The second village didn't have the luxury of disbelief. When the first bell rang—an old frying pan banged with something wooden because no one trusted iron to be spare anymore—people moved. They didn't move well. They moved in four directions at once, like water trying to remember the shape of a broken jar.
"Lines," Ryn said, and made the word into a shape that fit into panicked mouths. "Form lines. Rope. Hands. Children in the middle. Old ones at the front so you don't lose them."
Hana went down the lane like a knife, flipping buckets off carts with the flat of her hand. "No buckets!" she barked. "If you hate your own children move slower! If you love your pigs, kiss them goodbye!"
The Guild runner with the yellow sash took a deep breath and burned his small pride like kindling. "Well there! Tie—tie rope about your waists if you can find any! Those without rope, grab sleeves and don't let go!" His voice cracked. He glanced at Ryn, caught his nod, and found a shard of authority in himself that had nothing to do with paper.
Sereth climbed the low church step and looked over the roofs to the bend of the road, where dust lifted in slow, ugly fingers. "Six minutes," he murmured. He drew a line in the air with his bow, not to shoot it yet, but to remember where it would go when it left him. Tamsin disappeared into the larder of a tumbled house and came out with a small jar of lampblack and a hand mirror. She smudged her own face and Ryn's, not bothering to ask, then handed him the mirror.
"Why?" he asked, because putting black on his face felt like a lie he wasn't good at.
"Shine," she said, with contempt for the sun. "Also I like you uglier."
Ilyon trotted sideways like a crab, his pouches clacking, and landed by the village well with a flurry of confidence he didn't entirely own. The well had a roof and a pulley, blessedly not collapsed. He winched the bucket up with practised movements his soft hands weren't built for and set it down. "Salt," he called. When no one immediately handed it to him, he rifled his own pouches, found a paper of coarse, damp grains, and dumped them into the water with ceremonial gravity. He used a little clay spoon to stir and then sloshed a line of brine along the inside of the well curb. "Burrowers dislike it," he said to no one in particular, then looked pleased with himself. He flinched at a bug that wasn't there and covered it by adjusting the leather strap of his apron.
Ryn took the rope someone shoved at him—he didn't ask who—and tied it to the front of a small cart that had been used for hauling firewood, not lives. He set the knot quickly, teeth tugging, fingers moving by habit. He checked the axle pins and the wheel nails and banged them down with the handle of his knife because the hammer was elsewhere. He knelt and wedged thin pieces of wood into the gaps of the bed to keep little ankles from dropping through. His hands kept a ledger his brain didn't have time to write.
The System slid a cool, clean box of text into his peripheral vision and he ignored it; it slid away without offense. He liked it more for respecting his mood. He hated that he liked it for anything.
"Ryn." Sereth's voice, thin as a bowstring. Ryn looked. On the road beyond the bend, a line of figures coalesced out of dust and heat—Garron's next lot. The spear-woman wasn't at their head. A different man was: short, solid, a shaved skull that glinted. He had a machete on his back and a small, round shield in his hand with a boss scuffed from old fights. His men moved like they'd slept in their boots. Behind them, a pair of riders cantered—messengers running to ensure discipline, not to break a line. Garron had given this village a middle forearm, not a fist.
"Pikes," the Guild runner muttered behind Ryn. He meant the Guild column Ryn could not see now behind the low houses; he meant a hope that had paper on it.
"They won't be here first," Ryn said. "Move."
He put his shoulder into the cart, and the world shifted under his feet. The donkey from the first village—now named "Tara" by a child who had decided naming made ownership and ownership made care—had been given over to another cart for the youngest. This one they pulled with rope and will. The cart creaked, groaned a question, accepted the math of it, and moved.
Tamsin slid past Ryn and lobbed a jar of oil onto a patch of hard-packed clay just ahead of the bend. She didn't light it. She spread it with the sole of her boot and buffed it into invisibility. "Slick truth," she said, and Ryn nodded with mean affection.
