The vale ahead had human edges: low stone walls knee-high, hedgerows where birds huddled and scolded, a cut of road that had been tamped by bad shoes for years. But across it, at a knuckle of rising ground, the shape that moved wasn't human. It wore a ruin like a shell.
"Ossuary ground," Sereth said again under his breath, tasting the word like bad medicine. "Old tower there. Bones stacked into walls. The people here didn't do that. The ground did it to save itself."
"Save," Tamsin snorted, knives out. "Bones piling bones to save bones."
Ilyon went pale and took a step toward the shade as if it could hide his excitement. "If it's a keeper, it will have a peripheral node. That's—"
"Don't," Hana said without turning her head. "Don't name the thing that will kill my children."
Ryn rubbed his thumb over the rope burn on his wrist and made the only decision he had. "We go around," he said. "We hold our line. We don't pick a new fight because the world wants to show us teeth."
Sereth nodded like a man agreeing to let a bridge collapse somewhere else. "Skirt east, along the terrace," he said. "Make the walls part of our map."
The path along the terrace was narrow, ruts made by the habitual feet of a dying village. The low walls on one side and the drop to a drainage ditch on the other made a corridor Ryn didn't love: good for lines, bad for escape. He tied a rope to a boundary stone at the entry with a knot that undid with one pull. "If we have to run," he said to Tamsin, "you pull this and the wall falls different." He pointed where the stone line had a natural break. "We'll make a mouth for us and a tooth for them."
Tamsin's grin showed canine. "I like it when you plan wrong for other people."
They moved, a long-bodied creature of rope and old decisions. Children in the middle, Hana at the cart, Ilyon shadowing the donkey with a handful of salt like a priest. The boy with the yellow sash—Kerrin, he'd learned—kept his eyes on his feet and his mouth shut, a blessing that kept him useful.
Halfway along the terrace, a woman stepped out from behind the wall. She was older than Hana by a decade, hair bound back hard, arms like ropes from hauling. She held a pitchfork, not to intimidate; to work. Her face was the sort you didn't argue with because it had learned when to stop making sense and start moving grain.
"You," she said, without fear. "You brought a line. Good. The thing on the hill woke. We got as far as the stacked stones before it looked at me. My knees talked me out of it." She jerked her chin toward the low houses beyond. "There's an old man and two babies. Everyone else ran at dawn. My Donn went to get the Guild and didn't come back."
"We'll fetch them," Ryn said, because it was the only answer that felt like a handhold. It rang wrong in his bones, too easy in his mouth. He swallowed and added, "If we can't, we'll take you instead."
"Donn would say the same," she said. "He's thick in the head and good in the back and knows cost."
Hana stepped up without waiting for Ryn's sense. "Get the babies," she said. "You and I will carry the old. If you argue I'll leave you and take the pig."
The woman bared her teeth. "Pig's gone," she said. "I'll argue after."
Ryn looked at Sereth. The old scout had already climbed up onto the wall with a quiet efficiency. He scanned the slope and the ruined tower at the knuckle of hill. The air there looked a fraction wrong, heat shimmer without heat. The bones stacked into pseudo-walls around the tower were clean, not from bleaching—born that way. Tendrils of something white-veined and sinewing crept along stones. Not vines. Bone creeping into moss. It rested, then tightened, then loosened like a breath taken underwater.
"The keeper's not fully grown," Sereth murmured. "Small. Fast. Things move under it—the wrong kind of quick."
"Rats," Ilyon whispered. "Worse. Things that take your tether when you step into a burrow. Salt—" He patted his pouches and came up with two pinches, cheeks hot. "I've enough for a door."
"Rope," Ryn said, and passed him a length. "Tie it to me. If I go down a hole, you keep me until I choose where to fall."
"You aren't going," Hana snapped. "I am."
"You carry the old man," Ryn said. "You're better at telling him to stop arguing. You'll listen when he tells you his house matters. I won't." He turned to the terrace woman. "Name."
"Maed," she said. "Children are Brin and Fera. The old bastard is Tev. If he tries to die for a cupboard, hit him."
