Heat had a sound. By late day the moor sang with it—flies, the tick of seedpods, the creak of wood that had soaked and dried too often. Ryn's tongue felt like the wrong tool. His shirt stuck to his back. The field around him, the one he had started to feel since saying yes to Rook, hummed at the edges of his bones, a net of small pressures that told him where air lay differently and where men would make bad choices.
The tollhouse's slab—buried wedge under the ditch—shivered a hair, not hungry, not polite. It made lying to himself about being clean harder. He tied the last line across the window and tuned the bell until it rang the wrong note at just the pitch his head despised.
He had made the decision he'd put off for a week. The field logic in his body felt like admitting a secret, not gaining a weapon. Array, the System had called it, politely. Ryn thought of it as covered ground—the feel of a place under his foot and his rope turned into habits that would trip men whose habits were wrong.
Sereth stood in the doorway and did the habitual work of men who meant to live—oiling a bowstring, checking a nock, looking out of a slit in wood and making his eyes get small to count numbers. "Northmen have settled two fields east—making their own square with three carts and two oxen they haven't eaten yet," he said. "Sponsor's lot pulled back after the willow. They set glass where men stick heads; I saw the glint. Guild moved to the weir. Factor's trying to learn to breathe where the river stinks. Ossuary's hum shifted west to where men won't listen. For now."
"Good," Tamsin said. "We can disappoint different men tomorrow." She slid a coin—or something that had been a coin once—across her knuckles, flicked it into the air, let it fall, didn't pick it up. Small rebellions made her smile.
Ilyon stared at a jar of vinegar with blank hatred, then set it away from him, as if he'd just accepted it as something a god had put on his table and he would use without loving it. His hand looked less raw. The cut on his palm had a crust of dried paste and obviously hurt only when he used it. He used it more anyway, a stubbornness Ryn found reassuring.
Hana was teaching Trella's cousin how to set a deadfall in one sentence that sounded like a curse. "If he steps here," she said, tapping the floor with her foot in a rhythmic way, "this falls and the door calls him a fool. If he asks you how, tell him he should have asked yesterday." The woman's mouth twitched. She had made a habit of asking men too late; she looked like someone who'd fixed that habit the hard way this month.
Dorran napped with his eyes half-closed—the dog sleep of men who will get up and be useful when summoned by the wrong sound. His mouth opened and closed. His hands didn't tremble. His breath rasped like a file.
Kerrin had learned his knots. He could tie a flat knot without making the rope resent him and then undo it without fighting the line. He stood by the door with his shoulders set the way boys set them when they are preparing to lie to themselves about fear.
Ryn took a breath through his nose and told the field around him where his ropes lived. He felt it as a soft catching along his forearms, a minor pressure at the base of the bell rope, a tug where line kissed rafter. He hated that it felt like the System had moved into his blood; he loved that it gave him something to do besides die. Anchor, then weight. Marla's voice in his head, not the Warden's. He'd keep it that way or break.
He'd meant to spend the evening boring himself with array practice and letting the donkey steal bread. The world did not give a damn about his plan.
Horns from two directions. North-east: sponsor—irritated, thwarted. North: a new call again—three longs, one short—northmen, but not the group from the ridge. Off-call. Not for him. For someone else. The Warden's horn did not sound. Good. He didn't want that weight on his head again today.
Sereth was already standing, bow in hand. "We'll get a test," he said. "Then another. Then we'll be asked to eat other people's mistakes by night."
"Eat," Tamsin snorted. "Chew, if we're lucky. Swallow, if we're saints."
"Move," Hana said, not waiting for something to ask permission to break their door. "One hour. Then we go whether you think you can or not."
Ryn said nothing. He tied one more rope, then picked up the donkey's halter and rubbed her jaw. "Apple," he told her, unrepentant liar. For a fraction she lifted her head like a queen convinced of her own dignity. He laughed and put his head against her withers and then didn't because a man who talks to his rope is one thing; a man who prays into donkey hair is another. He went back to work.
They had at most an hour before the sponsor's enforcer remembered boredom and made it someone else's problem. Ryn used eighteen minutes of it to practice array: laying two lines a palm-width apart across a gap and setting them to pull at different times, first one, then the other, hard enough to make a thigh betray a knee. He blew air through his teeth, felt the lines sing under his hands, and adjusted because the singing was too sweet. He made it ugly. He made it work.
[Array: Two-line wedded (basic) — built.]
