The alpha's shadow came over Ryo and blotted out the white line. He didn't think about it. He shoved the ash pole into the joint where leg met chest and barked, "Down!" and went down himself, knees to wet stone. The front rank dropped with him. The beast's belly washed heat over his back as it leapt. Rope snapped with a gunshot sound. Carts hopped out of ruts and banged back into them.
Ryo rolled left, felt claws rake his coat without taking skin, and saw, in the slice of space between knee and road, a stupid grin and an iron pin in the thin man's hand where the stocks should have been locked. The fool had pulled the pin and stepped back to watch.
Ryo didn't shout at him. He pushed off his left palm and surged, low and ugly. He hit the thin man thigh-first and then shoulder-to-sternum, lived in the feeling of ribs for the half second he needed, and wrapped his fingers around the man's thumb. He rolled it the way he'd rolled Brann's, not sharp, just placed. The man's hand opened like a fish. The pin clanged on stone. Ryo kicked it to send it skittering, then went after it with both hands while the thin man gulped air like a slapped child.
"Ren!" Ryo said without looking. "Stocks jaw!"
Ren didn't pause to ask what jaw meant. He shouldered the lower half of the heavy board, got his shoulder under the top, and began to lever it upright. Corlan saw what was being asked and ran in without a word, putting his back to the wood and his feet to the stone. The priest got a palm on it too. It came up heavy, losing water in sheets. The alpha turned toward the mass of men and wood because motion pulls hunger.
"Here," Ryo said. "Here." He didn't yell. He made his voice a thing the body had to hear like the word move in a fire. He jammed the pin through the holes in the stocks to catch on the hinge so the top jaw would fall and stop where he wanted it. It made a brace. He didn't plan it. His hands did it.
The alpha hit the wood with its chest and then, because gravity and stupidity love each other, shoved its own throat into the semicircle cut in the stocks that had been meant for wrists. The jaw came down under its weight. For a second nothing happened. Then the hinge slammed and wood met bone. The alpha's throat folded into the hole and stuck there. Its claws scrabbled at the sides. It tried to yank back and couldn't. The pin had kept the jaw from swinging too far. The collar of reed and bone around its neck jammed exactly where the wood bit.
"Pin!" Ryo held his hand out. The thin man was still on his arse, eyes wide, hair stuck to his face. He didn't have the pin anymore. Toller had seen it skitter and scooped it with his toe as if he'd been playing games since he was five for this moment. He slid it across the stone. Ryo caught the iron with both palms and shoved it through the jaws and into the hole so the jaw couldn't lift when the beast thrashed. His fingers kissed the alpha's wet hide and came away with slime and heat.
"Hold," Ryo said to the men and to the idea of the line because it needed saying. Hold: set.
The alpha threw a shoulder and tried to roll. It couldn't. Ren's shovel found spine. Brann was already there, stick shortened to a club, face blood-striped, eyes feral. He went for the mouth again because he'd decided that was what he did. He drove the broken stick into the soft place behind the palate. The thing snapped and caught the stick and Brann's knuckles. Brann didn't pull back. He pushed deeper, skin tearing across the back of his hand. The alpha panicked. It choked itself on wood and its own weight.
"Lye," Ryo said without turning. He knew the sound of Anna's feet. She didn't run; she walked like she was in a kitchen and didn't want to slosh. The goose house woman was with her, hands steady on the lip.
"Now," Ryo said. They tipped. Steam and a stink like old grease and piss hit all at once. The alpha took it into its mouth and nose because it was trying to breathe. It made a low, drowning noise.
"Finish it," Ren grunted.
Poles came in like stakes. Toller had a rope around a hind leg already and flung himself backward on it with both heels dug, learned from calves and stubborn pigs. Corlan used his weight with cruel patience, not speed. The priest, cursing, put the broken broom into an eye and then dropped it and picked up a rock, which he used on the far temple like a man tenderizing meat. Soren didn't swing; he pushed with his pole where Ren told him to. Brann braced his body against the stocks like a man shoring up a door in a flood. Ryo took the shovel when Ren's grip slipped and put its edge where breath wanted to go and made sure breath couldn't.
The alpha's movements changed—less power, more random. The weight settled heavier into the wood. The reed-and-bone collar creaked against oak. It smelled like a river bed turned over and something dead pulled up from the silt. The howls stopped. The water around their boots went dark from churned muck and blood.
Ryo didn't trust dead until the muscles let go cleanly. He counted five breaths after the last big jerk. Then he nodded once and stepped back and away from the board, pin still set.
Silence wasn't clean. It held panting and whimpers and someone vomiting and someone else praying in a language they probably only used to barter fish. Ryo made himself stand and look. Two white-shirt boys were down. One had a shoulder ripped open like bad cloth; he was breathing. The other was still, eyes open and seeing nothing, face too serene. A woman from the fish tables held her forearm, bleeding slow and thick between her fingers. Anna had a burn on her wrist from the lye splash; she'd hidden it from herself until now.
