Chương 21: Chapter 20 - Maren

"I'm Maren, by the way." She said it easily, a small smile that read as genuine rather than practiced.

"Sorry — I should've led with that instead of just staring at you from a distance for five minutes." Her eyes flicked, brief and unguarded, to the trim of her own armor.

"I represent the Cerlan clan. You've been very carefully not looking at the colors since I started walking over, so I'd guess you'd already worked that out." He had been avoiding them. She'd noticed anyway, and that told him more than the armor and the careful approach already had — she paid attention to small things, the kind most people let pass.

"I noticed," he admitted, which was more than he'd meant to give her. She held his stare a second longer than the words strictly needed, like she was deciding whether to say something about it, then let it go without comment — one more small thing noted and set aside.

"That was quite the fight." She glanced back at the scorched patch of ground, genuine interest in it rather than suspicion.

"I was actually starting to make my way over before your Kithren showed up. Two against one felt worth doing something about. Then things resolved themselves rather more thoroughly than I expected."

"You didn't need to." Ant moved the sword to his other hand, more to have something to do with it than out of any real need.

"It worked out."

"Clearly not." She smiled again, more careful this time.

"Can I ask your name?"

"Ant."

"Just Ant?" He held her gaze a moment, weighing whether a surname was a door he wanted open this early in a conversation he hadn't chosen and hadn't decided to trust. She waited, patient about it, like she had nowhere else to be and no real stake in which way he answered.

"For now."

"Fair enough." A short pause, then, lighter than the question probably deserved: "What clan, if you don't mind my asking? You carry yourself like someone who's had training, even if the sword work needs a bit of polish." He weighed that one too, quickly. She'd already seen the fight. Seen Mahkir. A name wasn't going to make anything meaningfully worse, and refusing outright would only sharpen whatever curiosity had brought her over here in the first place — curiosity that, so far, hadn't felt hostile.

"Silverwing," he said.

"Formerly." Her expression didn't move right away, and that told him more than if it had. A half-second delay, the word landing and sitting somewhere before her face caught up to it.

"Formerly," she repeated, gently, not quite a question. He didn't fill the space he'd left open. She looked at him a moment, registered that he wasn't going to, and let it go with the same easy grace she'd shown so far. The edge went out of her posture anyway — not quite respect, not quite curiosity, both arriving at once. He'd seen a version of that look before, briefly, on Claire's face in the market. Someone quietly recalculating an assumption they hadn't known they were making.

"Can I ask you something else? Stop me if it's too forward — I have a bad habit of not noticing I've overstepped until well after I've done it." He said nothing, which she seemed to take as permission.

Her Kithren settled onto its haunches a few feet off, watching Ant with the same patient stillness it had carried the whole way over, and Maren reached back without looking and rested a hand briefly against its shoulder — the kind of touch that didn't need to mean anything, just habit, the way a person leaned on a doorframe.

"If your Kithren's capable of what I just watched, why fight with a sword at all? Why not let him handle it from the start?" The question landed somewhere he hadn't braced for, friendly as her tone had been. He thought about deflecting — something vague about preferring to handle things himself, a half-truth about the sword being new and untested. Neither arrived fast enough to stop what actually came out.

"He's only level three." The words were out before he'd properly weighed what he was handing over by saying them. He'd been careful for a whole hour — careful with the boys, careful with what he revealed and what he didn't — and it had taken her under three minutes to undo that, her manner making it easy to forget he was supposed to be guarded in the first place. Level three. A number that, set against what she'd just watched, didn't fit anywhere in whatever framework she was working from. She went very still.

"Level three," she repeated slowly, like saying it again might reveal it as a misunderstanding.

"That's not possible." If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation. She took a step back — not far, not dramatic, but a clear physical retreat, the kind a person put between themselves and something they'd just realized they didn't understand.

"No Kithren at level three should be able to take out a Kithren at level five. Let alone two, working in coordination." She said it the way someone recites a fact they've known long enough that saying it aloud feels almost unnecessary.

"The stat gap alone should make that mathematically impossible regardless of skill. Whatever fought those boys should've needed to be level six, minimum. Seven, more likely, to handle them with that little effort." Ant said nothing. There wasn't anything useful to say that wouldn't make it worse.

"I mean — I could be wrong." She caught herself, backtracking fast, the words tumbling out ahead of her own composure.

"I'm not, though. I've run these numbers a hundred times, it's the first thing they teach us, growth curves and stat bands and — I'm not wrong. That's what's bothering me." She talks fast when she's rattled, Mahkir observed, entirely too pleased with himself about it. I like her already. Her eyes narrowed, the warmth draining out of them, her attention fixed entirely on him now.