Ilyon darted toward the lath fence guarding the back of a garden and levered a plank up with a neat little pry that told Ryn for the first time that Ilyon knew how to use his hands for more than mixing. He grabbed a boy by the collar—a skinny thing with hair that looked like a brush—and shoved a coil of rough cord into his hands. "You duck," he said, eyes suddenly very sharp. "String this knee-high along the fence foot to that post. If you tangle your fingers I'll cut them off and we'll do without." The boy nodded fiercely and did not tangle his fingers.
Four men from Garron's lot padded into the green with the caution of men whose friends had told them stories about the last village. They saw the rope around Ryn's waist and the cart and the knot and judged the worth of cutting it in their heads. The shaved man didn't choose rope; he chose panic. He flung his shield low and wide to strike hands and knees.
Ryn went up on his toes, not high—high is where blades live—just enough to let the iron rim scuff his boots. He brought the buckler down on the shield's top edge and shoved. The impact rattled his already aching shoulder and made the rope burn on his wrist flare; he bit back a hiss and leaned the rest of his weight into the cart handle. The cart rolled, catching the shaved man's shin; the man swore and stepped back a half pace. Tamsin slid past and cut the strap on the shield with a neat little jab; the shield dropped on its own. The man looked surprised and then angry and brought his machete up.
Sereth's arrow took him in the thigh; the point punched through and stuck into the wooden rail of the cart. The man shouted, staggered, and Tamsin plucked the arrow free with an efficient twist, letting the blood go down. "You'll be limping," she said, almost cheerful, which was its own kind of cruelty.
The men behind tried to flow around. Ryn yanked a small loop of line he had tied from the cart's front rail to a garden gate. The latch on the gate sprang, the gate swung across a man's shins, and he chose to step rather than be hit. Discretion was a wrong choice in that heartbeat. He stepped onto Tamsin's slick clay patch and his feet went out from under him. He hit the ground in an undignified sprawl. Someone behind stepped onto him without apology and tripped in his turn. A small, vicious chain of bodies trying not to crush each other and failing to kept men who had more courage than sense off Ryn's back for fifteen breaths. It was enough to get the cart into the lane.
"Left!" Hana shouted. She had a sense of the town's map in her body the way Ryn had the sense of a knot in his. He didn't question. He turned left where she pointed and ducked under a washing line hung with shirts—slapping fabric in his face that smelled of salt and grass and family. He cut the line with a quick flick so the men behind would wear the shirts and trip. Tamsin grabbed and stuffed one into her shirt as if theft of cloth counted as love. It did.
They spilled onto the back lane. The way ahead tightened to a single-tracked cut between garden walls. Ryn's heart sank. It was a killbox for the hard and the stupid both. He laid his hand on the buckler strap to steady it. He wanted to overclock every line in him and blow his breath into something that would smash the world flat. He heard the System whisper about it in his bones and said, "No," out loud—which made Ilyon's head snap toward him as if he had been addressed.
The first of Garron's men slid into the lane. Tamsin had set a cord along the fence foot earlier. He hit it shin to wood and pitched forward, catching himself on his hands like a man learning the floor is not to be trusted. The man behind planted his boot on the first man's back without ceremony and leaped, clearing rope and man both. Ryn brought his buckler up into that man's knee and made it go sidewise. The man screamed, not because of the pain, but because his mouth knew the word "timing" was the thing he had lost and liked saying the word hurt even when his mouth couldn't.
Sereth studied the lane mouth through his bow's shape, calm as a surveyor at work. He put the next arrow not into a throat or eye or heart; he put it through the shoulder of a man who had turned to throw an oil jar. The jar fell and broke by his own feet, splashing his shins with slick. He sat down abruptly. The man next to him decided to pull him up. He pulled him into the slick. They became a problem for their friends and bought Ryn thirty heartbeats.
"Stop picking the pretty shots," Tamsin snapped at Sereth without taking her eyes off the lane. "Kill them."
"Slow lasts longer," Sereth said, and placed another arrow into a hand—deliberate, thoughtful cruelty that kept men thinking about why, not what. Ryn didn't like it and loved it both.
Ilyon appeared at Ryn's shoulder. He had a small clay bomb in his palm, fuse coiled like a sleeping vine. He whispered, thrilled and terrified, "If you hate them really hard, throw this."
"What is it?" Ryn asked, breath ragged.
