The door took the first blow like a mule—head down, legs braced. Leather hinges squealed. The bar jumped against its brackets and settled. The thin bell Ryn had tuned rang one low clear tone that vibrated in his teeth and told him where it had been disturbed: left side. He shifted his stance a half foot, letting the map in his head overlay the room with quiet lines.
"Not yet," he breathed, mostly for himself. Tamsin's knife hand twitched in the lampblack triangle where she'd sunken herself. Sereth's bowstring hummed once in sympathetic vibration, like it had a soul.
Outside, the bluecoats didn't shout. The leader had trained them out of that. They breathed like men running up stairs in a house they already owned in their heads. One man kicked low. Another pressed the shield they'd taken off some dead man into the seam. A third probed with his spear butt, looking for line, knot, glint.
"Watch their left," Sereth murmured. "Three there."
Ryn put his palm on the chest-high line and felt the world as tension. The rope hummed quietly back; the knot registered like a thing he could see. He could hold this for a while. He didn't know how long a while was. The donkey stamped once in the back and huffed. Jarla whispered something filthy and encouraging to her and the animal's ears tilted toward the sound.
The door flew inward a handspan and stuck. The low line bit somebody's shin; a muffled curse. Ryn yanked the chest-high line. It slid and caught a throat and the man who owned it made a noise like any man when rope suddenly becomes half his breath. He reached for the line with both hands. Tamsin's knife flicked, bit a wrist, drew a little blood just to teach, then withdrew clean.
"Hullo," the leader said, outside. Friendly. "That you again, half-elf?"
"Collect teeth later," Hana snarled from her post at the cart, breath steady. "Bite now."
The leader laughed. "Fair," he said. "I like you."
"Go marry a pig," she said, and the boy with the yellow sash choked on a shocked laugh that turned into a cough because the air was tight with bids.
The next push came with a rhythm Ryn recognized from men who'd fought in cities: shield in, spear in the gap over the shield at a diagonal, foot step, weight shift, push like the tide. He let the shield come three handspans into the room and then stamped on its top rim and shoved down. It tilted like a table with a broken leg. The spear point skittered on the wood of the buckler and kissed his forearm, bit a line that stung bright, then came free. Sereth's arrow thudded into a thigh. The man behind swore but did not fall; they didn't reward pain with panic. Another moved to fill. Tamsin slid a clay cup into the new man's face with a motion like affection. Skunk-water splashed; he choked and belched and fell backward into his friend. The line twanged. Ryn's palms burned.
Out in the yard, metal clinked against metal: a pole turned in a bracket. There was a faint hiss and a pop and the smell of some alchemical thing trying to be important. Ilyon hissed back, "No," and flung a handful of pale powder—baking soda, ground shells—through the murder hole. Something fizzled into rubber and made a sad sound like a penny dropped into a cistern.
The leader stepped to the threshold then, hat gone again, one cheek a crystalline weal, eyes pale under lids that never seemed to blink. He looked at Ryn over the shoulder of his shieldman, polite as a man at a counter. "What's your rate?" he asked. "Nightly laying rent, since you've decided to forego sensible loyalties."
Ryn bared his teeth with no humor under it. "You have less coin than breath," he said, and then regretted the line because it made him sound like a man who thought speeches were weapons. He didn't. Rope was a weapon. Pry bars were weapons. Walls were weapons. He tightened his grip on the rope.
The leader's eyes slid to Tamsin's triangle—the blade of his attention, not just his eyes. He could see where men hid even when they hid like that. He looked to the right and down—calculating Sereth's angle. He looked at Ryn's feet, at the buckler. He looked at the boy with the yellow sash and made the small amused sound a cruel teacher makes when a clever child has tried a new trick in front of older boys and gotten away with it.
"You'll tire out," he said. Now cool, not mocking. "You have a runner, a half dozen watchers, an old soldier sleeping badly. I have a city's worth of bad habits and a handful of things in bottles. I'll take your breath for rent in the morning or the evening. I can even let you keep your sainted donkey."
