The hum gnawed at the edge of hearing, not loud, not kind. It threaded through Ryn's jaw and settled behind his eyes the way a headache waits for permission. He rolled to his feet with the pry bar in his hand and the buckler strapped tight. The donkey lifted her head from sleep, ears flicking toward the gorse. Pell sat up like a startled rabbit and looked at Ryn for permission to be afraid.
"Stay down," Ryn murmured without taking his eyes off the circle. His voice sounded like it had gone through a sieve.
The moss inside the iron posts glowed weakly, pulse matching the shard under his skin for a heartbeat before slipping off like a hand from a damp rope. Sereth was already in the door of the roofless hut, a shadow with a drawn bow. Tamsin rolled to her haunches from sleep and slid forward, knife in her grip, hair rucked and eyes sharp. Ilyon crouched by his covered lantern with his shoulders up around his ears, breath fast and loud enough for Ryn to want to reach over and shut his mouth with his hand.
The voice from the circle wasn't a voice. It was sound caught in a shape that made words. "Hungry," it said again, childlike without being a child at all. Then: "Closer."
Tamsin's fingers touched Ryn's forearm. Careful. "Don't answer," she breathed. "It likes the taste."
He nodded and stepped out into the cool night. The wood around them breathed and watched. The circle's hum shifted again, a hair lower. The old iron posts rattled as if something had brushed them.
"Maps," the voice added, curious, terrible. "Lines. Give."
The System shifted in his skull like a clerk clearing their throat at a bad meeting.
[Local Peripheral Node emitting lure-pattern.]
[Attention risk: Elevated.]
[Manual Interface remains available. Warning: Night activity will multiply risks.]
Sereth put the arrow tip on the string and didn't draw. "One shape," he whispered. "Low. Wrong."
Ryn narrowed his eyes. Movement in the ring of bent posts. Not a body stepping into light. A deforming of shadow, then a bulge, then a dragging, like something pushing itself up from under a rotten plank. A limb—jointed, thin—touched the moss and recoiled from the faint salt line Ilyon had been stingy with earlier. It tapped the line with ugly patience, like a mindless finger drumming. Another limb quested behind it, then a mouth, the wrong kind, too wide, no lips. He smelled ammonia and long-damp stone.
"Wrong rats," Ilyon whispered, closure and fear in the same note.
The thing pressed again. The sound of its breathing—if breathing—made hair try to stand up on Ryn's forearms. He set the pry bar and took two steps closer, then stopped at the edge of the circle. He didn't cross the iron. He was not a fool to walk into humming places because he hated being at their edge.
"Hungry," the not-voice said again, but now the word had an iron scraping in it. "Maps. Give."
Ryn did something he'd once called a sin: he looked at Tamsin and let his face ask a question. She answered with the tiniest lift of her chin. Not yet for knives. Maybe fire. He nodded. He eased a jar from his satchel with his free hand. The cork made no sound when he slid it; he kept the ragged end of the fuse in his teeth and breathed on it to keep his own breath from shaking it out of place. He waited. The thing pressed again at the salt edge, tapping, testing. Stakes groaned in the earth.
"Now," he breathed. He struck flint on knife spine. Sparks fell. The rag kissed ember. He lobbed the jar past the inner edge of the iron ring, shallow. The glass broke. Oil spread like a quiet flood. The rag hissed bright for a breath and then fell, and the moss took, old dry under the first layers of damp. Flame ran across the oil and up the thin iron posts and licked at the carved lines on the stone like a tongue learning a new lesson.
The thing screamed without voice, a pressure inside the skull that made Ryn want to punch his ears. It flinched back into dark, dragging, scraping. The smell of burning hair caught a beat later and made bile rise in his throat. Ilyon dropped to his knees and retched once, quietly, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and made himself small.
Sereth's bow hummed once. The arrow went into black, parting willow fronds beyond the circle. He might have hit; he might have missed. He had fired to say, We see. The circle hissed and hummed and then settled to a lower, uglier frequency, a moan behind the teeth. The child-voice tried once more: "Hung—" then went to a thin whining sound and failed. Moss smoldered. Smoke rose.
Tamsin's hand dug into Ryn's forearm. "Wait," she said. "Something else."
