The horn from the hills threaded through the moor and the wood like a needle, low and steady, the opposite of the bluecoats' clipped signals and Garron's long notes. Ryn felt it more than heard it, a pressure change along the old scars in the tollhouse wall, a shift under his feet like air drawn in before a house settles.
Hana looked up from a loaf she was bullying into shape with fists. "What now," she said without a question mark.
"Not him," Sereth said, chin toward the ridge where Garron's line scuffled with the Guild's. "Not them." He squinted east. "Other."
Ilyon's shoulders went up around his ears. "Node," he breathed, too eager. "Or—something that eats one. There's a—" He stopped himself with actual visible effort and swallowed. "No. I don't know." He glanced at Ryn, seeking permission, absolution, a plan. Ryn had none of those in stock.
The circle in the gorse didn't change its pitch. The shard under his skin did. It warmed to a hum like a pot beginning to sing. He rubbed it through his sleeve as if he could soothe a muscle, then dropped his hand. It felt too close, too awake. The Warden's warning settled like a new strain on an old rope: do not hum at stones when you are tired.
"Lines," Ryn said, because it was the only prayer he believed in. "Sereth—north face. Tamsin—yard. Ilyon—no new experiments unless the world ends, and if it ends, aim it away from my face."
"I—" Ilyon started, then nodded, chastened by the fact that his last clever thing had made candy from a bomb. "Understood."
They adjusted, tiny changes: Sereth shifted his posts so his arrows would arc under the eaves, to take a man coming at a run from the side road that cut through the furze. Tamsin reset the murder hole at a different height. Ryn took the salvage writ, scowled at it, and tucked it under the bar for later sacrilege.
The moor did a slow shiver. A shadow moved across the ridge that wasn't a cloud. Out of the north, along the line of the old road, came a procession that had a shape like ceremony and a smell like char.
Four men in dark leather with hair braided back ahead of a low cart pulled by two tired mules. On the cart, a box. Not a chest with a lid. A long thing with a slatted front like a shuttered window. Behind it, six more men and a woman with a ledger tied at her waist and a quill stuck through her hair like a pin. She walked with the careful confidence of someone who had learned to count while starving. Two carried banner poles with nothing on them; the poles moved with the wind and the emptiness on them was some kind of statement Ryn didn't understand.
At their head, a man with clean hands and a coat that had been expensive in a city even if it had been turned twice since. He wore no sword. He carried a staff shod in iron and walked like he was keeping time with the earth rather than with the men behind him. His mouth had the grimness of a man who found himself in the wrong profession and had made it fit anyway.
"Sponsor," Tamsin said softly, voice gone thin. "Not the enforcer. The man with the ledger."
Sereth's eyes sharpened. "Better than a man with a bottle," he said, and didn't sound sure.
The sponsor stopped twenty paces from the tollhouse, as if he knew the exact reach of rope work and didn't want to be in it. He set the iron-shod staff down and leaned on it like a man who wanted to look tired but was actually testing the ground.
He smiled at Ryn with a fraction of his mouth. "We've been collecting taxes in places where no one wants to do the paperwork," he said. "We would like to talk to whoever is writing your papers."
Ryn put a hand on the bar through the door and didn't open it. "He's tired," he said, because the factor was elsewhere with his pikes and his scowl. "You can talk to me."
"Then let me speak to your donkey," the sponsor said. His eyes went to the rope, the jangle bell, the new glue stains on the rafters. He grunted, an honest sound. "Your work is tidy."
Ryn didn't answer. He didn't like the way the man said tidy. It sounded like he was judging a room someone had died in.
The sponsor gestured and one of his men in front lifted the slatted front on the long box on the cart. A smell blew out—not quite rotten, not quite clean—like meat that had been bled too carefully. Ryn flinched. So did Tamsin, without embarrassment. The shard under Ryn's skin warmed again, a half-step.
Inside the box, behind the slats, something moved. Not one thing. Many. Creepers, like mutated vines, slid and turned, glistening pale. They rasped on the wood with little nails. The sound raised the hair on Ryn's arms. The men carrying the box looked like men who had picked it up before and trusted it only because it had not killed them last time.
"Harvest cage," Ilyon said under his breath, horror and fascination braided. "He's moving tendrils. For graft. For… stabilizers."
