Heat lay over the ridge like a sheet you couldn't shake off. By midmorning the air had stopped moving, and every sound seemed louder for it: the clack of Sereth's shaft against bow stave when he reset a nock, the scrape of a cart wheel from some other road, the thin, wrong humming under the earth like teeth tapped together.
Ryn ran a hand along the donkey's neck and felt old sweat dried into her hair. She leaned into his fingers without asking. He checked his rope again—stupidly, precisely—feeling for places the line had gone stiff with dried brine, for fibers that had thinned too much. He re-tied the quick-release at his hip in the knot he only trusted himself to set. He didn't say anything. His words felt like they should be counted and he had spent enough already.
"We cut the quarry and run the low," Sereth said, voice thin and professional. He crouched at the lip of the old man-scar—a flattened amphitheater where men had once pulled stone up with rude sledges. "There's a shelf halfway—good for a line. Northmen up there." He nodded to the ridge. Figures moved on the far shoulder: round shields, low helmets, pale hair in braids. They weren't rushing. They were angling, measuring. "Sponsor's lads down the east lane. Their patience is short today. Ossuary quiet for now."
"You're sure?" Tamsin asked, not doubting him so much as daring the day to argue.
"I don't say it if I'm not," Sereth said, shrug.
Ilyon stood with his hands awkwardly still at his sides as if he had been told to sit on them and found no chair. "Salt," he said. "None. Vinegar: half a jar. Skunk-water: quarter. Sugar glue: almost gone. Sorry."
"Your brain is still disgusting," Tamsin said with affectionate scorn.
"Thank you," Ilyon said, suffering. He looked at Ryn. "We can make ash-water at the next well," he added, as if apologizing for the future.
Ryn nodded. He looked down the slope—broken, patched with scrub. The path ran narrow along the quarry face for ten yards before opening onto a shelf that would be a perfect place to die if you were a ballad and wanted a good image. He didn't. He wanted a place to get small and make someone else clumsy.
"Rope," he said simply. He tied a line from the donkey's halter to his waist, from his waist to Kerrin's belt, to Hana's middle, to Jarla's husband, then back to the cart where Dorran leaned, not even pretending this was going to be comfortable. Pell, the boy with too-large eyes, counted the knots out loud like a liturgy. One. Two. Three. Ryn let him. Counting made a bad walk into a job.
They went over.
The quarry face had been cut by men who thought they would live forever because they were good with rock. You can tell by the overhangs. They hadn't minded creating shadows. Ryn minded them. He put his shoulder against the donkey to keep her from bumping wet stone with her knee and felt his own boots slip a hair; he corrected and did not look down. His upper body had learned a new rhythm this last week—a constant small state of tension that wasn't panic and wasn't calm. Anchor, then weight. He repeated it in his head in Marla's voice and hated himself for how much he needed it.
Halfway along they hit the shelf. It was exactly as bad as it had looked because it had been designed to be useful to men hauling stone, not to men trying not to die. There was a lip at knee height, a vertical face with two good old iron spikes still hammered into it, and beyond that a sloping run of gravel that promised to turn ankles into beliefs.
Above, the northmen crested the ridge and turned their shields outward like a fish turning its scales to a new light. Not a full warband—ten, twelve, with one man out front taller and more careful. He didn't shout. The horn behind him made a low, raw sound. He looked down the cut as if it offended him.
"We'll have company," Sereth said. He hadn't drawn yet. He didn't want to tell them where his arrows lived until he had to.
"Set the field," Ryn said. His hands moved. He tied rope across the lip at ankle height, slack enough to be forgiving to the right step, mean enough to make a wrong foot confess. He wrapped his line around one of the old spikes and played out twice his height of slack. He could do a lot with twice his height.
"Try it," Tamsin said, amused and watching. She had her knives bare but held low, as if she expected to cut the day's throat if it came near and needed to be quiet about it.
Ryn braced, then ran two paces, threw his weight along the line, felt the tug take him and used his hips to correct the pitch. Snapline Step liked to throw him forward and down; he had learned to lie to it, to put a bad edge under his foot as if it were a good one and then lift before it decided to betray him. He landed two paces farther, upright, his ankle not folded. He grinned involuntarily. Joy in a stupid thing scared him more than half the blades on the ridge.
"Again," Sereth said, flat.
