Chương 104: Chapter 103 – A Favour With No Name

Ravensworth had said no over good wine and better manners, their steward walking them halfway to the gate afterward as if the walking itself were an apology. Stormvale had said no faster, though not unkindly — a woman with a scar through one eyebrow had listened to the whole pitch, credits and all, then told them plainly that a clan her size didn't gamble its own people on someone else's deadline, however good the cause sounded.

"That's twice," Kalsar said, on the road east, hands in his pockets, doing that thing he did where bad news came out of his mouth sounding almost cheerful.

"Twice, and neither one slammed a door. That's not nothing, boy. A hard no from a stranger's easy to give. A polite one usually means they wanted to say yes and couldn't."

"Feels like a lot of politeness for two failures."

"Failures." Kalsar snorted.

"You've been doing this six months. Ask me again in six years." Andy didn't say anything. He rarely did on the road, walking a half-step behind, Hexa's bulk taking up half the road on his other side, her six heads swaying low and slow near the ground, eyes tracking the tree line out of habit more than worry. Ashmere announced itself before the road did.

The trees thinned first, and then they weren't really trees anymore — black stumps with the tops sheared off clean, some of them still holding a faint char smell that the rain hadn't managed to beat out of the wood. Past that, the ground itself changed. Scorched in patches the size of houses, the grass grown back wrong in the gaps between, too green against the black like something trying too hard to prove it had healed.

A stretch of low wall, what used to be a farmhouse boundary, stopped halfway across a field for no reason Ant could see, as if the rest of it had simply stopped existing one day. Nobody spoke for a while. The quiet out here had a texture to it, thick and close, the kind that made you lower your own voice without deciding to.

"This is bigger than a breach," Ant said, finally.

"Claire told me three clans, months back. This isn't three clans' worth of fighting. This is a war." It smells like a war, Mahkir said, low, at his side — the bond-voice only Ant could hear, tail flat and still against the ground, none of his usual looseness in it. Ash and old blood, under the green. You can't scrub that out of dirt. Takes years.

"Anyone else notice the birds stopped?" Kalsar said. He hadn't slowed his pace, but his hand had drifted to rest near his hilt, an old habit surfacing without him seeming to clock it.

"No birds. No bugs, even. Ground this scarred, you'd still get bugs."

"I noticed," Andy said, and left it there. The Blackthorn hold sat on rising ground past the worst of the scarring, a squat fortification of dark stone that looked less built than grown out of the hillside, walls patched in places with lighter rock that hadn't weathered to match the rest yet. Three lookout posts ringed the approach, spaced wide, each one a platform lashed into whatever tree had survived close enough to use.

Ant saw the first signal before he heard it — a length of black cloth run up a pole, fast, followed a breath later by a single low horn note that the others answered in turn, one after another, down the line.

"That's not an alarm," Kalsar said, reading it before Ant could ask.

"That's an announcement. Different pattern. They're telling their own people company's coming, not telling them to arm up."

"How do you know that?"

"I've watched horns mean different things at different distances longer than you've been alive, boy. Trust me on the ones that matter." They were met at the outer gate by two guards who looked like they hadn't slept properly in longer than two months allowed for, and waved through with a speed that surprised Ant more than a full search would have.

Inside, the hold opened into a yard busy with the ordinary business of a place still functioning — but everyone in it walked slower than the work needed, shoulders bent forward like the ground itself was pulling at them. A woman hauling water stopped dead when she saw Mahkir, the bucket forgotten at her side. A man mending a strap near the stable door went very still, watching, until someone else nudged him back into motion.

"They know him," Andy said, quiet, more to himself than to anyone.

"Watched the semis. Had to." The smell hit Ant properly once they were past the gate — woodsmoke, always, underneath it something sharper, medicinal, drifting from a low building off to the left with its door propped open and a line of cots just visible through the gap. Nobody explained it. Nobody needed to.

They were brought to a hall that had clearly been built for more people than currently used it — long tables, half of them bare, a fire at the far end doing more work than it should have needed to for the size of the room. A boy no older than twelve brought water without being asked and refused to meet Ant's eyes doing it. The woman who came to meet them wore no crown, no obvious mark of rank beyond the way the room quieted a half-second before she spoke.

"Natalia," she said, extending a hand that had calluses in places Ant recognized from his own. Dark hair pulled back hard enough to look like it hurt, a face that had probably been softer a year ago.

"You're the Common champion's handler." Not a question. Her eyes moved to Mahkir and stayed there two full seconds longer than politeness demanded.

"And that's the one who put Ironmaw down in the semis. One of ours — good fighter, better sport about losing than most. He talks about it more than I'd like, honestly." This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

"He fought well," Ant said.

"Genuinely. Mahkir still brings it up." I do not, Mahkir said, at exactly the wrong moment, and Ant had to swallow the urge to react to it in front of a room full of strangers. Natalia gestured them to sit before Ant had finished his sentence about why they'd come, and by the time he'd laid the actual ask on the table — a vortex, high-risk, seven days out from Cael's deadline, whatever credits and standing the clan could offer in return — she hadn't said no.

She hadn't said much of anything, just listened with both hands flat on the table like she was holding it down.

"Stay for dinner," she said, when he'd finished.