"A thing that embarrassment gave up on," Ilyon said, not helpful. Ryn took it anyway. The clay was warm. He counted his breath and threw it underhanded so it would bounce under the legs of three men stacking for a rush. It broke with a sad little plop. A stink exploded into the lane that made all the men gag hard at once and scrape their tongues with their teeth. One vomited and slipped in it and pulled another down out of friendship.
"Skunk water," Ilyon said, blushing with pride. "From beetles, not skunks, don't panic."
"Gods," Tamsin said, coughing around a laugh. "You're disgusting. I like you."
"Thank you," Ilyon said earnestly.
They shoved the cart along the lane until it let them out onto the charcoal path where the hedgerow started again. The cart's wheel hit a rut and stuck stubborn as a mule. Ryn and two men he didn't know leaned into it, and the wheel didn't move. Someone screamed at the head of the line, not a wounded man, a man who had seen a thing he shouldn't. Ryn looked up. Over the hedgerow, a figure with a spear walked the top of the low stone wall with painful elegance, moving like someone who had used that wall as a balance beam as a child. The spear-woman looked down at Ryn and the cart like a ledger put in front of her with two columns and not enough numbers.
They locked eyes. He saw her lip split, unhealed from where the broken shield rim had kissed it. She saw the swelling along his ribs and the way his rope-burned wrists moved like they belonged to an old man.
"Again," she said, more of a sigh than a threat.
"Again," he said back.
She laid the spear along her shoulder and did not thrust. She walked the wall lengthwise, not paying attention to men's lines, just putting weight where weight belonged. She looked down the charcoal path and nodded once, as if she'd liked the person who had cut it without knowing their name. The shaved-headed foreman pushed up against the lane mouth behind them with his men, snarling orders. She turned and shouted something that made all of them look small. They froze. She called, "Continue," to Ryn, in a tone that made it more an insult than a kindness. He continued. There was nothing else.
When they broke into field again, the first village's elder stumbled, caught himself with his stick, and wheezed, "Water." Ilyon handed him a skin without being asked. The old man drank carefully, like a man who has hauled buckets all his life. He didn't thank Ilyon. Ilyon didn't ask for thanks. Ryn liked that.
They didn't outpace pursuit. They sidestepped it. Garron had split his line and sent the spear-woman to cut them, but the hedgerow and the ditch and the stupidity of old farm lots slowed everyone equally. The donkey's breath rasped like a saw. Ryn ran a hand along her neck and counted breaths—not his, hers—so he would remember when she needed to stop for heart, not for legs.
The Guild column appeared again on a ridge to the right, moving obliquely, like a school of fish adjusting to a net. The factor rode at the front with a borrowed horse and a frown that had never left his face since he'd learned numbers exist. He lifted a hand and made a signal that meant "Hold formation," and shouted something that meant, "Look like you're helping." The pikes leveled and then lifted again, a meaningless gesture. Ryn wanted to hate him. He didn't have the energy. He put the Guild in the column labeled "Cost of later" and kept moving.
The charcoal path dived into a copse and came out at a wash that had once been a stream and was now a trickle. The bank on the far side was low and looked tender with growth. Sereth went first, feeling the give with his boots, and then nodded. "It'll hold," he said, which in Sereth's mouth meant, "It will break on the fifth man and not the third."
They crossed. They counted. Flowers crushed underfoot made a sickly sweet smell that stuck under Ryn's tongue. He wanted to wash it out. He didn't. On the far side, a low rabbit warren riddled the bank. Ilyon hissed softly. "There," he said, pointing. "Wrong kind. If we stand and search, they bite. If we move, they don't like it. Salt?"
Ryn tossed him the salt bag. Ilyon poured a line with a precise wrist. The burrow mouths foamed slightly, then subsided like a bad thought dismissed. Ryn shivered, not from fear of the wrong rats, but from the ease with which he had started to push the System's problems onto other people's cleverness. He acknowledged the shiver and filed it as a thing to fix later when the world didn't require his hands every second.