Brann pulled his hand back from the stick. Meat was opened on the back of his thumb and along the index finger. Not deep enough to lose anything. Ugly. He looked at it like it had betrayed him.
Soren's lips moved. He wasn't praying. He was counting heads. He saw the thin man on the ground and something passed over his face that wasn't mercy.
"Back in," Soren said, voice raw. "Stocks. Now."
The thin man scrambled and tried to stand. Ren's hand found his elbow. He turned the joint and the man folded without a word like a puppet with its strings cut. Ryo took the free wrist and dropped it into the left hole by habit. The priest lifted the jaw up an inch, and Ryo slid the pin loose, then reset it with the man's hand inside. It clicked. The sound landed different when it had just held a monster's throat.
"You moved the pin," Mara said. She had come while they were putting the big one down and had stayed out of the line because she knew where she was useful. She looked at the thin man, then at Brann, then at the counter-sign still in Soren's other hand.
"Registered collector's man, freed during an attack, removed stocks pin," she said, voice even and formal because the room without walls needed it. "Name: Brann's man. Mark holder: Brann. Trespass during emergency. Steward?"
Soren straightened,, rain and sweat making his hair cling. He spoke like a man reading a verdict he hadn't had the luxury to write at a desk. "By my name under Gareth of Millroads and with the village officer witnessing, registration for Brann is suspended for one season for endangering the guardians' line. His men do not collect. Any coin held is escrowed. Any collector found at a door is fined and put in stocks. Names will be taken."
Brann turned his head slow. His jaw worked once. He bled and didn't look at his hand. He looked at Soren like the box under Soren's arm had just turned into a weapon he hadn't brought himself.
"You do that now," Brann said, voice low. "You do that while things that shouldn't exist are trying to eat the road."
"I do it now because you picked now," Soren said. Something in him had broken and settled - not courage, just the thing under it that lets it stand. "You could have stopped your man. You didn't. You can pay out of your own purse for a season while we count what's left of ours."
Brann looked past Soren at Ryo. He didn't smile. His eyes said he wanted to see which way the room tilted now. Ryo didn't give him a tilt to stand on. He looked at the collar on the alpha's neck.
"Cut that," Ryo said to Ren. "Careful. Don't break it."
Ren glanced at him and then reached for his knife without commentary. He slid the blade between reed and flesh where it touched wood and drew. The collar came away. It was made of narrow reeds braided tight with thin bone slivers laid in like nails head-to-toe. In one place, a sliver of metal had been bound into the braid, not fancy. A disk of tin with a stamp. Two dots, one above the other.
Ryo showed it to Mara and then to Soren without lifting it high like a banner. He didn't need the whole lane to see. He needed the right people.
"Same mark as the nails," Mara said. She didn't make a speech out of it. She looked at Brann.
Brann didn't flinch. "Reeds and bones are everywhere," he said. "Children make collars for dogs out of that. Tin is tin."
"Tin with two dots stamped vertical," Ryo said. He kept his voice even, like he was naming weight, not guilt. "Same as nails under thresholds. Same as pegs in alehouse doors. It means someone with a box of those made both things. Same seller at least, same hand at worst. You can say it wasn't you, and maybe it wasn't. I don't care yet. I care that it's here."
The priest bent and picked up a tooth as big as his thumb that had popped free under the shovel. He held it up and squinted like a man choosing a nail for a hinge. "This doesn't come out of the marsh because it woke up on its own," he said. "It comes out because someone got smart and lazy. I hate smart and lazy in the same body."
White-shirt boys began to check their own wounds with the stunned movements of men who had been very close to stopping moving forever and hadn't believed in that before. Women tied cloth around arms. Anna ripped her sleeve at the seam with her teeth and wrapped her own burn with as little fuss as a person can make when their skin is screaming.
Ryo took the tin disk and rubbed the mud off it with his thumb. He put it into his bag next to the three nails on the plate and the cloth with words on it. He slid the jar with the thumb print further down so if someone thought to grab it, they'd get fingers in old blood instead of evidence.
"Clean the line," he said to anyone with a pole and a hand. "Don't leave paste where dogs will lick it and get ideas. Reset the rope. Those carts go back in the ruts before someone snaps an axle tonight."
Corlan grunted something about his axles and moved. Ren set the rope. Toller went back to his nails and collected them with a stick so he didn't add new holes to his hands.
Brann tore cloth off his torn sleeve and wrapped his hand with the tightness of someone used to doing it himself. He started to walk toward Ryo like he had a thing to say that had his name in it.
