Chương 130: Borrowed Colours

The staging yard sat behind a windowless storehouse Ant hadn't known existed until a runner walked him and Ben there before first light, no name on the building, no marking on the door, nothing that would tell a passing patrol it was anything but another supply shed. The air inside smelled of oiled leather and old sawdust, and the single lamp burning in the corner did more to deepen the shadows than push them back.

Four crates sat stacked against the far wall, and the man waiting beside them didn't introduce himself beyond a name.

"Grant." He said it once, flat, a man who expected it to be enough. Broad through the shoulders, older than Corlan, a face that had settled into permanent, unimpressed stillness a long time ago.

"You're both here because someone above me decided you're worth the risk. I don't need to know why, and neither do either of you. What you need to know is in that crate. Open it." Ben crossed first, unhurried, and pried the lid with the flat of his blade. Ant followed a step behind, close enough to see inside before Ben had even finished lifting the wood clear. Cloth.

Folded uniforms, dark green over grey, a stitched crest on the left breast that Ant recognized before his mind had finished catching up to what he was looking at. Oath of Defiance colors. His own clan's colors, folded neat and pressed flat like they'd never been worn by anyone at all.

"Put them on," Grant said, already turning away like the matter was settled.

"Both of you. Your own gear stays here." Ant reached into the crate and lifted a set free, and his hand caught for a moment on the wood as he did, rough-cut, unmarked, no maker's stamp burned into the side the way most supply crates carried somewhere. He'd seen wood exactly like it once before, in Rebekah's description of a warehouse two streets past the armory, empty, cleared out days before she'd gotten there to look. He said nothing.

Whatever this was, it wasn't the moment to start asking questions Grant had already told him not to ask. That's the same build as the crates from the warehouse, Mahkir said, quiet, once Grant had moved off to check the other supplies. The dust marks Rebekah described. This is the same wood. I know. The uniform fit close enough to pass, and when Ant looked at Ben already dressed in his own set, something cold settled behind his ribs at how convincing it was.

Two men in Oath of Defiance colors, standing in a room that had no business existing, being handed weapons that matched nothing either of them had trained with.

"Where are we going," Ant asked, "dressed like this."

"You'll know when you get there." Grant didn't look up from the pack he was securing.

"Your job is simple. You look like Oath of Defiance. You act like Oath of Defiance, right up until the moment you're told otherwise. What happens after that, you'll be told in the field, and not before." Ben caught Ant's eye across the room, and for once there was nothing calculating in his face at all, just the same unease Ant felt sitting plainly on the surface. Whatever this was, Ben liked it as little as Ant did, and that alone was almost enough to make Ant trust him for the length of a single glance.

They walked for the better part of two hours, Grant leading, a third fighter Ant didn't recognize bringing up the rear with a Kithren that stayed close and silent the whole way, until the road cut through a stand of birch and opened onto a wide stretch of open pasture that Ant didn't recognize from any patrol map he'd studied. Grant raised a fist, and everyone stopped. Figures moved at the far tree line, five of them, unhurried, patrol formation, colors unmistakable even at this distance. Dark green over grey.

Oath of Defiance. Real Oath of Defiance. Ant's chest went tight. He didn't need to see faces to know what he was looking at, and the figure at the front of the formation, tall, unhurried, a presence that made even strangers quiet without trying, confirmed it before he'd consciously placed the name. Natalia. Mahkir. I see her. Mahkir's voice had gone very careful, very controlled. She's known my face since she joined the clan. There's no version of this where my face doesn't give us both away.

Then we don't let her get close enough to look properly. Grant crouched, sketching the ground with one finger.

"Five of them, five of us. They'll hold formation until we commit, which means we split their line before they get organized." He pointed at Ben.

"You and the cat take the flank, work toward whoever's giving orders on their side and keep her occupied. I'll take center with Reed. You two, clean up whoever breaks off the sides."

"Understood," Ben said, and if the order troubled him he didn't let it show. Grant's voice cut low and hard across the group one final time.

"Positions. We engage on my mark, and we do not break until I say so. Whatever you think you're seeing, whatever you think you recognize, you are Oath of Defiance today, and you fight like it." Ant's mouth had gone dry.

Fighting like Oath of Defiance meant fighting against Oath of Defiance, against people who'd bled for the same clan crest currently stitched over his own heart, and there was no version of the next ten minutes that didn't end with him drawing a blade on someone who might have called him a friend three months ago. Grant's hand dropped. The two lines closed the distance across open pasture at a dead run, and the world narrowed down to the width of a blade and the next half-second.