At the third low rise, a child staggered and sat down abruptly in the dust. Pell. Ryn's mind supplied the name like a hand in the dark finding a familiar notch in a beam. Ryn knelt and put his hand under Pell's arm. "Count," he said. Pell's lips moved. "One," he whispered. "Two." He got to seven and lost track. Ryn gave him a skin of water. "Sip," he said. Pell sipped and looked up at Ryn with eyes that had too much hope in them. "Will we get to the tall trees?" he asked, the trees that marked the border with the fields where the Guild sometimes patrolled. The tall trees had a smell of safety, even if safety was an illusion.
Ryn looked at Sereth, at Tamsin, at the fields, at the road. He didn't lie. "We'll get to the next shade," he said. "Then we get to the trees." Pell nodded and staggered up and grabbed the rope with both hands and set his jaw and walked.
Garron's men pressed again, not close enough to cut, close enough to keep dread at their heels. The spear-woman followed along the hedgerow on the stone wall, not overtaking, not falling back. She wasn't shepherding; she wasn't flanking; she was watching a piece of roadwork. Ryn found himself both hating and understanding it. If you learn a man's art, you can kill him better later. He didn't know if she was learning how to cut him or if she was building respect he didn't want. He kept moving.
At the next farm there was no one to save. A door hung open in a way that said it had been kicked both in and out in the last day. Tamsin's face did something then that made Ryn look away—not grief, not exactly. She reached into the house and came out with a tin of rendered fat and a spool of thread, trophies that felt like talismans against a world that kept taking without asking. She slipped the thread into Ryn's hand like it was a vote of confidence. "Good knots," she said.
They topped the rise at last and the tall trees stood ahead, a line of alder and ash and a few old beech, their leaves clattering in wind. Ryn wanted to weep at them. He did not. He wet his mouth, thought of apples for Tara, and said, "You're not done," to the donkey. She snorted like she had known that before him and went on.
At the edge of the trees, the Guild factor waited with a small detail of pikes, flanked by two riders with helmets and discipline. The factor looked like a man who had not slept but had not forgotten how to put on a clean shirt. He lifted a hand that wanted to be a greeting and ended up as something else. He pointed at Ryn. "You," he said, no flattery. "We need to talk about your… property."
Hana laughed in his face.
Ryn didn't have laughter left. He had breath. "We aren't staying," he said. He put his hand on the cart's rail and made every finger loud enough to be heard. "We'll take the path under the hill to the old toll road and then east toward the moor. Garron won't press through there hard. You want to help, you hold this point and look angry and make the papers count for something for once until we're over."
The factor's jaw set. He swallowed a speech like a coin and nodded once, sharp. "We'll do that." He leaned in, briefly careless of Ryn's shadow, and said, low, "There is a writ for you. From me. For you to surrender a relic." He nodded to Ryn's hand, where the shard hummed complacent. "I don't want to read it. Give me a day."
"You have a half," Ryn said. He didn't know if he would have the luxury of even that. He glanced past the factor's shoulder and saw the woman with a pike who had argued earlier. Her eyes were on the children, not the paperwork. She would hold the line. He returned his attention to what mattered: rope, people, donkey.
The System chose that moment to be tolerable.
[Level Up: 4 -> 5.]
[Stat Growth: Agility +1, Tenacity +1.]
[Skill: Improvised Bomb II unlocked.]
[Technique: Snapline Step — Stabilization 40%.]
[Passive: Steady Breath I (reinforced).]
[Status:]
Name: Ryn
Race: Half-Elf (Unregistered)
Class: Trapper I
Level: 5
Strength: 7
Agility: 11
Vitality: 9
Mind: 8
Perception: 10
Tenacity: 10
Corruption: 1% (Shard Sync: 9%)
He felt the gain as a tiny shift in the way his lungs grabbed air—less scrape, more clean pull. He didn't like the wash of pride that came with it; it felt like praise from a teacher he didn't trust. He let it sit and hoped it wouldn't stain.
Under the trees, the temperature dropped three degrees and the world smelled like rot and life together. The path under the hill was narrow, rutted, studded with roots. He glanced at Ilyon. "Burrowers?"
"Smell wrong," Ilyon said promptly, then flinched at the thought of being wrong. He sniffed. "There. There." He pointed to two dark holes that might have been burrows or the mouths of ghosts. "Salt," he said briskly, then realized he had used most of it and looked abashed.
