Dawn came copper and wrong. The hum from the ossuary to the west had changed by a half-step in the night, a pitch that made the hairs at the back of Ryn's neck want to stand. The tollhouse's slab answered in a faint sympathetic vibration he could feel in his molars. He ignored both. He had chosen not to hum at stones in the dark. Morning wasn't better; it was simply honest about what it asked.
North, then. Into bone.
They moved quick. Rope along waists. Children in the middle. Dorran upright between Hana and Jarla's husband, grousing in a tone that made his pain sound like an old story he'd told one too many times. The donkey stamped, ears flicking, resigned saint that she was. Trella watched them go from the palisade gap, bark horn tucked at her hip, eyes flat with the sour triumph of a woman who had paid a day's rent in patience and wanted her change in blood. Ryn had none to give her but rope. He left her a knotted coil, their knots, and she took it without a thank-you, which suited him.
The north path felt older than the road, older than the village. It cut along a low ridge where hedges had greyed into tough old wood. Past that, fields gone to seed, a stand of hawthorn rearing like a row of old women seeing the weather first. At the knuckle of hill, the ossuary tower squatted with its ring of bone-lattice and slow breathing hum. The lattice looked like rib and tendon taught bad manners; it rose and fell with a rhythm too even to be animal. Bone crept along the stones where moss had the courtesy to get out of its way.
Sereth took point at the ridge's crown, bow angled low, eyes narrow. "Wind's wrong," he said softly. "Coming around from the west and down the hollow."
Tamsin's knives glittered once and vanished. "I hate polite bones," she said. "Messy bones I can forgive. Polite bones think too much."
Ilyon loped alongside the donkey, fingers twitching to the rhythm of unmade decisions. He'd slept, but thought had kept moving through the dark like mice. "Peripheral understructure will be…" He stopped when Tamsin's hand lifted without her looking; he made a face, swallowed the rest, and pointed. "Salt," he said instead, offering actual usefulness. "I boiled down a little from the last brine barrel. Not much. Enough for a door and a threshold."
"Good," Ryn said. He placed his palm on the rope at his own waist and let the Linework sense settle into his bones. The ground offered gentle paths and cruel ones. The cruel ones were cleaner.
They didn't walk in under the tower. They skirted the bone-lattice's breath, staying on the back of the ridge where the slope would help a run and not push a stumble. The hum pressed at their teeth, an insistent child. Ryn kept his jaw set and let his hands talk to rope.
At the foot of the knuckle, the ground slumped into a cut made by old water. Two sheep bones—wrongly clean—lay by a trickle. The children's eyes fixed on them and went wider. Pell counted under his breath, counting something that wasn't bones because he had learned to count when scared. Ryn felt a mean love in his chest for the boy and hated the world for requiring it.
"Door," Sereth murmured. He pointed with his chin. The base of the tower's ring had an opening where bone-lattice had thinned, less a door than a section the ground had convinced to rest otherwhere. Smoke—no, dust—laced the air within, lazy, clean-scented like something that had never eaten anything dirty in its life.
Ryn took a breath and let it out through his nose. "We go in, fetch what we can, break what we have to, get out." He looked at Ilyon. "Rope on me. If it pulls, you let it sing in your hands for a count of three and then you pull me whether I ask or not."
Ilyon nodded, face too intent. He looped rope around Ryn's waist twice and tied a knot Ryn had taught him without ragged edges. "Three," he said, mouth dry. "Then yank."
"Good," Ryn said. He slipped the buckler onto his arm, slid the pry bar through his belt, and took two paces into the shadow of the bone ring.
Cold pushed at him like a patient hand. The light inside was wrong—clean, not generous. The lattice had grown into shelves and ribs and hollows where things might sit: tools, bones, the little luxuries that make a house grow teeth. Ryn saw a kettle set into a niche. He saw a child's cracked bowl. He saw a scatter of bones that were not animal and not arranged and not clean. He did not look long enough to let his mind have them.
The hum inside was louder. It offered a tone. He did not take it.
"Hungry," the not-voice said. It was curious, not demanding. He hated it. He moved forward in the slow three-point stance of a man arguing with a roof beam: hand, foot, breath. The rope hummed a hair against his waist. It made him feel less alone.
On a low shelf grown from rib, a box sat. It had been a good box once—brass-bound, oiled wood. It had old scratch marks at the lock where someone had taught themselves to lie and own things. It had been opened and closed with care. It hummed quiet now because the slab under the floor hummed under it.
