so men following with a rush would hit it shin first. He cut two hand-high holes into the hedgerow at the charcoal track where a man with a spear might put his point and find only space. He considered everything as a question with one answer: how do I buy ten breaths?
Tamsin went light-footed through cottages, looking for anything that could be thrown and burn without making smoke too fast. She found grease and soaked rags and a small box of carpenter's nails with a label in a careful hand, each letter drawn three times for someone who'd had to remember his own name a lot. She tucked the nail box under her arm and said, "This is mine now," in a way that meant she would give it back if someone lived to ask.
The shard slid words into Ryn's sight as if it had always been part of him. He put them in the corner and worked around them.
[Directive: Evacuate civilians under pursuit (High Difficulty).]
[Timer: 00:28:19]
[Suggestion: Layered delays at choke points; prioritize speed over perfect lethality. Reward modifiers: High for no child casualties.]
"Thank you," he muttered without meaning it, then felt foolish for saying thanks. He lifted one end of a water barrel and poured the water into two skins, then rolled the empty barrel into the road and wedged stones under it so a man running would break his shin on something he thought he could step over. He pulled a length of line from his satchel and tied it between the barrel and the hinge of a gate, deadfalling the gate to fall outward when a body hit the line. He tied the other end to his belt as a reminder that he had a line connected to the world and to his own idiot body.
He went to the cottage where Jarla lay. He had never met her. He met her like this: a pale woman with a twisted foot and a basin next to the bed and eyes that knew too much about pain. Her husband, a man whose hands were bruised and whose mouth had lost its shape from clenching, stood defensively in the doorway like a gate that did not know whether it wanted to be open or closed.
"We'll carry her," Ryn said.
"I can," the husband said. His voice cracked like a shoe when the sole comes off. He put his arms under his wife and lifted and his back told him something honest and he almost dropped her and then his pride held the rest his back couldn't.
Ryn stepped forward, took half the weight. "You can," he said gently. "And I can too. And we can do it faster together, and she'll scream less."
Jarla didn't scream. She smiled, a small ferocious thing like a child showing all teeth to a wolf. "Move," she said. "I've wanted to leave this house for ten years. I'm not dying in it when I have an exit."
"Good," Tamsin said, and moved everything else out of the cart that wasn't a human shape. She took a hand from a boy who thought he could decide and made him decide more usefully by giving him a rope to hold. "You pull on this when anyone tells you to, not when you want to," she said in his ear. He nodded and did not let go.
The elder went house to house like a storm, with Hana at his hip. He told an old man with shaking hands that he could carry his own chair or his neighbor's child; choose. The old man chose the child and left the chair, and the world got lighter by two small weights.
"Ryn." Sereth's voice from the edge of the green. He pointed with his chin. Dust on the road. Sun glinting off a spear head. "They're early."
Garron's vanguard came like daylight—inevitable, not angry. Ryn saw no banner; Garron didn't need them. A handful of raiders rode ahead on swayback nags, eyes open, mouths closed. Behind them, ten men and a woman jogged with rifles of old styles and machetes and three pieces of armor between them. They looked not exhausted, not fresh. They looked like men who had learned their own legs well enough not to ask too much or too little. At their head, a man with a nasty scar across his cheek and a habit of chewing as if a piece of straw lived eternally in the corner of his mouth. He had no straw. His jaw worked anyway.
He lifted a hand and his lot slowed. He had learned gag reflexes too. He saw the rope peeking under barley; he didn't step into it. He sent two men into the field low to cut flanks like slow cats. He was good. Ryn disliked him immediately and respected him in the same heartbeat.
"Time," Tamsin said, not a warning, a verdict.
"Go!" the elder bawled, and the word took breath from Ryn's lungs and turned it into motion across the green. The cart creaked as it started, Tara the donkey set her shoulders and pulled, the two men at the rope leaned into it with their hips and went, muscles in their backs making outlines under their shirts. Children clung to the side line and shut their mouths because good children know when a thing is a game and when it isn't. He saw Jarla's white face in the cart, set, eyes open and lucid. He saw the boy with his arm in a sling clench a rope in his teeth and make a funny noise to keep himself from crying.