"Good," Ryn said. He set his jaw into something like a hinge and looked at Sereth, at Tamsin, at Ilyon. "We go," he said, and the line tugged.
They made a bad plan into a better one: split by seconds, not distance. Tamsin and Ryn took the path up the hollow to the left of the hill, using the wall for cover. Sereth cut around to the right to look high into the tower's shadow. Ilyon crept along behind Ryn with a line of salt poured thin as lies.
At the foot of the tower, the air smelled of stone and old marrow. The hum under the shard in Ryn's skin climbed a quarter note, then steadied. He didn't touch it. The crawlspace under the tower's first course looked like something had gnawed a door into it. There was a child's cloth there—a strip of blue knotted into a pretend bracelet. Tamsin crouched without emotion and picked it up and pocketed it and did not show it to Ryn.
"Quick," she breathed.
They slipped inside. Inside had the wrong taste of dry places that should be wet. Bone-lattice stitched the walls like a spider had used ribs instead of silk. In the rear, a figure hunched on a low pallet, thin backside to them. Brin, Fera—the little ones—hid under a table, faces dirty, eyes enormous.
Tamsin slid in, low and gentle. "Come," she said. "Hold this rope. Hold it with your teeth if your hands forget your name." She pushed one into the loop. The other child set their jaw and bit rope like a pup. Good children. Ryn moved to Tev.
The old man's eyes had the bright clarity of men who have been too poor too long to have had the luxury of being stupid. He saw Ryn. He saw the line. He saw the bone-lattice. "Not a cupboard," he wheezed, making a joke for a life he hadn't had time to live. "A chair. It's the only one with arms. I won't miss it as much as I think." He pushed himself up, all resentment and bone, and took Ryn's arm without apology. "Careful," he said, and showed Ryn a knot of floor where the ground had eaten itself. "It makes mouths."
Ryn nodded once. "We'll talk about cupboards later."
The hum rose. A motion—too smooth—slid down the interior of the tower wall. Ryn barked, "Back," and didn't care who he sounded like. Tamsin jerked the rope. Ilyon's salt hissed across the threshold like a line drawn by a god in a story. The thing—the keeper—didn't show a face. It didn't have one. It pushed bone-lattice down like a slow waterfall and then pulled it back, testing. It smelled clean, wrong.
"Hungry," it said.
Ryn wanted to break something beautiful. "No," he said, and he didn't know if he was talking to the thing or to his own hand. He backed out, body threaded to door by rope. The bone-lattice quivered and then lashed out—a whip-like sweep that would have cut calf. Salt bit it and it recoiled, quivering like it had been embarrassed.
Tamsin laughed, sharp and mean. "You don't get to be ashamed," she told it.
They backed into sunlight. Sereth's arrow hissed past Ryn's ear again—he would get used to that at the moment of his death and not before—and pinned a chunk of bone-lattice to the outer wall where it writhed like a stuck eel. The children flinched, pressed their faces into rope, then peered out and gathered their courage with both hands. Tamsin tugged again. Ilyon threw his last pinch of salt. The lattice recoiled a third time.
Behind them, the harvest cage's tendril-shadows had reached the edge of the village, questing with obscene curiosity. The sponsor's crew had posted two men with poles to keep the tendrils from wandering into their expensive travelers. They were trying to collect the spillover by offering it their wrists like rope to be tasted. It was obscene and practical. There was no shame alive here for anyone.
Hana and Maed reached them at the foot of the tower path, Tev between them in a harness of shawls and profanity. Tev's breath rattled but his eyes stayed mean. He looked at Ryn and didn't say thank you; he nodded once like a man who still had one coin in his pocket and wasn't going to spend it before bread. They moved down the path at a good clip for old legs. Ryn set his body between them and the slow waterfall of bone.
The keeper said, curiously—how had it learned the sound—"Map."
Ryn didn't answer. He shouldn't have ignored it, maybe. He did.
Back at the terrace, Hana shoved Tev into the cart and said, "You die later." Tev spat into the grass. "Everything is later," he said. "Don't fuss." She cuffed him and he smiled into it and didn't get sentimental.