Ryn flicked open the lid with two fingers, ready for teeth. There were none. Inside lay three wrapped items and a folded paper. He didn't like paper. He took the paper anyway because it made other men do stupid later. The wrapped items went into his vest. He didn't check them. He would in the light. He closed the box and placed it back exactly, because sometimes you don't tell a house it has been robbed.
At the far side of the ring, the lattice puckered and then poured, a slow collapse. Ryn flinched back on instinct, hand up. The lattice didn't strike. It leaned. A tendril—clean and pale—tasted the air by his face without touching. He could smell bone—not the way graves smell—cleaner, like old teeth in a cup. He nearly laughed because the hum in his head wanted him to. He didn't.
"Map," the not-voice said. Like a child who had learned the word yesterday and liked its shape.
"Later," Ryn said, out loud without permission, because his mouth had decided speech was a tool. "Not yours."
The tendril retracted a finger's breadth, not offended. Curious. He hated it.
He backed the last two steps and measured the hinge at the door with his foot. "Out," he breathed. The rope tightened. He went.
They slid back along the ridge and down into the cut. The hum followed a pace and then stopped the way a dog does at a property line taught by a mean hand. The children exhaled. Jarla's husband's hands stopped shaking. Dorran swore under his breath without moving his mouth and Ryn wanted to hug him for it and did not.
Back in daylight, under hawthorn's honest shade, he untied the wrapped items with fingers that had learned to be quick and gentle at the same time. A small tin of salve—good, brown with something honey-smelling; a roll of clean linen; a small, pale wedge of the good stuff, the peripheral—properly cut. Not much. Enough to make the perimeter less stupid for a day. He didn't let the shard in his skin purr. He wrapped it again, double, and handed it to Tamsin. "Your pocket," he said. "If I reach for it, you cut my hand off."
She smiled like a girl who had pushed a boy into a river when he needed it. "Gladly," she said, slid it away, and patted her hip like a promise.
He unfolded the paper last. It had good weight. The hand was clean and busy. He hated it already. The note read: "Harvest schedule adjusted per drift. Collection at west yard minus two. Bone-keeper stable; keep it fed. Pay ran. Docket attached." It was signed with a tidy line, no name. Ryn felt his stomach drop. Someone local had been feeding this. Not the sponsor's crew. Someone who brought bits—bones, meat, everything bones like—to keep the thing polite at the edge of their house.
"Who?" Hana asked, reading his face because she was not a fool.
"Someone who wanted order," Ryn said. He wanted to spit. He didn't. His mouth was too dry.
"Trella's cousin," Tamsin said lightly, malicious as gossip. Ryn shot her a look. She shrugged. "Someone like that. Some man with an ache and an idea and no patience for ugly doors. You can hate him later. Right now we set teeth."
He swallowed. "We set teeth," he agreed. He divided linen and salve. He tucked the schedule paper into his vest and hated that he had done that; he didn't want to be a man who collected documents. He broke the world's rules by smiling at the donkey when she nosed his hand and finding a carrot and pretending it counted.
They got an hour before someone tried to take it. Men are not the only creatures who interrupt meals.
The ground in the cut, where old water had eaten, began to heave. Not enough to throw anyone. Enough to displace air. Ilyon's hand spasmed around the salt packet. "Burrowers," he whispered. "Wrong ones. Big ones."
Sereth put a shaft to string without being told. Tamsin sidled a pace left and opened her body like a hinge. Ryn looked at the hawthorn's root and tied a line to it with a knot he had never needed to use on a living plant and hoped it wouldn't mind.
The first wrong rat—larger than any rat—burst up through dirt fifteen paces downhill. It had the shape of a thing that had wanted to be a rat and failed in details—head too flat, teeth set like a comb, blind, with whiskers that were not whiskers but plumes tasting air. It reared and hissed a sound like steam. The second burst harder, angling toward the donkey. She spun, ears back, a thing of grace Ryn didn't deserve. Sereth's arrow hit the second behind the shoulder. It screamed; it died like a thing that didn't know dying but had read about it.