Ant's opponent was a wiry man with a hatchet in each hand, fast, aggressive, clearly used to winning fights by pace alone, and Ant fought him the way Ethan of Ashholt would fight, giving ground when he didn't need to, taking a shallow cut along his forearm he could easily have avoided because a clean, effortless parry would have said more about him than he could afford. The hatchets bit close twice, and both times Ant let the closeness read as luck rather than restraint. [Ant HP: 82/88.] Further down the line, a woman built low and solid was trading blows with Reed, Grant's silent fighter, her Kithren, an armor-plated pangolin-type with claws built for tearing rather than digging, driving in low against Reed's own Kithren with a ferocity that had nothing performative in it at all.

Something about the set of her shoulders tugged at Ant's memory before he placed her: one of the runners who'd carried messages between HQ and the training yard, back before any of this started, someone he'd nodded to a dozen times without ever learning her name. She didn't recognize him. There was no reason she would, not dressed like this, not with a stranger's face on him, but the not-knowing didn't make it easier to watch her fight for her life against people wearing her own colors.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report. Ben had already peeled off toward the flank, Talonstrike a banded blur beside him, and the OoD fighter he'd engaged, a heavyset man with a spear and a Kithren built for grappling, was giving real ground, driven back step by deliberate step. Ben wasn't holding anything back, not the way Ant was; whatever cover story Ben answered to didn't require him to fake weakness, and it showed in every economical strike.

Mahkir stayed close to Ant's flank, intercepting a second fighter who came at them from the side, a young man with twin short blades and a Kithren shaped like a hawk that dove and wheeled overhead, screeching. Mahkir met the man's Kithren strike for strike, claws meeting talons in showers of displaced feathers, and every movement was deliberately a half-step slower than it needed to be, a fight staged to look hard-won rather than the massacre it could have been in three seconds flat.

This is worse than holding back against the sicklebacks, Mahkir said, catching a talon strike along his flank that he could have avoided outright. That thing actually knows how to fight. Losing gracefully to something with skill is harder than losing to something with none. You're doing fine. Just don't let it land anything real. Define real. I've already let it land four things it thinks were skill and were actually me being polite. [Mahkir HP: 74/80.] Then Cindermaw entered the fight properly, and the whole field seemed to feel it before anyone actually saw the Epic Kithren move: a wave of heat rolling ahead of a long, coal-bed body, smoke leaking steady from between armored spine-plates, orange fading to grey along every joint. Natalia rode close behind it rather than directly on it, blade drawn, and the two OoD fighters nearest her fell back half a step on instinct, giving her room the way people always did.

She was cutting a direct line toward the center of the fight, toward Grant, and for three full strides it looked like Cindermaw's path would carry it straight through the space where Mahkir stood locked with the hawk-type. Ant's chest seized. A clash between Cindermaw and Mahkir, even a glancing one, would put both of them close enough for Natalia to see exactly what her own eyes were already halfway to confirming.

At the last possible stride, Cindermaw peeled off at an angle no combat logic actually demanded, curving wide around Mahkir's engagement instead of through it, and Natalia's own strike found a different target entirely, the young man Ant didn't recognize, driving him back rather than closing on Mahkir at all. It wasn't an accident. Ant was certain of that even before her eyes finally found them both properly. She stopped mid-motion.

Just for a heartbeat, just long enough that the fighter she'd been engaging nearly landed a real hit before she recovered, but Ant saw it happen, saw the exact moment recognition crossed her face and settled into something far more complicated than surprise. Her eyes moved from Mahkir to Ant, and held there.

Ant held perfectly still under it, blade raised, breathing hard, and for that one suspended second neither of them moved at all, two people who knew exactly what they were looking at, in a field where saying so out loud would end everything. Around them the fight kept moving, steel and shouting and the low percussive thud of Cindermaw's tail sweeping through the grass, but the space between Ant and Natalia felt separate from all of it, a held breath neither of them could afford to let out.

"That's..." One of Natalia's fighters, younger, breathless, had followed her line of sight and started to say something with real shock climbing into his voice, already turning toward the rest of his patrol like the words were going to matter to someone.

"That's the clan leader, that's Ant, why is he..."