Ryn kept breath in and let it out. "We aren't your road," he said. "You can walk it, but don't call it yours." He pulled the rope again because talk had taken too many seconds and the bell had chimed wrong to his ear; a body had crept higher. The chest-high line bit a shoulder this time. He yanked it low into an ugly slash on a bicep. The man grunted and slid back, smearing blood in an arc that would be a note later when Ryn needed to remember where men had been clumsy.
"Paint your house with me if you must," the leader said, and stepped back into the yard. "I am patient. My surgeon is not. He likes morning light."
"Good," Tamsin said, and her voice was avid and grim in equal measure. "I've always wanted to meet a man with a scalpel and mother issues."
"Don't tease the surgeon," Ilyon muttered. "He has bad toys."
"He can try them," Tamsin said, pleased, and sank farther back into the line where the wall met the hearth.
They pressed again. The third push told Ryn truths about their patience: they were willing to spend a few men's blood to mark where his strings lay. They were probing, not taking. They had a man with a pole-engineered claw outside who tried to drag the bar up with neat leverage and nearly did. Ryn let him pull a handspan and then eased the pressure and then slammed the bar back down, catching the man's fingers, because cruelty in small doses drove better men home than cutting them. The man screamed clean and short and swore. A hand the size of a shoulder appeared from the side and grabbed him and hauled him back. The leader's, probably. The scream cut off. Good discipline.
The bell sang twice, low. A weight on the right. "Sereth," Ryn said. The archer had already moved. His bow thrummed, a sound you never get used to even if you love it, because it cuts across so much softness in the world. A hiss; a thock. A curse. Sereth's exhale: measured.
They withdrew a foot. Ryn let the door swing shut. He put his ear to the wood and listened to the shape of the outside by vibration. The house told him what pressed it. Men's breaths were different against wood than animals'. He counted. Eight. Maybe ten now. He looked at Sereth and Tamsin. They looked back with the same answer. Eight to ten. The leader might have more in the lane. If they had to run, they'd have to think about that.
Light flattened toward iron. The sky outside went from red to grey to black. The tollhouse became a box with a lid you couldn't take off, a coffin you were arguing with. It was both comfort and trap. Ryn set his jaw, felt the old rope burn pull, and tightened the strap on the buckler until it bit and gave him more to think about than fear.
They came again; they came softer. A scraping along the far wall, low. "Window," Tamsin whispered. Ryn felt the line on the sash vibrate. He didn't pull it—he let it sing to him. The note dropped a half tone, then rose. The window's peg bent and then popped. Someone breathed who hadn't meant to. Sereth pivoted and put an arrow through a slat gap without a sightline. A hiss, a cry. He'd hit someone in the arm. Not elegant. Good enough.
"Let them tire," Sereth murmured. "They have to swell their lungs to get breath just like us."
The assault paused. The noise of someone unpleasantly amused moved across the yard. The leader again. "We'll drink," he said, conversational. "We'll come through the roof. You'll be beneath. Don't be beneath."
He was right. The roof was only half-attached; the rafters weren't pegged tight. A man with a hook and a rope could pull a section down with a little leverage and a lot of bad luck. Ryn did something he didn't want to do: he looked at Ilyon like a man looks toward a child and hopes there's a clever trick in that head that won't cost blood.
Ilyon's eyes lit with embarrassed joy. "I… can… make this roof stop being interesting," he said. "If I set off three jars, two here, one there, and plug my ears and ash my skin—" He grimaced. "No, that will bring the wrong kind. It will be loud. We will have other uninvited." He scratched his head hard enough to hurt. "I can stick the rafters with sugar glue. It holds until it doesn't. It will buy an hour. If anyone licks it, they'll like it and get stuck worse."
Tamsin snorted. "Your brain is a barn full of rats and kittens."
"Thank you," Ilyon said primly, and crawled up onto the table to smear goop into rafter joints with narrow, efficient hands. He hummed out of tune. It steadied him.