He almost said no, just because he wanted to be done. He listened. The wood's nighttime voices had swallowed up the immediate unnatural panic and returned to their own inventory: leaf, water drip, a small thing gnawing. Under that, another sound: metal on wood, not the iron posts now. From the darkness beyond the trees, a half-horn rose: two short notes. Not the long one that had flayed his nerves earlier. Call and answer. Garron's scouts, perhaps sending a language into the wood to say, Where are you? The answer didn't come.
"Pull back," Sereth murmured. "Hold here. If it wants more, it can knock when the sun's up. Garron won't rush wood at night when it sings."
Ryn nodded. The thing in the circle didn't press again. The lingering hum sang at the same pitch as the shard under his skin for three breaths, then drifted. The System, annoyingly unfazed, wrote two lines and stepped back.
[Perimeter defended: Minor.]
[Attention abated.]
Ryn wanted to tell it to go die in a ditch. He pressed his palm against his thigh instead and measured the tremor in his fingers. Not much. Good. He looked at Ilyon. "You sleep," he said. "You breathe through your nose for ten breaths until you remember your spine."
Ilyon looked offended. "I have a spine," he said with unexpected heat, then colored. "Sorry. Yes. Breathing. Spine."
Tamsin made a small huff that might have been a laugh. "He'll be useful. Or he'll get us killed. Or he'll be useful and then get us killed. I don't care tonight." She touched the hilt of her second knife and reset her shoulders. "Sleep."
They took turns like rational creatures. Ryn tried and failed to sleep with his head on his arm and his hand on the pry bar and the donkey's breath on his neck. He let his eyes thin out to slits and peered at the circle until boredom threatened to unman him. When his turn came for wakefulness again, the eastern sky had the notch of grey that means a day might be forgiven. The children like Pell slept, finally, mouths open and bodies crooked in straw.
The spear-woman was gone from the ridge. The wood felt—if a wood can feel—like a house after people argue and leave: relieved, hungry, embarrassed.
"They didn't go through," Sereth said. "Garron's lot will press around on the road. He'll test the Guild's line instead, use their pikes as a whetstone. He doesn't want this place eating his men."
"So we pick a fight somewhere else," Tamsin said. "Somewhere roadwide with room to run. No wood that hums. Preferably downhill if you insist on dragging more saints behind you on rope."
Ryn turned to his rope and checked the knots for the third time, then let his fingers rest on them in apology. "There's the old underpass before the moor turns to fell," he said. "Stone arch, narrow. Rats liked it worse than burrowers last time." He remembered the smell. He shivered. "We can hold there while the Guild pretends to help and maybe steals our donkey."
Hana, awake now with hair rucked and a grim mouth, said, "They won't. You call her donkey; I call her better than a man." The donkey flicked an ear as if she knew and reached to lip at Ryn's sleeve with indifference that felt like mercy.
They moved quietly, because morning makes truth more obvious. The System put no new offers on the table. It didn't need to; the world had plenty. When they stepped back on the old toll road, a pile of cut brush and a prior evening's cook fire told a simple story: another group had come before and left after. The ash made an interesting smell when the donkey stepped through it, bitter as old coffee.
On the downhill toward the underpass, they ran into the Guild. Not by choice. The column had split. Half held the ridge. The other half had come forward, three pikes wide, a mishmash of proper polearms and farm tools lashed to poles with strips of boiled leather. The factor rode a small horse grown out at the hip with a forgotten gait. He had mud on his cuffs and damp sweat under his eyes and looked like a man trying to hold three orders in his mouth without swallowing any.
He raised his hand. "Hold," he called. The pike captain raised hers and mirrored him. The line trained to stop on a breath. Ryn didn't stop. He aimed the cart at the gap between two old walls and the world made a noise like a complaint between old wood and new work.
"You cannot pass until—" the factor began, and Hana laughed and stepped past him and the cart obliged to follow with donkey grumbling as if she were ready to bite paper too. The factor's mouth clenched. He let them pass with a face like someone about to have a tooth pulled. "This is a folly," he said to Ryn under his breath as the cart wheel brushed his boot. "You're making fools of my men."
Ryn's breath scraped. "Better that than corpses." He eyed the line of pikes. "Make a corridor and look like you know a price more than coin. Garron's men will test you at the second scour hole."
