Chương 128: Chapter 127 – Too Fast to Stop

Ant had his hand on Mahkir's shoulder and a plan for the window half formed in his head before he'd even reached the door. He opened it braced for Ben, or worse, for men who weren't Ben at all. It was Priya, fist raised for a second knock, roster sheet tucked under one arm and an expression that said she'd knocked exactly once before and had no intention of doing it a third time.

"You look like you're expecting someone to murder you." She looked him over, amused rather than alarmed.

"It's patrol. Same as every morning. You coming, or do I tell Marcus he's stuck with just me and the anteater again?"

"I'm coming." Ant felt the tension drain out of him all at once, fast enough to leave him faintly dizzy with it, and had to work to keep that off his face too.

"Give me a minute."

"Two minutes. Mess hall's not going to hold breakfast for you." She was gone before he'd fully shut the door. Mahkir looked up at him from the floor, ears still flat from two nights of listening for something that hadn't come. That wasn't him. No. Ant pulled his boots on, hands steadier than they had any right to be after two days of expecting the worst through every knock and every raised voice across the yard. Just Priya. Just a patrol. Same as it's been every day since we got here.

I would like it on record that I never once doubted it, Mahkir said, with the dignity of an animal that had, in fact, been coiled to fight something through the door thirty seconds earlier. Noted.

The patrol met at the east gate the same as always, Ant and Priya and Marcus, Mahkir and the anteater falling in a step behind, and a fourth animal Ant hadn't seen before waiting at the edge of the group: a broad-shouldered ground-hawk, slate brown through the body with a patch of new white feathers grown in messy along one wing where something had clearly gone wrong with it a while back.

"That's new," Ant said, careful to keep it light.

"Not new. Mine." Marcus said it without looking up from his gear check, like the answer wasn't worth more words than that.

"She's been laid up since spring. Wing infection that wouldn't clear no matter what the healer tried. This is her first patrol back."

"You two have been partnered so long people forget he's got one at all when she's out sick," Priya added, cheerful about it in a way that told Ant this wasn't news to anyone but him.

"The anteater's mine. Always has been. Nobody bothered telling you because nobody thought there was anything to tell." Ant had spent two days building something bigger out of the gap than that, some story involving Marcus and a Kithren he'd lost the way Rowan never got to have one in the first place, or worse, and it embarrassed him a little how much simpler the truth turned out to be.

He'd learned better than to go digging at a thing like that anyway, not after watching how carefully everyone at home stepped around Rowan's absence, and not with his own five years still close enough to touch if he thought about them too long. He let it go with a nod and nothing more.

Priya talked the whole way to the marker stone about nothing in particular, a cousin's wedding back home, a disagreement with the quartermaster over boot leather, and Marcus checked his gear at every stop, same ritual, same order, buckle and blade and the strap on the anteater's harness, glancing up at his hawk on the wing above them more often than he probably meant anyone to notice.

Ant found the rhythm of it settling into him same as every day this week, four hours of ordinary standing between him and whatever was actually happening to his nerves underneath it.

They were past the ridge trail and coming down through a stretch of scrub none of the last few patrols had covered, taller grass, broken ground, ankle-twisting stuff Priya complained about every time they crossed it, the air thick with the green, slightly rotten smell of standing water somewhere off to the left that none of them could see, when the anteater went rigid mid-stride and stayed that way. It stopped like something had yanked a wire through it, snout low, every line of its body pointed at the grass ahead.

"That's not the rabbit face," Priya said, already reaching for her blade, all the idle chatter gone out of her voice in half a second. They came out of the grass low and fast, four of them, maybe five, lean grey-green bodies built close to the ground with too many teeth for something that size, sickle-shaped tails whipping for balance as they moved. Not big enough alone to worry a trained patrol.

Moving in a pack that coordinated like it had done this a hundred times, splitting wide to flank before anyone had finished registering what they were looking at. The hawk dropped fast, wings finding a rhythm they hadn't needed to hold in months, but a stoop needs height and distance to mean anything, and the pack was already too close underneath her by the time she'd built either.

