Dawn came thin as skimmed milk. The field Ryn had laid around the tollhouse—wedded lines, deadfalls, the bell hung to sing the wrong pitch—sat in his bones like a net that wanted to lift. He stood at the doorframe, eyes gritty, hand on rope. The donkey blew into his shoulder. It would be another ugly day. He would ask too much of his luck and hate himself for every time it answered.
Sereth peered through the door slit. "Sponsor's enforcer on the east lane," he said. "Nine. Bored. Northmen further north. Two bands now. One wearing blue on their arms. One not. Guild at the weir, trying to look like a wall."
"And the bones?" Tamsin asked, flipping a bone disk across her knuckles and letting it fall without picking it up.
"Sleeping like a snake," Sereth said. "Storing bite."
Hana shoved a cup into Ryn's hand. Broth thin enough to resent. "Drink. Salt stays better than you do."
He drank. The salt felt like a rope tied around his heart and dragged it back into place. He put the cup down. "We hold until the enforcer runs out of bored," he said. "Then we go before the bones remember our door."
"You're getting religious," Tamsin said.
"I'm bored," Ryn said.
He wasn't. He was tired. He had said yes to Rook the day before, and the field under his skin had become a new sense he could not stop hearing. He could feel where the door would flex under a hard shoulder, where the well curb would catch a shin at the wrong time. He hated it because it felt like the System. He loved it because it meant he could push a line at the right breath and keep a boy from dying because a man's boredom wanted it.
The enforcer arrived as predicted: polite as a cut, bored as a magistrate. He stood five paces beyond the cart gap and lifted two fingers. "Rent."
"Paid," Trella's cousin said, her tone thirty years older than her face. She had set her jaw around the word like it was spiked bread. Ryn stepped back from the door to let her own crowd see her in front of him. It mattered.
The enforcer sent two men left. Ryn had set a two-line array across that gap, one ankle, one knee. He waited for the wrong breath. Field sense tugged in his forearms. He pulled the knee line when the first man lifted and watched the second stumble into the first's knee instead of over it. Tamsin's knife cut correctness into hamstring. Sereth put an arrow through sleeve, low. The bell hummed low. Ryn let it hum.
"Stop tuning bells," the enforcer said, exhausted. "It offends."
"Stop coming," Ryn said.
They held. They adjusted. It felt like holding breath in a room that had forgotten how to air. The enforcer redirected three times in six minutes. He was learning faster than yesterday. Ryn pulled faster. Anchor Whip snapped a shin at a bad moment. Quickstep II took him two paces into and back out of a reach that would have cut his thigh. The field under his skin brightened when the door moved. It was like having a ghost tell him when his own house breathed. He didn't thank it. He used it.
Then the wrong horn—the new one—three long, one short—cracked the morning from the north-east. Sponsor's men turned their heads. Even the enforcer flicked his eyes. "They'll dirt up my road," he said, annoyed, and lifted his fingers in a bored retreat. He didn't like sharing boredom.
"Move," Hana said without waiting. Ryn cut the door lines he meant to leave as lessons, left one for the door woman's hands, and ducked out over nettles. The donkey followed, sure-footed like a queen, like always.
They slid through a beech stand into a shallow lane where hedges met overhead. Ryn mapped the field under him like he had learned to map lines: the pitch of road, the sag in a hedge, pressure against a loop. He set a falter rope across the narrowest gap and left its tail under leaves. He tuned the bell in his head he'd hung behind them and told himself not to listen to bells in his head.
They reached the next rise in time to see the square in the little hamlet beyond being turned into worship by men with inside-out coats and long knives. They had a horn. They had a voice. They had bad habits they called law. A woman held a child on her hip and stared straight ahead with her mouth set. A man with a pike pretended not to shake.
Ryn stepped into their square as if it were his, because that is sometimes how a bad habit dies. "Rent," he said, deadpan. The lead knifeman looked at him like he had seen a story suddenly manifest. "Pay us," he said, flexing fingers as if he had never been allowed to feel how long they were.