Ryn, Tamsin, and Sereth stepped into the space between village and road and set their lines so that men couldn't cleanly sprint. Ryn pulled the barrel rope when the first runner barreled past, and the gate dropped in front of him and he tripped over it with his shin and went down soundlessly, breath gone. A second runner went wide, saw the rope, stepped over, and Tamsin buried a knife under his collarbone from the side as he lifted his head to avoid an imagined second line. Sereth's first arrow did not go for a kill; it took the chewing man in the thigh and turned him into a man who limped—limping men slow columns better than dead ones as long as they make noise.
Garron's vanguard saw. They adjusted in ways Ryn hated them for—smart and mean. They didn't charge the gate again. They went for the flanks and the low hedges, where Ryn had not had time to set enough lines. They came light-footed across yards like neighbors. That made them worse. Men who look like neighbors sometimes are.
"Anchor," Ryn shouted, and he didn't mean a place in the ground. He meant each other. Sereth took the right, Tamsin took the left, Ryn held center. He let them eat the field: small bites, chewed wrong. He set simple teeth: a cord across knee height that turned into a snare when a body tripped. A jar on a low wall with a rope and a loop that pulled it down to smash one man's foot when he stepped to take off on a sprint. A smear of water across a flat rock that had never been slippery in its life and now was. Not killing. Making time.
The chewing man grinned when he saw the jar trick. He admired it. Then he put his hand on a boy's shoulder and shoved him into it, a boy from his own lot. The jar shattered. The boy screamed. The chewing man barely looked. Ryn's anger went bright and clean with that one small act. He put an arrow through the chewing man's cheek himself.
He didn't have an arrow. Sereth did. Ryn shouted "Now," and Sereth gave him the thock he wanted. The arrow went crooked through meat and did not kill. It changed the way the chewing man's mouth moved forever. He gurgled and swallowed blood and still kept moving. That kind of man knew how to give himself back to a plan after a cut. Ryn resolved to finish him if he could.
They moved. The cart rolled. The donkey pulled like a saint. The children held their rope. Hana slapped hands that reached for things that weren't human and did so with such ferocity that men who thought they were hard flinched and didn't try again.
On the far edge of the green, a small boy with a snot-glossed lip tripped. He went down under the wheel, not under, not all the way. His ankle caught. The cart lurched. Ryn saw it from three paces away—three paces is forever and no time—and moved without thinking, Quickstep biting into his thigh, burning. He grabbed the boy by the back of the shirt and hauled up, body screaming as the wheel brushed his wrist and the wood burn stung. He rolled the boy into the cart as if he were a piece of meat that needed to be salted immediately. The boy cried but held the rope with his teeth tighter. Ryn's vision flickered white and then whitened out more as the System did the thing it did when a life got bought by a lie you made work through teeth.
[Milestone tick: Protect Non-Combatants (1/2).]
[Minor Cleansing applied: Corruption -1%.]
[Quickstep I — Progression 67% -> 92%.]
[Pain Gate I — Stress threshold extended marginally.]
He felt a breath of cool-down in his skull, not mercy, not exactly; the System scraped away a thin layer of the grime it had put there itself. He snarled without a target and ran again.
The chewing man came at him with a hook, not the canal type, a butcher's. Ryn didn't want to be meat. He let the man come and then snapped a rope up into his wrist. Hook-and-Break wasn't art; it was physics. He jerked the rope down and stepped into the man's space, and the man's wrist bent in a way it shouldn't, and his grip on the hook loosened, and Ryn took it and flung it away and put his buckler into the man's wounded cheek. The arrow in it cracked and made a sound like a tooth in a barrel. The man laughed and bled and put his head down to charge. Ryn stepped aside with a smoothness that wasn't his; Snapline Step tugged his body along the line he'd set to the gate leg. He did not fall this time. He felt the technique wobble in his ankle like a memory that wasn't his yet and filed it under practice more later not now.
