Chương 114: Chapter 113 – A Toast to Absent Friends

Somebody had strung lanterns the length of the tavern's rafters, and half of them were already guttering by the time Ant pushed through the door. The place smelled like it had swallowed the whole clan whole — roasted meat gone crisp at the edges, spilled ale soaking into wood that would never fully dry out again, woodsmoke from the hearth fighting a losing war against the press of bodies. Somebody's dog was asleep under the long table, undisturbed by the boots stepping over it every few seconds.

Thomas had built the place with a builder's eye for load and drainage, and it showed in the bones of it — but nothing in his plans could have accounted for what a hundred and change clan members did to a room once the drink started flowing.

"There he is." Duncan's voice cut clean over the noise, which took some doing. He was already on his feet, mug raised high enough to slosh down his own wrist.

"The man himself. Come on, come on — you're a full hour late to your own party."

"I was doing leader things."

"You were in the bath." Rebekah, from somewhere to Duncan's left, didn't even look up from the drink she was nursing.

"I sent Lem to check."

"That's an invasion of privacy."

"That's diligence." She finally glanced over, and whatever was on Ant's face pulled the corner of her mouth up.

"You're welcome, by the way. Somebody had to make sure the guest of honor hadn't drowned." Mahkir shouldered past Ant's leg and made straight for the fire, where Rowan had, with characteristic foresight, already laid out a proper spread specifically for him — enough that half the table was craning to watch him eat. This is a good party, Mahkir said, mouth already full, the words arriving a little muffled through the bond regardless. You've been here five seconds. Long enough.

His tail thumped twice against the flagstones, satisfied. There's meat and nobody's trying to kill me. High bar cleared already. Ant found the nearest open stretch of bench and dropped into it, and the noise of the room closed back over him like water. Ray was somewhere near the middle of a story that involved, from what Ant could piece together, a merchant, a goat, and a bet he was clearly embellishing in real time.

Raven sat across from him with her arms crossed and her expression doing all the work of a woman who'd heard this story before and had opinions about the liberties being taken with it. Hazel had wedged herself in between Raven and Duncan, mug already half gone, needling Ray about the goat before he'd even gotten to the good part of it — "you're building up to something, and it had better be worth the wait" — the whetstone nowhere in sight for once, left back at the forge where it belonged tonight.

Thomas was somewhere past his second drink already, staring at the rafters with the particular unfocused look that meant he was mentally re-drawing a joint he'd probably drawn correctly the first time.

"A year today," Rowan called out, from further down the table, raising his own mug high enough to catch the lantern light.

"Since some fool walked into the clan hall with a deed for a half-collapsed castle and talked a clerk into making him a leader. To the fool."

"To the fool," half the room echoed back, grinning, and Ant found himself raising his own mug along with the rest of them, toasting himself, which felt exactly as strange as it sounded.

"Twelve months," Ant said, mostly to himself, and found he'd said it loud enough that a few heads turned anyway.

"Go on then." Duncan thumped the table, delighted.

"Say something. You're the leader. Leaders say things."

"I don't have a speech."

"Nobody wants a speech," Raven said.

"Say something short and we'll all pretend it was profound." Ant looked around the room — really looked, the way he hadn't quite let himself since walking in. Kalsar near the far wall, arms folded, a single untouched mug in front of him that he was clearly nursing on principle rather than thirst. Andy a few seats down from him, watching Mahkir eat with the same quiet fascination he always seemed to bring to it, like the sight hadn't worn thin after a year.

Maren mid-laugh at something Rowan had said, her folder — the one that seemed surgically attached to her most days — nowhere in sight tonight. Natalia near the hearth with Garrick, Petra, Nadia, and Bastian around her, the five of them settled into the room in a way that looked, at a glance, like they'd always been part of it. Bastian had a mug he was clearly not going to finish and kept eyeing like it might do something interesting.

Petra sat with her back to the wall, saying nothing, watching everything, the way she always did. Nadia had already gotten into an argument with someone Ant didn't recognize about the best route between two patrol points, gesturing fast enough to nearly clip Garrick's ear.

"To surviving it," Ant said finally, and raised his own mug.

"Whatever it turns out we survived. I genuinely couldn't tell you half of what happened this year if you asked me to lay it out in order. Vortexes. Tournaments. A castle we won off a man who cheated at his own game. A traitor who sold us out to Shell Razor and is still out there somewhere, no doubt still furious about it. Wraithkin, twice as many of them as anyone actually wants to fight, and somehow — "he looked at Duncan, then Kalsar, then let his eyes go around the whole room" — somehow we're all still here.

