Chương 64: Chapter 63 - Nobody's Dying Tonight

Thomas found his voice first.

"Rowan!" He said it like a gunshot, cutting straight through whatever moment the yard was trying to have with itself. Rowan came out of the treatment room at a dead sprint, bag already in hand, and didn't stop to ask who first — he just went to the nearest body on the ground and dropped to his knees beside it, hands moving before his eyes had finished the assessment.

"Kalsar, don't you dare pass out on me," he said, not looking up, peeling back a strip of torn cloth from Kalsar's leg with a kind of brisk indifference to how much it clearly hurt.

"Not after everything else today."

"Wasn't planning on it."

"You said that the last three times too." Ant stood in the middle of it and didn't know where to put himself. Maren was already down beside Axel, one of his four arms hanging wrong, murmuring something to him that Ant couldn't hear from here. Hazel had Vulcan's head in her lap, running a hand along a burn that had faded from black to an angry pink, and didn't look up when Rowan called her name and told her to hold still and let him look in a minute.

Mahkir pressed against Ant's side, warm, silent, breathing hard enough that Ant could feel each one of them. Rowan worked fast. Faster than Ant had expected from someone who barely met your eyes over breakfast. He went from Kalsar to the unconscious attacker without so much as a flicker of hesitation over which one deserved it more, checked the man's pulse, muttered something about a concussion, and moved on to Bramble next — a hand pressed flat to the bear's ribs, eyes closed, checking for breaks Ant couldn't see.

One by one the yard quieted. Not silent. Just quieter. The particular hush of people who had been screaming an hour ago and now only had the energy left to breathe. It took the better part of thirty minutes before Rowan straightened up, wiped his hands on his trousers, and said the words everyone had been waiting to hear without asking.

"Nobody's dying tonight. Not on our side." Kalsar let out a breath that sounded like it had been sitting in his chest since the first attacker cleared the wall. Ant sat down hard on an overturned crate that had, until recently, held roofing nails. His hands wouldn't stop shaking. He watched them do it, distantly interested, like they belonged to someone else.

"You alright?" Mahkir asked, quiet, just for him.

"Yeah." He wasn't. Not yet. But there wasn't room for that right now, not with the yard still full of people who needed something from him, so he pushed himself back up and made himself walk over to where Kalsar sat propped against the wall he'd been trying to fix a few hours ago. Kalsar looked wrecked. Blood dried dark along one side of his face, his leg wrapped tight enough that Rowan had clearly used most of what he had left in the bag, and he was still, somehow, grinning.

"You should've seen your face," he said, to nobody in particular.

"You held eight of them," Ant said.

"You and Hazel. On your own. For — how long, before we even got here?"

"Long enough." Kalsar shrugged, wincing at what the shrug cost him.

"Wasn't holding them alone. Had Hazel. Had Vulcan. Had Thomas refusing to go inside no matter how many times I told him to."

"I wasn't leaving without knowing you were still standing," Thomas said, from a few feet away, not defensive about it, just stating a fact.

"Didn't mean I was going to be much use to you if it came to it. Just meant I wasn't going to be somewhere I couldn't see." Ant looked between the two of them — Kalsar bleeding through a bandage and still upright, Hazel with soot streaked up one forearm, both of them talking about it like it had been a hard training session rather than eight people and eight Kithren coming over the wall with intent to kill.

He'd known, in the abstract way you know things about people you like, that Kalsar and Hazel had both come up through the arenas. He'd heard the word "champion" enough times that it had stopped meaning much of anything specific. Watching it happen was different. Watching it happen was Kalsar taking a strike that would have put Ant on the ground and simply not going down, resetting his stance, and finishing the exchange anyway.

"I knew you two fought in the arenas," he said.

"I didn't — I don't think I understood what that actually meant, until tonight." Hazel laughed, short and dry, and reached over to pat Vulcan's flank without looking away from Ant.

"If you think that was impressive, you should've seen him in his prime." She jerked her chin at Kalsar.

"Man used to clear a five-round bracket without a single life spent. Kithren fights and human fights both, same card, same night. I watched him do it more than once."

"I'm sixty," Kalsar said.

"Not dead. Still got plenty of fight left in these bones, old woman."

"Sixty and bleeding through a bandage Rowan just finished tying."

"Sixty and still standing."

"If this was twenty years ago none of them would've made it over that wall in the first place." Hazel shook her head, but there was nothing unkind in it.

"Still. Not bad for an old man."

"Old woman." Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site.

"You said that already."

"Bears repeating." There was a rhythm to it that told Ant this wasn't new — the two of them had clearly done this dance a hundred times before he'd ever met either of them, the insults worn soft and comfortable at the edges the way only real affection ever got. He glanced at Maren, who was watching the same exchange with an expression that suggested she'd noticed exactly the same thing he had, and didn't say anything about it either.

Thomas cleared his throat, and pointed toward the unconscious man Rowan had checked earlier — still out cold near the wall gap, wrists already bound with what looked like offcuts from the wall repair.

"What do we do with him?"

"Get him inside," Kalsar said.

"Restrain him properly, somewhere he can't do much even once he wakes up. When he comes around, we've got questions, and he's going to answer them." Thomas turned without another word and went to deal with it, calling Bramble along with a low word that had the bear lumbering up onto three good legs to follow.

"Alright," Kalsar said, once Thomas was out of earshot, dragging himself a little more upright against the wall.

"One minute we're digging a foundation trench. Next thing I know there's eight bodies coming over that wall with about four seconds of warning. Let me give you the whole of it, since you two weren't here for the start."

