Chương 75: Chapter 74 - What The Fire Doesn't Show

They left before the wall was even finished, which felt wrong to Ant in a way he couldn't quite name — leaving a job half done, walking away from stone that hadn't set yet. Kalsar told him that was exactly backwards. The wall would still be there when they got back. Shell Razor's numbers wouldn't stay put waiting for a more convenient week. Maren hadn't liked it either, not that she'd said so directly.

She'd stood in the yard with the ledger still under one arm, watching the five of them check straps and count arrows, and said only, "Send word the second you're somewhere the relay can reach," in a voice that made it sound less like a request and more like a condition of them being allowed to leave at all. Rowan had pressed a small tin of something into Kris's hands at the last minute — salve, from the smell of it, sharp and herbal — and told him not to be a hero if it came to using it on himself.

Kris had said he'd try not to be, in the tone of a man who fully intended to be one anyway if the moment called for it. Four days out from Bramholt, the road stopped pretending to be a road. It happened gradually enough that Ant only noticed it in hindsight — the packed dirt thinning to a track, the track narrowing to a line no wider than a deer might wear into the ground over years of the same crossing.

Raven walked point most of the stretch, Shrike a dark shape wheeling high overhead whenever the tree cover broke enough to let her fly. Kalsar kept pace beside Ant without seeming to try, the way he did everything, and Ray trailed at the back with Kris, the two of them talking low enough that Ant only caught pieces of it carried back on the wind. The land itself turned meaner the further they went.

Trees thinned unevenly, whole patches burned black and never replanted, gaps in the canopy that let too much grey sky through for a forest this deep. Twice they crossed streams running the wrong colour, a faint rust tint to the water that Raven crouched to study and then chose not to explain. Nobody pressed her on it. The quiet after that told Ant enough on its own — whatever it meant, it wasn't good, and it wasn't new information to her either.

Once, near midday, they passed the remains of a cart on its side in a ditch, wheels gone, wood gone soft and grey with weather. Nobody stopped to look closer. Nobody needed to. Territory smells wrong already, Mahkir said, low, from where he padded at Ant's heel. Too much char under the green. Old fires, not campfires.

"How far?" Half a day, maybe less, if the wind's telling the truth. They made camp early because Raven called it early, dropping her pack against a fallen trunk with the flat finality of someone who'd already decided the conversation was over before it started.

"Another hour and we're setting up in the dark. I'd rather have light to pick a bad spot than none to pick a good one." Nobody argued. Kalsar least of all — he had that look on him, the one that meant his mind was three moves further down the road than his feet were, and he wanted quiet to catch it up. The clearing wasn't much.

A ring of half-dead pines, needles thick enough underfoot to muffle everything, the ground sloping just enough toward a dry creek bed that Raven pronounced it defensible without explaining what that meant beyond a short nod at the terrain. Woodsmoke went up thin and careful once Ray got a fire going, mixed under it the wet-earth smell of a forest that hadn't seen proper sun in days, pine resin sharp enough to catch in the back of Ant's throat. Kalsar didn't sit by the fire.

He crossed to where Raven was crouched over her pack, said a few words too low to carry, and the two of them drifted twenty feet off toward the treeline, heads bent together over a hand-drawn map Kalsar had unfolded from inside his coat — faint pencil lines Ant couldn't read from this distance even if he'd tried.

"They do that a lot?" Ray said, dropping down across the fire from Ant, tiger folding itself against his leg like it had already decided the ground was comfortable enough.

"The private huddle."

"Kalsar likes working things through before he says them out loud," Ant said.

"Raven's the only one who argues with him properly. Everyone else just agrees and hopes he's right."

"You don't."

"I try not to. Doesn't always work." Kris had settled a little apart, close enough to the fire to be part of it, not close enough to crowd. He'd unslung the bow from across his back and was running a cloth down the length of it, unhurried, the kind of motion that came from habit rather than any real need — the bow looked well kept already.

"You any good with that," Ray said, tipping his chin at the bow. Barely a question, more a way of starting. Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings. Kris didn't look up right away.

"Passable."

"Passable's doing a lot of work in that sentence."

"I hit what I aim at, most of the time." A small shrug.

"Never had reason to test it against a person before tonight, if I'm honest." Ray leaned back on his hands, considering that.

"No fighting experience at all? Real fighting, I mean. Not drills."

"No." Kris kept working the cloth along the bowstring, steady, not rushing to fill the silence the way most people did when a question landed somewhere uncomfortable.

"Never trained for it. Never had a Kithren built for it either, before him." A glance sideways, toward the treeline where his elephant stood half-visible in the dark, patient as furniture, breathing slow and huge.

"But I've lost people. More than I'd like to count. And I got tired of being the one standing at the back doing nothing while it happened."