[Field sense: micro pressure changes map updated.]
He let the neat letters pass through him like a breeze and thought of nails again.
The enforcer did remember to be bored. He came down the lane with nine men and a patience that showed in the courtesy of his weapons sitting not-quite-ready. He had a crude bandage over his cheek now where Tamsin's knife had taught him something earlier. The line of glitter that had hung to his face like a scar had been scraped. He wore the blue ribbon and looked like someone carrying an umbrella out of spite. He lifted two fingers. "Rent," he said, almost friendly. It sounded like the subtle insult of men who think they're clever and are.
"Paid," Trella's cousin said before Ryn could. Ryn liked her dearly for that. The enforcer's gaze slid past her to Ryn's hands the way it always did, then to the donkey, as if writing down that he had not changed appetites.
He didn't attack the door. He stopped five paces out and looked left, at the field under the larches to the north, where his men could go around and make the line irrelevant. He made a small motion with his hand. Two men slid left. Ryn had expected that. He had set a wedded pair of lines there so the first would lift a foot just enough and the second would bite above the knee when pulled; he waited the second he had given himself, then pulled the second line tight when the first man committed with his weight. The man's knee parted its relationship with his thigh with a noise that would follow him into other towns. He went down without grace. The second man did that overcompensating step where you don't have a friend's blood on you and then do. Tamsin took the tendon behind his knee with a narrow, holy cut. Two down, both alive to tell each other to get up later. That sufficed.
The enforcer didn't flinch. He weighed the cost and measured more than coin. He made the small chin movement that made his men go right instead. The well-side gap would let two in and then none easily. He would test it, see the wrong bell sing, note which line was attached to which silly old man's knot, tell himself a story he could use tomorrow, and leave with the boredom he had brought like a picnic.
He would have. He didn't get the chance.
The sponsor's trumpet from east had turned into a scream. Not of men. Of the wrong hum. The ossuary's ring chose that moment to move quiet and far away. It poured toward a stand of fruit trees two fields down—cherry, such as they were—and the sponsor's men had put bottles under them even though Ryn had seen his own bones' hunger. The wrongness poured happily into the easier wrong, and someone's bright idea got smarter and crueler. The enforcer looked over his shoulder at the sound, calculating. He scowled. Not because he was sorry. Because someone had stolen his attention. He hated that.
"You took a thing from the bones," he said to Ryn suddenly, stepping forward a fraction. "You'll bring me one. After you've given one to the Warden so your conscience can write letters. You'll bring me one, boy, or I'll put your donkey's head in your lap and ask you to map it."
Ryn felt the surge of heat rage gives. It made his fingers clench. The field around him brightened in that way it had; he felt lines like a map of small rivers under his skin. That made him more nauseous than the threat. He kept his mouth, barely. "No," he said. If he said more he would have to kill a man for saying something he absolutely would say again tomorrow and the day after. He could kill him. He could not kill the word.
The enforcer's mouth thinned into something that would be boredom later and anger now. He lifted his fingers again. The array Ryn had laid did its dull work. Men tripped at wrong moments; the field told him they would, and his hands pulled lines with a calm not like a god at all. A young man with a shield learned how to regret on his face and did not die. Tamsin cut where she needed. Sereth shot sleeves. Ilyon kept the vinegar far from skin and near breath. Hana moved children with bread and moved men with swears. Dorran held and remembered how to be bored in the face of a spear and kept himself alive because he was too tired to be fancy. It wasn't heroic. It wasn't supposed to be.
The enforcer redirected three times in nine minutes. He is a good student. He learned the pitch of Ryn's bell and didn't look when it sang wrong. He learned to test the lower line with the heel and the upper with the shin. He learned to avoid the tree where Tamsin had set a murder hole. He learned to step where Sereth's arrows couldn't push because of an angle between rafters and post. He learned impatiently. Ryn wanted to respect him and did not, like refusing food made by a clever enemy. He accepted that too.
A horn from the north again. Sereth put his eye to the slit and made a small noise. "New lot," he said. "Round shields. No blue ribbon. Boredom walking."
The enforcer's mouth curved, a man delighted that someone else might be less bored than him. He called a withdrawal with a hand flick; men obeyed. He walked backward a step, then forward a step, then back again, bored in ritual. He pointed at Ryn's hands. "Soon," he said—not threat so much as promise to himself. Then the bored god turned and left, and Ryn's hands shook as if they had been holding onto something heavier than rope.