The leader's men, outside, dragged something. Wood on stone; a pike laid against a lintel. They knocked with it, almost polite. Ryn didn't answer. He put his palm back on the door and let the tollhouse tell him about the pressure on its face. Left. Left. Underfoot. The red breathing of a man who'd lost something that mattered and was trying to decide if it had been his confidence or his finger.
They had a quiet minute. Ryn's shoulders shook with held brunt. Hana poured him two fingers of something that smelled like rot left in a barrel and he swallowed it with gratitude and then hated the gratitude because it meant he might look for it again.
He glanced back toward Dorran. The old guard's eyes were open now, not really seeing. He grunted. "Still at it," he croaked, like the flavor of contempt had become fondness and he hadn't consented to it. "Half the world wants your hands. Other half wants your breath."
"I'll send them a bill," Ryn said, and Dorran's lip tried to curve.
They came again, not with men, with noise. A horn—short, inside the lane—blew once, a signal. Bluecoats moved. The yard rattled with the sound of a ladder being set gently against the back wall. Sereth's head snapped up like a bird of prey hearing a mouse squeak. "Back," he said, and reached for an arrow from the wrong side; he had to shift hands around the low rafters to make the shot work. Awkward. He did it anyway. The arrow hissed out through the back window angle and clonked against wood, then a grunt.
"Let them climb," Tamsin said. "Then we come out and snap lines into ankles. You always want to fight in the hole. Fight at the lip."
Ryn nodded. "Jarla. Hana. If they come through, if we lose the door, you take the rope and go under that table by the hearth and out the crawl. It's mean down there. It's worse up here. Don't argue."
Hana opened her mouth. Ryn looked at her. She closed it. "Fine," she said, angry to have found trust in him. "Don't die. If you die, I bury you wrong."
The ladder scraped. A man huffed. Another cursed. The roof creaked as someone put weight on it and found the joints tacky with Ilyon's sugar glue. A soft "What the—" cut off. Tamsin slid like a shadow to the lip under the windows. Ryn measured where their ankles would be. He tied a short loop of line with shaking fingers and set it where a man would put his foot with confidence.
The first head came over. Ryn didn't swing. He looped the man's ankle and yanked toward himself like a boatman making a catch. The man's foot slid off the beam. His hands flailed for grip. The sugar glue held. His fingers stuck. His body hung a half-moment, long and heavy. Tamsin put her knife into his armpit and then stabbed up into the weak seam. He grunted like a sack dropped.
The second man came over less willing to die. He planted his knee wrong and caught the sugar glue and panicked with a noise like every animal. Ryn felt petty awe at Ilyon's horrible glue. He yanked the loop again and decided he didn't hate the alchemist entirely.
A clatter at the door then, and a problem: someone outside had decided talking wasn't interesting. They set fire.
Smoke licked under the lintel in a line; not full flame yet. The leader was being cute: he'd set a slow burn on the door frame, hoping the old wood would catch. Ryn's world narrowed. He had to choose. Roof or door.
"Hana," he said. She had a bucket already, because of course she did. She flung brackish water at the seam; it hissed, steam going up. The slow burn sulked. She flung again, face set into something ugly and purposeful. The boy with the sash took a second bucket and mirrored her without question. He had learned to listen when he hated it. Good boy.
"Again," the leader said, outside, and the ladder scraped, the man at the lip screamed as the sugar glue claimed him and Tamsin eased him into quiet, and the bell sang because someone had put foot to line.
It went like that for a while. A long while. The world became a set of small tasks. Ryn learned the shape of each man's breath at the door. He pressed the line into each throat that deserved it. He set his foot under the buckler in a new stance because his rib did not want the old one, and he learned to love that too. Pain Gate made a thin neat border around the worst hurts; he knew they were still there and he thanked his body for the lie.
Then something changed. It always does.