Two of them hit Marcus at once, one at his calf and one higher, at the thigh, and he went down with a sound that had nothing performative in it at all. Now, Mahkir said, already moving, and Ant was moving with him, the two of them crossing the distance faster than four hours of patrol boredom should have let either of them react. Ant put his blade through the one at Marcus's thigh first, its jaws still locked when it died, and felt the wrongness of the wound the second the body came free.

Too much blood, too fast, dark and pulsing instead of the ordinary seep of a bite. He took the second one off Marcus's calf with a clean strike, then turned, already knowing before he looked that the fight wasn't the part that mattered anymore. Behind him Priya swore, sharp and short, and went down under a third one dragging at her sleeve.

Ant crossed the ground without deciding to, caught it by the tail and hauled it off her hard enough to feel something in its spine give, then finished it before it stopped moving. Priya staggered upright, breathing hard, eyes narrowed on him for a second too long. A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

"You crossed twelve feet like it was nothing," she said, half a question buried somewhere inside the observation.

"Adrenaline," Ant said, and didn't have time to worry about how thin it sounded, because Mahkir finished the last one behind them and the yard went quiet, and quiet was when everyone's eyes finally landed on Marcus. [Ant HP: 84/88. A shallow line along his forearm, more sting than damage.] [Mahkir HP: 76/80.] [Mahkir: 14, 510/32, 000 to Level 9.] [Ant: 890/15, 800 to Level 13.] He was pale.

Too pale, already, his own hand gone slack where it had been pressed against his leg a moment ago, blood pooling dark and fast into the dirt beneath him in a way no simple bite wound should have produced.

"That's not right." Priya dropped to her knees beside him, hands shaking as she found the source and pressed down hard.

"Ant, that's not right, there's too much, I can't..." She looked up, and for the first time since he'd met her there was nothing talkative left anywhere in her face.

"He's not stopping." Ant's hands went to the wound on instinct, pressing hard beside hers, and even through his palms he could feel how fast Marcus was slipping, the pulse under his fingers thin and getting thinner. Field bandaging wasn't going to be enough. Not in the time they had. Not an hour from anyone who could do more than press linen against it and hope. [Restore: Activate? Target: Marcus. Cost: 120 mana. Current: 268/268.] He didn't let himself think about what saying yes would mean. He said yes.

Warmth spread down through his hands, cool at the edges like water instead of fire, and where his fingers pressed the wound the torn muscle knit itself back together in front of Priya's eyes, skin closing over skin, the color coming back into Marcus's face as fast as it had drained out of it. [Marcus's wounds restored. Mana: 148/268. Restore: 24-hour cooldown.] Priya didn't move for three full seconds.

She just stared at the leg, whole and clean under a mess of drying blood with nothing left underneath it to explain where the blood had come from. Ant grabbed the bandage roll off his own belt and wound it fast around the leg anyway, some part of him still trying to make the last ten seconds fit inside a story that made sense, even with her sitting right there watching him do it.

"He's stable," Ant said, like that was an answer to anything.

"Bleeding's stopped."

"I can see that." Priya's voice had gone strange, quick, words tumbling over each other in a way that wasn't her usual talk so much as her mouth trying to outrun whatever her mind was doing with what she'd just watched.

"I can see it's stopped, I watched it stop, I watched his leg stop having a hole in it, Ant, I need you to understand that I watched that with my own two eyes and I don't, I can't even..." She pressed the heel of her hand against her forehead like she could push the last ten seconds back out through it.

"We are going to talk about this. Not now, not with him lying here bleeding all over both of us. But we are going to talk about this."

"Priya..."

"Not now." Final, fast, already checking Marcus's breathing with hands that hadn't quite stopped shaking.

"Help me get him up. We need to get him back." They made it back to the east gate a full hour later than usual, Marcus conscious again but grey and unsteady on his feet, leaning hard on Priya's shoulder the whole way while she talked at him in a rapid, brittle stream about nothing that mattered, the words of someone who needed her mouth occupied so the rest of her didn't have room to think. She didn't look at Ant once on the walk back.