"Pull!" the elder bellowed, and the cart leaned into the charcoal path. Brush scraped sides. Rope hummed. The donkey snorted a low angry thing that sounded like a hymn. Garron's men flowed sideways to cut the path. Sereth shot a man's foot off his gait with an arrow from ten paces; the man went down and learned his own blood had weight. Tamsin used two nails from the purloined box to throw into a man's eyes when his helmet brim hid most of his vision. He screamed and clawed, not just because nails hurt, but because it made him flinch the wrong way into Ryn's line. Ryn put a foot under him and used his own momentum to sling him down.
A rifle cracked. The sound was wrong on this road—flat, mean. A woman with a scarf wrapped over her hair at the far edge of the green cranked an old lever-action with a smoothness that made Ryn hate her skill. The bullet kicked dirt by his foot. Sereth wheeled and loosed and his arrow thudded into the rifle stock, not the woman's flesh. She cursed and worked the lever anyway and put the next shot right through the rope at the front of the cart.
The rope snapped.
It licked out of the men's hands and left weals. The donkey stumbled, surprised, then pulled, then couldn't, then did, and the cart lurched backward. The children shrieked and clung to their side line. Jarla clenched her jaw and held the bed edge as if it could solve anything. The elder swore like a man who had never believed in gods. Ryn ran.
He had rope in his bag, but not that rope. He had ten breaths; rope work takes more. He had weight and leverage and a pry bar and the knowledge that sometimes brute knuckles solve what a knot can't in time. He slammed the pry bar into the iron ring at the front of the cart bed and jammed his hip against it and shoved the bar down, making the front edge bite into the dirt. The cart skidded, slowed, stopped moving backward. Sereth stepped behind it and put his shoulder against it. Hana threw her body into helping. The donkey found purchase. Tamsin ducked a shot and then simply ran at the woman with the rifle, which is a holy sin in war: to run at a gun when you have a knife. She zigzagged so the woman would lose rhythm and when she got close enough she threw something that was not a knife, something small and mean—the brass whistle. It struck the woman in the eye. The woman screamed and dropped the rifle. Tamsin grabbed it and flung it toward the creek. It didn't go as far as she wanted. Ryn filed that under "ruin later" and kept his weight on the bar and felt his left rib complain that it was not a fulcrum and he told it to be anyway.
The cart creaked forward again. Rope. He needed rope now.
"Line!" he barked. He didn't look to see who answered. Someone threw him one end of a washing line. He didn't care that it was hemp and half-rotten and smelled like soap and mildew. He tied it, fast, a twist and a turn and a hitch that would hold and give when it should. He used his teeth as a second hand. He spat fibers. He pulled. The knot set. The donkey pulled. The world moved.
A bullet snapped a reed into two neat pieces in his peripheral vision. Ryn flinched, not from the sound, from the knowledge of what it meant: someone new had entered. He looked up.
A woman with pale eyes and a spear limped out of the barley, blood dried along her lip. The spear-woman had come around faster than he'd thought. She did not grin. She did not snarl. She was breathing hard and in pain, and she had decided to move anyway. She planted the spear and leaned on it for a breath and looked at Ryn.
"You're stubborn," she said.
"You're limping," he said back, because cruelty was a kind of salt and he had run out.
She smiled in a way that showed he had hit a nerve he should not enjoy. "We're both here," she said. "Move your cart."
He moved his cart. He did not turn his back on her. She did not thrust. She could have. She didn't. He didn't understand her calculation and hated not understanding more than he hated the ache in his ribs.
A bell of warning chimed in his head, literal—a tin on a line he'd hung earlier to tell him when something moved where he didn't want it to. He yanked the little line. A jar fell. It broke against the flat stone someone had used as a step for twenty years. Oil slicked it. The next man slipped. He took two with him. Sereth shot the last one's foot as he fell and made him scream to slow the ones behind.
They made the charcoal path just before Garron's vanguard could close the box. The path tunneled behind the hedgerow, narrow and rutted, low enough that Ryn had to duck his head and the donkey had to put hers down and shoulder through. It felt like crawling into a throat.
"Don't like this," Tamsin said between her teeth. She took the lead because she preferred to know the thing that killed her was in front, not behind. "Feels like a trap."
"It is," Sereth said. "Ours."
