Heat lifted from the packed earth in waves that made distance blur. By midafternoon the air had turned into a wall, and the only things that moved easily were flies. Ryn's shirt stuck to his back. The knot on his quick-release had swelled with sweat and grime and felt honest under his fingers when he checked it—again. The hum in his skull—the ossuary humming from a ridge back—had settled into a background wrongness, like wood warped by water; you could ignore it until you touched it.
They'd bought a morning. The east hamlet's square had learned to pull a rope. The sponsors had been polite and bored; the northmen had been efficient and bored; the Guild had attempted to write boredom and failed. Ryn would have liked to sit and feel guilty about the fact that boredom had saved lives. Instead he walked with the line at his waist and counted bodies, then counted his knots, then counted the breaths between Sereth's footfalls where the archer ghosted along a hedge.
The path ran under oaks into a shallow bowl where ground had been scraped out long ago for rick stones. To the north, the moor rose and fell; to the east, the road cut low and straight. The donkey's ears flicked forward and back. Kerrin's rope creaked at his belt. Ilyon chewed his lip raw and then remembered to stop like a boy catching himself at an old habit.
"Two bends and we hit the stand by the willows," Sereth said softly, chin indicating the slight rise where a copse huddled around a spring. "Good for a field and a drink."
"Good for an ambush," Tamsin added, not disagreeing.
"We make the ambush ours," Ryn said. "Or we leave. Either."
The willow stand watched them with that lazy grace only water trees have. The air around it felt two degrees kinder. There was the wrong hum under it too. There always was. Ryn pushed his stomach's clench aside and made himself remember: under every good hiding place now, somewhere, a little periphery hummed like a ledger with three missing pages.
"You set a line there," Ilyon whispered, pointing to where a root showed in the clay. "If anyone pulls, they fall into the spring." He sounded pleased with the idea not because it hurt a man but because it used a things's own desire. Ryn liked that about him and hated how close it was to the surgeon's voice.
"I'll set it," he said. He tied the rope low under the willow root and ran it along the ground through leaf-mold so it vanished to sight. He anchored it to a dead stump with a knot that looked weak from one side and wasn't. He left the tail across the path under a scatter of windfallen leaves. He'd pull when some man stepped exactly wrong.
The stand made habits want to slow. Ryn forced movement instead: he had Kerrin draw water in a skin while Hana stood over the boy with vinegar and hard words. He sent Sereth to the far side of the stand to set two nails into a beech where a man would only learn about them when his sleeve caught. He had Tamsin make the murder hole at knee height this time where eyes don't look when they're tired. He laid lines. He breathed.
They were almost done, mid-blackfly curse, when the System slid its tidy plate into the side of his vision:
[Approach: Sponsor detachment (8–12). Surgeon present. East lane.]
Ryn swallowed. The spring's water tasted metallic under willow and hum. He didn't wipe his mouth. He looked at Tamsin. She rolled her eyes without humor. "I wondered when his pet would arrive."
"Don't hum," Ryn said, and hated how small he sounded to his own ear.
"I won't sing to bones," Tamsin said, offended. "Only to knives."
He laughed without meaning to. It steadied his hands more than anger did.
They heard them before they saw them because a surgeon's detachment comes with the wrong smell. It came light on the wind: ammonia dressed in something sweet. Ryn flared his nostrils and his stomach went tight. The donkey went head-high, nostrils narrow. Good girl. Ilyon murmured "Don't" and held the halter as if binding himself.
They didn't come straight. The enforcer would have. The surgeon drifted his crew through the oak shade like someone tasting soup and being polite about finding it thin. The bottles on their belts clinked. The men carried small shields and knives too clean. The surgeon walked in the middle like a man who had learned to keep his soft bones under hard ones when he stepped. He had a cloth over his nose, not for stink—for habit. His nose had set wrong; a line of glitter had been scraped and filed. He had not learned how to look less hungry. He didn't try to.
He stopped at the edge of the willow's shade and smiled like a teacher who doesn't know he's in a brothel. "You flatter me by thinking I would come find you," he said, voice warm, speaking to Ryn as if nothing else existed. "You stink of my drug. In your mouth." He did not point. He did not move his head. His eyes flicked toward Ryn's lip where the grit had glittered yesterday and Ryn had rubbed at it to pain.
"Bad habit," Ryn said.
"You'll die of it," the surgeon said, pleased. "After you teach me."
"Rent," Hana said acidly and made the word sound like the worst insult.
