Morning burned off the moor's thin mist too quickly. Heat came up the way it does when the sky has run out of places to put it. The ossuary's hum had moved one shelf back in Ryn's head—no longer at the fore, still there, like a tooth touching itself after a bad bite. East felt marginally safer, which meant it wasn't.
They moved along the old ridge-cart lane that tunneled through brush in places, then opened to hedged pasture in ragged rectangles. The donkey stepped with weary saint's grace. The rope at Ryn's waist sang lightly with each shift in grade. He had tied the line to Kerrin's belt, then to Hana's waist, then to Jarla's husband at the rear. It wasn't a long rope—just enough to say: if you stumble, we are attached.
Sereth ran the hedges like a rumor, keeping eyes and breathing quiet. Tamsin toggled between left and right flanks, choosing whichever would turn a small ugliness into a later safety. Ilyon, pouches clacking, walked in short bursts, then forced himself to stop and breathe like someone fighting the urge to talk to a storm.
The Warden's directive had been satisfied for the moment; their shard lay under a spring in a place where it would hum at the water instead of at Ryn's hand. The map in his skull—the one the Warden had forced into him—showed three little nodes glowing pale to the east and one larger, dormant under bone. He didn't love having the map. He loved having a way to choose where to bleed. Both could be true.
They had just cleared a bramble-choked gate when Sereth's hand came down, flat, with authority that could quiet wolves. He made a small, pure sound, the one even city boys know to mean stop. Ryn froze, hand on the donkey's lead, the rope tightening, then going slack, then tightening again as bodies settled into a stillness they hadn't had for days.
Ahead, the lane dipped into a shallow swale. A cart lay there at an angle, one wheel in a rut, the other free, leather traces cut. Four dead hens lay in a scatter of feathers like late snow. Ryn looked with his body, not his eyes. Cart. Wheel. Rut. Rope. The rut was smooth in a way that said the wheel hadn't slipped so much as been placed. Above, in the hedgerow, saplings had been cut and bent over the road and pinned with pegs. The pegs were new, the bending old. Ryn hated men who remembered old tricks.
"Ambush," Tamsin said softly, not in surprise—like saying the correct name. "Poles at that notch. Men in the ditch under that bramble. 'Smile and take coin' vests. Not the sponsor's tidy tips."
Sereth nodded once. "Left and right both. A man above with the throw-stone."
Ryn exhaled patiently through his nose. He'd built to fight men prying at doors; he would now have to fight men pretending to be doors. He put a finger to the line at his waist and tugged twice, a code they had made two villages ago. The rope tensed. Hana's hand tightened on a child's shoulder. Dorran, no longer play-brave, simply set his mouth like old bread and adjusted the grip on his shield sideways to act as a wedge.
"Cut them in the ditch," Sereth murmured. "Soft under there."
"Make them spend breath on accident," Ryn said. He set a quick-release on the lead line and hung it from the donkey's halter. He slid the falter rope from his belt, coiled twice in his left hand, anchor-hand steady. "Tamsin, left ditch. Sereth, the thrower. I'll take the cart, make it inconvenient. Hana, when you say move, we will."
"I always say move," Hana breathed with contempt, which was also love. "Move."
They did.
Ryn walked forward with the donkey as if he were alone, letting his shoulders hang loose, making himself the kind of thing men ignored when they are certain they are clever. He reached the cart and put his hands on the wheel as if he meant to lift. He pretended to grunt for someone else's benefit. The ditch breathed wrong. A man stood in the hedgerow above and raised the throw-stone with a little flourish he thought looked like danger. Ryn let go of the cart and the wheel spun free and the cart's bed dropped a hand's breadth across the lane. Not enough to crush. Enough to make men recalculate.
Sereth's arrow thunked against the throw-stone's chain and jerked the man's arm, ruining his elegant throw and turning it into an ugly drop. The stone hit the lip of the cart and bounced and broke apart with a hollow crack and a puff—nothing fancy; clotted dirt. The boy in the ditch beneath Ryn's left hand flinched, not because of fear, but because the sound shaved off the edge of his plan. Tamsin slipped her knife into that boy's forearm where it met rope and fetched it away with a practiced twist. He grunted, offended at the feeling rather than the pain. Good. He learned.
Three men burst out of the left ditch. Tamsin tangled the first with the falter rope at ankle and used his flail to trip the second. The third committed and brought a hook down at Ryn's shoulder. Ryn lifted the buckler and felt the shock run up into his old rope burns. He stepped into the man's space with Hook-and-Break and turned the man's wrist—not hard; at that angle it will resist—then took it farther with a knee to the outside of the elbow. The man made a sound like a nail being pried free. Ryn hated that he took satisfaction and used it anyway.
On the right, a man with a pole came over the hedge and landed on the cart. He was the mouth of the bandits—he had the look. He raised his hands and shouted something that sounded like a speech he had written in his head: "No need for blood, friends! Just a—"
Tamsin's knife took his breath by pure proximity. She didn't cut him; she placed the flat at his throat for a heartbeat, and he tasted metal. He reassessed the meter of his poem. "—small tax," he finished weakly.