"We were working the north stretch," he said.

"Me, Hazel, Thomas, Bramble. Rowan was inside doing inventory. No warning at all from where we stood — one second the ground was ours, the next they were just there, coming out of the tree line straight for the stretch we hadn't closed up yet. Rowan was already inside, thank whatever's listening, so I shouted for him to bar the door and stay that way, and Hazel and I put ourselves between whoever was coming and the door he was behind. Thomas wouldn't go in either. Told him twice.

He stood off to the side with Bramble, out of it, until near the end when he didn't have a choice anymore."

"I wasn't leaving without knowing he was alright," Thomas said again, returning in time to catch the tail end of it, quieter this time.

"Turned out I didn't get much choice about staying out of it anyway."

"How'd you two find out?" Kalsar asked, looking at Ant now.

"Raven's bird again. It found us on the walk back, gave her the count before we were even close." Ant hesitated on the next part, aware of exactly how it was going to land.

"We split up to close faster. I went in — invisible. Mahkir with me." Kalsar's eyebrows went up slow, and his expression turned calculating, the look of a man doing arithmetic he didn't like the answer to.

"Invisible." He said it flat, testing the word.

"Since when do you have a skill like that."

"Since a few days ago."

"And Mahkir? New trick too, or just yours?"

"Just mine." Ant met his eyes and held them there, deliberate.

"It's — a longer conversation than right now."

"That a look you're giving me, boy?"

"That's exactly the look I'm giving you." Kalsar studied him a second longer, then let out a breath through his nose that could have meant anything.

"We are all part of your clan now. Every one of us out here bled for you tonight — literally, in my case, and I'd wager Hazel's too, under that bandage she thinks I haven't noticed. We're a bit past secrets, don't you think?"

"I don't disagree with you," Ant said.

"I mean that. But it's not a short answer, and it's not one I want to give half-finished, standing in a yard with blood still drying on all of us. Once everyone's patched up and fed and not about to fall over, I'll tell you everything. All of you. Properly." Kalsar held the look a moment longer, then let it go.

"Fair." Thomas came back over, wiping his hands on his trousers, Bramble trailing at his heel with a slight limp still in his back leg. Hazel glanced up at the bear and went still for a second.

"Bramble," she said.

"That's the first time I've ever seen him go for someone." Thomas looked down at his Kithren, guilt and pride crowding his face at the same time, sitting somewhere uncomfortable between the two.

"I think he gets the peaceful streak from me, if I'm honest. But in that moment I couldn't feel anything except him deciding I mattered more than staying calm did. His whole nature just — went somewhere else. All that was left was making sure nothing got near me." He crouched down, put a hand flat against Bramble's shoulder.

"I've spent a long time telling myself defense wasn't the same as fighting," he said.

"Telling myself I could hold that line and never actually cross it. Tonight I watched him nearly get hurt trying to keep that line for both of us, and I don't think I can keep pretending they're separate things anymore. I still don't want any part of the actual fighting. That hasn't changed. But defending what's mine — defending him — I think I need to be better at that. Better than tonight." Kalsar reached up and clapped him once on the shoulder, the effort of it costing him visibly.

"I'll help. Defense only, same as you're asking. We'll build something solid." He turned his head toward Maren and Ant next, and whatever warmth had been in his voice a second ago sharpened back into a drill instructor's.

"And you two. You got stronger tonight, both of you. I saw it. But what I saw out there was power doing the work technique should've been doing. That gets you through one fight. It won't get you through the next one clean."

"Training continues," Maren said, flat, like she already knew exactly where this was going.

"Training continues." She stuck her tongue out at him, quick and childish, and Ant caught the smallest twitch of a smile pulling at the corner of Kalsar's mouth before he smoothed it back down into a scowl. The idea of more of Kalsar's training was, by every account Ant had ever heard, something between a privilege and a threat. Then Maren's face changed. Whatever had been light in it a second ago dropped clean away, replaced by a wariness she didn't try to hide.

"We need to talk about the actual problem, though," she said.

"That was Calvin's group. The Light Smash match, back at registration — that was them, wasn't it. This wasn't random. That was revenge."

"Wasn't a guess," Kalsar said.

"It was them. And they were kind enough to leave one of their own behind for us to ask about it properly." He pushed himself up off the wall, unsteady, waving off Rowan's attempt to stop him with a look that dared him to try harder.

"Come on. Inside. Food, and let Rowan finish whatever he still needs to finish on the rest of us, and then we talk about Calvin's people once everyone's not standing in the cold bleeding on each other." The group started moving, slow and limping, toward the castle's lit windows. Kalsar paused halfway, looked back at Ant — still sitting on the crate, still too quiet, still pale in a way that had nothing to do with the cold.

"You did what you had to do out there, boy," he said, low enough that it didn't carry to the others.

"Don't let it sit on you tonight. Taking a life is never easy. It shouldn't be. The day it stops costing you something is the day you need to worry." Ant's eyes stung, sudden and unwelcome, because Kalsar had walked straight up to the thing he hadn't said out loud to anyone and named it without needing to be told.

"I'll be in soon," he managed.

"Just need a few minutes." Kalsar didn't push. He turned and followed the others in, favoring the bad leg, and the door shut behind the last of them, leaving the yard quiet except for the wind moving through the gap in the wall nobody had gotten around to closing. Mahkir sat down beside him, close, and didn't say anything. He didn't need to. He was just there, waiting, the way he always was, for as long as it took Ant to find the words for what he was carrying.