The surgeon's mouth quirked. "Rent," he agreed. He spread his hands like a priest. "You pay in hands. Mine. Yours. Both." He took a little pinch of something from a pouch and threw it underhand. It floated like friendly dust, glittered like cheap coin. Ryn jerked back. Ilyon clapped his hand over Tamsin's nose and she bit him because she does not permit even kindness to be unannounced. The dust fell and vanished into the leaf mold with a little sigh like a satisfied child. The wrong hum under the spring leant toward it for a heartbeat. Then the ash ring Ilyon had painted earlier around the curb sulked like a dog told to lie down and did so hard enough to be useful. The hum eased back.
"Clever," the surgeon said sincerely, noticing the ash. "You thought about it. Thank you."
"I didn't do it for you," Ilyon said, spitting vinegar at his feet. The spit hurt Ilyon's mouth and delighted him. The surgeon's eyes lit with that terrible eagerness of someone who finds a new instrument. "Don't be rude. I like good instruments. They last longer."
"Rope," Ryn said flatly and pulled the line through the leaves. Someone stepped where he had hoped they would because men love the lip of a spring. The line bit their ankle and tugged. They flailed, went into the water up to their knees, and yelped as cold bit more than skin. The surgeon looked at the man as if seeing a friendly dog fall off a low wall. He giggled, actual, then clapped his mouth with two fingers and made it go back inside like a mother telling a child, not now. It didn't matter what he told himself. It mattered that he did it.
Tamsin hissed between her teeth. "Bad."
"Bad," Ryn agreed and dropped the falter rope low across the path at knee height while the first line was making eyes. He did not intend to fight the surgeon proper inside the willow stand with the hum under their feet. He intended to make it ugly and get them somewhere neutral men could be cut into their own choices.
The surgeon held his hand out, and a man from behind put something in it. Not a bottle. A rod with a little brush on the end, like something for teeth, but with crystalline powder caught in the bristles. "Taste?" he said and flicked the brush at the willow trunk. Powder hit bark and glittered. The hum in the ground hopped, not in pleasure. In interest. The willow made a sound Ryn felt in his teeth. He wanted to vomit.
"Get him away from the tree," Sereth said evenly, as if telling someone to move a pig from a wall. Ryn shifted, snapped, low, pulling the line into the surgeon's leg at calf height. The line caught. The surgeon hopped with involuntary humor—like a man stepping over his child who had crawled in front of a prayer. He stamped the line with his other foot—he had learned one thing in the last two days. Ryn let it go slack and then jerked again. The surgeon fell, proper, onto his back. He made a delighted noise and rolled wrong—flat not sideways. Tamsin was there, merciless and clean, knife down at the hinge of jaw. She would have ended it then. The surgeon's cheek glitter caught the blue line of her knife. He smiled at his own blood, not at her.
"Don't," Ryn barked, not to save the surgeon—so he wouldn't die under the willow hum. Tamsin snarled at him and then made a noise of pure disgust, not mercy, and stepped back. She had two rules about killing men that week: she never killed boys doing what they were told, and she never killed a man where he could infect her knives with something she didn't understand. She kept rules not because they were rules, but because they kept her alive.
The surgeon sat up and smiled as if someone had done him a favor at his own birthday. He had the laugh lines of a man who found the world funny. "Please," he said to Ryn. "Just show me the hand. The one you use on rope. The one with the humming."
"No," Ryn said. He pulled another inch of line and broke a man's ankle at the edge of the spring deliberately because this was uglier than the polite fight at the tollhouse and had to be. He moved the donkey back a pace with press and breath. She moved like the forgiving queen she was. Kerrin moved when Ryn said without waiting to be asked—his good boy thing was getting out of hand, but it was now useful, so Ryn pocketed his concern for later.
The surgeon stopped smiling. Not because his men were dying. Because he didn't like being denied. His mouth thinned. He held up a hand, snapped his fingers once. The men behind him—those with the little bottles—stepped forward like three tidy suicides. They flicked their brushes and made the air dance wrong.
Ilyon shouted "Down!" and threw half the jar of vinegar up and then overhand like a mother with water and a pig. The cloud the men had thrown turned into a wet silver rain and fell onto the hum circle on the ground. It hissed and turned into a gel that didn't move the way anything should move.
"Bless you," Ryn said, not to a god and not to Ilyon and not to anything in the ground. The man he was talking to would be neither grateful nor forgiving. He was anyway.
The surgeon's mouth curved in genuine delight at having his ideas challenged. He laughed and clapped like a child. "Yes," he shouted. "Yes. Again."