A new smell: alchemical, sharp, like cinnamon burned in a clay pot. Ilyon froze in the middle of a breath as he recognized it. "Don't breathe," he hissed, too late. The flask broke at the door seam. A pale vapor flowed in, not like smoke—like fog in a dish. It ran along the floorboards like a shrew and then puffed up in small pretty poofs where it met air. Ryn's eyes flooded with water. His lungs wanted to cough. Sereth coughed once and then stopped himself and made a sound like a man swallowing a wheel.
"Not skunk," Ilyon said between clenched teeth. "Blood-salt. It makes you rut like a dog up stairs for air. Don't. It's a trick."
It was a good trick. The boy with the sash broke first, because of course he did; he was honest. He hauled in breath and his throat closed and he panicked and reached for the door. Hana slapped his hand, cruel and necessary. Tamsin stuffed a strip of rag in his mouth. Ilyon upended his own pitcher of vinegar along the seam and the pretty poofs softened, suborned by a new smell that was worse but kinder. He threw powder after, his hands in tidy quick circles. The air stopped trying to hurt them quite so hard.
The door jumped again. The slow burn reignited. Ryn felt his patient disappear with it. "Enough," he said—half to the rope, half to himself. He grabbed the pry bar, put it under the bar to the door and levered it up a thumb; the man with the hook outside had been waiting for that. He snagged. Ryn let him pull the bar up another inch. Then he slammed it down and felt the hook bite wood. He let go and the hook stayed caught. A lever on a lever. He shoved the bar sideways and pinned the hook under it. He had created a problem. For them, he hoped.
"Cute," the leader said. Not tired yet. Yet.
They pressed again. Ryn lost count of little kills. A shoulder. A knee. A wrist. He forgot faces. He remembered hands. His own burned. His mouth tasted of ash. He wanted to drink until he couldn't hear the bell. He did not.
The new strike came when it had to: from the side. Two men slipped under the window line on the east wall and he hadn't expected it because a low trough of ground led to a culvert there and he had assumed men wouldn't want to come from mud. He was wrong. The leader had men who didn't mind mud. They worked a knife under the window shutter and lifted it a handspan. A hand came through with a little grenade like a seed. Tamsin flung herself toward it but Ryn was closer and did the wrong thing fast—he put his buckler over it and stomped on the buckler and felt the buckler jump and his foot ring and then the buckler was hot. The grenade under it had broken. Something activated. The buckler's leather started to char. He dragged it back and Ilyon jammed a wet rag under the rim and the thing fizzled into a hard sugar-like mass. Another of the leader's pleasures—things that become candy you can't eat.
"Stop giving me food," Ilyon snapped through fear.
"Be bored then," Tamsin said, and then, in the same breath: "Ryn, left."
He moved. It wasn't elegant; it worked. He had no elegance left. He tangled a man's feet, fell with him, slammed his head on the hearth stone, rolled, left the man in a bad position with a small ugly economical crunch. He stood. The room stank like a circus of bad ideas. The boy with the sash threw up in his mouth and swallowed it, gagging. He didn't leave his post. Hana thumped his back like a heart.
The leader's voice came in then, almost kind. "Last chance," he said. "Give me the half-elf and I'll say my surgeon got bored."
Hana laughed with all the meanness she had saved for men like him across thirty winters. "He is not a pig," she said. "We don't sell pigs anyway."
"Pigs sell you," Tamsin added.
Sereth made a noise that might have been "enough." Ryn's hands trembled with rage he hadn't invested in much. He was a practical man. He did jobs. Someone had decided to make him the job, and he didn't like it. He put his forehead on the wood of the door for one brief breath, felt the vibration of boot on board through his skull, and thought—badly—of Garron, of the Warden, of all the people who had told him about right and wrong lines in the last day. Then he picked up the pry bar and set it across the door frame like an instrument.
"Hook-and-Break," the System whispered in his head like a chalk on a slate.
"Shut up," he told it.