The cart moved. The terrace path turned into something like a drum and Ryn felt the pressure behind. The keeper had followed—not fast; it wasn't a dog. It rolled bone-lattice down its walls until it touched their shade like a tongue. The shard in his skin hummed higher. The piece he'd set in dirt earlier answered like a beacon and Ryn flinched; he hadn't wanted them to talk. He couldn't stop them when they wanted to.
The bone-lattice lashed again at the terrace, a whip-shape aimed not at calf now but at the rope line of the cart. Ryn snapped his own rope up and caught it in a loop borne of spite and technique. Hook-and-Break in his arms, in his shoulder, in the bad rib. Torque. He twisted. The bone-whip resisted—slick, cold—and for a sick half breath, he thought it would take his wrist with it. Ilyon threw vinegary brine across the loop and the bone-whip went brittle where salts invaded. It snapped with a sound like cooked chicken legs pulled apart. The broken nub recoiled and burrowed through soil like something disgusted at itself.
"Cute," Tamsin said, breathless as she backed down the path with the children, knife up, eyes bright. "I hate it when rocks play dog."
Sereth, moving along the wall above, put two arrows into the chunks that writhed to re-attach. He didn't waste words on shots that weren't kills. He shot to create problems that the next thing would trip over. He made himself a wall by believing it.
At the bottom of the terrace, the stone fell away into the broad track. The sponsor's box-cage trundled to a halt, the men at its poles glancing toward the hill with a professional interest that had nothing to do with anyone's child. The sponsor himself watched with his iron-shod staff held just-so and his mouth in that little line that tried to be both kind and cruel and therefore meant nothing. He looked at Ryn's rope like a man looking at a tool he hadn't wanted to buy because it was better than his. He had a ledger-carrier scribbling.
He lifted a finger. His enforcer—the neat-bearded man with the crystalline cheek—stepped forward, not at Ryn, not at the cart, but toward the bone wall. He raised the spear with blue ribbon and set the butt against bone. It hummed. He pressed the point into lattice and made a small satisfied noise that sounded like someone finding a word they'd been holding in their mouth too long. The lattice tightened and then loosened. He didn't stab. He tested. He was not a fool.
"Don't," Ilyon hissed.
Ryn agreed with unpleasant humility. "Don't," he repeated, not sure for whom. The enforcer smiled politely and stepped back with maddening grace. He was learning. Good. Terrible.
They broke line with the terrace and poured onto the broader track. Ryn kept the rope between the cart and the hedge, letting the world funnel itself. The keeper rolled bone-lattice down until its wall kissed the track and then stopped. It didn't chase beyond the bone borders. It either had rules or it needed something from the tower's dark that wasn't sunlight. It shivered. It said, soft and wrong, "Hungry," one more time, and then withdrew into itself.
Ryn exhaled. It felt like being forgiven by something that would ask for interest later. He didn't say thank you. He felt stupidly tempted.
"Go," Hana barked. "They called it. We don't sit here until it changes its mind."
They went.
As they made the bend that would take them behind a wall of elder to the next safe stretch, Ryn saw two men in the sponsor's crew lower the harvest cage tenderly into the ditch. The tendrils stirred like snakes tasting. The men poked, not cruel. They had a quickness to the hands that meant they knew the cost of this mistake and wanted to pay it slowly. The tendrils brushed under the bone-lattice of the keeper and retracted in disgust as if two wrong things had sniffed each other and found the wrong species. The sponsor watched with genuine interest that curdled into worry and then, to his credit, into decision. He signaled a retreat, a small precise motion. The cage was heaved back onto the cart. They backed away with professional tidiness.
"Good wolves," Tamsin said under her breath, sour.
Ryn kept his mouth shut. The rope sang in his palm. The shard under his skin slid down to a hum he could ignore if he tried. The piece he'd set in dirt, a field away, hummed supportive. He felt filthy for liking it.