Ryn's stomach clenched as if someone had put the stew of the last week in it and stirred. The wrong hum two fields down sang higher; tendrils met bone-lattice, and poor wrongness leapt into wrong wrongness. It would taste like victory somewhere else later. He filed it under bills that would come due. The Warden's map in his head showed a node dimming a hair and another brightening; he hated them both.
"Move," Hana said, again, and his heart took the word as a prayer. "We go before a new man with a new flag decides to have a religion about our door."
They unbarred the door and filed, the donkey a presence that excused his own lack of holiness, Ryn rubbing her jaw again, liar and believer pulled thin as rope. They came out into afternoon light that had gone gold and false-kind. Northmen crested the ridge like a story and then paused, maybe because a cherry tree had just done something obscene to a bottle. Sereth nodded once, the corner of his mouth quirked. "Let them argue with their boredom," he said.
They slid along the ditch. The field under Ryn's skin shifted as his lines took space at different distances. The feeling was wrong. He used it anyway. He realized with a quiet horrid humor that this was all he would ever do now: feel pressure, pull line, make breath into work, hate himself a little, love himself less, and continue.
They cut into a low wood that smelled of old fox and new mould. He buried another wedge under a stone at the lip of a trickle where water would listen to it instead of his wrists. The hum there flattened. He breathed. The Warden's weight in his head eased too; boredom satisfied for an hour.
At the far edge of the wood the land fell away into a shallow gulley where men had dumped broken things for a generation. He saw a broken plow, two wheel rims, a bed frame turned to pretence by weather. There was a child's doll head sunk in mud. He thought of counting and didn't. They slid down and up, feet slipping, rope singing.
On the ridge beyond, a clean line of men stood against sky—northmen again, but not the boring honest ones. These wore bits of sponsor gear and had tied blue cloth to their arms. Ryn hated the sight more than any proper enemy. It meant men could be anything ugly with enough boredom. He felt something in his chest turn into a thin bitter laugh and he didn't let it out.
"Rent," Tamsin said softly, not to be funny.
"Rent," Ryn agreed, and his mouth made that word sound like a promise in a way he hadn't intended. He set a wedded pair of lines along the next ditch and felt their song settle, ugly and familiar.
They moved. The moor rolled. The knots held. The day didn't. It changed again.
Near evening, as they cleared a ridge and came down into a shallow swale with a slap of water in the bottom, Sereth's hand came up flat. His mouth made a shape Ryn had learned to trust more than any horn: surprise underlaid by contempt. "That," he said, and nodded.
At the swale's lip, two men knelt with pry bars under a stone, not sponsor, not Guild, not northmen. One in a tunic with a little clean patch over the elbow, hands soft and awkward, the other with sleeves rolled, muscles in forearms made by sledge and rope. They had a piece of something brittle wrapped in cloth on a sack next to them, three other pieces wrapped already. A donkey much thinner than theirs stood with its head low, patient like all her kind.
The Warden had told him this would be here one day—a choice for him to make that would taste like sick. Kill one, speak to the other. He had already made it at the bridge. It tasted like pennies in his mouth now with dust.
The working man looked up, saw Ryn, his eyes went to the rope and not to Ryn's ears, then to the wives and not to Ryn's knife. He put his hand over the wrapped shapes as if they were his child. The clerk-boy grabbed for a pry bar like a man who will ruin his thumb to be brave for the first time.
Ryn walked down. He didn't raise the pry bar. His hands were empty.
"What," the clerk-boy said. Not very brave. Trying.
"Rent," Ryn said softly. "Sins, taxes. You know."
The working man's mouth got thin in a way Ryn recognized in his own mirror sometimes. "My boy," he said, not asking for sympathy, spitting the fact because he couldn't swallow it again. "The river took him. If I sell the teeth, my other two eat."
Ryn swallowed the thing in his own throat. The Warden's voice ran up his bones: You will kill one. You will speak to the other. If you save both, six others will drown. He hated that the arithmetic had entered his house.
He looked at Tamsin. Her mouth was a flat line. She had cut a man on a goat path two hours ago and smiled. She did not smile now. She shrugged because no knife could make this honest. She would take whichever part of his decision she could bite.
He breathed in through his nose, closed his eyes, opened them. He would not perform this like a hero. He would do it like a man who ties rope for innocent thieves who mean to put it around their own necks later.