Most of us."

"Most of us," Duncan repeated, and something in the warmth of the room dipped for half a second before he caught it and hauled it back up by main force.

"Right. Right, before we get too far into this — Sam." He said the name plain, no dressing on it, and lifted his mug higher.

"Two drinks tonight. One for him because he's my brother and he's not here to drink his own, and one for—" he pointed the mug at Ant, not unkindly, "—you. Because you're the one who let him go do whatever fool thing he's doing out there instead of standing here where I can see him."

"That's fair," Ant said, and meant it.

"Course it's fair. I'm always fair." Duncan drained half his mug in one go, then the second one right behind it, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

"Miserable, quiet, won't-shut-up-about-being-quiet brother of mine. Somebody ought to drink for him tonight since he's too busy being mysterious to do it himself." A ripple of laughter went round the table, real but thin, the kind that comes with everyone privately doing the same math Duncan just did out loud. Ant drank his own toast without quite tasting it, and set the mug down harder than he meant to.

"Is it always like this?" he asked, half to the table, half to nobody, more honest than he meant it to sound.

"The clan, I mean. Is this — is this what it's supposed to feel like? Because some days I genuinely can't tell if we're thriving or just moving fast enough that nothing's caught up with us yet." If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it. He'd meant it as a joke.

It came out sounding less like one than he intended, and he watched it land that way too — watched Kalsar go carefully blank near the wall, watched Andy's hands go still on the table, nothing to do with the ale in front of him, watched Maren's laugh die somewhere in her throat before it finished.

"What," Ant said, and the single word cut through more of the room's noise than he expected it to. Nobody answered right away. Rowan, God bless him, tried — opened his mouth with the particular brightness of a man about to change the subject entirely — but Natalia beat him to it, and once she started, the table quieted the way it always did around her, not commanded, just noticed.

"We've been talking. The three of us." She nodded at Kalsar, then Andy, unhurried, her dark hair pulled back tight enough that it looked like it hurt, the old break in her nose catching the lantern light at an angle that made it look fresher than it was.

"Especially since Sam brought back what he found."

"You know about that?" Ant looked at Maren, at Rowan.

"I thought—""We told them," Kalsar said, from the wall, not moving from it.

"Few weeks back. Didn't feel right keeping it from people who run half this clan's day-to-day."

"Right," Ant said slowly.

"So what have you been talking about." Natalia set her own drink down, both hands flat on the table either side of it, the posture of someone about to say something she'd rehearsed and still didn't love saying out loud.

"I led Blackthorn myself, before it folded into you. I know what normal looks like at that size — what kind of trouble comes looking for a clan like ours, and how often." She looked at him directly.

"Clan against clan, real open conflict, isn't common anymore. Hasn't been in my lifetime. Territory disputes, the occasional grudge that gets out of hand — sure. But nobody wages an actual war on a clan our size. There's no profit in it. Too much risk, too little to take."

"And the vortexes," Kalsar said, taking up the thread without needing to be handed it.

"One high-risk clearance, two medium, all inside a year. Long as I served before I ever set foot in this clan, I never once saw a mid-tier clan handed a high-risk assignment. Not once. We got one, and two mediums stacked on top of it besides."

"Cerlan's warning," Andy added, quiet, from his seat.

"Cael didn't come to us with a rumor. He came to us with a specific read that somebody with real weight had taken a personal interest. That's not the kind of thing a man like that says lightly."

"And now Sam," Natalia said, "finding people wearing faces that aren't theirs, two months into a pattern nobody flagged until it was already established." She held the silence a moment before she went on, voice level, careful.

"None of that, on its own, means much. All of it together —" she spread one hand, palm up, the closest thing to a shrug Ant had ever seen from her "— I don't like what it adds up to." The table had gone properly quiet now, the noise of the rest of the room suddenly very loud around the edges of it, like the whole clan had shrunk down to just this stretch of bench.

Raven was the one who broke it, arms still crossed, voice flat and hard in the way it always was when something actually worried her enough to bother saying so.

"So somebody's been building toward something. For a year." She looked around the table like she was daring anyone to disagree.

"That's a long game for anyone to run against a clan that's barely a year old."

"Which is what worries me," Natalia said.