Sereth's second arrow did not kill. It pinned a vest to a cart post, catching cloth and skin. The man yelled and then bit down on it with a sound that made Ryn think better of him for half an instant before hating him again, because his good sense would go to waste later. Ilyon stood low behind the donkey, not because he was a coward, but because he had learned he made good medicine happy from the ground. He had a small pouch of salt in his teeth and a little pinch between finger and thumb. He didn't throw it. He held it and whispered, "Not prodigal," to himself like a prayer.
The speechman on the cart made the mistake of trying to step back into the ditch behind and found that Tamsin had tied a batten to the cart's lower brace in the half-second when no one was looking; his heel hit the batten and he sat down hard into a surprise. Ryn used the second falter rope to hook his ankle and roll him flat. He put his foot on the man's chest and applied his bar like a bracket across the man's throat. Not enough to break. Enough to pause.
"Rent," Ryn said to him, bored, and the man blinked at the witlessness of it as if he hated himself for being witty. His hand opened. He had been holding a small brass whistle. It fell into the cart and rolled. Ilyon's eyes snagged on it as if it were a song. Ryn made a noise in his throat and Ilyon flinched and kept his hand on the salt.
Hana used the cart's change in height to swing a girl over the ditch and set her on her feet in a more honest piece of road. The girl fell once and then did not.
Behind, the hedgerow murmured with more bodies. This wasn't a two-ditch lesson—this was a crowded mouth trying to take a bite without choking. Ryn hated it when men tried to solve poverty with a crowd. He yanked the quick-release on the donkey's lead and linked it to the rear of the cart in a looping hitch. "Up," he told her, and the donkey, saint that she was, stepped sideways. The cart pivoted and jammed into the ditch in a way that made the world smaller, buying breath. The rope at Ryn's waist went taut as the line behind him took the strain.
"Enough," the speechman said, genuine for once, pain doing what it should. He raised both hands. "We're leaving with all our fingers. Don't take that from us. This was a bad bend."
"It was a bend," Ryn said. "It wasn't yours." He looked at Tamsin. She shrugged, not uninterested, then looked past the cart.
The thrower with the chain had got his breath back and had a second stone ready. He spun it fast. Sereth stepped left and shot him in the foot. Not because it would end the fight. Because men with full weight on their left foot become heartbroken at a greater rate. The man screamed and dropped the chain. He hopped badly toward his wrong friends and made them make choices. A good shot. Ugly. Ryn used the choice to make himself smaller, then larger. He tugged the falter rope he had thrown across the lane and felt the tug of an ankle that would be stairs for a man to trip up.
Tamsin palmed the brass whistle before Ilyon's hand betrayed his curiosity. She slid it into a pocket that was a kind of vault. Ilyon looked offended and then shamed at himself for the offense and then recited, under his breath, "You are not a dog," and Ryn loved him a little for making the effort.
"Back," the speechman tried again, and for once his men obeyed his mouth. They slid away into the hedges like the world had decided not to tell their story. He would go set up another bend two miles down and Ryn would have to pull someone else through that mouth. He hated it. He pulled his foot off the man's chest and let him go, then kicked him in the ribs once for the use of it—not to teach the man, to teach his own bile to go elsewhere.
"You could have killed them all," Tamsin murmured, almost neutral.
"I could have," Ryn said, and left the rest belted. The next bend would be worse because the man would brag or bleed or both. He couldn't afford the bad arithmetic of becoming the man who solves each throttle with slaughter. He knew that. He hated it.
They moved. The lane ahead cut into a stand of oak round and old enough to own itself. The ground grew roots and the hum under Ryn's ribs went quieter. The donkey blew and dropped her head as if in thanks to the tree and Ryn chose to believe in that because he needed a god that didn't ask him to kill men because a ledger told him to.
The ridge opened and climbed to a high piece—a shoulder with an old table-stone, three small mile-markers in a row, and a view of the next two hamlets. The east one had a plume of smoke thin and ordinary—a hearth. The north-east had a plume thicker and wrong—a field burned either on purpose or by stupidity. Sponsor banners moved on the far road like the mouth of an eel.
Sereth squinted east. "We go left," he said. "Cut through the gorse and come at it under the hedge. The sponsor will be there by noon. We buy them a day, then leave at dusk before the bone moves. It will. They will bring tendrils again and call it medicine."
Ryn felt exhaustion in him make an ugly joke of relief. "We do the same thing again," he said.
"We do the same thing until it works long enough," Hana said, no pity in it. "Then we do a different thing."
Ryn nodded. He tied off the rope to a mile-stone and took a breath. The Warden had stood on a mile-stone when they told him to kill one and speak to the other. He shook his head once to break the shape of that memory.
"Move," he said. They cut through gorse. It grabbed at shins. Tamsin's knives displeased it into grabbing less. Ilyon held coats out of thorn with the small concentration of men who used to be boys and hoped to be men again someday. The donkey refused to complain. Ryn loved her for it, again, with an emotion he would never name.
They came into the east hamlet from the back, the way bad luck arrives. Two carts had been pulled into a lean square like a child's first try at geometry. Four men and a woman with cudgels and pitchforks stood there with the look of people who want to be brave and can be but know it will cost twice. No sponsor's men in the square yet. Good. They had a breath between horns.