The first surged, hit the salt line Ilyon had thrown in a neat thin arc, and flinched, nose writhing, unable to bear the taste of a thing that made its blood forget itself. Ryn stepped in with Hook-and-Break, not into the bite—never into the bite—but to its flank. He looped line around one of the stunted forelimbs, torqued, rolled his shoulder, listened for bone in rope to answer—there, there, now—and let the line do the ugliness his hands didn't want to. It screamed. The hawthorn root groaned. He hated using a living thing. He left the loop slack a half-heartbeat sooner than he should have. The rat writhed and bit the air where his hand had been, teeth clipping nothing. Tamsin stepped into its mouth and out of it and left a narrow cut across the hinge that closed too soon. Sereth's next arrow pinned its shoulder to the ground, unkind, necessary.
"Back," Ilyon hissed. "More."
They came like bad decisions: fast, stupid, with more hunger than sense. Ryn set the falter rope across the second gap in the cut where a man would try to leap and the wrong rat tried to wriggle and found itself flipped onto its back, soft belly exposed for half-a-breath. Tamsin took the breath and paid it back with point. Sereth made theirs second guess their own smell with an arrow shaft through a whisker. Ilyon threw a pinch of salt, sparing as a miser, then saved the rest. Hana, because she was Hana, hit one in the face with a bucket and called it names like a child, because sometimes contempt hurts more than rope.
They killed three. The fourth went away and took its mistakes with it. The earth settled like a tired flank. Ryn hated the way his hands were shaking and loved it too because it meant they still belonged to him. He checked the donkey. She nudged him in the ribs where the worst bruise slept and he swore and laughed in the same breath. He scratched her cheek and lied to her about apples. She looked at him like she loved him anyway.
Hana handed around water. "That's your breakfast," she said. "No time for more. Bones hum. Ledger men walk. Pick where you pay."
"East was the promise," Sereth said, looking not at Ryn but at the world's high edge, calculating. "But if we leave this—" he nodded at the tower, at the hum "—it will have teeth in our shadow by dusk."
Ryn wanted to go east. He wanted to keep his promise to himself to handle one thing at a time. He wanted to not walk into a building made of bones and ask it to judge him. "We go in," he said. "Now. Fast. We take it before the sponsor learns to talk to it. If we leave it, it will take a child tonight. If we break it, it will take something else later. We pick now and hope later forgets."
Tamsin grinned without humor. "You make bad choices with good hands," she said.
Hana snorted. "He makes good bread with bad flour," she said. "Move."
They took the rope down the last half-slope and into the tower's ring. Ryn felt the hum in his teeth. He would not hum back. He entered through the same thin section and put his body into argument with bone. It wasn't a fight yet. It was an assertion.
The keeper had grown greedy in the hour. The lattice rose, slow and mistakenly grand. It didn't strike. It tried to fill everything. Ryn ducked low, under the breath, and slid left to the slab's seam in the floor where he had felt it vibrating earlier. He didn't have enough salt to draw lines everywhere. He did have a pry bar and poor manners.
"Ilyon," he hissed. "Glue." The alchemist blinked. "Sugar," he said, startled, then bright, and then ashamed for being bright around whatever this was. He smeared glue under Ryn's hands in the crack where stone met lattice. Ryn jammed the pry bar under the seam and listened for the world to say stop. It did. He pushed anyway.
The slab lifted a hair. Cold breath came up—a coffin opened in reverse. The hum changed pitch, dissonant over itself. The lattice twitched and then whipped, but not toward Ryn—toward the slab. It wanted to clean the mess. Tamsin's knife flicked—not to cut flesh, to cut glue—scoring the line where sugar would hold or not. Sereth shot an arrow at a joint and pinned two pieces of bone to each other so they would argue about which was the right one. It worked terribly. It worked.
Ryn hauled. The slab rose another hair. The wedge of peripheral he'd wrapped and given to Tamsin earlier sang in her pocket like a rope bitten into by a drunk dog. She grinned and didn't move her hand to it. He loved her for that for a second that felt like wrong prayer. He ripped the slab another hair.
The keeper said, "Map," again, as if offering a bargain. Ryn spat on the stone and pulled. His shoulders burned. His wrists screamed. His palms bled a little where old rope burns cracked like dry clay. He pulled anyway. The slab came up enough to slide fingers into. He slid his hand into a place where it wanted to take it. He put his fingers under the edge and made a noise that wasn't a word. He pushed at the lip with the pry bar. Ilyon poured the rest of his damned sugar glue into the seam and it set wrong and right both and the slab stuck open a painful handspan, refusing to decide.