"Thank you," the factor said, to his credit, without sarcastic acid. "Could we—" he glanced at the kids in the cart, at Jarla's white face—"could we have… a list? Names?"
"Later," Ryn said, and neither man had to say what later meant.
Past the Guild, the road ran into the old stone underpass like a throat into a stomach. When they came close, the smell of rat-returned hit their noses—ammonia and old straw and a dank note like a cellar door shut too long. Ilyon flinched. Sereth's lip curled.
"Salt's gone," Ryn said, and Ilyon shook his head miserably. "Cedar pitch," Ryn added.
"Used it," Ilyon said. "I have vinegar. They hate it but so do we." He looked proud to offer it and ashamed to say it. "Stinks."
"Give," Ryn said. He sloshed a sour line across the underpass floor. The smell lifted hair on his arms again. The burrow mouths at the edge of the pool foamed. The wrong rats pushed their whiskers out, snarled without voice, tested the line, retreated, pressed again. He wanted to stomp them all into a repurposed mass. He had bigger bites to argue about.
They shoved the cart through the underpass. Men gagged. children cried. In the dim, between stone and stone, noises ran like spiders. The donkey shook her head and put her feet down where Ryn's hand told her to. He found a respect in him he had not known was there for an animal that would follow a line through stink and fear because a man had tied a rope to it and asked.
On the far side, the world opened to a cunicular stretch of heath and the beginnings of old felled stands. They rolled, then jogged, then ran, because Garron's lot would test the Guild, then avoid, then slip and try to let the forest chew those who ran. The sun lifted fully into a weak gold that forgave nothing.
They had ten minutes of grease under their feet when the world delivered a predictable stupid: a group of six men moved out from behind an old thorn hedge and planted themselves across the path. Not Garron's men—these had bits of Guild kit worn wrong, leather belts patched with women's ribbon, and knives carried like they were there to be looked at. Bandits of the in-between time, not smart enough to join a big wolf and not dumb enough to stand in front of it. The man in front had a hat that wanted to be a captain's.
"Stop," he said cheerfully. "We are here to help. Drop your coin."
Hana, Ryn, Tamsin, Sereth, Ilyon, and the children behind did not slow. The donkey, saint that she was, pulled.
Ryn's mouth was too tired for contempt. He lifted his pry bar like a man contemplating a minor repair and then let the bar sit on his shoulder. "No," he said. "Move."
The man in front twitched at the tone—the way some men do when they have grown up with a father who had a hand just heavy enough. He grinned nastily. "No," he said back, mimicking. "Move." He lifted his hand. His men lifted knives. Ryn's anger was just emptiness with a spine now.
"Sereth," Ryn said.
"Mm," Sereth said, and put an arrow into the captain's knee, exactly where it healed into a weakness. The man went down with an ugly grunt and dropped his knife from surprise, not pain yet. His men looked at him and then at Ryn and then at the cart—calculus, poor. Ryn walked forward and hit the nearest man with the flat of his buckler across the ear. He didn't fall. Tamsin put her second knife between his ribs and then stepped back without looking like she had. The third man stumbled into the vinegar line they had sloshed earlier and retched. Ilyon, emboldened by a victory worse than decent, took a little espresso cup of skunk water from his pocket and flung it into a fourth man's face. The man howled, a terrible animal noise, and clawed at his eyes. The donkey tried to bite him on principle.
"Move," Ryn said, and kept walking, not turning to see if he'd be obeyed. He would probably get a knife in the back one day for this habit. He didn't that morning. The men moved because nothing they could get out of this encounter—coin, rope, respect—had numbers good enough to justify blood. He filed their faces under "Later: cost to others," and hated his own accounting.
Beyond the hedge, the tall trees broke into view again. A mile marker leaned there, moss on its shoulder. Ryn's chest hurt in a line that matched its crack. He tightened the buckler's strap. Snapline Step tugged at his ankle—a promise he'd be able to draw lines between posts later and fling himself forward like a man on a taut rope. He needed practice somewhere he would not die falling. He promised himself a morning one day when he would tie lines for joy and not for blood.
The children made tired noises and subvocal prayers. The old woman Jarla hissed at her own body and grinned through it and patted a child's hair until the child stopped shaking. Hana counted in her head. Ryn could see her lips moving. He liked the sound even as he hated the reason.
