Chương 73: Chapter 72 - Not Interested

The arrows were still standing in the dirt when she called down from the trees.

"Don't move." A woman's voice, flat, carrying easy across thirty meters of open ground.

"Or the next one goes between your eyes." Nobody moved. Duncan's hand had drifted toward the strap of his shield and stopped there, frozen mid-reach, like even he understood that reaching the rest of the way would be the last thing he ever did. Ant kept his eyes on the treeline and said nothing, because there was nothing worth saying to a voice he couldn't see yet.

She dropped out of the canopy without warning — no branch creak, no scramble, just there, landing soft on bent knees in a crouch that unfolded into a walk before the dust had settled around her boots. A fox came after her, picking its way down through air that shouldn't have held it, paws finding purchase on nothing at all until it touched ground and became solid, deep grey shot through with threads of pale silver that moved like smoke caught in water. It didn't growl. It didn't need to.

It just walked a half-step behind her shoulder, patient, its eyes never leaving the group. She stopped at thirty meters. Not twenty-five. Not thirty-five. Exactly far enough that the bow across her back could clear its case, notch, and loose before anyone crossed the gap.

"Isn't nothing around here but me." She looked them over once, unhurried, the way a woman might look over a stall of fruit she already suspected was bruised.

"Don't know what you're selling. I ain't buying."

"We're building a clan." Ant kept his voice level, kept it where hers had been — not louder, not softer.

"Looking for people. Talented people. The kind who might want more than the next big score." She didn't answer right away. Her eyes moved over him instead, top to bottom, slow enough that it stopped being an assessment of threat somewhere around his boots and turned into an entirely different kind of appraisal.

"Can't promise fame," he said, because he had to say something and the silence was starting to itch.

"Can't promise you won't fight. But I can promise you a home."

"Mm." She kept walking that same slow line with her eyes, unbothered, like his answer had barely registered.

"Not sure you're my type." A pause, considering.

"I like my men bigger." Her gaze slid past him to Kalsar.

"Too old." To Andy, the same flat once-over.

"Him neither." Sam. Duncan. She lingered there half a second longer, approval flickering across her face before it vanished again, and then her eyes swept straight past Hazel like she wasn't standing there at all. Hazel went still, the particular stillness of someone deciding a thing wasn't worth the reaction it deserved. Nobody else seemed to notice.

"No." Rebekah shook her head, slow, final.

"Won't do. You come all this way to proposition me and that's the best you've got?" She spread one hand, barely a shrug.

"Told you. Not interested. Be on your way."

"Now hold on a damn minute." Kalsar's voice cracked across the clearing before Ant could open his mouth.

"Nobody said anything about propositioning you — not like that, anyway." He jabbed a thumb at Ant, scowling like the misunderstanding had personally offended him.

"Boy's recruiting for his clan. That's the whole of it." Heat crawled up the back of Ant's neck before he could stop it, and he felt the shift in her look the instant it landed — reassessing, recalculating, her eyes going sharp in a way they hadn't been a breath ago. She winked at him. His heart did something stupid and immediate.

"Careful," Hazel murmured, close enough behind his shoulder that only he could hear it.

"She knows exactly what she's doing. Keep your guard up."

"Seems we've made an error." Ant turned, already moving, already done.

"Apologies for the trouble."

"Shame," Ray said under his breath as the group turned with him, already resigned.

"She would've been a hell of an addition." Another arrow hit the dirt between them, close enough that Duncan actually flinched this time.

"Who said I was rejecting anything?" Ant stopped. Didn't turn around yet. Rebekah's voice had gone sharper, the boredom in it cracked through with something that sounded almost like being cheated out of a good afternoon.

"As I recall," Hazel said, not bothering to lower her voice, "you told us you weren't interested." She started walking again, not waiting to see if the rest of them followed.

"Keep moving." They kept moving, and said nothing else the whole way back. The tavern room had not gotten any bigger since that morning, and eight people made it feel like something closer to a supply closet than lodging. Sam had claimed the windowsill for lack of anywhere else. Duncan sat on the floor with his back against the door frame, shield propped beside him, looking entirely too pleased with himself for a man who'd nearly lost an arm to a lance-thrower two days prior.

Andy had found the one chair in the room and settled into it like he'd been sitting in chairs his whole life and had opinions about the good ones. Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings. Mahkir dropped onto the foot of the bed with a groan that had nothing dignified about it, tucked his tail over his nose, and was asleep within seconds. Ant let him be.

The fight with Hexa had taken more out of him than he'd said out loud, and if the fur was thinner along his ribs than it used to be, Ant chose not to mention it yet.

"So." Rowan dropped onto the edge of the bed, careful not to jostle Mahkir.

"That's five names down. Four in the clan, one apparently stalking us through the woods."

"She is not stalking us," Ant said.

"She's outside right now," Ray said cheerfully.