Ryn did it again. This time he had to twist mid-step to avoid banging his shoulder into the iron spike. He could feel the technique settle under his skin as something more than a trick and less than a talent. He hated how much like the System's voice it felt when it settled. He did it a third time because three makes a habit.
[Snapline Step — Stability increased: 76%.]
[Quickstep II unlocked: dash-fit between anchors. Stamina cost: Moderate.]
The neat, clinical lines slid into his sight as if congratulating him. He didn't congratulate it back. He saved the breath. The donkey bumped the rope with her chin as if asking whether it would hold her too. He shook his head. "Not you," he said. "You are the board, not the piece." He regretted the sentiment as soon as it formed. She snorted as if forgiving him for being a fool, and he scratched her cheek to apologize.
Above, northmen adjusted. They were not being paid to be clever; they had been born clever enough. They angled along the ridge, placing men so that if Ryn's crew ran the shelf and came out onto the open slope, there would be bodies to meet them with low shields and low expectations. Sponsor's men were a smear of blue on the east lane, setting a net the way men who have a map do when they think the world will follow lines.
"Move," Hana said under her breath, a constant, reliable command. She slid past Ryn onto the shelf with the small ugly grace of a woman who has carried eight kinds of weight for nine kinds of men. Kerrin came next, eyes too wide, knuckles white on the rope. Tamsin took him by the back of his collar and guided him with knife and grin. Dorran grunted and set his shield low and stepped the wrong way on purpose to argue with the stone, and then the right way to survive. Ilyon crossed with his small pained breath like a boy in bad shoes in church.
Halfway across, something Ryn hadn't intended to account for intervened: the northmen's leader spoke. Not to them. To his men. It wasn't a language Ryn shared, but the shape of it was familiar: it was the sound men make when they have decided to move as one and want to carry their fear with less friction. It would have been beautiful if Ryn hadn't hated what it was for.
They came down.
At first, politely, because you don't jump in the river without seeing what it is eating. Ryn threw the falter rope across the lip to present a problem to their knees. The first man saw it, stepped high, and the second stepped where the first had intended, and that made him trip. He caught himself with his shield and laughed at himself. The sound was clean. Tamsin hated him immediately and smiled wider.
Then all at once. Four men down the slope, three along the top, two angling from the far side along a goat path Ryn hadn't seen. Sereth put an arrow into a shield, through leather, into forearm—not to kill, to make the arm heavy. The man grunted, pleased to have something to prove. That type. The leader's mouth didn't move much. Good command.
"Anchor," Ryn told himself out loud, not bothering to pretend it was for anyone else. He looped the line once around the spike and felt it bite his palm the right way. He grabbed the donkey's lead with his off hand because sometimes you have to hold two kinds of life at once. He flagged Tamsin with a chin to his left: the goat path men. She nodded and turned.
He stepped and snapped.
The rope yanked him along the shelf and he landed inside the first northman's reach in a place no polite man expects another man to be: too close for a spear to make sense, too quick for a sword to have a story. He put his buckler under the man's hand and twisted with Hook-and-Break and heard tendons talk back. He stepped aside because you always step aside when a man with a shield falls in a place where your ducks are lined up. The buckler took a knife meant for his ribs and rode it into the iron spike. He kept moving. Quickstep II did what it promised and cost what it promised; his breath went thin and edged, not gone. He could spend. Not too much.
The second northman came in lower, smart, went for Ryn's legs at knee height in a way that would have ended this if Ryn hadn't learned to hate his own ankles enough to protect them. He hopped—not high, just wrong—let the spear butt glance his shin, and kicked the shaft hard enough to stagger the man into his friend. Tamsin took the half-beat that cost and sliced the man's hamstring with an economy that was a kind of love. He dropped with grace, every man's prayer to never fall ugly, and she ruined the prayer. She smiled without teeth. It was cruel. He earned it.
Sereth shifted, pulled, shot. Pulled, shot. His rhythm had changed constant under stress into a smaller song: breathe, pull, release, breathe. He didn't aim for center. He aimed for places that would make other men do the wrong thing: a foot, a sleeve, the seam between strap and skin. He made their line sloppy, then Betty-corrected it by making the leader choose between clean and alive. The leader chose alive. Good. Bad.
"Anchor Whip," the System offered in Ryn's skull like a neat chalk mark.