The last stretch to the old moor tollhouse ran across a bare patch of heath. That was where the Guild caught up—where men who had wanted to be helpful found a place where showing their help was just running next to a cart. The factor pulled alongside on his tired horse and bent down to Ryn's shoulder with a face that was trying to be numbers and duty too.
"You'll need to stop soon," he said. "We can put you under paper in the beech stand. We can supplement your food. We can… manage. The road east is—" He swallowed. "It cannot be held entirely. Garron will take his tax in blood whether we like it or not. We can make deals."
Ryn looked at him and remembered the ledger on the tollhouse desk and the way the factor had told him he had a writ to seize a relic and didn't want to read it. He wanted to hurt the man and he wanted to hold him like a brother because both men were on the same road and both had rope burn. He said, not kind, not cruel, "We make deals too. Ours include children and not pigs."
The factor shut his eyes for a second, then opened them with violence. "You're going to be a problem," he said. "I am going to write your name anyway."
"Spell it right," Ryn said, which was the closest to a joke he could come.
They reached the oncetollhouse ruin and poured into it with the relief troops have at a trench line they know is safe only because it's theirs and not because it's good. Ryn set the cart, kissed the donkey's jaw while pretending he wasn't, and went immediately to the circle in the gorse while his hands were still moving. Ilyon followed. Tamsin and Sereth drifted, one toward the broken window line, one toward the thin trees, because neither loved places that hummed.
The circle's hum was quiet now, the iron posts cooling back into themselves. The carved slab's lines were less visible in daylight; the mind refused to trudge over that geometry when the sun was up. Ryn put his palm out over the stone without touching and felt the shard under his skin lean—no, swim—toward it, like a fish noticing a current and wanting to ride.
The System presented the same ledger as last night, with a small change: a new line in red.
[Local Peripheral Node (poor) — drift: increasing.]
[Chance of uncontrolled draw: moderate.]
[Manual Interface: possible. Shared load if multiple users anchor. Jitter risk: high at night, medium at day.]
Ilyon's face was too eager and too careful. "If we anchor it just long enough, we can make it fix its own floor a hair. That gives us… a half-mile around, less noise. It might wake something else. But we already woke something else. Better we teach it where to hum."
Tamsin leaned against a broken frame and flicked dust off her knife with her nail. "Let the stone hum. You don't need to hum with it like a drunk at a song."
Sereth's eyes went to the ridge. Garron's riders moved like ants there, too far for arrows, too near for comfort. He said nothing.
Ryn's ribs ached consistent as a thumb on a bruise. He wanted a wall at his back and a voice that wasn't a stone's to tell him he could sleep. He also wanted not to be eaten because his curiosity affronted something old. He flattened his hand over the empty air above the stone.
"Hands on," he said to Ilyon. "With me. Tamsin—" he nodded to a rope. "Line me off. If I twitch, drag me back. If I keep my hand on it too long, cut my fingers off."
Her smile was slow and not nice. "Gladly," she said.
Ilyon laced his fingers into Ryn's without ceremony. His hand was callused oddly, at the tips of his fingers like a scribe and at the heel like someone who ground spices for hours. He smelled like vinegar and a little like fear. "One breath," he said.
Ryn nodded. He let his palm drift down until the stone's heat met his skin at a specific point that felt like a tongue of something tasting him. He said yes, and he could pretend it was for the rope and the children, but he knew he was also saying yes because the inside of him wanted his head to match the line in his hands and finding a thing that answered that urge mattered in a way that felt shameful.
The shard took the bridge.
Cold like a winter nail drove into his palm and up his arm and into his head with a clarity that time couldn't beat. The world did not become numbers. It became lines in a map that sat behind his eyes. The slab's carved fernwork echoed into the ditch and the path and the small moor. The iron posts hummed like an old machine. There were tiny nodes—seeds—along the road, like nails along a beam. He saw three places where children would hide if you wanted to kill them and five where they would hide if they wanted to live. He saw white points—burrowers—averted by salt. He saw a red smear to the south where a bigger thing turned in its sleep and he did not look at it hard because it would look back.