Word had clearly outrun them anyway, because half the yard seemed to know something had happened by the time they came through the gate. Corlan found him before he'd made it to the bench where Rebekah was already watching him cross the yard with an expression he recognized and didn't much like. Corlan crossed the distance at a brisk, unhurried clip, one hand resting on the hilt at his belt out of a habit he probably didn't notice anymore.

"Sicklebacks. A full pack, this close to the wall." Corlan didn't waste time on pleasantries, planting himself in Ant's path with the same flat, unhurried assessment he'd used during intake.

"Marcus is walking, more or less, which he wouldn't be if that fight had gone the way it usually goes when a pack that size catches a patrol flat."

"We got lucky."

"You crossed twelve feet in the time it takes most fighters to decide they're going to move at all." Corlan's voice stayed even, no accusation in it, which somehow made it worse.

"I told you once already you don't hold yourself like a level six. I'm telling you again because it's starting to look less like an instinct and more like a pattern, and patterns get noticed by people who aren't as generous about it as I am."

"I don't know what to tell you. I fight how I fight."

"That's the answer I'd expect from someone with something to hide, which isn't an accusation, just an observation." Corlan held his eyes a moment longer, then let it go, shrugging like he'd decided the conversation wasn't worth pushing further today.

"I'm passing this up regardless. A save like that doesn't stay quiet in a clan this size, whether either of us wants it to or not. Get some rest. You earned it, whatever else it means." He walked off toward the infirmary where Marcus had been taken, and Ant made himself finish the walk to the bench, where Rebekah was very deliberately not looking up from her ledger.

"I heard," she said, before he'd even sat down.

"The whole yard heard. I'm fairly sure the sheep in the low pasture heard." Then she actually looked at him, and whatever she saw on his face made her set the pen down slowly.

"That's not the face of a man who just got complimented on his footwork." Ant kept his voice down low enough that it wouldn't carry past the two of them.

"Marcus should be dead right now. He was bleeding out from something that wasn't going to close with a bandage, and I didn't have time to weigh up what using it would mean for us, so I used Restore on him. Priya was kneeling right there the whole time. Wound open, wound closed, no bandage in between, nothing she could reach for that would explain it." For a moment Rebekah didn't say anything.

"And she said what, exactly."

"That we're going to talk about it. Not report it. Talk about it." Ant kept his hands flat on the table because they wanted to do something else entirely.

"I don't know what that means yet." Rebekah exhaled slowly, and when she finally spoke the wryness was gone from her voice completely, nothing left in it but the flat, careful sound of someone doing arithmetic she didn't like the answer to.

"Corlan thinks you're fast for a level six. That's survivable. People explain away fast." She looked at him, and there was real fear under the calm now, not hidden anymore.

"Nobody explains away magic that shouldn't exist coming out of a farm boy from a clan that folded eighteen months ago. If Priya says a word to the wrong person before we get to her first, this ends tonight, and not the good way."

"I know."

"Then you also know we don't get to sleep on this." She was already closing the ledger, already thinking two steps ahead of the conversation the way she always did when it actually mattered.

"Where is she now?"

"Infirmary, with Marcus. She hasn't left his side since we got back."

"Good. That buys us a few hours at least." Rebekah stood, smoothing her skirt down with hands that were steadier than her voice had been a moment ago.

"Go see the healer about that arm so nobody wonders why you're avoiding the infirmary. I'm going to go find a reason to be in there myself. We talk to Priya together, tonight, before she has time to decide what any of this means without us in the room." Ant looked down at the shallow cut along his forearm like he'd forgotten it was there.

"And if she's already decided?"

"Then we find out exactly how much trouble we're actually in." Rebekah held his eyes, steady despite everything underneath it.

"Go. I'll find you the second I know more." She was gone before he could answer, weaving through the yard toward the infirmary with a purpose that didn't look like worry to anyone who didn't already know her, and Ant sat alone at the bench for a moment longer than he meant to, listening to Priya's voice somewhere past the infirmary wall, still talking, too fast, to someone who wasn't answering.