He nodded at the working man. "You go," he said, and his voice had no right to absolve. The man's eyebrows knotted like he couldn't decide whether to curse and weep. He took his wrapped, three pieces; he took the skinny donkey; he didn't look back. He would feed children and lie to himself about what he had sold and it would not be a sin worse than breathing. It would be until tomorrow.
Ryn turned to the clerk-boy. "You have to run," he said. "Now."
The boy looked at him like men look at sugar, at pleas, at bad water. He looked at the three pieces in the sack and the fourth by the pry bar and at Ryn's hands. The arithmetic in his head told him honesty would keep him alive and lying would keep him richer. He opened his mouth.
Ryn didn't let him talk. He stepped fast and used Hook-and-Break wrong, catching the boy behind the knee and dropping him to the ground without grace. He took his head in a way that was not heroic and not kind and not barbaric, and broke his neck. He didn't do it beautifully. He did it before he could see a picture of this boy's mother. He vomited into ground that had taken children before.
He had done the Warden's math. He hated it. He would do it again. He did not expect to be forgiven. He did not intend to ask.
He wrapped the fourth piece without looking at it and put it into his satchel as if it were a thing he had to carry until he could give it to someone he hated less than himself. Tamsin didn't speak. Sereth made one short sound and then turned his head, because he had the decency to give the dead a privacy. Hana put a hand on his wrist for one blink and then swore and moved on because she had to move men more than grief.
Kerrin took rope and held it without a fuss. Ilyon looked at Ryn and looked at the field and looked at the wrapped thing and made a decision to be quiet for the first time in a day and Ryn loved him for it so hard it made his back ache.
The Warden's horn did not sound. Ryn thought he could hear a weight in the map inside his head settle onto a new shelf. He put his hand under the donkey's jaw and rubbed. She sighed, a saint. He Foxed the last piece under the stone into the ditch, because he was done making choices for an hour.
Then they moved again into evening because nothing else made sense; because men's boredom needed them elsewhere; because the ossuary hummed behind them and the sponsor would occupy themselves with fruit that had been made wrong rather than his house.
The tollhouse he had next in mind lay on a low hill with a dragon spine of rock under it. The slab under its floor hummed polite. The woman at the door had her pike and a no-nonsense mouth. Ryn held up the writ without seeing it and used Trella's voice because he didn't have one of his own left. "Rent. One day," he said.
She squinted and made a sensible noise. "Fine," she said. "You look like a man who will leave me something I'll hate and use."
He nodded. "I will," he said. He would place a wedge under a ditch where it would hum into water and make a line straight and alive without needing his hands. He would set his array across the door. He would hold one more hour and then one more because he intended to make a habit of it.
This was his life. He hated it and loved it and did it anyway.
He set the lines. He took the bell. He bored himself. He felt the field under his skin turn this door into a place. He smiled and it didn't look like joy.
The System, companion and clerk and priest and enemy, put a thin neat line into his skull and made him want to break it and thank it both.
[Objective: Field hold (afternoon) — Completed.]
[Experience: +58.]
[Rook I — Array logic proficiency increased; Anchor Whip II learned.]
[Trapper II — Full (maintained).]
[Notes: Surgeon: testing new vector; Enforcer: bored, angry; Northmen (split): one group holds their own rent; Ossuary: will move at night.]
He stared at the numbers and names like they were nails and he was tired, and nodded to nothing. He told his rope to sing when touched by men he did not have the time to learn the names of and sat on the bench by the door for one breath before he had to stand again because someone else would make a bad choice and he would have to argue with it by wedded line in his own hands.
It wasn't heroism. It was a trade. He pulled breath out of the world and made it into rope he could give to someone else later and hate himself for doing it on time if they didn't take it. He did it because he could. He did it because he didn't know what else to do. He did it because Marla would have hit him if he didn't. He did it because the donkey would not.
He rubbed the donkey's jaw again and promised two apples. He felt like a liar he had met in a mirror once. He didn't mind much.
When the next horn sounded from the north at twilight—three short, one long, like something laughing uglier than necessary—he picked up the rope and didn't hesitate. He turned his face not to the Warden or the ossuary or the sponsor or even the northmen. He turned it to Hana and Tamsin and Sereth and Ilyon and Dorran and Kerrin and everyone else he had gathered and said the only word in his world worth repeating.
"Move," he said, and breathed, and the field under his hands took it well. He pulled.