The slate-cut path to the north took them out of voices and into a kind of silence that wasn't peace—just the absence of people. It was the old road to the quarry, Ryn decided, by the way the stone underfoot had been worn flat in long, shallow crescents, and by the rusty stains in places where iron tools had been left to weather. The hedges thinned into gnarled hawthorn and scrub oak, then opened to a low shelf of land where the hill jutted like a knuckle and the ossuary tower squatted with its ring of bone-lattice and that patient, wrong hum.
They went fast because slow gives the world time to decide. Rope around waists, children in the middle, Dorran shocked into grudging uprightness by a dose of Hana's vinegar, the donkey a steady mass at Ryn's shoulder with every step a benediction he didn't deserve. The piece of peripheral in Tamsin's pocket lay quiet. The shard under Ryn's skin hummed once as if clearing its throat; he rubbed at it and gave it nothing.
"I'll take the high," Sereth said, barely a puff of breath. He slipped up along the hawthorn where an old sheep-track had cut notches into the soil, taking his shadow with him. Tamsin went the other way to a rocky outcrop and vanished like she had taught the rocks to hold still around her. Ilyon hovered at the donkey's flank, hands twitching toward his pouches and then reluctantly away. "Salt," he whispered. "Enough for two lines. No more unless we boil it out of the well."
"Two lines," Ryn said, the repetition a way to make decision feel like habit. "Door and threshold."
The cut up to the tower had the look of a small river dried, its bed a mix of gravel and old bones ground down to powder that stuck to boots like flour. The hum was stronger here; it sat in the joints. The bone-lattice rose and fell, each slow breath revealing more of its internal pattern: ribs running in spirals, spurs like calcified vines, the hints of a spine rib that had decided to be upright. Something like tendrils rippled across the outer ring and withdrew, not striking, tasting air.
"Hungry," the not-voice said from the shadow of the ring, the word soft and inquisitive, a child's echo. Pell, tied to the rope a pace behind Ryn, whispered "One, two, three," under his breath to cover it with his own map.
"Door," Ryn said to Ilyon without looking at him, and the alchemist scattered one tight pinch of brine-white along the threshold where stone met bone. It hissed and crusted in a thin line. The tendrils retreated a thumb's breadth. The hum stayed indifferent and patient, like someone holding a lid down on a pot and expecting it to rattle eventually.
Ryn took two steps into the shadow of the ring, wariness knitting into his calves. The light inside wasn't darkness; it was filtered and too clean. The stamp of men was obvious: a brass-bound box on a shelf of lattice, a kettle hung on a rib, tallow smears in small fingerprints on bone. And the wrongness under it was patient as stone.
They had a goal and had to pretend it was simple: pull three more packages from the slab, make the ossuary less hungry, plant an anchor for their route north. The Warden had been clear; the ossuary would want them, and if they gave it what it asked now, it would ask for more later. Do it on their own timing. Ryn hated the timing. He did it anyway.
"This thing wants to learn," Ilyon whispered, more to himself than anyone else. "It presses the edge of its ring where the salt is thin. Put more there."
"You have enough for one more line," Ryn reminded him, voice flat. "Two lines or none. Pick."
Ilyon swallowed half a dozen words and nodded. "Threshold," he said, and moved.
Ryn went for the seam in the slab again. The pry bar slid into the isolate with the reluctant ease of a man agreeing to hold a door he didn't want to patronize. The sugar glue from last time had set where it wanted. It had made an ugly film that crusted under the pry bar and cracked like caramel. Not strong enough to hold the slab open this time; enough to make the hinge whine when the bar cut into it. He set his shoulder and levered and felt it lift a hair.
The lattice shifted toward him. It didn't strike. It poured, just enough to fill space. He ducked under and set his foot under the lip of the slab and hated the hiss that passed through his teeth. Tamsin slid into pride of place without asking and stuffed her hands in along his, swore as cold bit bone, and said cheerfully, "You owe me rings." Sereth's arrow whispered past and clacked into a joint with a sound like someone rapping on teeth.
Between Ryn's arms and Tamsin's swear and Ilyon's thin line of salt, the slab came up enough to take two packages with a quick hand. They were smaller than yesterday's—someone had robbed the box already. Ryn stuffed them into his satchel without looking because the not-voice was saying "map" again and it made him want to tell it the shape of his hands. He pulled, slammed the slab back down, and rolled out backwards in the same motion, the rope at his waist singing in Ilyon's hands as the line took strain and gave it back.
Bone-lattice whipped; he expected it. He didn't expect it to change mid-strike, the whip flattening into a pane of bone that slid toward the threshold like a door closing. It hit the salt and cracked fine, a spiderweb through wrong glass. Ilyon threw his second pinch of salt along the line and the pane pulled back a fraction, embarrassed again. It healed itself slowly, the broken mesh knitting with wrong apology.