"Stop naming things," Tamsin muttered, which was her way of saying don't give it power.
The sponsor's smile went thinner. "You have a choice," he said mildly. "You may rent this tollhouse from us for a reasonable rate and keep a ledger that I will respect. Or you can continue to rent it from the Guild, who will fail to protect you and then charge you for the failure. Or we can remove you and put in someone else. I prefer the first. I am a patient man, but not a sentimental one."
Hana snorted from her post by the half-door. "You are a man who likes bread cut in neat slices and thinks that makes bread better than when we cut it messy. It doesn't. It only makes a mess later."
The sponsor's eyes moved to her. He had the courtesy of not looking away because a woman had spoken. "I like bread," he said. "I like children fed and small pigs getting bigger. Mainly because men do not knife me in alleys for my coat when they are busy feeding pigs. I am practical, madam."
"You're a thief," she said. She didn't raise her voice. It wasn't a debate.
"I am," he said, and did not blush. "In the service of a better theft later. Look." He pointed his staff to the east, where the ridge line cut the sky. "What comes when men with blue ribbons and men with grafts and men with pikes and men with rope burn go away? Teeth. More teeth. I intend to be the teeth we can survive."
"Better wolves," Tamsin said under her breath. "So thoughtful."
Ryn's mouth went dry. The man was not wrong; that was what made his words dangerous. He put his palm on the door and felt the hum of the line vibrate his bones. "We'll hold this for a day," he said. "Then we'll go. No rent. No ledger."
The sponsor's eyes slid to Ryn's wrist where the rope burn shone. He followed the line to the door, to the rafter, to the posts. His gaze was slow and accurate. "Half-elf," he said gently. "Garron will kill you because he dislikes not owning tools. The Guild will kill you because you make them write new papers. My enforcer will kill you because he enjoys puzzles and doesn't like not solving them." He gestured with the staff to the harvest cage. "My surgeon will not kill you because you interest him. That is worse. Work for me. Invent neat ways to tie the world so it moves when I pull."
Ryn looked at the box and the pale little bodies inside brushing the slats. He thought of the surgeon's glitter. He thought of Ilyon's little thrills of joy. He thought of the Warden telling him boring keeps things alive. He said nothing for a count of five. He said, "No," then, and nothing else.
The sponsor nodded. No flinch, no anger. He had heard it before. "Then here is my reasonable offer," he said. He reached into his coat and pulled out a small packet wrapped in oilcloth. It had a weight that made Ryn's stomach clench. He tossed it at Ryn's feet. Ryn didn't move. Tamsin flicked a stone into the packet; nothing happened. He bent and picked it up with two fingers. He opened it. Inside, wrapped in silk, a wedge of pale material—like the shard under his skin if it had been smoothed and taught manners. The shard in his arm hummed in recognition like a dog seeing a sibling.
Ilyon sucked air. "A peripheral," he whispered. "Cut clean. Not from a ruin. From a body."
"That is a gift," the sponsor said. "To show you I can give as well as take. It will stabilize your perimeter a half-mile and keep the wrong rats quiet. Not free. Never free. But I keep my bargains." His eyes sharpened a fraction. "Rent later. Not today."
The offer sat greasy and glittering in Ryn's palm. He wanted it. He hated that he knew how to use it now—that the slab in the gorse had taught him what his hand would do. He closed his fist around it and crammed it into his vest like a sin. The shard under his skin purred and that made him want to cut his hand off. He didn't.
The sponsor clucked his tongue. "You will die," he said, not cruelly. "Sooner or later. I am trying to make it later."
"So am I," Ryn said. "But I'll die my own way."
The sponsor sighed, then straightened. "Remove the ledger," he said to the woman with the quill, and she made a note in a careful hand. He gave Ryn one more look, not hungry, not angry. Measuring. "If you live the week, we will speak again."
He turned and walked away, staff tapping in perfect rhythm with the men pulling the cart. The harvest cage slid through light like a slow evil idea you cannot dismiss.
Ryn closed the door because he needed a job. He put his forehead against the wood for a second and breathed. The donkey blew at his shoulder and bumped him as if to say: rope is rope; apples are apples.