Ryn tossed him the last paper of salt. Ilyon dribbled it with the gravity of a priest and crossed himself in a tiny private movement that meant nothing to Ryn except that Ilyon's fear sometimes looked like faith to himself. He didn't comment.
They moved under the trees. The light turned green. The world cupped them in one leafy hand and for a moment Ryn let his shoulders come down. The rope around his waist tugged twice—children stopping then starting—and he matched the tug automatically, the way his hands matched a wheel's wobble. He could feel the anchor back at the cart like a phantom limb now—I am here—I hold you—I ask you to not die in this breath. It was both comfort and chain.
They broke out of the trees onto the old toll road—wider than the cart track, packed to stone where it had been used, dappled with sun. It ran eastward into a stretch of moor that glimmered brown and green and promised sodden feet and poor footing for horses. Good.
Ryn glanced back. On the ridge behind them, the spear-woman stood in profile. She rested her weight on her spear like a woman leaning on a shovel, watched the world, and did not move to close. He raised a hand without thinking. She didn't wave. She tapped the butt of the spear twice on stone, a quiet sound, then turned away toward her lot and the road.
"Friends?" Tamsin asked, amused and appalled.
"No," Ryn said too quickly. "No."
"Fine," Tamsin said. "Frenemies."
"Don't," Sereth murmured, not looking up.
They rolled onto the moor. The ground sucked at the wheels like a rude man at a stew. Ryn's thighs screamed. Ten more breaths. Ten more. He counted like Pell. Pell's lips moved ahead of him and Ryn wanted to put his head on the boy's shoulder and weep. He didn't.
The moor had more surprises. In a hollow, a stand of bone-white reeds hid a collapsed length of road where water had eaten at it from underneath for years. Wheel and donkey foot went over together. The donkey cried once. Ryn's heart pitched. He dropped the rope and flung himself down and jammed the pry bar under the axle to lever the wheel up out of the sucking mud. The old trick he had been taught for wet rock: lay a flat board, push the cart forward onto it, roll, shift, roll. He looked for a board. There wasn't one.
"Shield," he said. Sereth cursed like a quiet man who has been told he has to do something stupid and necessary. He pulled his own shield off his back—a square, dented thing—and jammed it under the wheel. Ryn leveraged. Men pushed. Children cried. The cart came up onto the shield with a noise like old arguments being settled. Ryn heaved. The shield bent. The wheel rolled. He grabbed the rope and hauled it, clipping his own shin with it hard enough to raise a lump. He did not swear. He filed the pain with the rest.
They moved again. The cart creaked. The donkey's breath rasped. Ryn didn't look back for once. He looked forward. The land ahead lifted to a low ridge lined with scrub and gorse. The old road cut through it in a deep notch. The notch would be a good place to make a stand if you were very sure you wanted to bleed and die to hold a nothing. He wanted to avoid it. He couldn't. The moor narrowed; the notch was the only passable place for the cart.
"Line," he said, flat. No one asked what he meant.
He took his last two oil jars and handed one to Tamsin and one to Ilyon. "Don't throw them at people," he said. "Throw them at ideas."
"I'm good at that," Ilyon said, sincere, and Tamsin snorted.
Sereth scouted the notch. He came back with a face like a breaking plate. "Tracks," he said. "Not ours."
Ryn closed his eyes, opened them. "Guild?"
Sereth shook his head. "Smaller. Wrong feet." He touched the back of his neck. "Rats."
"Of course," Ryn said. He knelt and put his palm on the ground at the notch's mouth. It was cool and damp and the hum in his hand changed a hair—the shard picking up on something like a node's smell here. It didn't hum a lot. It doesn't take much to tilt a day.
"Salt," he said, without asking who had it. Ilyon produced a pinch from somewhere like a magician who was getting cocky. Ryn poured a thin line in the notch's shadow.
"We'll go one cart length at a time," he said. "People on the sides, not between wheel and wall. If something bites you, you don't kick. You stomp and you pull your foot out. You scream only once and then you run."
Hana said, "If you fall, I'll drag you. If you complain, I'll break your nose. If you run backward, I'll break your knee. Forward is the only way."