"Both of those things need thinking, and I don't think well standing up in front of guests I've only just met." Kalsar caught Ant's eye across the table, the corner of his mouth pulled tight against a grin he wasn't ready to let out yet, and said nothing at all. Dinner was plain — bread, a thin stew that stretched further than it should have for the number of mouths it was clearly meant to feed, and an empty chair at the head of the second table that nobody sat in and nobody explained.

Garrick, when he introduced himself, had the look of a man still turning a loss over in his head long after everyone else had moved past it.

"Ashclaw took a claw through the shoulder in the final," he said, when Ant asked, without being asked to elaborate on which final, because there was only ever going to be one everyone meant.

"Sunclaw's fast. Faster than the scouting reports said. We knew going in it was a coin flip, and it landed their way. No shame in a coin flip."

"You don't sound broken up about it."

"I was, for about a week." Garrick's mouth pulled sideways, tired rather than amused.

"I've just had worse to feel bad about since." Nobody at the table picked that thread up, and Ant didn't push it.

Three others sat further down — Petra, broad-shouldered and quiet, her Kithren a squat armored shape curled near her boots that Ant only half-registered before Andy's eyes caught on it properly; Nadia, leaner, restless in her chair, something folded and leathery-winged perched on the bench beside her that flicked its tail once, slow, a barbed stinger tracking nothing in particular; and Bastian, who ate like a man who hadn't been sure a meal was coming, curled horns visible on the creature dozing against his leg, the lower half of it coiled like rope rather than resting on legs at all.

"Trainers," Kalsar said, low, mostly to himself, cataloguing.

"Good ones, by the look of the gear."

"We don't have much left to spare," Nadia said, catching it anyway. Sharp hearing, or sharp instincts.

"Figured you should know that going in, before anyone gets excited about numbers we can't actually field."

"We're not asking for numbers," Ant said.

"We're asking for enough."

"That's the same question with better manners on it," she said, but there wasn't heat behind it. Natalia came in partway through the meal, not sitting, standing instead at the head of the table with both hands resting on the back of the empty chair — the one nobody had touched all evening — and the room quieted around her the way it had before.

"We'll do it," she said. No preamble, no build to it.

"Five of us. Myself and Cindermaw, Garrick and Ashclaw, Petra, Nadia, Bastian. That's what we can spare without leaving ourselves thin here, and we won't go thinner than that, deadline or not." Ant's shoulders came down an inch he hadn't noticed pulling up.

"Thank you. Truly—""There's a condition." She said it plainly, the way a person lays down a fact they've already decided isn't up for negotiation.

"A favour. Owed to us, collected when I choose to collect it. Not named tonight."

"What kind of favour?"

"The kind I'll tell you about once it's paid off, not before." Her eyes didn't move off him, steady, giving nothing away.

"That's not me being difficult for the sake of it. That's me not putting a debt into words before I know exactly what I need it to cover."

"That's — " Ant stopped himself, tried again, quieter.

"That's a hard thing to agree to blind."

"It is." Natalia didn't soften it.

"You can walk away from the offer if you want a cleaner deal. I won't think less of you for it. But I don't hand my clan's help to strangers without keeping something back for later, not after the season we've had. You'll get the same fair treatment either way. You just won't get the name of the favour until it's earned its keep." Careful, Mahkir said, quiet, at his side.

"If it's something that turns us on people who never asked to be part of this — civilians, another clan that's done us no harm — I want that off the table now, before either of us agrees to anything."

"Then you refuse it, when the time comes, and we call the debt paid regardless." Natalia said it without hesitation, like she'd already turned the question over herself before he'd asked it.

"I'm asking you to trust me with something unnamed. I'm not asking you to hand me your conscience along with it." Kalsar's hand found Ant's arm under the table, two fingers pressed flat — a reminder, plain as that, that a room full of people was watching how this landed. Ant held Natalia's eyes a moment longer, weighing it the only way that mattered — seven days, no other clan's yes to fall back on, a vortex that wouldn't care how carefully he'd chosen his words. A bad deal. Still the only deal on the table.

"Agreed," Ant said.

"Whatever it is, when the time comes."

"Good." Natalia's shoulders came down half an inch, the first give he'd seen in her all evening.

"Then eat. We leave within the hour — this isn't a fight I want you walking into on an empty stomach, and it's not one I want to walk into rested and slow, either." The communicator crackled once Maren picked up on the other end, her voice compressed and crackled through the small device Kalsar held cupped in one palm.

"We've got help," Ant said.

"Five from Blackthorn — two Epics and three Rares, their own clan leader among them. Tell Sam and Duncan's teams — come when the mediums are clear, not before. Nobody rushes on our account. We'll hold the line till they get there."

"Copy that," Maren said, and then, quieter, the relief plainer in her voice than in anything she actually said: "Be careful. All of you." The line went quiet.

Kalsar took the communicator, tucked it away and looked out at the five figures already gathering their gear by torchlight — Natalia checking a strap on Cindermaw's harness with the same flat efficiency she'd used to lay out the terms of a debt nobody understood yet, Garrick checking Ashclaw's straps with the thoroughness of a man who'd learned the hard way what a loose buckle cost you, Nadia's Kithren stretching leathery wings once and folding them tight again.

"Well," Kalsar said.

"That's the easy part done."

"Was that the easy part?"

"Boy," Kalsar said, already walking, "you have no idea." They set out from Blackthorn's gate into ground that hadn't finished healing from the last war fought across it, eight of them and eight Kithren strong, the road ahead swallowed up almost immediately by dark.