He stopped fighting the night like a man and started fighting it like a trap. He let the bluecoats come a step in. He let the leader's shield move left because the buckler had made him expect pain on the right. He dropped the loop at ankle and tightened it at knee. He pulled, he twisted, he broke. It was ugly. It was not fair. He saw the leader's eyes sharpen with respect of the wrong kind.
He did it three times before they learned a new meal. He felt the cheap joy in his chest at breaking—not men—timing. He hated the joy. He loved it. He didn't have time to measure.
They pulled back then. They did it like men about to take a breath and come back with something unforgivable. The yard went quiet. The bell didn't sing. The wood didn't tell him anything except that it wanted rest.
"Move," Tamsin whispered. "They'll throw the real thing now. Not bottles. People."
Sereth nodded once. "They'll want him in a bad corridor. They'll flood the door with bodies and we'll get lost in them."
"Out and over," Tamsin said. "We take them at the ladder while they're still pretending to be tidy."
Ryn wanted to do something else: sleep, scream, take the shard's offer to overclock, run into the wood to find the Warden and say, Tell me where I can die that matters. He didn't. He went to the rope at the back window and tied it around a rafter Tamsin had smeared with glue. He knotted it with a hitch he could undo with numb fingers and tossed the free end out.
"I'll go," he said. "I'm ugly enough they'll look at me and not at your knives."
"I'm uglier," Tamsin said, and flowed to the window before he could say yes or no. Sereth caught the rope with one hand and eased it, then let it run when she dropped. She hit the yard in a crouch where the sugar glue had made a man's corpse stick to the beam and used his head as a step, not unkindly. She disappeared left where the ladder lay like a bad idea.
Ryn followed. Pain Gate flickered—the cumulative line of hurts had outstripped it. He tasted blood that wasn't his. He felt the rope. It felt like a friend and a leash. He dropped, rolled, came up with the pry bar in his hand, and became for a breath a man very good at demolition.
They met the first bluecoat at the base of the ladder. He hadn't expected a man to be where he'd been set to be. He saw the pry bar, got his hands up too late; Ryn took his wrist to the wrong angle and let him have his hand back with new lessons. The man screamed. His friend committed and tripped over him. Tamsin cut the friend's tendon above the heel—not deep enough to kill, deep enough to stop the next step. She moved past him to the ladder and tipped it. It fell outward rather than inward—she'd thought of that when she set her feet. A man halfway up clung to the sugarglued beam and said something prayer-shaped before he fell backward onto two of his own.
Ryn saw the leader then at the edge of the yard, watching with a very specific interest: interest that isn't about winning, about learning. That frightened Ryn more than any alchemical trick. He wanted to throw a jar into that interest and see it burn. He didn't. He laid a line across the ladder's broken rung and tied it to the bent ring at the corner of the house so that when a man tried to set the ladder again the line would catch his ankle and teach him a sharp lesson.
"Enough," the leader snapped this time—not to his men, to himself. He was bored or angry or a combination of both Ryn didn't want to meet later in an alley. "Pull," he said, and the bluecoats melted back into the lane, quiet as a stream deciding to be somewhere else.
The silence afterward rang like a terrible church. Ryn bent over with his hands on his thighs and spat bile. Tamsin wiped her blade on a dead man's hem with care. Sereth dropped down from the window without a sound that any man would have heard. Hana's head popped into the frame and she squinted at the yard. "You two done playing?" she asked. "We have bread for the children if you're quite ready for them not to be killed by your sports."
"We're done," Ryn said, and meant, for a minute.
Inside, the air tasted like a bottle of vinegar had gone bad in a house where someone had forgotten a stew. Ilyon sat with his palms on his knees, trembling. He had not wept. He looked like a man who had; that would do. The boy with the sash leaned against the wall and breathed like he had a man's lungs and a child's ribs. Jarla smiled at Ryn with a tired coins-in-a-mug sound. Dorran slept with his mouth open.
The System presented a ledger Ryn expected and hated and needed.