Ryn pulled the falter rope's tail through leaves. It kissed their ankles. They stumbled. Tamsin cut one clean. Sereth's arrow pinned sleeve to cart, dragging a man backward in a movement his brain didn't authorize. Ilyon threw vinegar into the wrong air like rain. Hana moved children like she had invented the concept.
They left, indignant and intact. Ryn didn't kill them. He didn't forgive them either. He took their horn. He set a rope around a cart's axle and showed the man with the pike how to pull it so the door would bite the next time. He left before the sponsor's enforcer remembered he hated sharing altars.
They cut east. The field under his skin tugged toward the willow stand where the surgeon had played. He stayed well away without having to think about it.
The heat made the day blur. It broke into the sound of bees in an elder tree and then into the crunch of bone-dust under foot at a place where a cart had broken something it didn't admit in the night. Ryn kept count. He had stopped counting names; his head couldn't hold them. He counted lines. He counted breath. He counted how many steps he could take before he needed to pull something or he would be sick.
At midday, they struck a small trouble that wasn't polite enough to be rent. Northmen—seven—had pulled two carts across the shallow lane and set a rough square to start a church of their own. The leader wore no blue. His men had the tidy weight of people who'd fished something off a boy's arm and not felt sorry. He raised his chin at Ryn as if this were a test. Not of the door. Of Ryn.
Ryn walked up until their field and his touched. It felt like a hand pressed against his under glass. "Rent," he said because it killed nothing to make old words work. He lifted the writ just enough to make humiliation something to balance. The leader squinted. He had no patience for paper. Good. Ryn hated paper too.
"Payment," the man said finally, as if taking pleasure in translating. "Go through late."
Ryn nodded once, a bow to the concept of not dying this hour. "Late," he agreed, and didn't say what it meant in his mouth. They reversed. Sereth pulled them off into a tight path through broken hedgerow, bending back new growth with the respect you give a good idea. Tamsin marked the northmen's square on her map, the one that lived behind her eyes and inside her favored knife, so she could cut it later. Ryn filed the leader's face under men who would need ugly language rather than clean lines.
They slid into low oak again. A child cried. Ryn swallowed a reflex to stop and fix it and let Hana do her work. He had to stop pulling every rope.
They came up on the next tollhouse without expecting it because someone had done a job right months ago. The door bar slid comfortably; the slab under the floor hummed polite. A man and a woman, old, shared a bench outside, neither bothering to be armed. They watched. They took Ryn in like weather.
"Rent," Ryn said and hated himself for liking the ritual now. The old man put his hand up with gentle annoyance. "Keep your house ugly," he said. "We put our rooms into it and it bit the last polite men."
Ryn smiled. He did not feel the smile. "Good," he said. He set his ropes. He tuned his bell. He showed them how to pull. He buried one wedge under the ditch where the water wanted to tell him he smelled too much like stones. He did not hum.
By late afternoon, when the heat became a held thought, the enforcer moved closer. He would not miss the evening. He wanted to eat well before he slept. The field under Ryn's skin told him the weight at the cart gap would be more tonight; the breath near the well would be heavier with sweat. He would need to pull sooner and turn Quickstep II into uglier moves to save ankles.
He took time he didn't have to set a new trick: three tied lines wedded into a little braid and laid across the left gap. He could pull any one and the others would sing moment later. It would make a thigh lie to itself and a knee betray that lie. He tested it with his hand. It bit him. He liked it and hated liking it.
[Array: Three-line (basic) — built.]
[Field sense: updated.]
He cut off a laugh before it could get out of him. He rubbed the donkey's jaw and told her a long, detailed lie about two apples, pausing to describe their speckle. She snorted, holy, and tried to bite his shirt. He loved her, disgusting and honest.
"Move," Hana said. He set his hand on rope and the field turned small and true in his bones.