Ilyon's hand in his squeezed. Ryn realized the other man was taking some of the noise, or sharing, or stealing; he would judge that later. For now, it kept Ryn from stuttering. Tamsin's rope around Ryn's waist went tug-tug, not in panic, but in warning: come back. He did not move. He breathed.
The System moved with the stone. For once, it didn't feel like a clerk. It felt like a carpenter's chalk line snapped true across a board.
[Manual Interface: partial.]
[Shard Sync: 12% (Corruption: 3%).]
[Whispering Node aligned: +Minor stabilization in 300m radius.]
[Map fragment acquired.]
[Cache chance: 21%.]
[Attention: Reduced (daylight).]
[Warning: Drift increased in adjacent sector.]
A series of clear images flashed: where he could set tripwires and have the right tension; how to secure the ruins' outer wall with horizontal lines; where a depression would hold water if you dug two feet. He gave his breath as if it were a coin and took the ideas. He didn't ask what happened to the drift next hollow over. He told himself he'd pay that too. He knew he was lying.
He jerked his hand back. Tamsin pulled the rope harder than necessary. He stumbled and sat on his ass and laughed in a grunt because his head hadn't cracked. Ilyon fell back too, hands shaking, muddy water up his forearms because he'd braced on the wrong thing.
Tamsin looked at both of them like they were two boys with their hands where they shouldn't be. "You did something stupid and didn't die," she said. "Small miracles."
Sereth had moved to the outer edge and lifted his chin at the ridge. "They aren't in the wood," he said. "They're arguing with paper." He meant the Guild. He meant Garron. He meant neither would help them.
Ryn pressed his fingers into the dirt and felt the last of the hum fade. He didn't feel cleaner. He felt a little truer. He hated that that mattered. He stood.
"We set it," he said. "Then we go. We don't sleep on this hum. We let the Guild and Garron shout and we slip under their shouting. We go to the eel-bend by noon and cut ropes there to buy someone else an hour. We take the next village if it's still breathing. Or we bury and move anyway because we aren't their undertakers."
Hana had appeared behind them, a bucket of water on each hip, eyes the small, bright kind of tired. "You are now," she said. "Until someone else makes sense." She drank from her own bucket with a defiance that made Ryn love her in a very exact way.
He went to work. The map in his head told him where to set lines along the broken wall so that a man would think he'd stepped into a safe gap and find his throat involved with rope instead. It told him where to run a tripwire through the scrub so that it would catch a knee without snapping the wrong branches. He let the map argue with the real world and chose the real world each time it made sense. He hung tins to jangle at the wind's wrongness and tuned them with a finger so that if they rang with a note he didn't expect he would know. He remade the hearth to draw smoke into crack rather than into eyes. It was poor work. It was the only work.
The System put notifications into his sight in small bites and for once he didn't hate them. They felt like a saw's teeth catching as it should.
[Makeshift Trap II — Efficiency increased.]
[Linework II — Tension reading: Fine. Anchor sense extended to 4m radius.]
[Snapline Step — Stability: 55%. Practice opportunities: available.]
When the world was a nest of lines again, they moved. The factor did not stop them. He was too busy. Garron's spear-woman had taken a position on the near ridge where she could see and not intervene. Ryn did not wave. She didn't lift her spear. He understood their truce now: each was making a map; each was collecting a price.
They left the ruins and the small hum and returned to the old road's rhythm. The eel-bend—named not for eels but for the way the road slithered like one—brought them to the first real choice of the morning. A small farm huddled there, three huts in a U, a pigpen, a yard. The gate lay open. A woman stood with a pitchfork planted and a face that said she had been awake too long, a baby on her hip, a boy clinging to her skirt. A man—barefoot, shirt open, eyes wild—stood by a cart with a sack in his hands.
"Help," he said without preamble when he saw Ryn. "Which way?"
"East," Ryn said. He glanced at the sack. Grain. He could see it by the way the sack sat, settling itself into shapes. The man's hands had cuts from rope. The woman's hands were smooth and callused both—laundry, child, pig feed. They had chosen work. "Leave the sack," Ryn said, before the man could decide. "Take your child. Take water. If you carry that, you'll die twice. If you put it down now, you might only die once."
The man's mouth twisted. The sack of grain; the child. Ryn watched him do the math men have done since coin was invented and before. The woman made a small noise with her throat. The man looked at her and then put the sack down, very slowly, as if it would bite him for betrayal. He picked the boy up with the arm that had been holding it. He didn't look at Ryn.