[Defended: Tollhouse (Night Assault, Sponsor).]
[Experience gained: +42.]
[Hook-and-Break — Upgrade learned: Intermediate (limb control improved, +brief destabilization on successful torque).]
[Quickstep I — 92% -> 100%. Quickstep II available upon practice.]
[Snapline Step — Stability: 62%.]
[Trapper I — Progress: 92%.]
[Status:]
Name: Ryn
Race: Half-Elf (Unregistered)
Class: Trapper I
Level: 6 (pending)
Strength: 7
Agility: 11
Vitality: 9
Mind: 8
Perception: 10
Tenacity: 10
Corruption: 4% (Shard Sync: 12%)
He breathed through his teeth and let the numbers become wood grain and then become rope again. "We made dawn," he said. "We go at first light. Bluecoat will be bored or angry enough to bring something we don't like. Garron's men will take a bite out of the Guild by noon on the other road if the horns mean what I think. We use the back paths."
Hana nodded like a woman who had also been thinking about all the maps and hated that hers agreed with his. "We collect the three back at the gorse you left because they were convinced this tollhouse was haunted," she said. "We take them by the hedgerow. If they don't come, we leave them. We are done convincing fools."
Ryn wanted to argue. He didn't. He had learned a new cost: kindness in the wrong place kills people later. He pulled an oilcloth bundle out of his vest—the writ—and set it on the table. He looked at it with contempt and hope and put it back in his vest.
As he straightened, a figure filled the doorway, bullied its way into his attention, made the rope's hum disappear: the spear-woman.
She hadn't bothered with stealth. She stepped into the yard with the calm of a wolf crossing a stream: not hurrying, not explaining. Her leg still limped. Her lip had not healed into something smooth. She looked at the line across the door, at the bell, at the bodged hooks, at the sugar glue spattered like icing on wrong bread. Her mouth twitched into something that might have been a smile if it had had parents.
"You collected rent," she said to Ryn. "Not coins."
"I like my ledger better," he said. His voice was shredded and he hated the sound.
She looked over his shoulder into the room and counted without moving her lips: Hana, children, donkey, old guard, archer, shadow-girl, the ink boy. She made a small shape with her mouth that meant hmm. She looked back at Ryn. "My captain has a problem with the Guild's line at the river. He wants to set men on it. He will use me for that. He also wants to break your pretty house because he dislikes not owning anything he can see." She shrugged—not careless, careful. "I thought you should know."
Ryn blinked. "Why," he said, too flat. "Why warn me?"
She leaned on her spear and seemed to listen to something Ryn couldn't hear. "Because I like my teeth," she said calmly. "Because your lines make his men bleed and that is useful to me when the other hand is writing." She stopped. Her eyes cooled. "And because one day you will owe me something I can name and you'll pay it."
"Maybe," he said. Not yes. She appreciated that.
She turned to go, then back. "The surgeon who follows the man with blue ribbon," she said. "He obeys someone who pays him, not the man with blue. He is not loyal. He is curious. If you show him something he does not have words for, he will make a mess and call it medicine. That will pay him. If you can make him curious about the wrong thing—" She tapped her spear's butt once on the stone threshold. "—do."
Ryn tucked that away. It would cost him. He might have to let the surgeon see the shard under his skin in a way that made him sick to think about. He hated that his brain put that on a table and measured it next to lives and did arithmetic.
"Thank you," he said. It hurt to say it to a woman who would kill him if her captain asked. She flicked her eyes away like someone flinching. She hated the thanks more than he did. "Don't make me careful," she said, as if that were the worst sin he could do her.
She left, stones whispering under her. The world breathed again. Dawn turned white at the edges of the moor.
Ryn looked at his people—he had thought them that. He didn't know when that had happened. He said, "We go," and didn't add, or we die.
They filed—sore, brittle, anger still in their bones. The donkey put her head down and pulled. The boy with the sash tied low like he'd been taught. Jarla's husband lifted badly; Ryn corrected him and forgave the fact he kept doing it wrong. Ilyon fussed and then did something useful and Ryn praised him because he deserved it like a child deserves a sweet when he doesn't cry.