"Now," Ryn grunted. Tamsin, who had been waiting for that word without knowing what it would mean, stuffed her hands in too and made the wrong noise and swore and grinned and said, "Later, you owe me bracelets," and dragged a wrapped something out of the slot where the hum was worst. Ryn didn't look at it. He pulled more, unwilling hand, and another something came free. Ilyon's hand joined theirs without his mind's permission and he shrieked through his teeth as the slab bit him with cold.
They had three lumps of wrong weight on the floor before the sugar glue admitted it was a lie and gave up. The slab slammed back down with a noise like a promise. The hum sharpened. The lattice turned mad.
"Out," Sereth said. He didn't raise his voice. He never needed to. Tamsin kicked the three lumps of wrapped peripheral under her into Ryn's satchel. Ryn spun, swallowed the not-voice saying "hungry" so close his ear rang with it, ducked under a lash of lattice that meant to be gentle and wasn't, and bolted.
They ran in the only shape running can be done in under judgment: quick, low, boring. The lattice whipped and caught a strip of his shirt and ripped it like he was made of something worse than cloth. He felt a bugle of heat across his ribs as old bruises remembered promises. He didn't look back. You never look back when the door you've held is collapsing; you use the time you bought like a thief.
They stumbled out into the cut. Faint light washed them in honest color. Ilyon cradled his hand and hissed and looked at it and decided he could be proud of the hurt. Tamsin spat and wiped her mouth and didn't show she was shaking. Sereth drew back without shooting, sighing through his nose as if the air had offended him by being too easy on his lungs.
The tower made one small sigh too—horrible, almost sorry—and then the hum dropped two notes.
"Hungry," it said, quieter, like a thing that had had someone take its cup away. Ryn hated it. He loved that it sounded smaller.
"We go," he said. "No staying. No testing. We go before it learns a new word."
They went. It shouldn't have worked. It did because they had made it work and because a thing with more mind than body sometimes forgets that bodies doing ugly, boring work dictate outcomes.
At the brook, Ryn sank to a squat and washed his hands in cold water the color of old coins. He bled mostly filth. The shard humming under his skin slid down another notch; the piece in Tamsin's pocket went quiet. He could feel the urge to make the next thing big and dramatic lean toward his shoulder. He chose a deadfall instead and set it across the path behind them where a man would step and remember he had bones.
Sereth exhaled, the permission to breathe. "Now east," he said. "We paid the bill. We can pick up the next one before it has numbers."
Hana huffed. "I will break your nose later so you remember how math feels," she told Ryn.
"I'll accept it," he said. He looked at his hands. They shook. Good. They still talked to him in his language.
The System, which had been quiet under the Warden's press and the tower's hum, slid into his peripheral with cold neat lines.
[Ossuary Peripheral: Disrupted. Drift decreased (local).]
[Experience: +78.]
[Trapper II — Progress 35%.]
[Linework III learned.]
[Snapline Step — Stability: 70%.]
[Warning: Sponsor attention increased. Enforcer re-tasking. Surgeon curiosity heightened (danger).]
[Warden: Pleased (temporary). Patience remaining: narrow.]
Ryn almost laughed. Pleased. He hoped the Warden liked their boredom. He didn't have the breath to hate the System for its tidy lines. He breathed, and the breathing made it less like a ledger and more like a list of jobs to do.
They reached the ridge's east-side terrace by midday. The sky had gone white with thin cloud. The moor's wind had turned sour in that way of late morning before a change. The sponsor's crew had not yet returned; they were busy trying to persuade someone to pay rent for bones. The Guild's pikes had set two posts near the weir and were learning how to be patient under river stink. The spear-woman was not on a ridge; she was somewhere else making men think twice.
They stopped at a hawthorn stand to drink and check wounds. Ilyon's hand looked like a mouth had kissed it. Hana bound it with linen and slathered salve on it with a competence that had nothing to do with medicine and everything to do with mothering pain. He hissed and thanked no one. Tamsin sat with her back against the hawthorn and closed her eyes for three breaths; she opened them and they were still knives. Sereth wiped shafts with oil and counted the barbs on his next arrow as if they were little debts he meant to collect, one by one.
Ryn allowed himself to sit and pull the wrapped lumps out of his satchel and unwrap one corner to make sure he had not pulled old carrot ends out of an altar. The peripheral pieces gleamed a clean pale without shine. They smelled of winter stone with a thickness under it, like milk turned wrong. He double-wrapped them and double-wrapped the pocket of his satchel and slid them under his shirt like a plague.