They ran. The cart rattled. Rope hummed. The donkey snorted and sweated. Ryn trotted backward three steps, watching the hedgerow mouth, then turned and trotted forward again, legs burning, lungs feeling like a bellows with a nail hole. Pain Gate smudged the worst of it, but his body still kept score.
At the first bend, Sereth cut into the hedgerow with his knife and pushed low branches aside and revealed a rabbit hole widened by kids who had once thought playing soldier would be fun. He looked at Ryn and the cart and the donkey like a problem. Ryn looked at the gap and saw no truth in it. "Cart won't fit."
"It doesn't need to," Hana said, coming up behind them and making him jump. "Children will." She went to the side of the cart and began unloading with a speed that was not frenzy. "Go. You two men," she snapped. "Take the rope. Tie it to your waist. Crawl. Pull like mules. Don't break children when you do it. You break a child, I cut you."
The men nodded and tied. They crawled in. Children crawled after them, bleating like small goats, little hands disappearing into leaf and dark, emerging on the other side like a string pulled through a seam. Jarla's husband lifted her again, even though he had already lifted too much for one morning. He got his shoulder under her leg wrong and cursed and fixed it and kept moving. Ryn spun to face the path mouth again as footsteps in the hedgerow flanked, and set one more line across the space and let it sit like a snake. The spear-woman came to the mouth of the path and looked down it, eyes adjusting to the tangle. She did not thrust. She did not call a fire order. She said, "Go," to Ryn.
He stared. She shrugged, a tiny movement that looked like it hurt. "Garron likes clean breaks more than I do. I'll turn boat. You row fast." Then she turned and barked at her own lot like a woman who had never played at soft. "Pull back! They're in a pipe. We do not feed men to pipes."
He didn't know what to do with the sharp, ugly gratitude that speared him then. He put it under work. He set a knee-high line across the path and made it invisible and then he ran.
They came up the back of the ridge like worms. The charcoal pit shed stood where the elder had said—half-collapsed, roof fallen in, charcoal dust long blown away. The track beyond it ran shadow under the trees, then opened to a shallow hollow that would be hell for hooves and kinder to men's feet. The cart rattled over tree roots and then settled when the path widened. Ryn felt the line of rope that ran from his belt to the cart's side pull and then ease, and he corrected without thinking, as if he had become a moving anchor.
"Water," Hana announced, and three women who had kept their heads dipped skins and handed them down the cart to small mouths and then to men's. "Sip. Don't drink all. If you vomit, I let you drink vomit."
"Bells," Sereth murmured. He nodded at the hedgerow behind. Ryn cocked his head and heard it—a small bell like a jangle line, then another, then a man's swear as his shins found rope he hadn't seen. His lines were biting late. Good. That bought ten breaths here.
The System slid the line of the timer into his peripheral vision as if it had a stake in the same breath count.
[Timer: 00:08:53.]
[Bonus condition: 0 child casualties. Status: Maintained.]
[New Suggestion: Sacrifice gear to speed passage (cart brake release). Risk: Runaway, injury on descents.]
"Not yet," Ryn whispered, because the descent into the hollow would gut them if they had a runaway. He looked at the cart brake lever with his hand itching and then left it. He would take that cost later if he had to.
They ran.
The charcoal path delivered them to a place where the hedgerow broke, and the ridge fell away into a shallow valley cut by an old stream. The Guild had once kept a watchpoint here; Ryn recognized the square footprint of the long-gone hut by how the nettles grew different. He put his hand on the donkey's neck, feeling the animal's breath against his skin, hot and honest. He loved that more than he loved lines.
They crossed the hollow and started up the far side. The soil turned to sand. The cart wheels bit and slipped. Men swore but did not stop. The donkey made a sound like an oath and found a piece of purchase where there shouldn't have been one. The timer in his peripheral vision crawled.
On the crest, the ridge broke into scrub and flung them into open hill. The wind caught and lifted sweat from Ryn's neck. The road lay a quarter mile out, hidden by a fold. A hawk hung above, interested. The elder looked around like a blind man who had been given eyes again and squinted into the distance. "We'll cut across there," he said, pointing to a place where the ground pinched down and then up—the old clay pit. "They won't think to look—"
Hooves. Not on the road. On the rise to their left.