"Out," Ryn said. He would not fight a long fight under a willow with a humming slab under it while a man who wrote his own ideas on people's bones wanted him to continue. He cut his own rope where it lay on the root and pulled it around the trunk wrong, snaring nothing, but gaining the angle he needed to drag his lot out of the stand by ugliness alone.
The surgeon didn't pursue. He watched the rope. He watched Ryn's hands. He licked a little of his own blood off his upper lip, drew a pattern of glitter with his index finger where he had cut himself, and smiled like a boy baking his first loaf.
"Later," he said, as if Ryn had promised a rendezvous.
"No," Ryn said, and meant it to mean until after he had buried his own head under a rock in a river. He would have to break the man. The Warden's map told him it would be costly. He filed the cost under future. He hated himself for filing.
They came out of the stand into light and air that felt like someone had opened a door. Ryn kept them moving, hearts still pounding, breath the wrong size for their chests. He did not speak. The willow's grace slid off their shoulders with the shade. The hum fell behind like a hand removed from a collar.
The path ran narrow along a fence line into a series of flat squares with a ditch between. It was a place for fields, not fables. As they crossed the second he heard the horn from the east—a short irritated note. The sponsor's net had moved south of the hamlet; the enforcer had gotten bored after someone else told him to be patient. He would move his men like a good general and expect the world to accept it. He would be right until someone made him wrong. Ryn did not intend that someone to be him today. He angled them away from the road into a lane that had forgotten itself, hedged to shoulder height with dead stems and new green.
They came upon the next tollhouse unexpectedly because someone had been careful. It wasn't old. It wasn't new. It had a door that had been rehearsed and a roof that had been repaired and a slab under it that hummed like a thing that had been taught to bite and not chew. On the step sat a woman with a pike like Trella's older cousin. She clipped her hair back with a pin made of bone and had cheeks pinched by hunger but not starved. She watched them while the rope watched her.
"Rent," Ryn said, dog-tired of his own voice and not letting it change. "One day. Then we leave you line." He held up the writ because even lies buy a minute.
She squinted at the seal like she had rubbed it into her finger for a debt once and wanted to see if it had changed. "One day," she said, skeptical. "You're the famous boy with the rope? The one everyone lies about to make their story sound like a prayer?"
"I'm tired," Ryn said honestly, because a truth sometimes bought more than a lie. "I tie knots." He nodded at the slab inside. "And you hum at stones. Don't. We set it dull for you. You leave it dull." He had a wedge left that wasn't of use to him now. He took it out and wrapped it again and pushed it into her palm. "Bury it. Not in your floor. In your ditch where the water touches it."
She looked at the wrapped wedge like a piece of something that would bite later. She nodded. "Fine. Rent," she said and swung the door on its bar up and in and let them in with no ceremony at all. He loved her for that; he would never remember her name; he would hold her face in his head like a border on a map.
They set teeth. They hung the bell. They shifted the cart. They put water where it would be easy and not where it would lie. Hana taught two men to say "move" in her voice. Tamsin put a knife within an arm's reach of a teen boy's lesson. Sereth set nails.
Ryn walked to the back of the house and set his satchel down and let his aged shoulder fall into door jamb and turned his face to the wall for one breath. He did not pray. He did not hum. He told his rope: move when I say.
The System took that moment, which was either bold or kind, to lay its card on his table with tidy facts he wished he could replace with a nap:
[Objective: Willow stand — Survive surgeon's test (Completed).]
[Experience: +62.]
[Anchor Whip I proficiency increased.]
[Quickstep II proficiency increased.]
[Trapper II progress: 90%.]
[Note: Surgeon interest: intense. Enforcer stance: repositioning. Ossuary: holds (for now). Warden: watching (boring).]
He nodded to nothing and rubbed his hands on his shirt and went back to the door.
They had fifteen minutes, maybe. Enough time to drink, to change a knot that looked tired for one that didn't; enough to pull bread out of a bag and put it into mouths and call it good; enough to put a hand on a donkey and rub, then lie to it about an apple with sheer audacity and feel forgiven because she owned more grace than he did.
"Broth," Hana said, thrusting a cup under his nose. It was thin as thought and tasted like salt and old bones. He drank it anyway. He felt it move through him like a line from anchor to anchor and hated how much he needed it.
He had a moment to spit into bark and feel petty and better. Then the wrong horn sounded—not sponsor's, not northmen's, not Guild. A three-long one-short bleat. Not the Warden. Whoever had sounded it did not know it was rude to borrow notes.