The donkey bumped his head. He gave her the last carrot. She chewed so slowly it might have been thought. He loved her for it.
"How many," Hana asked, voice so casual it did not deserve an answer and got one anyway.
"Three," Ryn said. "Enough to make door hold and fence lie less. Enough to make my head hum wrong. Enough to make the surgeon come if we show him."
Tamsin tilted her head. "Don't," she said. "Not yet."
He nodded. "Not yet," he agreed, then: "Later; if we need to break his map."
Hana spat. "We will. We always do."
They moved again. East lay a small hamlet that had decided to pretend to be a town by putting a market square in the middle of a patch of dirt and calling it something. Ryn did not want to know its old name. He wanted it to be a place where rope mattered. He walked faster without meaning to. The donkey stepped with him without resenting him for it, which made him feel worse about not having an apple.
They topped the last low rise and the hamlet lay below, its carts pulled into a square, its people in a neat circle around two men standing on a crate. Sponsor men. Not the enforcer. Not the surgeon. A negotiator with a soft voice and a sharp smile. He held a paper. He read something. He made the word rent sound like prayer.
Trella had not come here. There was no Trella. There was a man with the frightened eyes of a decent liar, a woman bound to her child with her jaw, a boy counting with his eyes closed. Ryn felt tired enough to fall in love with all of them for a half-heartbeat and knew it was grief disguised as anger.
He walked into the square like he belonged there. Tamsin slid right, knives out of sight and then not. Sereth drifted left and became a post nothing could lean on without noticing. Hana went to the women and reached for a bucket without asking. Ilyon stood very straight and said nothing and watched the negotiator's hands like they were a recipe.
The negotiator looked up and frowned because his words did not fit the mouths he'd been given. He shifted sentences with the ease of a man who had made profit in three dialects. "We do not demand much," he said. "We only—"
He broke off. The enforcer had arrived. Quiet. A ripple in how men at the circle's edge stood. He stepped in with his blue ribbon and his crystalline cheek set better and his mouth like a knife that had been wiped and not cleaned. He saw Ryn. He smiled. It looked like something you give a dog before you take its bone.
"Half-elf," he said, almost pleasant. "We should stop disappointing each other."
Ryn put his hand on the rope at his waist and felt the lines of the square. He made his mouth boring. "Rent?" he asked Trella's old tone, and the whole circle breathed in because some words are spells.
The System slid a neat black line into his vision.
[Event: Sponsor pressure high. Options: pay, fight, stall, misdirect.]
[Advice: Fields, not edges. Array the square. Borrow the Guild.]
"They have papers," Sereth murmured at his left.
"We have rope," Ryn said. He lifted his voice enough for the circle to hear and not enough to be a speech. "If you pay them, they will need more rent next week because another thing will eat theirs. If you don't, they will break your door and call it regret. If you let me set a line, you will hold a day for free. Then you can choose which sin you like better."
The enforcer listened with a face that said he was bored but making a note. "You are not wrong," he said. "You are insufferable. Let me buy you. I will pay you in wood and a bed. You deny me and I will put a mark on your donkey, and then every good boy with an empty stomach will try, and one day one will succeed."
Ryn's stomach twisted cold. He looked at the donkey. She looked at him with old honesty. "No," he said.
The enforcer nodded, as if he appreciated a good ritual. "Then let us do something tiresome," he said.
It was tiresome. It was not clean. They did not wait for him to throw the first nice thing. They arrayed the square's carts into a rook's idea of a board: two lines, staggered, with a choke point at the well and deadfall ropes set where men would step high. Ryn laid a field of lines that would tug ankles at odd rhythms. He tethered rope low to posts with quick-release hitches that he alone knew; he promised himself he wouldn't forget where. He placed the donkey in the square's back corner like a queen. She huffed, unimpressed.
The enforcer didn't charge. He made them tired first. He sent in two men with poles to pry at cart gaps. Tamsin cut one pole and turned the shaft into a line anchor in the same breath. Sereth put arrows through sleeves and thighs and knees and never throats—slow was better today. Ryn threw a cup—small—of skunk-water at a man whose face needed humility and the man learned a new word for ammonia. He hated that he had thought of Ilyon's trick as his and filed it under later.