"Not that someone's watching. That they've had the patience to watch for this long before doing anything you'd actually notice." Maren had gone very still, the particular stillness she got when something didn't add up and she couldn't stand that it didn't.

"There has to be a reason," she said.

"A pattern like that — resources, that kind of restraint — nobody spends that on nothing. There's a why in here somewhere and I hate that we can't see it yet."

"We will," Rowan said, gently, the first real crack of warmth back into the table since Natalia had started talking. Petra had drifted over from the hearth at some point without anyone quite remarking on it, her arm linked through his — a habit that had settled into the two of them these past weeks, familiar enough now that nobody at the table treated it as news.

"We've got good people looking. We've got each other. That's more than most clans facing something like this would have."

"Hope you're right," Garrick said, from further down — the first thing he'd offered to the wider table all night, his voice low and unhurried, eyes on the fire rather than any of them. He didn't say anything else. Just turned his mug once between both hands and drank.

"You say that like you don't believe me." Rowan pressed a hand to his own chest, wounded, the performance of it loose and easy enough that it pulled the first real laugh back out of the table since the toast.

"I'll have you know I'm an extremely credible source of good news." Thomas, mostly quiet through the whole exchange, finally spoke, slow and considered in the way he always was when he'd actually been listening rather than drifting.

"Whatever it is. Whoever it is." He looked at his own hands a moment.

"We've built something worth watching that closely. I keep forgetting that's true, some days. Might be worth remembering it's also true on the good days, not just when someone points a threat at it." Nobody had a clean answer to that, and nobody tried to force one.

The silence held for a moment — not heavy, exactly, just full — and then Duncan, because Duncan could never let a silence sit for longer than it took him to notice it, reached across the table and refilled every mug within arm's reach whether anyone had asked him to or not.

"Right," he said.

"Well. Can't fight it tonight, whatever it is. And I'll be damned if I let it ruin the one night we're all meant to be drinking instead of working." He raised his own mug, freshly full, and the gesture alone dragged half the table's attention back up with it.

"So. Same as before. To surviving it."

"To surviving it," the table echoed, ragged and half-hearted at first, and then — as more mugs went up around the room, as Ray picked the thread back up and steered it somewhere looser, as Maren leaned into Ant's shoulder just enough to remind him she was there — the mood found its feet again, the way it always seemed to with this particular collection of people. Not forgotten. Just set down for the night, the way you set down something too heavy to carry and drink at the same time.

Bastian, three seats down, finally worked up the nerve to actually finish his mug, and immediately regretted it loudly enough that Nadia nearly fell off the bench laughing. Petra allowed herself something that might, in poor light, have been mistaken for a smile. Andy said something dry to Kalsar that made the older man's mouth twitch despite himself. Natalia, still near the hearth, caught Ant's eye across the room for a moment longer than the noise around her strictly called for, and didn't look away first.

Somewhere near the hearth, Mahkir had progressed from eating to lying flat on his back in front of the fire, four legs in the air, utterly unconcerned with dignity, and Ant caught himself laughing at the sight of it before he'd fully decided to. The night went on considerably longer than it had any business going on.

Ant lost count of the drinks somewhere after the fourth, lost the thread of at least two separate conversations he was fairly sure he'd been an active participant in, and had a distinct, warm, entirely undeserved sense by the end of it that everything might actually be fine. The headache arrived before he did. Ant surfaced slow, the inside of his skull feeling like something had taken up residence there overnight and was now demanding rent. Grey light through a gap in the curtains.

His mouth tasted like the bottom of a barrel. Every small sound — a bird outside, his own breathing — landed like it had been personally aimed at the exact center of his forehead. He didn't open his eyes yet. Reached out instead, blind, toward the cool empty stretch of mattress he expected to find, the way he always did on mornings like this — a habit worn in from a year of waking up alone more often than not. His hand found something warm. Soft.

A curve that gave slightly under his palm and then didn't, someone's weight settling deeper into the mattress beside him, unhurried, a slow breath going out that wasn't his own. He didn't think much of it. Not at first — his head was too busy protesting its own existence to process much of anything, and half his brain was still convinced he'd simply forgotten a blanket had ended up bunched there. Then feeling started coming back into the rest of him, in pieces, the way it does. The warmth under his hand had skin.

Bare skin, unbroken by any seam of fabric, stretching further than a bunched blanket had any business stretching. He went very still. His own skin, he realized next — with the particular slow horror of a man doing an inventory he should have done several seconds earlier — wasn't covered by anything either. There was someone in the bed with him.