They moved along the hedgerow; they stopped twice to fetch fools and left one because he chose a pig over his breath. Ryn didn't argue with him; he didn't have the store. He tied two knots that had saved three children while he was asleep. He stepped over a dead bluecoat whose blood had dried like grit. He saw a Guild pike broken in hedge. He smelled the morning soup of wood smoke and mud and salt.
Sereth paced the right line, eyes narrowed. "River's sound," he said. "Guild's horns lying. Garron's men testing." He lifted his chin. "We'll run into it if we keep the road."
"Then we go under," Tamsin said, almost cheerful. "I like mud."
"You like being mean in quiet places," Ilyon said without heat.
"Both," she said.
They made the undercut path that led along the river bank. Sound changed there; water ate voices and turned them into secrets. Ryn felt half blind with it and loved it because men who loved their own noise would be blinder. He laced rope low and high; the map in his head told him where without being asked. The shard under his skin stayed quiet because it was daylight. He didn't trust it to stay quiet at night.
At the turn where the bank widened into a flood meadow, they saw the thing he had been half expecting and wholly dreading: the sponsor's surgeon.
He didn't look like a surgeon. He looked like a clerk who had never eaten poor food. He wore a leather apron with a dozen neat loops holding clean tools: scalpel, stitcher, fine saw, a tiny jar of glittering grit that made Ryn's stomach turn. His hair lay with a precision that meant he had told someone to cut it even when the world burned. His eyes were wrong—the wrong kind of hungry, hungry like a child on the first day a parent stops hitting them and starts making them recite poetry.
He smiled when he saw Ryn's rope. He spread his hands. "Art," he said, delighted. "I have read about this. May I see?"
He had two men behind him with little shields and knives that stayed clean by being used only on insides. They did not blink. The surgeon walked toward Ryn like a man coaxing a shy animal. "Half-elf," he said, friendly. "May I see your hands?"
Ryn's mouth did something dangerous—almost saying yes to the wrong thing because the wrong thing pronounced the name of his art correctly. Tamsin's fingers bit his arm hard enough to bruise. "Don't be a stupid artist," she hissed. "He'll wear your hands upstairs."
Ryn flinched and the stupid nearly left. He put the buckler up and the pry bar low. "No," he said.
The surgeon's face went into a curious shape. "No?" he repeated, like he had never been told it by anyone who had lived after. "But I just want to see."
"You want to eat," Tamsin said. The surgeon sighed delicately. "Everyone eats," he said. "We just pick what."
Ryn decided. Not because he had a plan. Because he didn't. He stepped forward fast and put his rope around the surgeon's ankle and yanked hard with Hook-and-Break in his forearms now a practice more than a skill. The surgeon flailed with an undignified noise and fell. His knife men stepped, and Tamsin's foot and Sereth's arrow turned both into boards to be stepped over later. The surgeon landed hard, breath knocked out. He laughed when it came back. "Fun," he said. He flicked a dusting of glitter into Ryn's face.
Ryn jerked back; he wasn't fast enough. Some of it hit his lip. It stung like cold and mint and pain. He spat, but the taste went inside. The shard under his skin warmed without permission. The world shivered like a rope being plucked. Ryn didn't like it. He slammed the buckler into the surgeon's face. The man's nose broke and did not bleed the way other noses did; it glittered at the edges. He did not scream. He looked fascinated.
"Later," he said, giddy, as if Ryn had kissed him instead of breaking his nose. "I want to—" He gestured with delicate fingers. "—open your map."
Ryn wanted to vomit. He wanted to cut the man into pieces. He wanted to run. He did the least romantic thing: he hit him again. He went still. His men didn't come back to life. Ryn left them there, very aware that killing the surgeon was like cutting the head of a plant; it sprouts elsewhere. It would antagonize the leader; it would delight him, too. Later.