"Focus on your own fight." Natalia's voice cracked across the field, sharp enough to cut through the noise of steel and shouting both, aimed at her own man with a force that left no room for him to finish the thought.

"Now, or I'll finish it for you myself." He swallowed whatever he'd been about to say and turned back to the fighter in front of him, shaken, and Natalia's eyes came back to Ant for one more second before she broke away, driving her own attack forward like nothing at all had happened, Cindermaw peeling off with her, still carefully, deliberately, nowhere near Mahkir. [Ant HP: 79/88.] [Mahkir HP: 71/80.] More figures were moving at the tree line now, six or seven at least, a second patrol answering some signal Ant hadn't seen given, doubling and then tripling the numbers arrayed against Grant's small group inside the space of a few breaths.

"Fall back," Grant barked, already disengaging, no hesitation in it at all.

"Now. We're not equipped for this many. Fall back to the road, don't stop for anything." Ben broke off from his fight first, Talonstrike covering the retreat with a snarl that sent the spear-wielding OoD fighter stumbling back rather than pursuing. Reed went next, pulling his own Kithren off the woman runner mid-exchange, and Ant turned to run, Mahkir a blur at his side, when the hawk-type Kithren Mahkir had been fighting made one last dive, talons out, aimed for Ant's exposed back.

Mahkir was there before Ant had finished registering the threat, taking the strike across his own shoulder instead, a real hit this time, no restraint in the way he twisted to absorb it, the talons opening a deep line that bled freely down his side. [Mahkir HP: 58/80.] They didn't stop until the birch stand swallowed them whole and the shouting behind them had faded into nothing but wind through leaves, Ant's lungs burning, Mahkir limping slightly on the side that had taken the hit, not looking back because looking back meant seeing Natalia's face again and he didn't trust himself to keep running if he did. Grant counted heads, satisfied despite the state of them, already peeling off toward whatever debrief waited for him elsewhere.

"Good. Nobody dead, nobody caught. That's a win, by the standards of today." Ben fell into step beside Ant on the walk back, quiet for a long stretch before he finally spoke, low enough that Grant wouldn't catch it.

"You know her." It wasn't a question, and Ant didn't have an answer ready that wouldn't be a lie he couldn't sell.

"I don't know what you think you saw."

"I think I saw a woman stop mid-fight to look at your cat like she'd seen a ghost, and I think I saw you hold just as still looking back at her." Ben's voice stayed even, careful, nothing accusing in it.

"I'm not saying anything to Grant. I just want you to know I saw it." Ant didn't trust himself to answer that either, and Ben didn't push for one, and they walked the rest of the way back in a silence that felt heavier than anything either of them had said out loud. Rebekah was waiting when he finally made it back to their quarters, and whatever she saw on his face stopped whatever question she'd been about to ask.

"That's not your uniform," she said instead, looking him over, dark green and grey still clinging to him like he hadn't been able to make himself change out of it fast enough.

"It's not anyone's uniform. It's a costume." He sat heavily on the edge of the bed, the day finally catching up to every part of him at once.

"They dressed us as Oath of Defiance and sent us out to fight an actual Oath of Defiance patrol. Natalia was leading it." Rebekah went very quiet.

"She saw you."

"She saw Mahkir first. Recognized him instantly, no hesitation at all. Then she saw me, and one of her own fighters started to say something before she shut him down so fast he didn't get past two words." Ant scrubbed a hand over his face.

"She reacted fast. Good instincts under pressure."

"Good instincts kept both of you alive out there today." Rebekah sat beside him, close, quiet.

"There's something else bothering you too, isn't there. You haven't told me the part that's actually eating at you." He told her about the crate then, the rough unmarked wood, the missing maker's stamp, the exact weight and grain of it in his hands feeling exactly like the description she'd given him of an empty warehouse two streets past the armory. Rebekah didn't say anything for a long moment. When she finally spoke, her voice had lost every trace of its usual lightness.

"The same crates."

"I can't prove it. It's wood, Rebekah, it could be a coincidence."

"It could be." She didn't sound like she believed the coincidence any more than he did.

"You already know they're using those colors to make real Oath of Defiance patrols think they're looking at friendly faces. What worries me is the scale of it. I've seen more than one of those anomalous entries in the main record, going back further than I first thought. If the same people are behind both, this isn't one crate and one mission. It's however many of these they've already run before today."

Neither of them said anything else for a while after that, the weight of it settling into the quiet between them, too large yet to do anything with except hold.