"Throw it away," Tamsin said. "Or use it and hate yourself. Those are the choices."
He took the oilcloth packet out and put it on the table and did neither. "Later," he said, hating his own cowardice. He turned to the room. "We move the hour the Guild's dust blows west. The sponsor's man will come back with the surgeon at dawn or they will fight each other for etiquette and we can walk through. Either way, we don't let them choose our morning."
Hana nodded. "Eat," she said, and tore loaf with rough hands, handed pieces to children, to Ryn, to the boy with the sash who ate like a man not used to it, sighing with relief into the bread. Jarla's husband kissed Jarla's hair and then blushed at his own tenderness; she cuffed him lightly and smiled into the cuff.
They didn't have a quiet hour. The horn blew again—shorter, closer. The moor beyond the ridge moved, a ripple of bodies that had nothing to do with men. In the lane to the side, something scuttled and then paused at the smell of the vinegar line. Ryn slid his buckler onto his arm. "Underpass," he said. "Now."
Sereth didn't argue. He gathered children with gestures rather than names. Tamsin called Ilyon a fool and told him to keep his mouth shut and his hands open. Hana hefted Dorran with Jarla's husband and swore at him and told him to live out of spite. The donkey sighed and heaved and became, yet again, better than a man.
They slipped out the back window and into the hedgerow under the little net of lines Ryn had strung earlier. He cut his own ropes one by one, each cut a small personal regret. The yard was not empty. Two figures moved there—one, a bluecoat who had come to test if the leader's boredom had changed to hunger. Ryn cut him down quick and clean with the bar, no speech. The other was the spear-woman. She stood with her spear planted and watched with that tilted grin that wasn't friendly and wasn't not.
"Your dentist came," she said, nodding toward the gorse where the harvest cage had rolled. "He made men brave. Stupid, too. I let him. Useful."
"Why are you here," Ryn asked, too tired for neatness.
"Because I like watching men who think they own roads discover they are wrong," she said. "And because I have a thing to pay." She lifted two fingers. "Don't take the stone from the box and hum it under your skin later, little rope man."
"Too late," Tamsin muttered. Ryn flinched. The spear-woman's mouth twitched. "Bad," she said. "Funny. Set it into dirt. Make it hum there if you must. Don't let it taste your blood twice."
Ryn nodded. "Thank you," he said, ashamed that he meant it. She shrugged. "We are not friends," she said again for both of them. "Go."
They went. The underpass under the road stank and the wrong rats pushed at the salt and then pulled back. The river's low hiss swallowed footfalls. They moved like fugitive saints under hedges and along the ditch, holding rope in the only way that made breathing feel like a job and not a privilege stolen from someone else.
At the bend where the ditch met the river, the world got smaller. Garron's men and the Guild had met in a precise horror: pikes and chitin and old iron in a knot. The sponsor's bluecoats hovered to one side like flies near sugar. On the crest, the Warden's shadow might have been a tree or a thought. The horn from the hill sounded a third time and, far off, a reply. Ryn's head hurt with too many maps.
They broke into the old coppice beyond the river where the ground went soft and the air smelled of mushrooms and root. Ryn slowed and let the rope around his waist go slack and then took it up again in a shorter loop. Pain Gate had gone thin and didn't help much now; his body had made its ledger unignorable. He couldn't fix it. He could carry it.
They found a lean-to in the coppice—two poles and a lashed roof someone else had set months ago. It wouldn't keep an army out; it would keep a wind off a child. It was enough for a mouthful of bread. Hana parked Dorran in the shade and said, "Do not die while I am chewing." Dorran grunted something indecent that meant he would try.
Ryn took the oilcloth packet out of his vest like something that would bite. He walked to the edge of the coppice where the leaf cover thinned and the ground had water in it from last week's rain. He dug with the heel of his hand and a stick until he had a shallow bowl. He set the pale shard wedge in it. He covered it with dirt and a piece of old slate and pressed until it hummed to his palm through the slate rather than through his skin. The map behind his eyes shifted a hair: the area around the coppice came into focus in a way that made his breath feel less thin. The wrong rats moved away a little because the hum told them they were seen.
The System slid a line in with what felt like approval and that made Ryn grimace.