He tried it because he had to. He snapped the rope like a lariat at the knee of a man stepping past the lip. The line bit and the man's ankle jumped; he stumbled a pace he didn't intend and his weight met the low rope Ryn had set across the lip, and he was on his back in a breath, blinking at the sky and thinking of all the fathers who had told him not to look up in battle. Ryn didn't enjoy it. He did it again because he had to. He felt a little piece of joy settle in his forearm. He hated it and set it aside like a tool he would put on a shelf later.
"You enjoy wrong," Tamsin noted sourly.
"I enjoy being alive," Ryn grunted, and cut the next rope to take the next man's leg honesty away.
The northmen didn't break. They adjusted. The shield ring tightened. The two from the goat path came low and tried to pry the donkey back toward the shelf with the butt ends of their spears. Ryn made a sound that wasn't words. The donkey pinned her ears, shifted her weight, and braced her legs in a better sentence than his. He snapped the line into the butt of the left man's spear and jerked; the man's grip contested and lost and he landed in his friend's crotch, politics ruined for an afternoon. Sereth put an arrow through the earth between their hands to remind them the ground had opinions.
This wasn't a fight to win. It was a fight to drive their choices. Ryn hauled the cart a hand-breadth to left with his weight and the quick-release, making the shelf a worse place for northmen and a better one for mules. Hana pulled with him with the kind of contempt that makes bodies obedient. Kerrin moved because Ryn said "move" and because he had decided to be a man in this week and hated it but did it anyway. Ilyon found himself suddenly helpful when he shoved a wedge under the cart wheel with the kind of mathematical thought only men who have made things can use.
It lasted nine breaths and a lifetime. Then the leader above lifted his hand and made a culling gesture. His men fell back a clean five paces and took breath together like it was food. He looked down at Ryn and Ryn looked back because you don't blink when men like that are deciding whether you will keep your hands. The leader's eyes flicked to the donkey, to the rope, to Sereth's bow, to Tamsin's stance, to Hana's posture—that squat, unromantic readiness to lift. He nodded once, grunted in his own language, and made another small motion. His men pulled away like they had never been interested in the shelf. They weren't afraid. They were efficient. They would eat later. They didn't want to be killed here by gravity.
"Friends?" Tamsin breathed, sardonically.
"No," Ryn said, catching his own breath in two hands again. "Not enemies yet."
"Fine. I'll practice," she said.
The sponsor's crew's horn made a curious high note—annoyed. They had missed their chance to pin a thread to a board and wanted to tell someone important without using their inside voice. Ryn grinned without humor. Let them be annoyed. He would be annoyed too when he wasn't in danger of vomiting from breathing.
"Move," Hana said, less contempt now, more urgency. "While someone else is bored with you."
They slid along the shelf one at a time and came out into the lower cut. Blood made a small slick on stone where Tamsin had taken hamstring. She wiped her blade and said nothing. Sereth took a meat strip from his pocket, chewed once, spit, and did the small tailor's business on the bowstring that meant he liked it to hum right under stress. Ilyon's hand shook; he stuffed it under his belt and scowled at his own shaking.
Ryn put his hand on the donkey and she breathed into him. He felt human for long enough to hate it.
The low road took them into a bowl of scrub and old stone fences. It was a place where sound changed—a mild amphitheatre. He hated it immediately. He moved them through without stopping—no wells, no tempting shade—then up into a narrow swale touched by pine and beech. The world felt held there. The hum under it—house-slab hum, polite and insistent—was stronger.
"Do not," Tamsin whispered, and Ryn hid his hand without knowing he had been lifting it to the ground. He didn't want to hum and had almost asked to, the way a starving man can ask to drink paint if you set it in front of him in a nice cup.
"Thank you," he said, meaning it. She made a small haughty noise and went forward.
They ran into sponsor's net a mile later anyway. You can't avoid everything.
The net wasn't men this time. It was the surgeon's. A line of bottles set along a hedge. Small perversely polite clay cups under them to catch drips. A fine mist in the air you would only notice if you were a donkey and had a better nose. The donkey snorted, head high, ears sharp. Ilyon hissed and grabbed her halter—careful—and dragged her back three steps. "Do not," he said, copying Tamsin, eyes wide. "Glitter."
"What is it," Ryn asked, already stepping back. He didn't breathe through his mouth.