"Go," Ryn said.
As they moved, Tamsin drifted back, and then forward again, then back again, scouting with a hunger that made Ryn think of cats. She said, low, "The weir you saved earlier? He didn't take it. He walked around. He hates pipes. I think he'll take the toll road before noon and tax the Guild with their own papers." She made a face that had blood in it. "We can make that hurt."
Sereth said, "Or we can make them argue again and slip past. I'd rather fight a paper than a plate."
"I'd rather break a plate on a paper," Tamsin said.
Ryn wanted to agree with both, which was not useful. The map in his head redrew from the hum with a softness that felt like guilt. He put his mind on the next bend and the next hedge. If he started thinking about Garron at the toll road, he'd forget the hierarchy of the morning.
They reached the eel-bend with its hedges and ditches. Ryn heard the creek before he saw it—a weak, sad water with stones sulking in it. He waded and laced a rope through roots at shin height. He tied a release knot on the near bank. When pursuers tried to leap it, he'd pull and take a man with it, lightly. He wasn't hungry for blood. He was hungry for slow.
Children's feet dragged in the dirt. Pell didn't ask about the tall trees again. He breathed like a counted thing. Jarla's husband stumbled and then swore and did not fall. Ryn put a hand on his back without looking and pushed lightly. The man found his legs again and laughed and then cried.
They bought noon with rope, jars, and survivable ugliness. When the sun moved past the zenith mercifully small and mean, the moor widened, the road thinned to two lines of stones with a seam of mud between. Ryn's vision wobbled. He had not slept. The shard under his skin hummed once like a cat judging whether to jump on a table. He told it no in the voice he used for the donkey when she wanted to bite.
Beyond the next ridge, a sound rose—metal on metal, call and answer, a horn from the toll road. Garron and the Guild were finally deciding how to hate each other in the daylight. If he had time later, he would go count the dead that were not his and put it in a ledger no one would read.
The path dipped, then rose, and a marker at the top, a stone leaned split with weather, marked the place where the world gave him a choice he didn't like.
Dorran stood under it.
Not stood. Leaned. Shield in his hand, sword point down, body held by three narrow decisions that could be called courage or stupidity. Blood had dried to brown along his side. His face was grey under beard. His eyes were bright as a winter day when the cold bites your teeth. He looked at Ryn and lifted two fingers, apologetic for being late.
Ryn's guts emptied themselves of ideas. He forgot the shard, the map, the lines. He ran the last five paces on legs he hadn't agreed with. He grabbed Dorran's arm, stupidly hard, and then gentled his hand like he'd touched a burn. Dorran huffed a breath that might have been a laugh.
"I told the bridge I would be here," Dorran said. His voice was shredded and tender. "It argued. I argued back. It has stronger friends."
Hana took one look and turned away with her mouth pressed thin. Tamsin looked and did not move. Sereth looked and his face went to that place careful men go when they cannot afford all their feelings. Ilyon looked and paled and then swallowed and moved like a man who'd read about this and wanted to be better than reading.
Ryn's hands shook. He did the wrong thing first—checked the wound, rough. Dorran made a face at him, which meant he was alive. Ryn swore and did it right—the linen out, steady breath, press here where thing bleeds. Dorran refused the smile and refused to die and refused to make it easy.
"Children?" Dorran asked, as if that mattered more. It did.
"Gone," Ryn said. "Alive." He bit the inside of his cheek and swallowed back the rest of the sentences.
"Marla?" Dorran asked quietly.
Ryn shut his eyes. Opened them. "Gone," he said. He wished he had a different word. He wished the world allowed different words. He wished his voice didn't sound like a boy under a table.
Dorran nodded once, like a tally he'd been expecting. He put his hand on the donkey's neck. She blew out a breath and looked at him with long-suffering. "She would have liked you," he told the donkey. "You don't argue. That's a lie. You do."
Ryn's breath hitched and his hands got mean and precise to cover it. "We're moving," he said. "You're going to walk. You're going to hold onto this rope. If you fall, I'll drag you by it unconscious and you can wake when you want to shout at me for it."
Dorran's mouth twitched. "Bossy," he said.