"So you learned the bow instead."

"So I learned the bow instead." He finally looked up, firelight catching flat along his face.

"I know what I'm not. I'm not going to run at someone with a sword and pretend that's going to end well for anyone standing near me. But I can put an arrow where I mean to, and I can do it from far enough back that I'm not the first thing anyone notices. If that means I'm the one covering your retreat instead of leading a charge — fine. Useful's useful. Doesn't have to look impressive." It was a fair answer, Ant thought. Honest, in the specific way that didn't try to dress itself up as anything braver than it was.

Careful one, Mahkir said, watching Kris over the fire, ears tipped forward, the way he did when he was actually paying attention rather than just listening. Thinks before he talks. Rare, that. Fair enough, Ant thought back, and let it go.

"What'd you lose them to?" Ray asked. Not unkind — genuinely curious, the way Ray usually was about most things, which was either his best quality or the thing that got him into the most trouble depending on who you asked. Kris was quiet a moment.

"Different things. Different times." He set the bow down across his knees.

"Doesn't get easier picking which story to tell when someone asks. They all end the same way."

"Fair enough." Ray let it go without pushing, which surprised Ant slightly — Ray wasn't usually the type to notice when a door had quietly shut, but he noticed this one.

"I lost my old clan to a landslide. Whole camp, near enough. Wasn't even fighting. Just bad ground and worse timing." He scratched behind the tiger's ear, absent, the cat leaning into it without opening its eyes.

"Makes you superstitious about camping near hillsides. She still won't sleep if there's a slope above us. Won't say why. Cats don't explain themselves."

"Neither do you, from what I've seen," Kris said, and it came out dry enough that Ray barked a laugh loud enough to make Kalsar glance over from twenty feet away before deciding it wasn't worth investigating. The talk wandered after that, the way talk did around a fire when nobody was forcing it anywhere.

Ray needled Kris about the elephant's appetite until Kris admitted, flatly, that he'd once watched it clear an entire cart's worth of turnips meant for a whole settlement and had never quite forgiven himself for not stopping it sooner.

"A whole cart."

"A whole cart. Farmer didn't speak to me for a month." Kris almost smiled at that, the first real give Ant had seen out of him all evening.

"Wasn't even angry about the turnips, in the end. Just annoyed I hadn't warned him first."

"You should've warned him first."

"I should've warned him first," Kris agreed, and went back to the bow like the conversation had never happened. Ant let it run past him without adding much, something about the ordinariness of it settling in his chest in a way the last few days hadn't given much room for. He tried, briefly, to remember the last time an evening had passed this plainly — no reports to give, no wounds to check, nobody watching him for the next order. Just a fire, and people talking about turnips. He didn't manage to remember one.

Kalsar and Raven came back to the fire a while later, the map folded away, whatever they'd worked out between them staying between them for now. Kalsar dropped down onto the log beside Ant with a low grunt, favoring one leg over the other as he settled, the old give-away he'd never admit to having.

"Well?" Ant said.

"Tomorrow," Kalsar said.

"We'll go over it properly once we've got eyes on the place. No sense planning around a map that's older than the last time anyone bothered updating it."

"That bad?"

"Raven thinks half the buildings marked on it haven't existed in years." Kalsar glanced toward her — she was already crouched by her pack again, running a whetstone along one of her daggers with slow, even strokes, Shrike a hunched shadow on a branch above her, head tucked under one wing.

"We'll know more in daylight. For now—" He nodded once, toward the fire, toward the rest of them settled loosely around it.

"Eat. Sleep while you can. Long day tomorrow, whatever it turns into." Nobody needed telling twice. Ant ate without tasting much of it, Mahkir curled against his side, fur warm enough against the chill to make the cold ground bearable, and somewhere past the treeline an owl called twice and went quiet.

Ray banked the fire down to embers before he turned in, muttering something to his tiger about taking first watch together, the two of them settling into the low crook of a fallen log with the ease of a pair who'd done this a hundred times before, the cat's tail flicking once before it went still, ears tracking every small sound the forest made.

Raven didn't bother sleeping at all, as far as Ant could tell — she sat with her back to a tree, dagger loose in one hand, eyes half-lidded but never quite closed, Shrike's silhouette a still black shape above her against the last grey light. Kalsar checked the perimeter twice before he'd admit to being satisfied with it, walking the treeline slow and unhurried, one hand resting on the hilt at his hip the whole way round, boots quiet on the needle-thick ground.

Ant lay back with his pack under his head, listening to the fire settle and pop, Mahkir's breathing slow and even against his side, the fire burning down to a red line in the dark. Sleep took him faster than he expected, given everything tomorrow was supposed to hold.