"Ammoniac, distilled, dressed with… I don't want to say; it smells like something under milk," Ilyon said in a rush. "It makes your blood drink wrong. It makes you want to breathe more when you should breathe less." His voice shook. He was thinking of the jawline of the man who had made these. He was borrowing words from him like a boy borrows a coat. He hated it. He stood up straighter. "We walk around."
"Over," Sereth said. He pointed to a low spot in the hedge where men wouldn't risk their clothes. Ryn wouldn't, either; he put his jacket down and used it as a mat to pull children over on. Little dirt faces went over one by one, rope never leaving hands. Tamsin used just enough knife to make the hedge understand who made decisions. Ilyon held his breath like a prayer; he took a mouthful of vinegar and spit to keep himself from breathing too much by accident.
The bottles sang lightly with the wrong hum. Ryn's scalps prickled. He moved them faster than he liked. He hated leaving craft behind him. He wanted to break every bottle, set the cups on fire, piss on the earth. He didn't. He would kill the surgeon. Later, perhaps. If the Warden's arithmetic allowed it. If his own allowed it.
They came out onto a ridge where the last house before the moor hunkered down—a tollhouse of sorts, the small kind that are more habit than law. It had a door and a window and a slab under the floor humming with someone else's tidy. Ryn had a wedge left. He wrapped it again to stop it from singing and buried it in the ditch. It was like hiding a bread-crust from a hungry child when you know you will give it back later. He swallowed the bile that thought put in his mouth and set another line under the hinge.
Horns back to the west, confused. Northmen had met sponsor's negotiators somewhere they had not planned to be and had gotten bored with their script on both sides. The ossuary was quiet enough to be storing hunger, which terrified Ryn more than when it was loud. The Warden did not call. He had time for small human things.
He gave the donkey water and a hand of cracked barley. He rubbed her jaw. He promised her the apple again. He meant it as much as he could. She accepted it. He forgave himself a breath.
Hana tossed Ryn a heel of bread and he ate it mechanically. Tamsin found an old woman in the house and taught her in three mean sentences how to pull a rope. The old woman understood as soon as the knife came out for demonstration. Sereth took his breath against a post the way men do when they have learned to steal rest.
The System slid its plate onto Ryn's mental counter like a half-respected colleague bringing you a bill you know you owe.
[Status:]
Name: Ryn
Race: Half-Elf (Unregistered)
Class: Trapper II
Level: 7
Strength: 7
Agility: 12
Vitality: 9
Mind: 8
Perception: 11
Tenacity: 12
Corruption: 4% (Shard Sync: 8%)
[Skills:]
Linework III (tension drinker)
Makeshift Trap II
Improvised Bomb II
Quickstep II (learned; cooldown short; stamina moderate)
Hook-and-Break (Intermediate)
Anchor Whip I
[Techniques:]
Snapline Step (76% stabilized)
[Notes:]
Ossuary: quiet (danger). Sponsor net: present (east lane). Northmen: testing. Guild: scattered.
[Inventory:]
Rope: 24m sound, 6m questionable.
Vinegar: 1/3 jar.
Skunk-water: 1/4 jar.
Sugar glue: smear.
Wedge pieces: 0 (carried; placed: 2).
Nails: 7.
Ryn didn't know whether to thank the neat lines for being honest or break them for being smug. He breathed. He clipped the flask at his belt differently because sometimes you change a little thing to keep your brain from going into a hole it likes too much.
They had a half-a-day before something else tried to be the center of the world. Ryn intended to spend it making the day narrower. He checked the carts of the tollhouse—wheels blessedly true, spokes in good order, grease old but not gone. He wedged a post. He set a deadfall just inside the door. He hung a bell from a rafter tuned to a pitch his head would hate. He set three tiny snares tied to nails at throat height in places men's curiosity would make them put their heads. He was a cruel man practicing kindness.
"Again," Tamsin said, and there was fondness in it as much as exasperation.
They moved east because staying anywhere longer than a breath wrung you dry. The ridge slid into a patch of moor where a path had run and then forgotten itself. The Warden's map in Ryn's head placed a small peripheral node here, beneath a stone that had survived shepherds and pigs and children and men with hammers. He skirted it widely, letting it be someone else's hum. He didn't want to feel its fingers.