"Learned it from someone," Ryn said, and nearly smiled, and then didn't.
They rigged a sling under Dorran's one good arm to take some weight. Jarla's husband got under his other side, because men sometimes know when it's their turn to carry an older man even if they hate the cost. Dorran grunted once but didn't waste breath on a joke about his own age; it had no use.
They moved. Ryn pulled at the front until his ribs screamed and the rope burned his wrist again, and he liked the sting because it kept him here. The moor smelled like old hay and standing water and sun-baked mud. The sound of the Guild horn faded. The buzz of the circle in the gorse died. The donkey blew into Ryn's shoulder and he wanted to put his head against hers and cry and he didn't.
When they went into the next hollow, the world surprised them. Not a bandit. Not a burrower. Guild.
Not pikes. A small squad—six men, one woman—carrying a heavy thing with care. They wore gear that fit and sandals that made sense in mud. At their head, a woman with salt streaking her hair and a clear simple way of speaking: "Make way. We're laying out a line to keep pigs from wandering into swamp."
Pigs. The word felt like a joke. Ryn's laugh sounded like a cough. He stepped aside and then back and then aside again because his body had forgotten whether to yield or not. The woman squinted at him, then at the injured man and the children and the donkey and the lines around Ryn's waist and said, in a voice that had nothing to do with the factor's paper, "You came from the road. You're pulling the three empties behind you." She yelled over her shoulder without turning. "Rope. Give them rope."
One of her men peeled off and handed Ryn a coil. Good rope. Thin, strong, old Guild issue. Ryn felt his heart hurt at the touch of it. He looked at the woman with an expression that wasn't gratitude because he didn't have that in public, but which was something like honesty. She shrugged one shoulder. "We can tie knots too," she said. "We aren't all ledgers."
He nodded once. He didn't want to like her. He tied anyway. The rope sang in his hands the way rope sings when it knows what it's for. The donkey flicked her ears and stepped like a queen.
The moor breathed out. Ryn looked back. The spear-woman was a small figure on the ridge now, just a mark on a map. He couldn't tell if she was smiling. He chose to think she was scowling for later. It made holding the rope easier.
They rolled into a section of beech wood when the sun tipped. Ryn's legs shook with exhaustion. The children had the thousand-yard stare of small soldiers. Dorran sagged but stayed upright. The Guild woman, whose name someone shouted and Ryn didn't register, waved them into a clearing with a hand like a captain.
"Water," she said. "Crack bark there. Soft ground there. Rats under the old stump. Don't sleep with your head against it." She eyed Ryn and then looked at the factor leading a column along the other path. "Also," she added dryly, "a man with ink on his hands wants to speak to you about papers. He's going to have to queue."
Ryn almost laughed properly at that. He didn't. He bowed his head in a nod that was more than gratitude and less than apology. He set the cart, unhitched the donkey, let her chew at a patch of grass that wasn't anything like what she deserved.
Sereth and Tamsin set lines in a pattern that would catch men reading a map wrong. Ilyon wandered to the stump and then back, hands itching to open bags, set up a little pot of something that would make skunk-water smell like songs. Hana lay down for a minute and turned her face away and put her hand over her own mouth and didn't make a sound. Pell fell asleep leaning against Ryn's knee again, anchoring himself to something he thought was anchor-shaped.
The System decided it was time to speak again and Ryn didn't hate it for once. He let it talk.
[Directive Chain: 3/3 complete — Assist Evacuations.]
[Reward: Experience +80. Reputation (Local): Anchor (modest).]
[Cleanse applied: -1% Corruption. Shard Sync: 12%.]
[Class: Trapper I — Progress: 80%.]
[Technique: Hook-and-Break — Upgrade available (Intermediate).]
[New Title: Ropehand (local). Minor persuasion bonus when coordinating non-combatants.]
He exhaled through his nose and put the information down as if it were wood doneness. He would fix the title later if it stuck wrong.
The factor approached when the sun had gone low and fly-whine replaced conversation for noise. He looked tired and moved like a man who had been forcing his decisions through the mouths of men and had found theirs full of other things.
"My ledgers and your lines," he said, standing a step away like a man presented to a dog, hands visible, "are going to have to argue later. For now, thank you."