Ryn swung his head that way, then flattened himself instinctively, but too late to hide. A small group of riders crested the hill in profile against the sky—four, five? Men with pieces of armor and hats jauntily wrong. At their head, a rider who sat like his horse was a chair made just for him. The Guild factor's runner had spoken of a squad that moved as the Guild's "enforcement liaisons" in places where papers were weak. Ryn hated that they had the look of healthy men who ate regularly.
Not Guild. Garron's outriders, coming across country. The spear-woman's "boat" had turned. A banner didn't fly, but a bit of blue cloth tied to a spear fluttered. The rider in front lifted his arm and his men halted, then kicked their mounts and started down at a canter.
"Run," Ryn said to the children, who were already running without waiting. He put his body between the riders and the rope around the cart. He stood with his buckler ready and the short sword not yet in his hand. He could throw a jar. He could cut a rope. He could not stop horses with rope and jars.
Sereth's bow thrummed twice in quick succession. A rider at the rear folded around his belly and slid out of the saddle with a sound like grain dumping. The second threw up an arm by instinct, not judgement, and the arrow went through his bicep and pinned it to his chest. He swore and jerked and his horse skittered sideways and ran over a brush clump. He didn't fall. He swore in a way that made Ryn think of heels kicked under tables and late-night arguments.
The lead rider—a man with a neat beard and a scar under his eye in a clean line that someone had taken a long time to cut—smiled like a man entering a warm room. He saw the cart and the children and the donkey and Ryn's donkey-bright eyes and the rope in his hands and the female spear-woman's absent shape. He did not see the nail box in Tamsin's pocket. He didn't even know such a thing could matter.
"Make way," he called, voice civil. "No one needs to die for a cart."
Hana spat. "You first."
He looked offended. "Is that how we speak to polite men?" he asked his men, and they laughed. It sounded like knives shaken in a tin.
Ryn wanted to throw a jar at his beard. He didn't. He turned to the men at the rope. "Run low," he said. "Don't pull high. Do not let go unless I tell you to. Do not look behind you. The world behind you is off our account."
He stepped short and flicked the length of rope across the riders' path like a snake. It settled. The horses hopped it neatly. Of course they did. They were not stupid. The nails mattered more.
"Tamsin," he said.
She had already palmed a handful. She stepped into the path of the lead rider as if she were a child daring a wave to break and flung the nails low, not at the horse's face—that would have been cruelty—at the ground under its front hooves. Horses are not cruel, but they respect iron. The front hooves hit nails. The horse danced a step, confused and angry, and then stumbled as a nail stuck in a frog and another slid under a shoe. It didn't fall, but it lost confidence. The rider swore and leaned forward the wrong way to cajole the horse into doing what horses don't do. The second rider swerved and hit a thistle and yelled. The third decided to go around and went where Ryn had set a line earlier—he didn't even remember doing it now, he'd set so many—that kicked into his horse's chest and made it rear. He fell backward and the horse did not, and the horse did the sensible thing: it ran away from whatever idiot thing had thrown it.
The lead rider recovered his horse and judged his pride against the small, human faces in the cart. He kicked his horse and came on, slower and angrier now. Ryn could taste the decision. He could taste the donkey's sweat.
He made the choice he had been hoping he could avoid. He turned to the men at the rope. "Let go," he said. "Now. Get behind the cart. Push."
They obeyed like men obey when the world's weight is a line in their hands. The cart rolled. The donkey hit the descent into the clay pit. Ryn ran to the cart's side and kicked the brake lever free. It clanged up. The cart went with a will. The donkey brayed a sound the world shouldn't ask of a donkey and then ran because running made more sense than being dragged. The cart flew into the hollow like a seed blown into a furrow.
Riders will not go down into a hole where they cannot see the future. Even men like the neat-bearded one hesitate. He did, for two heartbeats. That was all Ryn needed. He grabbed the rope left free and cranked like he was pulling a wheel out of a rut in sleet. The cart hit the bottom of the pit and skidded and nearly turned and didn't because Sereth was behind it and Hana was behind it and both of them shoved with the right kind of shove. Children screamed, old men yelled, Jarla laughed like someone who had kissed death on the mouth at least twice and wanted to tell it a joke.