"Who now," Tamsin said, genuinely aggrieved. Sereth gave the window a sliver and stiffened just enough for Ryn to see it. "Northmen. Other group. New teeth," he said.
"Rent," the door woman said. It wasn't a question. She adjusted her grip on the pike. Ryn saw how it had been repaired three times in different places. Good.
"Rent," Ryn agreed. He set his hands. He felt the rope with the nerve he'd grown in his fingers. He stepped to where men would step into the place where he had set boring things and made them become poetry. He did not hum at stones. He did not ask the Warden to write this one down. He did not care if the sponsor's enforcer thought this was interesting. He didn't. He tied knots.
Men appeared in the lane like rain. Not sponsor. Not northmen with round shields either. They carried long knives and wore coats turned inside out so the lining was out, which was an old superstition about confusing other people's maps. Ryn didn't know whose map they intended to confuse. He didn't care. He pulled the rope.
The bell sang its wrong low tone. The first man tripped over nothing he would write about. He fell like a king, everyone watching. Tamsin cut his friend's ankle because sometimes cruelty is a kind of honesty. Sereth shot the man whose hand was lifting a bottle. Ilyon saved a boy from breathing glitter by putting vinegar in his mouth like a punishment. Hana moved a child with her bread hand and slapped a man with the other. Dorran sat upright and made the correct thud with his shield and looked like a man who had found his old house by accident and decided to sit in it and not die yet.
The men who were not sponsor and not northmen and not the enforcer's disliked the taste of the tollhouse very quickly. They left, not panicked—disgusted. Ryn let them go. He did not even kick the last one. He had something else to do.
He walked to the ditch, took the wrapped wedge from the door woman's hand, and buried it under the lip where water seeped now that heat had risen out. He hated every inch of humming that fell into the earth and made itself a map someone else could use. He did it anyway. He held his breath while he tamped dirt, then let it out in a disgust that tasted like humility. He got up and wiped his hands on his shirt and told himself he would stop promising the donkey apples and then promised her another one because he had to believe in something.
He went back inside. The System was waiting with a neat new line he would have shrugged at yesterday. Today it felt like a friend who counted nails while he counted rope.
[Hold (Tollhouse East): Completed (Stall).]
[Experience: +44.]
[Trapper II: 100% — Advancement available: Rook I (Field Control) unlocked. Choose now or later.]
Later. He knew his answer already. He would choose now. The board had come under his feet twice that day. He could keep pretending he was only clever with knots. Or he could admit the truth: he had started telling fields where to be difficult.
"Rook," he said in his head, simply. He expected to feel like a liar. He felt relief instead. It sat wrong and right on his bones like a heavy coat that would keep him alive by making him carry it.
[Advancement: Rook I (Field Control) acquired.]
[Unlock: Array logic (basic) — lay wedded lines; anchor surge control increased.]
[Techniques: Anchor Whip II (stagger), Snapline Step stability +10%.]
[Passive: Field sense (minor) — feel pressure changes in 5m radius when anchored.]
[Synergy: Trapper II combines with Rook I — trap array efficiency +5%.]
He exhaled. He felt the field around the cart and the well and the door like a new layer of water what had not known to touch. He could feel where a man would put his foot in ten minutes when he was bored. He hated that it felt like the System. He loved that he could use it to make boys survive boredom.
"Not a priest," Tamsin said dryly without looking at him.
"Never," he said. "Just a man who likes nails."
"Good," she said, and flicked a coin she hadn't stolen because she had forgotten to. She let it fall to the floor on purpose and didn't pick it up. Tiny rebellion. He smiled.
"Move," Hana said because there was yet another horn in the world and it sounded like a story that would take all night to tell. "Don't die inside my house."
"Your house," the door woman said, a little indignation left in her. Hana grinned. "We like men who know doors," she said. "Keep this one ugly and you live longer than your neighbor."
The woman snorted. "I didn't like my neighbor anyway," she said.
They went. They moved under a sky that had stopped caring about color. The ossuary hummed behind the ridge. The enforcer shifted his net like a disappointed god. The surgeon went home to write a new bad hymn and Ryn intended to set fire to it later. The Warden watched without boredom now. It would cost him. He would pay later.
He tied a new line because it was time. He told the donkey, "Apple," and for the first time in two days, he actually believed he might find one by accident. That felt like hope. He didn't trust it. He carried it anyway. He had a field to hold and no gods to impress and a map in his head he had not asked for but would use.
He didn't hum at stones. He didn't need to. The rope and the field hummed enough. He pulled.