They pushed. They fell back. They tested the opposite gap. They tried to pull a cart. Ryn let the quick-release hitch go and the cart moved two feet then caught on a falter rope and they swore in three accents. They regrouped. They tried again. He pulled again. They swore better.
Then the surgeon came.
He stepped into the square's shade like a minted coin into a dry hand. His nose had set wrong; the glitter at the edge of it had been filed, not healed. He gazed at Ryn as if seeing a page he had loved and lost and been given again. His eyes went to Tamsin's hip like a dog's to a cupboard. "You have a piece," he said, delighted. "May I see?"
"No," Tamsin said, delighted for different reasons.
The surgeon's lips bunched. He sighed delicately and took a small sachet from his belt between two fingers like a cook. He threw a pinch of something into the air. The powder glittered. It drifted toward the well. It hummed at the slab under the square.
"Don't hum," Ryn said, heart in his mouth. He yanked the quick-release on his best line and let the cart crash into the well curb so the hum turned into a buck and the well answered with a shiver and the powder fell in and died.
The surgeon clapped, genuinely pleased. "Fun," he said. "Do it again."
Ryn flung a jar. Not oil: vinegar. It broke at the surgeon's feet. He stepped back without lifting his hem. That told Ryn the surgeon had not been hungry enough often enough. Good. He wanted the man to step in something mean sometime. Not now. Later.
"Kill one and speak to the other," Tamsin murmured at his shoulder like an old idea. "Pick."
He picked boredom instead. He tied a new line. He pulled. He kept the line taut while men threw themselves at it and learned. He moved the line when their breath made their decision for them. He almost enjoyed the ugliness of it.
The enforcer watched and smiled a tired God's smile. "We will keep doing this," he said. "Until you give me whatever you keep under your shirt or your donkey. I will not take it by force today because I am a man with patience." He leaned on his spear. "I will take breath rent instead. Ten lungs, small or large."
Hana spat and smiled without humor. "I will break your jaw," she said, not to him, to his words.
Ryn felt something in him finally stand still. He leaned on the line. He felt the board under him. It wasn't his yet. It would be. He was not a rook now. He was a trapper with too much rope and too much faith in rope. He breathed in and out and let the System, the Warden, the sponsor, Garron, the ossuary, the donkey all fall into lines under his hands like tools he didn't deserve.
"No," he said to the enforcer, drearily. "Try later."
"Fine," the enforcer said, also dreary. "I hate work." He waved two fingers. His lot melted backward. The surgeon pouted. The negotiator folded his paper with the precision of a man someone should force to get drunk once in his life. The circle breathed. No one thanked Ryn. Good.
He looked at the woman with the knot-jaw and the boy with the scar and the man with the liar's eyes. "Hold," he said, and left his rope tied to a cart and held their hands on it for three breaths until they understood that was rent as good as any other.
The System, which had been waiting like a clerk at a window, slid its sheet toward his eye with neat, tidy lines.
[Defend Square: Completed (Stall).]
[Experience: +54.]
[Field Control (array) techniques unlocked (seed).]
[Snapline Step — Stability: 72%.]
[Title (local): Fixer — increased trust in communities (small).]
Ryn breathed out through his nose. "Later," he told it, because that was his answer for everything today. He turned to Hana and Sereth and Tamsin and Ilyon and the donkey and felt his mouth wanting to say something like "thank you" and swallowed it. It would stick.
"North-east," Sereth said. "Fast path before the bones remember we annoyed them."
"East," Tamsin said, for mischief. "I want to make someone else's life ugly."
"North," Hana said, because she had heard the Warden. "Pay now."
"North," Ryn agreed. He would pay later too. He fixed the knot at his waist, checked the quick-release on his hips, and looked down at his rope-burned hands. They shook. He didn't hide it.
They moved. Behind them, a woman with a ledger watched from a doorway and made a mark on paper that would try to outlast rope. Ahead, the ridge fell into a slate-cut path where men had once walked to a quarry. The ossuary hummed ahead, patient and wrong.
Ryn chose and did not love it. He put his hands on the rope, and whispered, for himself alone, anchor, then weight, because saying it out loud might make him stupid.
The Warden's horn did not sound. The enforcer's did, faint, elsewhere. The surgeon hummed to himself like someone who had discovered the first chapter of a bad book. Garron's men at the weir shouted an old word for "hold" and meant it. The donkey nosed for an apple and accepted the lie.
Ryn set his jaw and went.