Mara stepped between them without making it a scene. She set her ledger on the cart so wet would wrinkle the paper later and didn't care. "You lost your mark for a season," she said to Brann, calm, like she was reading the day's weather. "Don't collect. Don't come to doors. Don't send boys to tap. Sit with your men and tell them you'll feed them from your purse. If you can't, tell them to find work that doesn't mean putting their hands on other people's lintels."
Brann looked like he wanted to say a lot of words one after the other. He didn't. He looked at the dead length of the alpha, at the rope, at the stocks with his thin man's wrist in them. He looked at Soren and made a small, tight smile that meant he would move the fight to somewhere the other man couldn't stand on a table.
"Book," Brann said to Ryo anyway, like he couldn't leave the word alone. "Tonight."
"Table," Ryo said. "Always."
Brann walked away. His ring didn't click against anything. The thin man in the stocks watched him like a dog whose owner had left it tied up. Nobody moved to pity him.
Soren stood without his box for the first time since morning. He had set it down and forgotten it. He looked at the road and the water and then at Ryo.
"If I make you something," Soren said, "a word on paper, with a line under it—warden, keeper, anything I can put down without writing lies—will you take it? Will you stand lines? It's not a soldier's post. It's a chore."
Ryo's first instinct was to say no to titles. He had work. He had a door. He didn't want a coat that meant he had to walk into rooms and say he was something. But the word fit, not because it made him bigger, but because it matched the work he was already doing.
"Put it in the book," Ryo said. "Not as a gift from you. As a thing you named so people know where to go when something leaks."
Soren breathed like a man under a beam decided he had to lift it anyway. "Warden of the Line," he said, half to himself, trying the shape of it. "Temporary. Bound to Mara's table. Witnessed by priest. No pay but priority on levy disputes."
Mara made a noise that might have been a laugh if she weren't half dead from keeping paper dry all morning. "I like 'no pay,'" she said. "It makes men believe you."
"Write it," Ryo said. He didn't smile. He didn't need to. He looked at Anna's wrapped wrist and nodded to himself that he would find clean fat for it, not paste. He looked at the rope and saw where they'd need a new length before noon tomorrow. He looked at the collar in his bag and understood someone had been too clever in the wrong direction.
Something in him clicked into place. It didn't make a sound anyone else could hear. It was like when he set a bar across a door and felt the right weight in his palm.
Office: accepted. Line authority extended when witnessed.
He let the thought go. He didn't chase it. He went to the alpha's mouth and put his hand near it to feel for any last death twitch. There wasn't one.
"Burn it," the priest said, pinching the bridge of his nose. "Not near the reeds. Out on the wet bank. It'll stink. Better stink than creeping back to your door at night one piece at a time."
"Fine," Ryo said. "Ren?"
Ren's hands were already on the rope. Toller got a hook under the jaw and grunted. White-shirts and fishermen and women from the sheds put hands on the carcass like it was a heavy table they were moving, and it was. Brann's men didn't walk away. They gripped too and pulled. A boy cried and tried to stop and then didn't because his hands knew not to let go even while his face didn't want to be there.
They dragged the thing to a bare patch past the ditch. The priest fetched oil that he'd stashed "for holy lamps," which Ryo suspected had been used on carts when people weren't looking. He poured it with a face like he was sick of himself for being practical. Ryo tossed the spark with a dry reed lit from the shrine brazier. The corpse took hard and burned with a smoke that smelled like river rot and hair and a forge that hadn't been cleaned. People stepped back, not in fear, in agreement.
Soren wiped his face with his sleeve and blinked stinging eyes. He looked like he wanted to sit down in the road and put his box under his head and sleep. He didn't. He lifted the box and tucked it under his arm again like that fixed anything.
"Meet at the table before dark," he said to Mara and Ryo and the priest. "We'll write what happened. We'll post the suspension. If Brann tries to turn the night into his story, we'll have ours already nailed down to wood."
"Bring the pin," Mara said. "Don't leave it here. It's an anchor that someone else will use if you let it lie."
Ryo pulled it from the stocks. The thin man hissed when the jaw lifted. No one apologized. Ryo slid the pin through his belt. He kept the collar in his bag and the tin disk where fingers would find it if they reached for his book. He picked up his pole.
He turned toward the lane. He had to go check a roof, and a door, and a pot that needed cleaning before it turned to stone. He had to rub tallow into wood and write lines on paper and sit at a table until his back hurt.
"Warden," Anna said at his shoulder in a voice that wasn't mocking. "Do you want me to wash your coat or do you want to wear that smell to the meeting so people remember what you did with their afternoon?"
"Let it dry," Ryo said. "Let them smell it. Then we'll wash it with lye and air."
He had his hand on the bar when a boy from the north fields came full tilt down the lane, shoes slapping water, eyes wide because he'd sprinted past where men didn't. He didn't stop to breathe. "Not done," he gasped. "Something's in the weir. Bigger than that. It's got rope on it already. And there's a man on the bank with two dots on his tin and he's calling it by a name."