The cart climbed out of the pit on the other side with a noise like plates rubbing together in a cupboard. Ryn's legs burned so bad he thought he might vomit. Pain Gate took the edge off and left the nausea as a thing he could put a hand on and push down. He turned and saw the rider with the neat beard coming down the slope like a balanced stone.
He didn't wait. He flung an oil jar. It struck the slope, broke, slicked it. The horse skidded and checked. The rider swore and didn't fall. He had good knees. He had a decent horse. Ryn hated both and respected both.
They cleared the crest. The road lay ahead again, the charcoal path's last thin branches marked by old scar on the bark. Ryn wanted to cry out in relief. He didn't. He breathed and said, "Down the old ditch, then up at the milestone. Don't go to the road. The Guild will be there with papers."
Hana laughed, a harsh bark. "Paper doesn't stop hunger."
"No," Ryn said. "But it slows men with minds like ledgers, and that's half of them."
"Three-quarters," Sereth muttered.
They reached the ditch. Ryn threw the rope to them again, low, and they slithered along it. The donkey went with ears back, accepting the stupidity because she was a donkey. Ryn loved her with a pure love and promised her an apple he didn't have. He spoke to her under his breath. "You will not like me when I die."
"Don't plan for my bad meal," Tamsin said next to him, panting. "Plan for yours."
He didn't have a retort. He put his shoulder under the cart again and pushed.
The ditch brought them to a place where a culvert once fed water under the road. Now it fed nothing but bad smells and a place rats learn to tell stories. Ryn smelled ammonia and iron and old wet. He felt his skin crawl. He tightened the line around his waist. The children made gagging noises and then turned their heads like small soldiers. They were better than most men Ryn had met.
They crawled under. Halfway, one of the smaller boys whimpered and stopped. Ryn's heart pitched. He slid forward on his belly and put his hand on the boy's foot. "What's your name?" he whispered, mouth full of sour air.
"Pell," the boy whispered back, trying to be brave and failing in a way that broke Ryn.
"Pell," Ryn said, because names tied anchors. "How many steps can you count? Can you count to ten? Can you count to ten again? Can you count to ten three times?"
Pell nodded and then realized Ryn couldn't see him nod and said, "Yes." Ryn squeezed his heel once, and the boy counted in a fierce whisper that made Ryn's eyes sting. They came out the far side of the culvert into a ditch lined with wild garlic and nettles and a few stinging things that took thought away. Hana slapped men's hands that went to scratch.
They climbed. The road appeared, a band of light with dust hanging above it. The Guild's column showed at the far curve like a new paragraph—helmets, pikes, a flag that meant nothing to anyone hungry. Ryn wanted to avoid them. He wanted to use them. He didn't have time to decide which.
"We go left," Sereth said. "Around the crest, then behind the alder. Then we put a field between us and papers."
The elder nodded like a man watching a game he had lost once and learned the rules for so the new ones wouldn't. "Go," he said. He planted his stick and took a breath and then ran in a way that would kill him later if they made it to a town. Ryn admired him against his will.
A shout from the road: "Stop in the name of the Guild!" It had that strange pomp men use when they want the world to be painted in one color. Ryn didn't stop.
"Factor's with them," Tamsin said without looking, from the way the words rang.
"Good," Sereth said. "Let them glare at each other. We're water."
Ryn laughed breathlessly at that and then coughed until his lungs felt like folded canvas. He watched the Guild line through the leaves: a man with an ink-stained hand pointing, a woman with a pike barking, a boy with a chest too broad to have lived this much famine. The ink-stained man's gaze caught the cart and did some math and then the shape of his shoulders changed: he turned to argue with the woman with the pike, pointing to paperwork in his head, not to the blood in the ditch. It was small and stupid. It helped. Ryn ran.
The path opened onto a low lane with a wall built of stacked field stones, the kind farmers make when they have more stones than soil. The lane ran into a copse of alders that looked like mercy. Ryn thought they could make it.