[Peripheral Shard placed: External. Local Stabilization: +Minor. Shard Sync unchanged.]
"Good boy," Tamsin muttered sarcastically. Ryn rolled his eyes and went back to the lean-to. He ate bread with gravy made from nothing, drank water that had dead leaf in it, and watched the treeline where the spear-woman had gone.
The world did what it does when men push limits: it pushed back. A shadow moved along the far hedgerow like a snake with a mind. The harvest cage's tendrils had found an old burrow and smiled. Wrong things with teeth came up where men had not planted them. A boy screamed on the ridge. The Guild's horn bleated in not-language. The sponsor's men laughed. Garron's men, on the right, went still the way good wolves go still when the forest moves in a way they didn't predict.
"Move," Sereth said.
They moved, not in panic—done with that for the hour—but with the giant smallness of men who have accepted the day is longer than a cart's wheel. They cut through the coppice, under low branches, rope low, breath low. The donkey huffed like prayer. Pell walked with his tongue out and his feet pointed wrong and counted to ten under his breath and then again. Ryn counted too; his hands remembered knots.
The tollhouse receded behind them as an idea, then as a place. Ahead, the moor, the next village, the next mouth that would ask for bread and rope. The Warden's horn, once more, from the hills. Not command. Accounting.
Ryn felt the shard under his skin quiet down to a hum he could ignore and let the piece in the dirt do its work. He had learned a new compromise: the line between what he could hold and what he had to let go.
They skirted a sinkhole, ducked under a lone hawthorn bent like an old woman, and came up on the shoulder of a ridge that looked down into a vale strung with old fence lines like knitting.
The factor's small column appeared on the right, moving slower now, pikes crooked with fatigue. He saw Ryn, lifted his hand, dropped it, moved on. The spear-woman did not appear; she had gone to be someone else's problem. The sponsor was a thought with a box, moving another way.
Ryn set his jaw. "We will hold another house," he said. "We will tie another rope. We will hear another horn. We will lay another rope and walk across it without falling."
Tamsin snorted. "And you will lie to that donkey again about apples."
He looked at the donkey. She looked back at him with the flat, forgiving honesty of an animal who knows every human is a liar about something. He opened his mouth to say something grand or small and useful and instead said, like a fool who had built a church for himself and tied it with string, "I'll find you one."
She huffed. It could have been assent. He hooked his fingers under the rope at his waist again and made it sing.
The System, tiresome and necessary, gave him his ledger at the end of the march.
[Level Up applied: 6.]
[Stat Growth: Perception +1, Tenacity +1.]
[Skill: Hook-and-Break — Intermediate (active).]
[Quickstep I learned (100%). Quickstep II unlocked (requires practice).]
[Trapper I — 95%.]
[Title: Ropehand (local) persists in new area.]
[Status:]
Name: Ryn
Race: Half-Elf (Unregistered)
Class: Trapper I
Level: 6
Strength: 7
Agility: 11
Vitality: 9
Mind: 8
Perception: 11
Tenacity: 11
Corruption: 4% (Shard Sync: 12%)
He put the numbers out of his way and focused on ground, wind, the slope of the next ditch. He heard horns and human voices and animals and wrong things. He set another line because that was his art, his vice, his argument.
They topped the ridgeline and looked down at the next village, which had not burned yet and might not if men listened. Ryn squared his shoulders and felt the rope's pull like a promise he would either keep or not. He thought about the Warden's knock, the sponsor's gift, the spear-woman's warning, Garron's slow nooses.
He thought about the brief, clean time when a knot holds. He smiled with all his teeth.
"Again," he said, to the world.
The world answered with another horn from somewhere none of them knew yet, and the shape that stepped out of the distant trees across the vale was not a man's idea. It was bigger, wrong, and moving toward a ruin that Ilyon had named a peripheral outpost.
Sereth swore once, softly. "Ossuary," he said. "Bone-keeper's ground."
Tamsin lifted her knives. "I hate bones," she said, which was not true, but made Ryn feel better.
They didn't get to pick clean roads. They got the ones with teeth and stone. Ryn tied a loop around his waist and set an anchor in the idea of the village and stepped forward into the next bad day, the next hum, the next ledger.
He knew the cost would come. He hoped it would wait one more night.
It wouldn't.