"Rent," Ryn said, voice empty. The woman had the sense to echo it. "Paid," she said, looking at his rope the way people look at a legend that is boring enough to be useful. "For a day."
"One day," Ryn said. "We hold. Then we go. We will leave you a line. You use it or you die. Don't write about it."
She laughed once, hard. "We don't write," she said. "We do." She had a small scar on her chin and a child hanging off her hip that looked at Ryn with the rude curiosity children keep when the world is still a set of doors.
They set their little ugly field. Ryn hung the bell. Tamsin set a falter rope at knee height across the cart's front. Sereth took the right roof with his bow. Ilyon went to the well and checked the rope; he pulled his hand back fast when he felt the hum under it—polite, slow, like a bad neighbor who watered his garden with your barrel at night. He poured a line of water thick with ash around the lip and it made a quiet, wrong smell and a right, right feeling. It would foul whatever the surgeon wanted to throw in later.
They did the thing again. The sponsor's crew came polite. The enforcer did not appear. The negotiator performed his script with a smaller smile. The men with poles uprooted pegs and placed them again. Ryn undid his own hitches and made them dig their heels. Sereth shot sleeves to poles. Tamsin tripped ankles. Hana said, through clenched teeth, "Move," and moved them.
They bought time with other men's boredom and their own ugliness. It worked. It did not feel good. It did not feel like winning. Winning had gone out of the world and been replaced with small victories that tasted like rope.
Midday slipped in with a fly-whine and the metallic taste of attenuated heat. The Warden was not visible. The donkey took one carrot from a child and didn't bite. Ryn turned in a small circle and counted the faces of those he had dug out of a ditch and the ones he had not and promised the road nothing because the road didn't keep promises.
Then a horn from the north-east—a short, careful call—cut through the square, and a second answered from down the ridge. Not sponsor. Not Guild. Not Warden. Another hand in the pocket.
"North men," Sereth said, unhappily. He's seen them before when he was younger and had slept in heather and learned to distrust their clean. "They don't rent. They take knives and leave opinions."
"Then we go faster," Ryn said. "We make this square ugly so the next thing that wants it finds it hard to swallow." He tied his last spare rope to the cart and anchored it to a post in a knot only he liked and would hate to teach. He showed the woman how to pull. "Two breaths," he said. "Then yank. That's free. The rest will cost you salt."
She repeated his words. She pulled with him once to feel it. She nodded once—a small, frightening nod of a woman who would take her line and make it into a rule. He liked her. He hated that he had to leave.
"Move," Hana said, for the third time, and the word was a ritual by now, an old prayer everyone knew because their mothers had said it when the door was smoke and the bread not yet ash.
They cut back out through gorse and made the next ditch in time to see the far ridge picking up men who were not sponsor's and not Guild's and not Garron's. They carried low round shields and had the look of a small town's worth of hungry men who had decided to become something else. No ribbons. No papers. Their leader wore a coat taken off a dead man and made it his by not apologizing. He saw Ryn and lifted his chin in the universal gesture of "I see you and you are not mine."
"Good," Tamsin said. "I like that better. He'll try to own us later without pretending. Honest wolves." Her tone said she would bleed him too.
They moved to the next hedge, the next ditch, the next breath. The ossuary's hum stayed one terrace behind and muttered to itself. Ryn tightened the rope at his waist until the blood ran from his fingers and shook them out and smiled at the donkey and lied about the apple because he needed to believe it too today.
The System came in at the margin of his sight like a clerk he had chosen to tolerate in his shop. It wrote in neat lines because it couldn't do anything else.
[Hold (East Hamlet): Success (Stall).]
[Experience: +46.]
[Quickstep II (practice threshold met) unlocked — dash-fit between anchors without stumble (short), stamina cost moderate.]
[Anchor Whip I (seed grown) learnable — snap a line to stagger.]
[Trapper II progress: 74%.]
[Notes: Northmen encroach; Sponsor rerouting; Ossuary drift slowed (local).]
He exhaled. "Later," he told the words, but they stayed, warming a part of him he didn't have the name for. He looked at Hana and Tamsin and Sereth and Ilyon and the donkey. "Again," he said, a prayer and a joke, and they nodded because there wasn't anything else. They set their lines.
They cleared another bramble, another lie, another breath. The ridge tilted and the path tumbled into a shallow quarry's man-scar, dried and raw and clean. It had the wrong hum under it too. Everything did. Ryn set the rope around his waist and pictured the board under him. He would be a rook soon enough. For now, he would be what he was: the man who tied the game up so someone else could live long enough to lose a different way.
"Anchor," he told his hands. "Weight," he told his breath. He stepped into the quarry's cut. The donkey followed, saint that she was. He loved her almost more than he hated himself for loving anything in a world that had told him it would use it. He raised his head to the path, and the day yawned.
The Warden's horn did not call. The sponsor's enforcer did, once, balancing boredom on a knife. Ryn put it under his feet and walked.
He didn't hum at stones. He didn't need to. The rope hummed enough. He pulled.