Then a body came out of the left in a tangle of nettles and arms and blood, and for a heartbeat Ryn thought it was a child. It wasn't. It was a man with gray in his beard and a cut under his ribs that had smeared his shirt with brown. He held a knife in one hand. He held something else in the other. He staggered and went to one knee and then surged again, turned toward the cart.
Jar of coin, wrapped in cloth.
Ryn didn't think. He lunged.
The man saw him and did what men do when fear and greed and hope hug at the same time: he tried to keep everything. He clutched the jar and reached for the cart and time went gummy.
Ryn had two hands. He could take the jar or the boy whose foot had slipped again. He had a bad thought: I could do both. He reached. His fingers brushed the boy's ankle. His other hand touched the jar, felt coin under cloth—weight, familiar, comfort. His brain tried to split.
"Ryn!" Tamsin shouted. It sounded like a slap.
He made the ugly choice. He grabbed the boy and hauled him into the cart by the armpits and shoved him into Hana's arms. He left the jar in the man's hand. The man blinked. He took a step and his feet slid in wild garlic and he gasped as his cut tore and the jar fell and broke and coins ran like yellow water. The man screamed, a wordless animal squall, and threw himself after them. He fell on his belly in nettles, grabbing with both hands, cutting his fingers, bleeding on money.
The spear-woman's shadow fell over him. She paused. She looked down at the man, then at Ryn, then at the broken coin jar, then at nothing. She swore softly, not at Ryn, not at the man. She flipped her spear in her hand and pinned the cloth of the man's shirt to the dirt with the butt so he couldn't crawl. "Leave it," she said, tired. "Leave it."
He didn't. He clawed. She lifted the spear. He flinched and went still and cried quietly into the dirt. She did not kill him. She didn't help him. She stepped back.
Ryn hated her and liked her in equal measures. He ran, because what else was there.
They made the copse. The ground swallowed them. The road bent and the Guild's column flowed by like a slow river, the factor talking, the captain listening, both measuring an account that did not include the donkey under Ryn's hand.
They ran until the elder fell and then got up again and laughed and then cried and then ran. They ran until the donkey stopped looking back. They ran until the timer in the corner of Ryn's vision hit zero and disappeared and the System washed his mind with a cold breath and a ledger of bits that made him want to smash his skull into a tree.
[Directive Completed: Evacuate civilians under pursuit (High Difficulty).]
[Reward: Experience +60. Reputation (Local): Rescuer.]
[Cleansing Applied: -2% Corruption.]
[Status:]
Name: Ryn
Race: Half-Elf (Unregistered)
Class: Trapper I
Level: 4 (pending)
Strength: 7
Agility: 10
Vitality: 9
Mind: 8
Perception: 10
Tenacity: 9
Corruption: 1% (Shard Sync: 9%)
He doubled over with his hands on his knees and laughed and gasped and then heaved and almost vomited. He didn't. The elder came to him, put a hand on his head like a blessing and had the sense to take it away before Ryn could flinch. "You did a cruel thing right," the old man said. "I'll take that over a soft thing wrong."
Ryn wanted to say, I left a man with a jar and you are praising me for not making a worse choice, and I'm going to put that under my tongue where it can dissolve into poison later. He said instead, "We keep moving."
"We do," Hana said, and clapped her hands again. "Up. Rope. If I see a pig near this cart, I'll throw it and you."
Sereth stood a little apart, watching the ridge and the road and the paths men take when they don't know what they want. He didn't put his bow away. He didn't look back. He looked ahead and did not like what he saw. He said, "We go to the next village and take them too."
The elder flinched at that in a way that said he had considered staying and hoped someone would give him permission to do so. Ryn did not. "We take them," he said, and his voice cracked and he hated it. "We take them because the ones who will be left will die and then we will die softer."
Tamsin looked at him as if cataloguing who he was becoming and whether she wanted to walk behind him when the road narrowed. She saw the shard under his skin and the way his eyes had started to go a shade too bright. She lifted a finger and flicked it at his forehead. He blinked.
"Stay here," she said, soft and dangerous. "Not there." She didn't point at the System in his head. She didn't need to. He nodded.
They moved again. The donkey walked, slower now, head low. Ryn put his hand on her neck and kept it there. He needed the anchor.