They cleared the worst of the vale by afternoon. The next village wasn't dead. It was doing the horrible thing of becoming dead slowly. Men with tools stood on the green arguing about whether to go or stay and whether someone else should have told them sooner. A woman with four children on a rope like Ryn's led them past Ryn's rope and breathed without asking for permission. The elder there had old paper in his hand that named a different factor than Ryn's. He had a face that knew it was out of date.
"We don't carry you," Hana said to him without sting. "We give you rope."
He nodded and took it and began to tie knots with fingers that had once worked cloth and now bent badly, and Ryn felt the anger in him turn into a shape he could use.
He was turning to call for water when the spear-woman's voice came from behind them, dry and uninvited. "You have a Warden's attention," she said. "It isn't asking a question anymore."
He turned. She leaned on her spear in the gap between hedges, unbothered by the way her presence curdled arguments. Her limp had gotten worse. The cut on her lip had pulled. She didn't care. She flicked her chin toward the low hill beyond the village. "Far side. Quiet place."
Ryn didn't like being told to walk; he did anyway. Tamsin came and so did Sereth because neither trusted the other to bring him back alive if he went alone. Ilyon started to follow, then stopped himself with visible effort and stayed with the donkey, hands clenching like a boy told to sit on his hands during a holy day.
They walked up the hill and the world changed. Not the ground. The way the air pressed. The Warden stood at the top, not as a silhouette now, close enough for Ryn to see that their age was either thirty or a hundred, or both, and their eyes were very pale, like water over stones. They had no badge of office. They carried no banner. The hum that came with them was a statement of privacy made public.
"You did not put the shard under your skin," they said, level.
"Not today," Ryn said, and had the biting sudden desire to be proud. He let it go. "I put one in the ground."
The Warden's face didn't change. He had the sense that if he told them a joke a man would weep at, they would nod and say, that is a true thing and still not smile. "Good," they said. "You will bring me a piece of what you pull from the next one you touch. You will not touch it at night."
"I'll try," Ryn said, and hated how young the words sounded.
"You will," the Warden repeated, bored of men who lied about trying. They turned their head, not moving their body, and looked toward the ruin at the knuckle of hill as if looking were enough to hold it where it was. "That bonesmith is hungry. Not large. Not new. It is being fed by hands you do not see. That changes my arithmetic."
Sereth adjusted his stance. "Arithmetics we should know?"
The Warden's gaze moved from the ruin back to Ryn and then to Tamsin and then Sereth like a ledger sliding into a drawer. "The sponsor collects," they said. "The sponsor will discover that nettles have thorns and then will cut them off and teach them not to grow. The Guild writes. Garron bleeds men into gutters and calls it a tax and is therefore honest. You—" They tilted their head the smallest fraction. "You hate the ledger and use it anyway."
"I hate the person you think I am," Ryn said. He didn't know he'd meant it until his mouth did. "I'm not your project."
"You are not special," the Warden said without sting. "You are useful. Keep that. Do not sell it to someone who will give you coin you can spend twice today and not tomorrow."
Tamsin's half-smile cut the air. "He's too cheap to do that," she said. "He'll spend the first coin on a donkey and the second on rope."
"Good," the Warden said—no humor, no scolding. They shifted slightly. The world adjusted to keep a distance from that little movement. "Your rope has two knots that will come due," they said, as if reading it. "The first demands that you fight men who write; their papers will come to your night and your door. The second demands that you step into a place where bone grows like ivy. If you do not, something will push you there anyway. Choose before dawn to go north or east. The road will fall differently if you do."
Sereth looked at Ryn. Choices on the map. Ryn sighed without sound. "East," he said. "Sponsor's ledger swallows the next three villages if we don't pull them. North goes to the ossuary. We don't have the measure yet. East costs us slower."
The Warden nodded as if he had selected the dull blade on purpose. "Bring me a shard from the east house," they said. "Do not touch the one under the bones. If you do, I will fix it by breaking you. I do not like wasting time."
"I'm very efficient," Tamsin murmured.