They held the door again. The enforcer yawned and tried new toys and hated that he was not the surgeon. He sent three men left and one failed the knot Ryn had made and one learned and one bumped into the cart and one hit his ankle and found a wedded line. He sent two men right and Ryn snapped Anchor Whip into a shin with the small happiness of a craftsman. The bell sang wrong; the enforcer didn't flinch. He was tired of bells.
They went on until a horn to the north—the old honest one—cut. Not for them. For the sponsor's net. Boredom moved. The enforcer frowned at his own hunger and waved his men off, because he was practical. He did not believe in dying in the evening when there was better dying to be had at breakfast.
They were ready to slide out over nettles when the new bad horn—three long, one short—blew from the east again, and a band of men with inside-out coats walked into the lane as if a god had called them and they believed it. Ryn had set his line to cut their ankles; he pulled. They fell. He hated that he found it funny.
They left. They got to the hedgerow and the willow stand beyond and Ryn kept them away from the hum because he had learned to be a dull saint. He did not hum at stones. He did ask Ilyon to pour a line of ash for some other child. He did it with a boy's proud care and Ryn loved him more than he feared the surgeon.
It rained, at last, near dusk, not enough to clean them, enough to make the ground release the day's heat and smell like what it was: old dirt, old fat, some truths, some lies.
They took the string of their door with them and called it rent and knew it wasn't. They stopped for a breath under a hawthorn whose thorns had grown heavy and then thin again with the season. The donkey lowered her head and ate wet grass with joy. Ryn felt heat leave his skull with his breath. He rubbed her jaw and asked for forgiveness he wasn't going to be given. She gave it. Saints are funny that way.
He had one more door to hold if he wanted sleep and didn't deserve it. He set it. He tuned the bell. He patterned the field with three wedded lines and told himself it would outlive him as a habit if he taught enough hands.
[Status:]
Name: Ryn
Race: Half-Elf (Unregistered)
Class: Trapper II / Rook I
Level: 8 (pending)
Strength: 7
Agility: 12
Vitality: 9
Mind: 8
Perception: 12
Tenacity: 12
Corruption: 4% (Shard Sync: 8%)
[Skills:]
Linework III
Makeshift Trap II
Improvised Bomb II
Hook-and-Break (Intermediate)
Quickstep II
Anchor Whip II
[Techniques:]
Snapline Step (80% stabilized)
Array logic (basic)
[Notes:]
Sponsor: enforcer bored, surgeon idle and thinking new thoughts.
Northmen: split; bored; watching.
Ossuary: storing hunger; night drift likely.
Warden: map weight: present; patience: thin.
He put the neat lines back into whatever box the System loved and turned his face away from it. He was a man who tied doors closed so it hurt to push when a bored god wanted in. He would keep being that man as long as the donkey would let him.
He shifted his weight. The field tugged at his jaw. The bell hummed the wrong note. He looked through the slit and saw a small motion that made the hair on his wrist lift.
"Sereth," he said.
"Mm."
"Left," Ryn said. "Second elbow. Sleeve. If you please."
Sereth's arrow sang. A man to the left jerked his sleeve back as if something had touched his arm in a love he had not earned. He swore, beautifully. He would live, in a different key. It would hurt. It would teach the next boy what door meant when someone else had the rope.
"Move," Hana said, final for evening, and Ryn breathed and pulled and felt the line hum under his hands like a song he had decided to live by without believing it was holy.
Night came. Bones sang a little. He didn't. He held. He had one more day in him. He would be afforded no grace for asking. He would ask anyway. He would promise apples. He would deliver one if he could.
It would put him in debt to nothing but the donkey. He could live with that. He wasn't a rook yet. He was a man with a field who knew where to put weight. If he lived long enough to become the other, he'd teach boys to be bored cruelly, maybe even better than him. That would make a ledger in his head go light for a breath. He pulled.
Morning would bring another horn, a new name, the same old boredom. He set lines for it now, because tired men set bad lines and he could not afford that today. He hung the bell a half-inch higher. He lay like a bad habit across a door and slept with his hand on rope. He didn't hum. The field hummed enough. He would pay later. He always did. He would choose when. That felt like the only worship of which he was capable.