The elder grunted. "Listen to her," he said. He didn't watch the skies for gods. He didn't ask for a prayer. He rolled his shoulders like a man about to carry a beam across a creek and snapped his jaw shut.
They went.
The notch narrowed to a cart-and-half width. The stone at hip height rubbed the skin from Ryn's knuckles. Rats—not rats—scattered at the edge of the salt line and chittered something that made the hairs rise on Ryn's neck. A small body launched at his ankle and bounced off leather and smelled like old mink. He stomped without thinking, felt bones squish, felt the old shame of killing a thing that had never been kind to you but had also never promised you any better. He kept moving.
Halfway through, a man in the rear shouted. Ryn broke his own rule and turned. A burrow under the wall had opened under the foot of the man who carried the end of the cart rope. He went ankle-deep and screamed and braced himself on the wall, face white. Ilyon slid to him and grabbed his forearm and pushed down on the heel, freeing the foot with a wet sucking sound. He shoved a little plug of something smelly into the hole. The burrowers squealed. "Cedar pitch," he said, cheerful and breathless, when he should have been cursing. "They dislike it more than me."
Ryn reached back and grabbed the rope to take the weight and his fingers brushed Ilyon's wrist and felt the pulse there jackhammering. "Breathe," he said. Ilyon nodded like a boy scolded by his master and then did, because he was good at being told to do things by people who made sense.
They got through. The cart lurched to safety on the far side. Everyone exhaled the same breath, ugly and joyous and miserable. The tall trees ahead deepened to wood.
On the road behind them, a horn blew—a single long note, spine-chilling. Ryn half-turned, then forced himself forward, because the choice was always forward. He had lived a whole life with his feet wanting to go backward and had decided today that he wouldn't do that anymore even if it killed him. He didn't realize then that deciding and doing were separate skills.
They made the shelter of the wood—a real wood, not a copse—and Ryn felt the ground change under his feet to something that had held men for a long time. He would later know the name of this place—Fellreach—but now it was just dark trees and the whisper of old things. The path broadened, then pinched into a place where a toppled wall had created a natural gate. They filed through. Ryn put his hand on the stone. It hummed in a way that tasted like the mile marker ruin. He pulled his fingers back, not because he feared, but because he was tired of humming at things.
The elder stopped, finally, because men stop when their bodies make them. He bent double. Hana slapped his back and he swore and stood straight and then laughed, a raw, torn thing that was more apology to his own bones than joy.
"Here," Sereth said. He pointed to a low stone building set back from the path, roofless, walls intact to a man's height—an old toll station or a forester's hut. "We can hold a bit here. Two roads in. One out. We can bar the one we came from for an hour and let not-Garron eat pike for a while."
Ryn looked at the Guild: the factor marshalling men, the pike captain speaking low and sharp to her line. Garron's men hadn't followed into the wood. Ryn saw the spear-woman at the edge, tapping her spear butt on the last stone, and then turning away. He didn't know why she let them go here. He would learn later that Garron had a rule about wood like this: if you don't pay it, it takes interest. Ryn took the gift and hated that he had to call it a gift.
They made camp in that ruin of a hut for an hour—the children lay with eyes wide, too tired to sleep, Jarla drank water and murmured curses sweet and low at her husband for lifting her badly, and then thanked him for lifting her at all. Ryn and Tamsin and Sereth and Ilyon stood in the doorway and watched the wood hold its breath around them.
The System, patient, clinical, dispassionate, tidied its notes and set them on the desk of Ryn's mind.
[Directive Chain (Evacuations) updated: 2/3.]
[Reputation (Local): Rescuer -> Anchor (minor).]
[Resource Warning: Rations low; lamp oil scarce; rope length 34m remaining (approx.).]
[Suggestion: Seek salvage/tollhouse or way-station (nearby).]
Ryn rubbed his face and felt stubble rasp under grime and lampblack. He turned to his three. "We push east to the old tollhouse on the moor," he said. "The map says it's there. We make it ours. We lock it down." He looked at Tamsin. "He'll come."
She smiled in a thin way that said, Finally. "He will."