The Warden ignored her. They lifted a hand—a small movement that did not gesture so much as mark. A message slid into Ryn's head in the way the System's messages slid, but this one was different: an admission that something outside both of them had listened and had decided to listen to the Warden now too.
[Warden Directive: Deliver one shard of Peripheral (east) within two days.]
[Reward: Cleansing (Moderate), Map access (Local Nodes).]
[Warning: Non-compliance draws attention.]
Ryn had the ridiculous urge to bow. He did not. He nodded, almost a headshake. "If I can," he said. "If it doesn't cost the kids."
"If it costs them, break the cost," the Warden said. They turned and stepped into the wind the wrong way. The wind moved so he could follow if he wanted. He didn't.
He walked back down the hill with Tamsin at his shoulder and Sereth on his left. "We're going east," he said. No argument. For once the world agreed. The map in his head stopped twitching and the hum under his skin slid into the note he could use to tie knots by.
Back among people, decisions grew small. Hana put bread into mouths and told lies that helped—that there would be a barrel at the next stand, that the Guild would bring oil later, that if men listened the road could hold. The factor's column drifted past. He had ink on his sleeve and a new cut on his cheek and looked like a man who had traded three favors and a finger for a bridge hold no one would remember.
The sponsor's crew trailed to the east with their school of empty banners and their box of hungry things. The enforcer's eyes slid to Ryn and counted. The surgeon was not with them, blessedly. Ryn was self-aware enough to know he was capable of running after the surgeon and smashing his nose again for the satisfaction alone. He didn't.
They moved east along the old toll road, the one that ran the ridge line toward the fell. The wind came up and pulled sweat off their necks. The donkey flicked her ears. The children were quiet in the way that meant they had discovered they were brave and had decided not to waste talk. Ryn put the backside of his mind on the shard under his skin and the piece he'd buried. They hummed to each other like two bees in a jar. He rocked his head once, as if that would unspool a feeling.
Two miles on, the next tollhouse sprouted from a low rise like a tooth. It had the look of something the world had intended to be easy and had turned hard. Its roof was intact. Its door hung right. Its windows had shutters that held. It hummed with a steady, invasive note: a fringe node lay beneath it, polite enough not to break the floor. Polite things broke slower when they were ignored.
"Paper," Hana said.
Ryn pulled the writ from his vest with two fingers like it was a hot coin. He held it up. A woman with a bow at the door peered down and made a face at his rags and the donkey and the rope. She had a pike set inside and the stance of someone who had killed people in the doorway before. She had the ledger look too—the kind that meant she did her sums in her head and then waited to see who failed theirs.
"Writ," Ryn said, voice so shredded he sounded like his own old man. He held it so she could read the stamp. She looked at it and at him and at the rope. She made a decision Ryn respected. She opened the door.
"Let it be ours for an hour," he said. "Then we leave, cleaner."
She snorted. "House doesn't get cleaner by letting men in," she said. "But I want to see your rope."
Inside, it was something like heaven—a swept floor, a water jug, a shelf with bowls. It was also death— a slab under the floor that hummed and had teeth.
Tamsin frowned at the hum. Ilyon smiled like a boy at a fair. Sereth sat on the stool as if he had dreamed it and was prepared for it to break.
"We do this fast," Ryn said. "We set lines. We breathe. We pull out the shard under the slab and break it into parts before it feels like a gift. We give the Warden a piece before it eats all the kids in here."
Hana lifted the bar with profanity. "You learned to ask men to do three things at once," she said. "Keep that."
They worked with the grace of a team that had become one without asking: Ryn at lines and knots, Sereth at the killing angles, Tamsin at the quiet corners, Ilyon at the bottles, Hana at the people. The shard under the slab accepted Ryn's hand with a hunger he didn't like. He begged it in his head not to touch him all the way in and knew begging stones was exactly the kind of man he hadn't wanted to be. He pressed his palm to the crack and felt cold and then the small tidy latch slide inside his bones—the way it had at the other one but worse now; the worse was because he had learned how to be complicit.