As they skirted a copse of trees, a figure stepped out from behind a trunk and moved to join them in that funny, sideways way some people have when they don't want to be looked at too much but don't want to hide either. He wore a patched leather apron and had too many pouches on his belt. His eyes were red-rimmed from smoke or lack of sleep or bad decisions. He lifted a hand, palm up, a gesture that tried to be peace and apology and arrogance all at once.
"Ilyon," Tamsin said, voice flat as a plank.
He ducked his head. "Hello," he said. "I heard the road screaming and thought that must be where people who don't want to die yet are. May I walk with you? I can help."
Ryn looked at him, at the apron and the ink-stained fingers and the way he couldn't keep his hands from twitching toward the donkey as if he wanted to pet her and also toward Ryn's shard as if he wanted to touch it like a child touches a jewel. He didn't answer. He breathed. He said, "What do you know about burrowers?" because that was the next thing in their path as sure as the next breath.
Ilyon lit up the way boys do when you ask them about their favorite kind of hammer. "They hate brine," he said immediately. "They chew wood but not stone. They learn lines slower than we do, but they learn. They have small spurs in their front teeth that catch on rope if the rope is rough. Do you have rough rope?"
Ryn felt a small unexpected laugh try to escape his mouth. He swallowed it. "We do," he said. He glanced at Tamsin. She had the same half-smile and half-sneer as before, the one that says danger is a trickster and she has kissed him. She rolled her shoulders. "He can walk," she said. "If he talks about better ways to die, I cut his tongue."
Ilyon smiled like a man who has decided this was praise. He fell in beside Ryn and the donkey and kept his hands to himself with visible effort. He said, out of the side of his mouth, as if he could not help it, "You have a shard in you."
Ryn didn't look at him. "No," he said.
Ilyon nodded solemnly. "Good. I didn't want to have to tell you you were lying."
Ryn almost smiled at that. It felt like a betrayal of a dozen pains to like this man. He didn't like him. He didn't dislike him. He put him in the column labeled "Useful and cost to be determined." His head hurt. He moved.
They came to the outskirts of the next village, which looked like the last one except more broken. Smoke drifted in thin lines from three roofs. Two dogs fought over something that had once been wrapped in cloth. A Guild runner with a yellow sash stood on a crate in the center and shouted about writs and water. The elder beside Ryn made a noise like a kettle and kept walking. The runner saw them and brightened as if he were saved by the arrival of a story he could insert into his script. Then he saw the cart and Hana and the donkey and Ryn and Sereth and Tamsin and something in his posture died. He gave them the face of a man who had discovered the ledger that would indict him had been used to light a fire.
He descended from the crate. He came toward Ryn. "In the name of the—"
Ryn cut him off. "No time," he said. He pointed to the far side of the green. "Garron's lot will be at the bend in ten breaths. If you want to live, shut up and tell me where the well is and who can pull. Then you carry a child."
The runner's mouth opened and closed. He had a good, honest face under the fear and the inexperienced rage. He pointed with a shaking hand. "There," he said. "And… I can pull."
Hana smacked his elbow. "You will," she said. "Or I make you a pig."
The Guild runner didn't know what that meant. He nodded anyway.
Ryn looked up. On the hill beyond the green, a rider sat, watchful. The spear-woman. She raised two fingers in a gesture that might have been a promise or a warning or a truce. He raised two back before he could think. He looked at his hand and hated that it had moved and loved that it had not shaken.
The System put a new line on his ledger.
[New Milestone: Assist Evacuations (Chain).]
[Progress: 1/3.]
[Trapper: Rank I progress 40% -> 62%.]
[Skill: Improvised Bomb II — Practice threshold near.]
He closed his eyes briefly, then opened them. He had a half hour in him, maybe two. He would spend it. He set his hands on a rope and made it true. He put his shoulder under a cart that wasn't his and pretended he could carry the whole road. He couldn't. He did it anyway. Above him, the hawk wheeled. Behind him, a man crawled over coin in nettles. Ahead, the Guild's flag flapped like paper in a wind that didn't care. On the ridge, a woman with a spear watched and did not yet move.
"Anchor," he said, and he meant it like prayer this time. Then he dragged.