Chương 65: Chapter 64 - Only Three Going Home

Mahkir didn't move for a while. Just sat there, letting the quiet stretch, letting Ant get to whatever he needed to say in his own time.

"It won't be the last one," Mahkir said eventually.

"You know that."

"I know."

"Doesn't mean you have to like it. You shouldn't. But hate it after, Ant. Not during. Hesitation gets people killed — you, me, whoever's standing next to us when it happens." He leaned in, nudged his head against Ant's arm.

"Grieve it tonight if you need to. Tomorrow, put it away. Carry that into the next fight and it won't be him on the ground next time." Ant stared at the dark line of the wall gap, at nothing in particular.

"That's a cold way to put it."

"It's the true way to put it." He let out a breath, long and slow, and pushed himself up off the crate. His legs felt wrong under him, distant, like they belonged to someone who'd walked further than he had. He reached down and rested a hand against Mahkir's head, just for a second.

"Come on," he said.

"Let's go find out what we've missed." He'd never actually been inside. The castle had been theirs for weeks now, deed signed, badge chosen, and somehow in all that time Ant had never once crossed the threshold — always outside, always in the yard, hauling stone or arguing with Kalsar about the wall or watching Hazel drag scrap into the forge. Stepping through the door now felt like walking into a building that belonged to someone else's story.

The entrance hall swallowed sound the way old stone always did, his footsteps flattening out into something dull and distant. Whoever had built the place hadn't been shy about height — the ceiling rose up into shadow overhead, a chandelier hanging dark and unlit, most of its chains gone green with age. A wide staircase split the room in two, curling up toward a landing he couldn't see the end of, banister worn smooth where a hundred years of hands had come before his. Dust sat thick along the skirting boards.

One of the tall windows near the stairs had a crack running corner to corner, patched crudely with a board on the outside, letting in a thin blade of evening light that cut across the floor and lit up motes drifting slow through the air. It smelled like old paper and colder stone, the kind of cold that never fully left a building this size no matter the season.

Whoever had lived here before had left almost nothing behind — no portraits, no furniture beyond a few pieces too heavy to move, nothing that suggested a person had ever actually called this place home rather than simply owned it. Ant supposed that tracked, given how they'd come to have it. Voices reached him before he'd worked out which direction to go — low, tired, coming from a room off to his left, door hanging half open. He followed them.

The room beyond had probably been something formal once, a dining hall or a receiving room, high windows and a fireplace big enough to stand in. Now it held a table that didn't match itself — three separate pieces dragged together and pushed end to end, mismatched chairs scattered around it, a couple of crates doing double duty as seats where the chairs had run out. Kalsar sat at the head of it, leg stretched out stiff in front of him, a fresh wrap of bandage visible below the knee.

Maren was curled into a chair with her boots up on the crate beside her, quiet, watching the room without saying much. Hazel had claimed the spot nearest the fire, Vulcan stretched along the hearth beside her, and Thomas sat with Bramble's head resting heavy across his lap, one hand moving slow through the bear's fur without seeming to notice he was doing it. A loaf torn down to its heel sat in the middle of the mismatched table, a board of cold meat and cheese beside it picked mostly clean.

Rowan moved between all of them, unhurried now that the worst of it was behind him, checking a bandage here, pressing two fingers to a pulse there, murmuring something to Axel that made Maren glance over with a tired half-smile. Ant stopped in the doorway a second, taking all of it in — his people, patched and upright, alive. Kalsar glanced toward the corner of the room, where a hulking, four-armed shape sat slumped against the wall, eyes half-closed.

"Xylock. Come eat something, you've earned it." The Kithren cracked one eye open, grunted, and didn't move. Ant blinked.

"Xylock?"

"That's his name," Kalsar said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

"Huh." Ant looked over at him properly, like he was seeing him for the first time.

"I always figured it was rude to ask. Just — never came up." Mahkir let out something that was unmistakably a laugh, muffled against the floor where he'd sprawled out near the fire.

"All this time. You genuinely never asked."

"I didn't want to be weird about it."

"You bonded with me in a cave and I told you my name inside a minute." Mahkir's tail flicked once, lazy, and he settled his head back down, still chuckling low in his chest.

"All this time fighting next to that thing and never once asked its name." If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

"So," Ant said, deciding the fastest way out of this was straight through it.

"What's our next move?" Kalsar looked up.

"Funny you should ask. We were just getting into that."

"Whatever tonight was," Kalsar said, "it doesn't feel finished. Not to me."

"You think they'll come back." Ant pulled out one of the mismatched chairs and sat, leaning forward onto the table.

"I think if a game of Light Smash was worth eight lives to them, they're not going to shrug off losing five of those eight and walking home with three." Kalsar shook his head slowly.

"That's not a grudge you let go quiet."

"They won't come at us straight away, though," Hazel said, from her spot by the fire, not looking up from where she was rewrapping her own forearm.

"Whatever's left of them just watched most of their people die for nothing. That kind of loss makes people careful before it makes them angry. Give it time, and when they've had time to sit with it — that's when I'd worry." Ant looked around the table, at every tired, banged-up face in it.

"Then we don't wait for that," he said.

"We go on the offensive."

"Easy." Kalsar held up a hand, not unkindly, but firm.