He pulled. The slab hissed out a hiss like a child made of frost. The shard came up like a knife out of snow. It looked innocent in the light. Ilyon knelt beside Ryn with fingers as steady as knives and a cloth to catch his blood if he slipped. He didn't. The shard came loose. Ryn held a thing the Warden wanted and the sponsor would pay to steal and the surgeon would open him to take. He didn't feel pride. He felt the rope at his waist tug, reminding him the world needed him to be dull.
"Break it," Tamsin said, soft. "Make it small."
Ryn looked at her. "Warden wants a piece."
"He didn't ask for a perfect slice," she said. "He asked for boring."
He wrapped the shard in cloth. Then he wrapped it again. Then he held it against stone in a double-fold of heavy cloth and hammered with the smooth back of his pry bar while Ilyon winced like a mother. It cracked, ugly. Not clean. Good. The hum jittered. He forced himself not to apologize for the small pain of a thing that wasn't a child. He put one piece in a bag for the Warden, one in a smaller packet for the perimeter in his pocket, and one in the corner for the woman with the bow.
"Use this," he said to her. "Bury it under the step. It will make the rats lie. It will make you taste the wrong thing in your teeth sometimes. You will hate it. It will keep your line level. Throw it away if it asks for blood."
She looked at him with a concentration that made him like her more than he trusted her. "You aren't a priest," she said.
"No," Ryn said, and wanted a bath.
They had a breath of quiet before someone tried to take it. It always came like that. Garron's call echoed faint from the west. The sponsor's polite signal cut twice from the east. And from the north, the ruin's low wrong hum ticked up one notch, hearing a thing it disliked being removed.
"Move," Sereth said. "You have one horn between things."
Ryn wanted to sit. He wanted to eat an apple with the donkey. He wanted a rope that didn't make his hands bleed. He stood instead. He slung the Warden piece inside his vest. He tied the second piece into a loop under the step and felt the house settle like a living thing under his hands. The title the System had given him in another village—Ropehand—settled like a glass in a true place. He disliked it and wore it anyway.
The System presented him with its ledger in a tone he had learned to tolerate under duress.
[Objective: Fortify Tollhouse (Day Hold) — Completed.]
[Experience: +60. Reputation (Local): Anchor -> Fixer (minor).]
[Cleansing: +3% (Warden-soon).]
[New Quest: Deliver Shard to Warden (Timer: 1 day, 18 hours).]
[Trapper I: 100% -> Advancement available: Trapper II or Specialization: Rook (Field Control) unlocked.]
He rubbed his face and blew air from his nose like a mule. "Rook later," he muttered.
"Chess?" Ilyon asked, delighted.
Ryn kept moving.
They left the tollhouse with bows pointed west and heads turned east. The woman with the bow saluted with two fingers and then had the sense to bar the door the instant their rope cleared the threshold. The shard under his shirt pulsed like a heart he didn't want to own. He imagined the Warden's pale eyes watching and tried not to feel like a child with a stolen coin.
They moved down the ridge path. Back at the terrace, the ossuary's song lifted another sliver. The sponsor's box moved like a bad idea trying to be a solution. Garron's line did something to the Guild's line that made men made of paper scream. Ryn did not look back.
East, the path ran through a patch of scraggly trees where haws and briars caught at clothes and children's hands. He cut his own lines to lead people through a place where men had not cut a path because men assumed other men would always go the same way. He zigzagged them in a pattern he learned in the bones, then taught Tamsin to run it without looking. Hana muttered a new set of lies that would be true because she insisted. Ilyon left a small jar of kindness at the foot of a beech: vinegar-and-herb paste that would make sores not fester. He did it without saying a word about it and Ryn liked him better for that than any bright idea he'd had all day.
On the far side, a slope dropped into a glade where a spring bubbled out of a rock and spilled into a basin shaped like a palm. The Warden changed the air again. Not by appearing. By permitting something. Ryn went to the rock, knelt, and placed the shard piece wrapped like a sin in the water's lip. He did not make a speech. He didn't even think one. He put it down and kept his fingers there long enough to feel the hum leave his skin and then withdraw into the stone and then into the water and then into a place that wasn't his. He let go.