Ryn wanted to shrug that off. He wanted to tell the man to go burn his papers. He said instead, "Hold your line. Make them spend coin. We'll drag more behind us. Or we'll drag less. Either way, we keep pulling."
The factor nodded once. He glanced at Dorran, who slept like a life he'd denied, and then at the donkey, who looked back at him with bleak honesty. He smiled despite himself. Then he handed Ryn a small packet—paper, sealed. The seal had a simple mark: a circle broken at one point with a line through it. "Writ," he said, dry. "Not for you to surrender anything. For you to claim salvage of a tollhouse two miles east if you can take it. That might keep some other hands off it who speak a language you hate."
Ryn took the packet and held it like a piece of wood he wasn't sure would burn. "Thank you," he said, and then, because he did not want to be a man who sneered like a boy, "sorry for earlier."
The factor's mouth curved. "Later," he said. "When there's bread." He held out his hand. Ryn took it. Their grip was dry and strong and not a promise.
Night would come. The hum in the circle would return in small ways. Garron's men would decide how to tax the road, and the Guild would decide how to make it seem like they chose something. Ryn lay down under the beech with a rope tied to his wrist and to the donkey's lead and to the cart. Tamsin settled at his shoulder without asking. Sereth took the far side where the line ran to the stump. Ilyon slept with his face on his book and his hand on his pocket where the skunk-water nested like a pet.
Ryn's eyes closed. He saw lines in his sleep. He did not dream of Garron. He dreamt of a wheel and his master telling him, "Anchor first, then weight," and of Marla throwing him a buckler and not waiting for him to say thank you. He tasted salt and iron and wanted a little bread and an apple for the donkey.
He woke to the circle humming again with a beckoning that wasn't a lure, not this time. It felt like a knocking. Ceremonial. Ryn sat up, heart percussive.
Sereth had already stood, bow in hand. Tamsin opened her eyes without moving. Ilyon jerked upright with a whisper of paper.
A shape stood at the edge of the clearing. Not human and not just old wrong. It was tall, thin, with angles. It didn't glow. It defied the habit of calling attention to itself. It wore something like a cloak that moved without wind. It watched with posture instead of eyes. The wood held its breath around it as the dead hold their breath in stories. Ryn did not know it. He had the ugly sense that it knew him.
The System supplied a name with a rare… not warmth. Weight.
[Warden of the Vale: Presence detected.]
[Advice: Do not lie.]
The Warden's voice, when it came, was not a thing Ryn heard. It was a temperature in bone. It said, "You have been drawing lines where you should not."
"Sorry," Ryn said, because his mouth had gone stupid. "Road was broken."
The Warden inclined their head a hair. "Road is always broken." They looked—not looked; weighted—at Ilyon. He sat up straighter, tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. "You have no sense," the Warden said, "and that sometimes helps."
Ilyon made a small squeak and nodded as if he had just been blessed and cursed in the same breath.
The Warden's not-gaze returned to Ryn. "You will bring me a shard of what you play with. Later. Not today. And you will stop humming at stones in the dark when you are tired. You will die, and I will have wasted attention. Do you understand?"
Ryn wanted to say no. He couldn't. He didn't want to obey. He also didn't want to be held like a nail by someone else's hammer. He grunted a sound that might have been assent.
"Good," the Warden said. "The road will call you. You will answer until it doesn't. Then you'll stop. That is all. Do not come into my wood unless you have something boring to say. The boring keeps things alive." They turned, cloak not-moving moving, and were gone between two beeches without sound.
The wood breathed again. Ryn exhaled. Tamsin let go of a breath, long and sinning. Sereth scratched his beard like a man embarrassed by being alive. Ilyon put his hands flat on his knees and said, "Well."
Ryn lay back down. He would deal with Warden and shards and roads later. For now, there was rope. There would always be rope. He put his hand on it and held on and let his head find dirt and didn't let the hum in his bones become a song.
Morning came like it always did: mean and useful. The Guild moved. Garron moved. Ryn and the rope moved between them, and the next village was either alive or dead. He would find out with his hands. He would bury with them if he had to. He would carry when he could.
And he would remember that a Warden had told him not to lie and that he had told the donkey she was a saint. He would buy her an apple if he ever saw a tree that made one again.
He closed his eyes and counted knots in his head until sleep took him by the hand.
End of Act 1