"Out," Sereth said. Tamsin didn't wait to be told. They ran like men who have borrowed seconds and don't mean to pay them back. The hum rose and then dropped as they cleared the ring; it sounded like an annoyed old man. Ryn ran until the rope went slack at his waist and then kept running until his breath scraped and then stopped and turned and listened just to see if the hum would follow. It didn't.
They took a moment in the shadow of a rock that had survived being the wrong shape for a long time. Ryn unwrapped the packages with the care of a man pulling chips of glass out of his skin. Three pale wedges. Enough to make their path cleaner and someone else's worse.
"We don't keep these long," he said. "Bury one here for the next. One in the spring west. One we carry to the Warden. They're cleaner than the shard under my skin. I hate that."
Tamsin took one and tucked it in her pocket like a sin she was proud of. "Later," she said. "We make it someone else's hum."
"We will," Ryn said. "We have to move. The hill will shake hard when it remembers the breath it just lost."
"Map," Ilyon whispered under his breath, mocking the wrong voice, punishing himself for wanting to answer it. "Map this: run."
They ran on along the terrace. The world had more room now that the hum was smaller. The wind changed and came from the north, thin and mean; it shifted old smells around and brought a more human one to Ryn's nose—smoke, old oil, stew burned to the bottom of a pot. He lifted his head and saw the next northern stand of trees, a little wood that had learned to grow around stones, called something in someone's grandmother's time and now just one more place with shade and ambush. Between the wood and the ossuary's ring, a yard had been cleared, and in that yard men paced. Not sponsor's men. Not Garron's. Not Guild. These were from further north, by their pale hair and the way they carried low round shields like they had invented the idea. Not the spear-woman's lot. The bark of their orders carried like gulls.
"Strangers," Sereth said, mouth tight. "Hungry strangers."
"You have room for more friends?" Tamsin asked, and Ryn nearly laughed at the irony and didn't.
Their path turned east into shallow lanes and old ditches, then forked. North-east, the ridge fell into a shallow place where water once had been. East, the old toll road ran into the shoulder of a hill with ferns and bramble and a shaded cut—a chance to avoid being seen for a half-mile and be bitten by ten thousand smaller things. Ryn picked bramble. He took the donkey's lead and hauled lightly and she ducked her head and fooled bramble with the elegance of a queen.
They had almost made it through the cut when the rope in Ryn's hands vibrated with the wrong hum. Not the ossuary. Not the sponsor. Not the Warden. A different little song, sharp and eager, like a bad instrument being played by a child. It came from his satchel. The packages.
"Tamsin," he breathed.
She had already pulled the wedge out from her pocket and wrapped it twice in old cloth. The hum dulled. "It wants to sing with its little friends," she said. "It's a little priest."
"I want to throw them into the creek and have the water explain itself," Ryn muttered, and hated how much like the Warden that sounded.
"Do," Hana said, breath light. "After we use them to make the ground behave. Then we throw them in. We don't have the luxury to pretend sin is boring."
"Not bored," Ryn said, tightening the donkey's strap until it bit the skin on his hand. He liked the pain. It brought him back from thoughts.
They reached a spring half hidden by ferns, its water running down a set of stones like someone had built a stair and forgotten it under green. It would do. Ryn dug with his hands again, the ordinary labor of moving small stones satisfying in the way it always was, even when the world had gone mad. He placed one of the wedges at the lip where water left stone and tucked it under the flow. It hummed, less wrong now. The hum ran down the water into the ditch and Ryn felt the ground around the spring settle a fraction. He did not thank anyone.
They moved. The ridge's shoulder curved, and the cut took them out into a little valley where an old finch-hedge had been allowed to grow into a line of tight trees. Beyond, a couch of stone lay like the skull of the world partly uncovered. It would be a good place to sit and watch and be bored in the miserable way that might keep you alive. Ryn took one glance and passed it—because staying made the world notice you. He went wrong and right both and kept them moving.
Toward noon, the last of the smooth wind died, and the heat came up. The donkey's breath grew louder. The children's mouths drew lines of dust. Ilyon gave them water like medicine, not kindness, and Ryn loved him for that too, because he had learned which kind saved and which kind killed.
That was when they heard it: a horn from the east, not the sponsor's neat two notes, not Garron's, not the Warden's. Three long notes and a short, like an impatient child hitting a drum. The enforcer's signal for a drag-net being pulled tight, maybe. Or the new northern crew telling each other where their own bite was.
"We don't sit for it," Sereth said.
"No," Ryn agreed. "We move."
They cut across a beetle's path through sandal-high bracken and came down into a flat where an old cottage had collapsed inward and grown soft edges. It had hum under its floor too. There was nowhere in this part of the world now that didn't. Ryn wanted to pull every wedge up and throw them all into the same ditch and watch them fight, and chickened out because he didn't trust himself not to watch too long.
As they came over the last sheep-cropped rise, the hamlet to the north-east—another stubborn patch labeling itself a town with a market box—showed in its little valley, its carts drawn up into a half-turned square and two watchmen with cudgels at a gap. One of them blew the bark horn in three try-hard notes. Rent again. Sponsor had beaten them. The enforcer stood in the square like a man in a shirt he didn't like and was going to wear anyway. His surgeon wasn't visible. That made Ryn more afraid than seeing him would have.