The Warden's voice was a temperature again, running up his bones. "Boring," they said. "Good." Then, after a minute of something like thought: "Map."
The System didn't balk. It folded a page in his head with new lines.
[Warden Map (Local Nodes) unlocked (Fragmentary).]
[Visible: Three peripherals (one exhausted), one minor node (unstable), one major (dormant) under ossuary.]
[Cleansing applied: -3% Corruption. Shard Sync: 8%.]
Ryn felt like a dirty dog that had been hosed off by an impersonal hand. He didn't say thank you. He dipped his fingers in the water and washed grit from the parts of his hands that still had skin. He went back to the rope.
Tamsin drifted up and flicked water at him. "If you become a holy man I will leave," she said.
"I'll officiate your wedding," he said solemnly.
She bit him—light—on the lesser ear.
They moved on. The world didn't stop chewing. It never does. They took a lane that slid between two farm lots and nearly ran into a skirmish with bluecoats over a sack of flour. Hana solved it by waiving the sack as bait and then throwing it into the ditch so both sides had to stop posturing to pick grain out of mud. Ryn used the pause to set a rope at knee height so a man who tried to swing at the donkey tripped and broke his nose. It was all very stupid and all made sense if you accepted men didn't.
By last light, they saw the next town's palisade in the distance; not a proper one, but four broken carts set in a square and woven with branches. A woman stood atop it, hair braided back like a soldier, a trumpet made of rolled bark at her lips. She blew three times. For a second, Ryn's heart rose—help? Then he heard the echo of a horn he had not enjoyed. The sponsor's signal, faint on the ridge. The woman wasn't calling for help. She was calling rent.
Tamsin hissed between her teeth. "Pick," she said. "Fight or go around."
"Through," Ryn said. "We don't fight unless they stab first. We cut lines where they strangle themselves. We feed the donkey. We sleep. We wake to an uglier morning with a math we understand."
Sereth nodded once. Hana muttered a prayer to bread under her breath. Ilyon checked his bottles. Kerrin with the sash spit into his palm and tightened his grip on the rope like a boy about to lie to his mother convincingly.
Ryn lifted his head. The rope pulled at his waist. The shard under his skin lay quiet, cleansed into something he could ignore briefly. The Warden's unknowns simmered like a stew he hadn't paid for. Garron's line bit someone else's town. The sponsor looked at rope and planned to cut it. The ossuary waited with patient hunger.
"Again," Ryn said, not in defiance now, but as an acknowledgement of the only way his hands knew to make the world not die around them. He stepped toward the palisade and raised the salvage writ and hoped the woman with the bark horn could read and, more importantly, wanted to.
Behind him, the donkey nosed his pockets shamelessly. He muttered, "Apple," and earned a snort that said liar.
The System chimed with a low, neat sound.
[Chapter Progression: Trapper Advancement available — Choose: Trapper II or Rook I (Field Control).]
[Pending: Night Defense, Sponsor Influence.]
Ryn smiled, humorless. Choices in a ledger. Decisions in hands. He would pick more rope.
The horn from the hills sounded once more, not the Warden now, but something else. It wasn't language. It didn't need to be. It said: Bones moving in a shape that used to be a village and now was a tool.
Ryn felt the old knot he'd tied this morning tighten.
"Again," he said a third time, and the palisade door creaked open, and a woman with a ledger and a cracked pike stepped out and said, "Rent."
Hana laughed like a woman who had tasted every man's price. "You and every pig," she said. "We have a rope. Hold it or let it cut you. Choose."
The woman squared her shoulders. "Door," she said. "Left open longer than I like. Close it if you can."
Ryn nodded and set his hands.
He would pick his specialization in blood and timber, not on a clean panel. He would be a rook when he had a board under him and not a hunger behind his eyes.
He put his back to the door and pulled. The day ended with his muscles making their own prayer. The next would begin with the Warden's knock answered or not.
He would not touch the bone-shard at night.
He tied a knot on that truth and hoped the world would not come to cut it in his sleep.