Ilyon cleared his throat. "Also," he said, trying for casual and failing, "there's a—ah—Whispering Node south of here. Not large, not stable, but… interesting. It might help. Or—it might help something else. But I know where its edges are."
Ryn's skin crawled at the word "Whispering." He thought of the shard under his skin, quiet for now, and the way the mile marker had hummed when he'd taken it. He thought of Garron's eyes on it. He thought of the spear-woman's laugh.
Sereth's mouth flattened. "We don't need more voices in our heads," he said.
Ilyon reddened. "It won't—if we… if I… if you let me handle it."
Tamsin clicked her tongue. "You'll sell us to it for a good story."
Ilyon flinched and didn't deny. "I'll try to sell it to us," he said, abashed and bold.
Ryn's ribs hurt every time he breathed. His wrists burned. His head felt full of light the System had put there. He thought of a roof, a bar, a line he tied himself that would hold when the rain hit. He thought of his hands on wood. He thought of the children under the rope looking up to see whether he flinched.
"We go to the tollhouse," he said. "Then we see what the Node wants." He held up a hand before Ilyon could make it sound like a good idea. "It will want something. It always wants something. If it wants more than we can pay, we leave."
Tamsin's eyes softened by a hair, which in Tamsin meant she wasn't going to argue about leaving if leaving meant living. Sereth spat neatly into the dirt. "I'll shoot anything that opens its mouth too wide," he said.
They moved out again under a twilight that had mercy in it—they only had to see far enough to avoid being outflanked here. The moor took them in, and the path under their feet became a line that hummed in Ryn's bones because it had been walked often by men who had similar bones and worse choices. The donkey's ears flicked forward and back, catching noises that were either trouble or not.
Half a mile on, the old tollhouse Ryn had meant appeared—half-collapsed, less intact than the one they'd used, a pity. The walls still stood to a man's waist. The hearth was filled with bird nests. Old iron straps hung from a beam like tired snakes. It would hold as a place to rest. It would not keep a warband out. Ryn swallowed the disappointment and set about making perimeters anyway, because a weak wall is better than none if your lines are good.
Ilyon slid down the slope at the side with a boy's eager stealth and hissed, "Over here," like a child with a secret. Ryn and Tamsin and Sereth followed, because secrets in places like this were either poison or treasure and you had to pick quickly. In the gorse, a stone platform jutted out, almost swallowed by moss. The hum under Ryn's skin deepened. A ring of old iron posts, most bent, delineated a small circle. In its center, half-buried in muck, a flat slab of stone with carved lines. The lines ferned across it in patterns that made Ryn's eyes want to look away.
Ilyon rocked on his heels. "Whispering Node," he said, triumphant. "Not a big one. A—rest stop. A—what do they call it—a peripheral. We could… sync it. It would give you—us—localized stabilizations. Maybe a map. Maybe supplies cached by old hands. Or—it could call hungry things. It could do that." He watched Ryn like a dog gauging his master's mood after chewing the wrong bone.
The shard in Ryn's palm pulsed, once, and the System slid in with all the charity of a loan-shark.
[Local Node (Peripheral) detected.]
[Integrity: Poor.]
[Manual Interface available via Shard Conduit.]
[Potential Rewards: Stabilized perimeter (minor), local map fragments, resource cache (chance).]
[Costs: Corruption strain, increased local monster activity possible, attention (Unknown).]
[Proceed? Y/N]
Tamsin put her hand on Ryn's forearm—not tender, anchoring. "You don't have to say yes to every humming rock," she said.
Sereth said, "We can hold this without it for a night. We can be gone before its bill comes due."
Ilyon swallowed and whispered, "We could take only a little. A taste."
Ryn laughed, low and ugly, at the echo of every temptation he'd ever known. He set his jaw so hard it hurt. He looked at the circle, at the carving that his eyes didn't want to sit on. He held his hand over it and felt the shard buzzing like a fly trapped under a cup.
He didn't touch it.
"Not yet," he said. His voice was thinner than he liked. "We lock down first. We eat. We sleep in shifts. We see who comes when we make no noise. Then—if we have to—we knock." He looked at Ilyon. "If I knock, your hands are on mine. If it bites, it bites you too."
Ilyon nodded, big-eyed, not fool enough to make a joke.