They moved. The river took their footsteps and turned them into fish. The world smelled of wet stone and the hint of sewage and something under that Ryn didn't want to investigate. He kept his hand on the rope and the donkey's lead and hated the feeling of the surgeon's glitter on his lip. It didn't itch. It hummed. He rubbed at it with his wrist until the skin burned. The shard hummed back.
At the rise where the river and the toll road parted, they paused. The Guild had made a line. Garron's men had made a wedge. They had the look of two dogs deciding who owns a bone while a hawk waits for pieces. Ryn wanted to go anywhere else. He didn't get to. The path he'd chosen cut across behind the Guild line. He would have to talk to the factor again.
He did. The man's face was washed-out and bright with anger. He had lost two and held three. He looked at Ryn like a man measuring a brace for a beam and deciding to overbuild. "I bought you a morning," he said. Flat. "You're welcome."
"You bought yourself a morning too," Ryn said. "Thank you."
The factor snorted. "Are we friends now?" he asked, deadpan.
"No," Ryn said. "We make ugly tables."
The factor's mouth twitched. Then he leaned in. "The writ you have will let you call this tollhouse yours for a day more. After that, I can't make the paper talk if your lines do not. You will be called rogue. Forever. If you care."
Ryn closed his eyes a second. The shard under his skin hummed. The surgeon's glitter hummed. The rope hummed. The Warden's warning hummed. He said, "I will be called worse."
"Yes," the factor said. Then, in a tone that had no paper in it at all: "Do you have bread? If I get you flour you'll bake it. I need to tell my men they didn't do nothing."
"Bring it," Hana snapped over his shoulder. "And salt and clean water and one apple if someone sees it."
The factor blinked. "An apple," he said, bewildered.
"For the donkey," she said as if to a child. "She doesn't work for your pretty words."
He nodded as if he understood and maybe he did. He turned away to his line, voice rising into command, not into sound.
Ryn felt the morning shift from night's teeth to day's news. He saw the leader at the ridge. He saw the spear-woman not at his side, somewhere else. He saw the surgeon not rising at the river. He felt the shard under his skin telling him gently where every line on this ground wanted to lie.
"Tollhouse," Tamsin said. "Now."
He nodded and put his shoulder under the weight again. The donkey didn't complain; she rolled her eye back and reminded him with a look that he had promised an apple. He thought, wretched and sincere, I will get it for you if I have to bite a man to do it.
They rolled the last of the distance to their ugly house and found three new people at the door: a woman with a heavy brow, a boy with a wide scar on his cheek, a man with empty palms. They had the look of people who wanted to ask for a place and knew they were not entitled to it.
Ryn didn't speak. He put his hand on the line and felt it hum and thought not of paper or sponsors or wards but of the simple fact that a room with a door and a line and a bar was church enough for a day. He nodded once, tired. The woman burst into tears. The boy didn't. The man put his head on the door and said thank you to wood.
The System placed a line in his head with the clinical indecency of bureaucracy at its least offensive.
[Objective: Fortify Tollhouse (Day Hold) — Status: In Progress 68%.]
He wanted it to say something human. He didn't need it to. He looked at Tamsin and Sereth and Ilyon and Hana and Dorran and Jarla and the boy with the sash and the donkey. He said, "Set lines," again because that was his prayer. He did it until the day shifted into a shape he recognized.
Out at the line of the hills, a horn blew that had nothing to do with Garron or the Guild. Not long; not short; a call none of them knew. The Warden's wood stirred, not in threat, but in what felt like interest.
"Not bored," Tamsin said unhappily.
Ryn swallowed and thought of the Warden telling him not to hum at stones when he was tired. He felt very tired.
He set a line anyway, because no one else would.
The door held. The house watched. The world shifted, very slightly, around whatever that horn meant.
He was about to learn who had been paying the sponsor's surgeon, and the price would be a new number on a ledger he hadn't wanted to keep.