Ryn stood a half-beat. He needed to pick: run in and remake a square with lines and buy a day of breath, or hold back and watch the enforcer's crew count rent for bone and then take the collection into the ossuary before dusk. If he watched, he would know their habit. If he ran, he would spend energy he would need tonight when the ossuary was angry they had pulled teeth from its mouth.
He felt Hana at his shoulder without seeing her, a presence like bread set on a board. She didn't say a word. She didn't have to.
"Run," he said anyway, because not moving risks more. "We help. Then we leave before he remembers that we're interesting."
They moved into the square like a rope being laid. The enforcer turned with a face that had decided to practice being friendly. "Me again," he said. "You."
"Rent," Ryn said, boring.
"Rent," Trella would have said, with fond contempt. He put the writ up by reflex and then lowered it, ashamed for himself and for an idea he didn't believe in. He didn't know if the enforcer caught it.
They set lines fast. The square already had bad fences; they turned them into good teeth. A rope across the well to catch a runner. A falter rope at the cart's front where a man would try to jump. A bell hung from a rafter, tuned to a wrong note so it would get onto Ryn's nerves before it got onto anyone else's. Tamsin set one jar of vinegar just to spite the surgeon's glitter, who wasn't even here, and for a second Ryn wanted to kiss her and then did not even think past the wanting to the why because he had better wants to worry about.
"Again," Ryn said to the enforcer, flat as a slate.
"Again," the enforcer agreed and lifted his two fingers. Men moved, not in a rush—like a tide. He didn't spend them quickly and he didn't pace them stingily. He spent them right. Ryn hated him for it almost as much as he respected it. The enforcer saw the line at the well and made a man learn it. He saw the falter rope and broke an ankle and made the boy next to him swallow a scream. He learned the wrong muffled note of Ryn's bell and sneered when it sang.
They held again. They held uglier. Their arms were longer and their breath shorter and their unkindness more exquisite. By dusk, the enforcer made a motion that meant his patience had come due. He pulled back and left a threat behind him like a debt scribble. "We will make you theirs," he said to Ryn, as if it were a kindness. "It will be better than being anyone else's."
"Don't turn poetic," Tamsin said. "It's bad on you. You sound like a man who has tasted a haunch and thinks he has eaten language."
He looked at her with the first real dislike he had shown. He fingered the blue ribbon on his spear. Then he was gone. His surgeon did not appear. That, somehow, was worse.
"North now?" Sereth asked, giving Ryn a chance to lie to himself. Ryn didn't.
"North," he said.
They went. The moon was climbing red, and the bone-lattice hummed like an old dog under a porch, counting itself alive. They skirted the little square and slipped into the quarry lane unnoticed because the enforcer had made men look at a cart he had set wrong on purpose. They made the last shelf of land before the quarry and the tower and the ring of bone. The hum was joyless now—hungry and insulted both.
"Set them," Ryn said, nodding at the satchel. "Make this ugly work count."
They buried one wedge at the foot of a hawthorn that had survived men. They set another in a rock hollow with water—Ryn hated giving it taste. They kept the last for the Warden. The slab in the tower hummed a tooth-grind. He didn't touch it.
They ran in. They pulled one more package. They nearly lost a hand and got it out with enough to make a thin anchorage. They came out with a bruise Ryn would love later because it would keep him from forgetting. He did not. He would not.
On the ridge back to the hamlet, the Warden's horn sounded once, flat. It wasn't a request. It was a ledger update no one could argue with. Ryn counted the alive. Pell. Jarla's boy. Kerrin with the sash. Hana's temper. Dorran's breath. The donkey's snore. He had nineteen breaths to buy more with. He pulled on the rope and felt the board under him, a shape he could use.
He wasn't a rook yet. He was a trapper who wanted to be something else and would have to learn how to make places into his pieces. He would.
The System slid its line in at the end, insultingly prim and exactly helpful:
[Ossuary raid: Night phase complete. Drift: -2 local. Attention: reduced (temporary).]
[Experience: +92.]
[Trapper II — Progress: 58%.]
[Array logic seed: 1/3 (Rook).]
[Upcoming: Sponsor enforcement at north-east (morning). Warden meeting east (midday).]
"I'll bring your shard," Ryn told the night—the Warden, the ossuary, the donkey, himself. "We won't hum in pipes."
"You promise too much," Tamsin said, gentle and cruel.
"Anchor first," he said. "Then weight."
Hana snorted. "And then you carry and pretend you like it," she said.
"Then I carry," he agreed.
He set the last wedge under a stone where the spring's water would muffle it. He touched nothing else. He sat, held rope, and let his hands shake because they had earned it.
He would pick Rook with a board under him. He would set deadfalls along hedge-line and trap field not as traps but as a language. He would hold this ugly door one day longer and then another.
He didn't sing to stones. He didn't need to. The rope sang enough.
The end of Act 2