They set perimeter lines with the last of the rope. Ryn tied the end to a bent post and felt his bones hum when he finished the knot—an illusion, maybe, a resonance between his own stubborn and the shard's. He used nails for pegs and cursed softly when he dropped the last one. Tamsin found it with her toe without looking and flicked it to him. "Eyes up," she said. "Hands down."
They ate—flat bread torn with dirty hands, dried meat hard on the jaw, water that tasted like the moss it had sat under. Jarla's husband fell asleep sitting up, his head lolling and banging off a post; he woke and smiled foolish apologies and drank again. Pell leaned against Ryn's leg without asking and Ryn, startled, didn't move. He felt the boy's ribs through a shirt and the beat of his small heart. He wanted to put his hand on the boy's head and bless him and didn't know how. He let the weight be there and didn't shake it off.
In the last light, before full dark, the spear-woman appeared, far off on the ridge, leaning on her spear. She watched without moving, a fixed point in a day that had been all motion. Ryn lifted a hand. She didn't respond. He turned away first this time.
Night settled like a lid. The wood made noises. People settled like sacks. Sereth took first watch with that stillness of his that made him look carved. Tamsin sat, back to Ryn, and sharpened her knife with peculiar tenderness. Ilyon wrote in a tiny book with a stub of pencil by a covered lantern, tongue sticking out a fraction. Ryn made his hands rub the donkey's ears; she sighed and put her head near his shoulder and slept standing up like the animal saint she was.
The System was quiet for a long minute. Then it slid in to stamp the end of his day, because it had to.
[Status Update.]
[Level: 5 (Applied).]
[Class: Trapper I — Progress 62%.]
[Skills: Makeshift Trap II, Improvised Bomb II, Hook-and-Break (Basic), Quickstep I (92%), Linework II.]
[Techniques: Snapline Step (Unstable, 40% stabil.).]
[Passives: Pain Gate I, Steady Breath I.]
[Corruption: 1% (Shard Sync: 9%). Warning threshold: 25%.]
[New Quest Offered (Optional): Interface with Peripheral Node to establish safehouse. Reward: Stabilization (Minor), Map (Local), Resource chance. Risk: Attention (Unknown).]
Ryn closed his eyes, not in prayer, but in a long, measured breath that he hoped would make the System think he had gone to sleep.
He slept. His body did its silent triage—moving blood, knitting edges for an hour or two, finding heat in bone that hadn't found it at the fire. He woke to a sound that wasn't burrowers or men, wasn't wind or donkey, wasn't the click of Sereth's bow or the whisper of Tamsin's knife. It was a low, thin keening like a kettle about to boil under a closed lid.
His skin prickled. He sat up. Across the makeshift camp, Ilyon's covered lantern flickered. The circle in the gorse hummed like a tongue on a broken tooth. Light bled up through moss in a thin, wrong color. The shard under his skin answered in a key his own ear couldn't hear.
A voice, thin as a thread pulled through old cloth, came from the dark beyond the circle. Not a person. Not an animal. Words, poorly used.
"Hungry," it said, in a child's cadence. "Hungry. Hungry."
Tamsin's hand landed on Ryn's wrist and squeezed once. Sereth rose, slow, and stepped into the doorway with quiet that was like a kindness to the night.
Ilyon whispered, small, "It woke."
Ryn stood, heart thudding once, twice. He faced the circle. He felt his own hum align with a thing he didn't want to match. He understood with a sudden, cold clarity that they were about to have visitors they hadn't invited—and they would come not as men, but as something that had been called by a humming line he had refused to touch and had touched anyway simply by being who he was.
The voice said, "Hungry," again, and something pressed at the edge of the circle—not crossing, not yet—like a wet nose at a crack.
Ryn reached for his pry bar. He hated that this was his comfort. He loved that it was his hand.
Over the ridge to the west, faint, a horn blew.
Two notes.
Garron. Or someone who had learned to sound like him.
The world lined up its debts and put them on his table in the dark, and Ryn understood the next morning would not bring choices made in daylight.
He licked his lips. He tasted salt and iron and ash.
"Anchor," he whispered.
The circle answered, and then something inside it stepped.