"Would you mind if I checked your level properly?" Still polite. Still asking rather than assuming, though the casualness had gone out of the request. He felt the faint shimmer of her reader lenses activate before he'd answered either way — the automatic scan every bonded person's glasses ran without quite waiting for permission. He knew what it would find.

There was a strange, small satisfaction in watching her expect an answer and get nothing — the reader coming back exactly as blank as it had for the academy boys, exactly as blank as it always came back. It didn't satisfy her. The alarm on her face hardened, her focus narrowing to a point. She stepped closer, closing the distance she'd just put between them, eyes fixed on his temple with an intensity that made him distinctly aware of the smooth, unmarked skin there.

"You don't have a chip." Not a question. The familiar tightness came up in his chest — a conversation heading somewhere he had no intention of letting it go. He'd known this was coming the moment he recognized her colors, had told himself watching her approach that he'd give her only what the conversation demanded and nothing more. Her friendliness had made that harder than he'd expected, and he was starting to suspect that had been at least partly the point, whether she'd meant it that way or not.

"Why would you remove a chip." Gentler again, like she was handling something that might shatter if pressed too hard.

"I've never encountered intentional removal. It isn't simple — you'd need specialized equipment, and even then the risk to the underlying connection is significant. Most people who tried would end up with no readable system at all. Yours is clearly readable. I watched it work." Ant didn't answer.

He turned and started walking instead, the decision arriving without much thought behind it — the same instinct that had carried him through five years of exactly this kind of conversation, the ones that only ever ended somewhere he didn't want to be. He made it maybe six steps before he heard her following.

"Wait." The composure had gone out of her voice, real urgency underneath it now.

"I'm sorry — that's none of my business, truly. I asked before I'd properly thought about whether I should." He kept walking. Don't engage. Don't explain. Walking away is always safer than staying to argue a point nobody's going to believe anyway.

"Unless," she said, and he heard the exact moment the thought arrived for her, the pause carrying real weight, "you never had one." He stopped. He hadn't decided to. His feet had simply done it, and he stood on the path with his back to her, his head swimming with the fact of having been read correctly by a stranger inside three minutes.

Five years of nobody bothering to look closely enough to ask the right question, and she'd managed it on a public path with a fraction of the information anyone in his life had ever had. Heat rose in his chest, closer to anger than shock once he actually looked at it. Five years of Kithered strangers walking straight past him without a flicker of curiosity. The clan seeing exactly what they expected to see and never once looking twice.

Claire herself, who'd known him his whole life, never once asking the question this stranger had just asked inside three minutes of meeting him.

"I want to help." She'd closed the last of the distance, her voice quieter now, warmer, the sharpness gone.

"Whatever this is — whatever you are, whatever that Kithren is — I'm not asking because I mean to report it or use it against you. I'm Cerlan. This is genuinely what we do. We find things that don't make sense and try to understand them properly, instead of deciding they're impossible and walking away." Ant turned around slowly.

She was watching him with most of the earlier sharpness gone from her face, openness sitting in its place, and behind her the broad-shouldered ape watched them both with the same placid stillness it had carried since she'd first approached. It hadn't made a sound the whole conversation, hadn't so much as flexed a hand toward the coat where Mahkir sat curled and silent, and Ant found himself wondering, distantly, whether that was training or simply the animal not seeing him as a problem worth solving.

He weighed her offer the way he weighed most things — quickly, against every reason he had to distrust it. She was Cerlan. Curious in the specific, professional way her whole clan seemed built around, and curiosity like that didn't always stay harmless once it had hold of something interesting enough. But she'd also introduced herself before anything else. Asked before scanning him.

Hadn't threatened, hadn't postured, hadn't done any of the things people usually did when they wanted something from him and had the power to simply take it.

"I don't know you," Ant said.

"No," she agreed.

"You don't. That's fair, and I probably deserve the caution after ambushing you with questions on an otherwise ordinary afternoon." She's not lying, Mahkir said, flat and certain about it. Not about wanting to help, anyway. Whether it's a good idea is a separate question. Ant noted that too. Mahkir didn't often bother sounding certain about people.

He was quicker to trust than Ant was, if anything — quicker to write someone off entirely, too, with nothing much in between — but he didn't hedge like this, not usually, and he wasn't hedging now either. Ant weighed that against everything else he'd watched her do in the last ten minutes — introducing herself before anything else, asking rather than assuming, backing off the second she'd caught herself pushing too hard.

Neither of them said anything else for a moment, quiet dropping over the path in a way that felt different from the silences before it — not hostile, not entirely comfortable, just two people standing at the edge of a conversation that had already gone further than either of them had planned for.