"Third tree from the well. Been there since we crossed the bridge." Ant closed his eyes. Rowan glanced over at Andy, still working at his boot strap, and seemed to remember all at once that the man had joined mid-afternoon, mid-fight, with no time for anything but a wager and a walk home. Between the three of them — Rowan filling gaps, Kalsar cutting straight to what mattered, Hazel adding the parts neither man thought to mention — they caught him up. The headquarters. The attack.

Calvin dead and no longer anyone's problem, his clan very much still someone's. Shell Razor. Small outfit, green and brown, turtle on the badge, based out of Coldwoof three or four days out, and nobody sure yet if what was left of them was finished or just regrouping. Andy turned it over without any particular reaction — a name that clearly meant nothing to him, filed away next to a dozen others just like it.

"Small clan going after five names and a castle is either desperate or stupid," he said eventually.

"Neither's comforting."

"Bit of both, probably," Rowan said. Kalsar was the last one still upright, pulling off one boot, then the other, dropping the second with a thud loud enough that Andy stirred without waking.

"Not tonight's problem," he said, mostly to himself, nodding toward the window and whatever waited beyond it.

"Everyone sleeps. We deal with the Bow Queen in the morning." Chairs scraped. Bodies rearranged into whatever corners of floor hadn't already been claimed. Ant stayed where he was a moment longer, looking at the window, at the dark beyond it where a third tree from the well stood somewhere he couldn't see. He was fairly sure she was still there. He didn't know what to do about that, and for once, he decided not to ask Hazel.

The sun was barely up when Ant stepped out of the tavern, and Andy was already three carriages deep into whatever he'd been doing since before anyone else had opened their eyes. Two of the carriages looked ordinary enough — worn wood, canvas tops, benches inside for however many bodies could be crammed onto them. The third didn't. It sat lower on its wheels than the other two, boxed in on all sides with iron banding at the corners and no windows anywhere Ant could see. Sealed, not just closed.

"That one's Hexa," Andy said, catching the direction of his stare without looking up from the strap he was tightening.

"Can't exactly walk her through a village without causing a panic. She doesn't love the box. She'll live." Ant filed that away without comment, and didn't ask how a man went about building a portable box for something the size of a hydra overnight in a village that hadn't known he was leaving.

"Gods above, it's still dark," Ray said, dragging himself out the tavern door with his boots half-laced and his shirt on inside out.

"Nobody said anything about dawn. I was promised recruitment work, not a military schedule."

"You volunteered," Rowan said, not stopping.

"I volunteered for daytime hours." Nobody answered that, and Ray grumbled his way toward the second carriage anyway, still fighting with his own shirt. It didn't take long after that. Sam and Duncan between them owned less than Ant would have guessed for two men who'd clearly been settled in the Hollow a good while — a pack apiece, Duncan's shield, Sam's lance wrapped in cloth against the damp. Andy had even less, just a single bag and whatever he'd already loaded before anyone else was awake to see him do it.

Kalsar moved between the carriages checking straps that didn't need checking, the way he always did when there was nothing left to actually organize and it bothered him. Hazel packed in the kind of efficient silence that told Ant she'd done this more times than either of them had ever talked about, folding and stacking without once looking up to check whether anyone else had noticed how quickly she'd finished. Under an hour, start to finish.

Ant stood in the road once his own pack was loaded and looked at how little space eight lives and their belongings actually took up, and found that fact sat oddly with him without being able to say exactly why. He looked toward the treeline before he climbed into the second carriage. Out of habit, mostly. Told himself that's all it was. Nothing. No shape against the trunks, no glint off a bow, no fox picking its way through the underbrush.

Just the road, the mist still sitting low over the grass, and the ordinary sounds of a village waking up around them. He wasn't sure what he'd expected. Wasn't entirely sure what he felt about finding nothing there, either — relief sat somewhere close to disappointment, and he didn't much like how little distance there was between the two. They could have used her.

That much wasn't in question — a bow like that, a Kithren nobody had lived to describe properly, those weren't things you walked away from without noticing the gap. But there'd been something underneath the way she'd looked at him in that clearing — underneath the flirting, the arrows, the theatre of it all — that had left him feeling watched in a way he hadn't liked. He'd only felt that once before, and it hadn't been from an arrow.

It had been standing in an alley three years ago with blood cooling on his collar, being looked at by someone who already knew exactly what she was seeing. He climbed in. The last of the resources got loaded — feed for the horses, what supplies the village could spare on short notice, a crate of something Kalsar had haggled over that Ant hadn't bothered asking about.

Then the driver called out, the horses stamped and settled, and the carriages rolled out onto the road home at a pace that felt almost indecent after a stay spent mostly on foot. Ant watched Marrow's Hollow shrink behind them through the gap in the canvas, and didn't stop watching until the trees closed over the road and there was nothing left to see at all.