"There's a difference between eight people coming into our lands and us marching into someone else's territory. We don't know who they are. Don't know where they're based, what allies they've got, whether there's someone bigger standing behind them we haven't seen yet."

"That's not entirely true." Maren spoke up from her chair, quiet, the way she always did when she had something worth everyone's attention.

"I saw the colours on a few of them, during the fight. Green and brown. Turtle badge." She paused, letting that land.

"That's Shell Razor. Mid-tier clan, not big, not small. Based out of Coldwoof, if I remember the regional directory right. Three, maybe four days out from here." The room went still for a second.

"Three or four days is nothing," Kalsar said, more to himself than anyone.

"That's close enough to have been watching this place before tonight even happened."

"Which is exactly why going after them ourselves is a bad idea right now," Hazel said.

"Even mid-tier, that's a whole clan. You've got me and Kalsar, and right now that's—""Wait." Maren sat forward, frowning.

"Three or four days out — is that from here, or from Bramholt? Because if it's from Bramholt, that's not the same as—""From here," Kalsar said.

"I already accounted for that."

"You didn't say that, though. You just said three or four days."

"I'm saying it now." Maren held up both hands, conceding it, and Hazel picked the thread back up like the interruption had never happened.

"—that's the entirety of what this place can call fighters," she finished.

"Hey." Ant sat up straighter.

"I can fight." Kalsar's look was steady, not unkind, but it didn't give an inch either.

"You and Mahkir can fight. I watched you do it tonight, and I'm not pretending it wasn't impressive. But be honest with yourself for a second, boy — what carried you through that fight? Your training, or his skill?" Ant opened his mouth, and shut it again.

"If Mahkir's mana had run dry ten minutes earlier," Kalsar went on, "if that Attribute Sharing hadn't been there to lean on — do you actually think the two of you walk away from that fight standing? Or do we?"

"... No." The word cost him something to say out loud.

"That was luck as much as anything."

"Luck's a fine thing to have on your side. Terrible thing to plan around." Kalsar leaned back, wincing at what it cost his leg, and folded his arms.

"I'm not telling you you're wrong to want to go after Shell Razor before they come after us again. Truth is, I don't disagree with the instinct. But if we're doing this — really doing this, not just talking about it around a table at midnight — then two things have to happen first. We need people. Recruits who can actually hold a line, not just dig one. And you need real training. Not what you've been picking up between fights.

Proper training, the kind that doesn't rely on your Kithren bailing you out the second it gets bad." Ant looked down at his hands, at the dirt and dried blood still creased into the knuckles, and didn't argue. Kalsar's eyes narrowed slightly, like something had just caught up with him.

"Speaking of relying on things you shouldn't have to explain." He looked over at Ant, deliberate.

"You said you'd tell us. Properly. Once everyone was patched up and fed. Well." He gestured around the room — Rowan finally sitting himself, Hazel's wrap finished, Thomas with Bramble's weight settled across his knees.

"We're patched up. We're fed, near enough. I don't see a better moment coming." Ant felt every eye in the room land on him at once, and understood there wasn't a way to put this off any further.

"Right," he said.

"Some of you already know part of this. Maren does. Kalsar does. For the rest of you—" He glanced at Thomas, at Rowan, at Hazel scratching absently behind Vulcan's ear and waiting.

"The chip lies. Has done since the day Maren fitted it. It says Mahkir's a Flaming Lynx. He's not. It only says that because we needed it to say something. What I actually have isn't connected to the chip at all — never has been, not since the day we bonded. And a few days ago it gave me something new. Concealment. Bends the light around both of us, hides us from sight, so long as I've got the mana to keep feeding it. That's how we knew where to go tonight.

How we got in without anyone seeing us coming until it was already too late for them to stop it." Nobody spoke for a second. Thomas looked between Ant and Bramble, working something through. Hazel's hand had gone still on Vulcan's fur.

"Cerlan doesn't know," Ant went on.

"Nobody outside this room knows, beyond the two who already did. I'd rather it stayed that way. Not because I don't trust any of you — I do, more than I probably have any right to yet — but because the fewer people who know a thing like this exists, the fewer people go looking for reasons to take it from me."

"Wasn't going to ask you to explain the mechanics of it," Kalsar said, after a moment.

"Wanted to know it existed. Wanted to know why the Master-at-Arms is walking around blind to half of what his own leader can do." He settled back in his chair, some of the tension gone out of his shoulders.

"That'll do, for now."

"Maybe I can help," Rowan said. Everyone turned. He'd stopped his rounds and was standing near the fire now, bag still hanging off one shoulder, looking somewhere between certain and terrified of his own offer. Kalsar's face went soft in a way Ant hadn't seen from him before — something close to sorrow, carefully held back.

"I appreciate the thought, Rowan. I do. But you don't have a Kithren. Whatever your body could become in a real fight, it hasn't had the chance to become it. Without a bond, you never went through any of the changes the rest of us did. You wouldn't survive a fight like tonight's. None of us want to find that out the hard way."

"Thanks for the confidence boost, Kal."

"I mean it kindly."

"I know you do." Rowan's mouth twisted into something that wasn't quite a smile. He looked around the table, at every face turned toward him, and something in his shoulders dropped, like he'd been holding a weight up there for a long time and had finally decided to put it down.

"That's not what I meant, though," he said.

"I think it's time I told you all how I actually lost my Kithren. And why I think that might be exactly what lets me help you now."