They were on the last length of bright grass before the bracken when the northmen's horn sounded off to the right, lower and more thoughtful. Not for Ryn. For someone else. The sponsor's horn answered with a tight, irritated call. The Guild's horns attempted an alliance and failed to make a beautiful noise between them. It had the sound of a marriage and a knife.
Sereth's head cocked. "They'll kill each other out of boredom," he said. "We can't let them do it over our Belts." The old name made Ryn grin involuntarily. He had grown up with men calling everything their belt and meaning their line. He liked that Sereth's nouns had survived.
"Then we go left and make sure the belt fits us and not them," Tamsin said.
It should have been funny. It was a plan. They moved left.
The moor broke into a low willow bog, then a run of dry hummocks like stone knuckles punching up. Ryn laid a line across the narrow path where a man would put his foot because it looked easier. Tamsin scrawled three insulting words in the mud where men would see them and forget to look down. Ilyon put a line of ash at the lip of a puddle that looked like it wanted to breed something. Hana swore at a horsefly and took its head off, and the donkey flicked her tail as if claiming the work.
They came to the last rise. Beyond, a small settlement cowered—a handful of houses and one ugly timber frame that had wanted to be a church and become a barn and wanted to be a church again because men are like that when they desire a place you can pretend to dream. There were no sponsor flags. There were no northmen shields. There was one man with a pike and a face full of fear that had taken the wrong shape and become arrogance.
Ryn stopped, then forced himself to start again. "Rent," he said out of habit. The man lifted his pike in a way that made the donkey consider biting him and Ryn let her know with a hand that he would permit it later. "Who are you," the man said, as if he had invented the road.
"Your rope," Hana said over Ryn's shoulder, contempt like bread. "For an hour."
The man with the pike sneered and then looked at the women behind Hana and his sneer died because he wasn't an idiot, just pretending. He stepped aside. "Make it an hour," he said. "Then go."
Ryn made it an hour. He set a field, small and true. He moved the cart. He hung a bell. He reset a deadfall. He argued with a hinge and made it into a friend. He wiped the donkey's face and promised an apple in a voice that came dangerously close to hope. He looked at Tamsin. She rolled her eyes and didn't ruin the moment.
The ossuary's hum stayed low. The sponsor's horn made one peevish note and cut off. The northmen's call shifted farther east. The Guild's horns learned nothing. The Warden did not call. The day bled into afternoon and Ryn held breath in his hands and called it work and tried not to call it life.
He had the luck to be bored for an hour. Then a horn he didn't know sounded from the far ridge, three long notes and one short. Not sponsor. Not northmen. Not Warden. Another, newer alphabet entering the argument.
"I hate that," Tamsin said reflexively. "Something new thinks it's clever."
"Everyone thinks they're clever," Sereth said, resigned. "Even us."
"Especially us," Ryn said, and set a new line because you answer new alphabets with old, honest verbs. He did it again and again because he knew nothing else and because each stood between now and worse. He felt his body accept the routine as a prayer and hated himself and forgave himself and made the rope sing.
At the end of that hour, when the day's long light went yellow and false-kind, he felt the System lean in to whisper with that infuriating confidence it used for simple truths:
[Objective: Survive morning skirmish — Completed.]
[Experience: +38.]
[Quickstep II proficiency increased.
Anchor Whip I proficiency increased.
Trapper II progress: 82%.]
He let it be. He looked at Hana and nodded and she rolled her shoulders like a woman preparing to lift a house. He looked at Tamsin and she flicked a coin across her knuckles that wasn't a coin but some stolen thing and let it fall and didn't bother to pick it up. He looked at Sereth and he lifted his bow slightly, which in his body meant: ready. He looked at Ilyon and saw him put his hand deliberately on the wrong pouch to train his fingers.
He looked at the donkey and said, "Apple," and laughed at himself and then didn't.
Then they moved again because not moving was renting your bones to the wrong ledger.
The ossuary sang quietly behind them. The sponsor's net moved. The northmen found another belt to test. The Warden's map pressed against the inside of Ryn's skull like a promise and a threat. He tied a knot and pretended it was both. He set his jaw and kept his hands dumb and his rope honest and his voice off.
It worked, which felt like theft. He didn't feel sorry. He would later, when the world asked him to pay. He would pay. He would make sure the apple was paid first. He would keep breathing through his nose while he did.
He didn't hum at stones. He didn't need to. The rope hummed enough. He pulled.