Chương 74: Chapter 73 - Something Worth Stealing

Four days on a road that hadn't changed since the last time they'd ridden it, and somehow they'd covered it faster than they had walking out. Nobody talked much. Ray tried, twice, to get a card game going between the carriages when they stopped to water the horses, and both times gave up when nobody would put coin on the table. Andy slept sitting upright, arms crossed, the way a man sleeps when he's spent years learning to do it anywhere. Duncan ate. Sam sharpened something that didn't need it.

Ant spent most of the ride with Mahkir curled against his side and his own thoughts circling a treeline he hadn't been able to stop watching, until eventually even that wore itself thin and the road just became road again. They smelled the smoke before they saw the wall. Woodsmoke and hot stone, drifting low over the last stretch of open ground the way it does when a fire's been going somewhere close for hours.

Ant leaned out past the canvas flap and there it was — grey stone climbing the whole line of the border where there'd been nothing but knee-high rubble and open ground when they'd left. It wasn't finished. He could see that even from here, patches where the stone ran thinner, one stretch near the tree line still scaffolded with raw timber. But it stood. A real gap sat in the middle of it, wide enough for the carriages, clearly meant for a gate that hadn't been hung yet.

"That's not possible," Kalsar said, and didn't say anything else for a while. Inside the wall, half the buildings they passed had scaffolding up or fresh mortar showing pale against old stone, patchwork but purposeful, the kind of repair that said somebody had gone building to building with a list. Ant caught Andy watching it all with the flat, appraising look he'd worn at the lake, like he was cataloguing what kind of clan did this in under a week and hadn't yet decided what to make of the answer.

"Andy." Ant nodded toward the river running along the outside of the new wall.

"Take her down there before we go in. Let her stretch out." Andy didn't need telling twice. The sealed carriage had been rocking harder every mile for the last hour, something inside it clearly done with being a box, and he peeled off toward the water without another word, already talking low through the iron banding before he'd got the latch undone. The rest of them walked on toward the castle.

Maren was out the doors before they'd properly stopped, and whatever she'd been about to say got lost somewhere between seeing them and closing the distance, because what came out instead was just, "You're back," said like she hadn't quite believed it would happen on schedule.

Thomas and Raven were behind her, deep in some argument that broke off the second they registered the group crossing the yard — both of them looking like they hadn't sat down properly in days, dust in Thomas's hair, a bruise going yellow along Raven's cheek that nobody asked about yet.

"This is Sam. Duncan." Kalsar said it plain, the way he introduced everything, no ceremony wasted on it.

"Andy's down at the river with his Kithren. He'll be along."

"Welcome," Maren said, and meant it, already turning to call back through the open doors before anyone could answer her properly.

"Kris! Come meet them." He came out from the kitchen wiping his hands on a rag, early twenties if that, broad through the shoulders in the specific way of someone who'd spent a lot of recent time hauling something heavier than himself.

"Kris," Maren said.

"Came to us a couple of days after you left. We wouldn't have got half this done without him." She said it like a fact rather than praise, which somehow landed harder than praise would have.

"His Kithren did the heavy lifting. Actual heavy lifting."

"Elephant," Thomas said, arms crossed, something like professional respect in it.

"Trunk alone moved more stone in an afternoon than Maren, Raven, and I managed between us in two days." They ended up around the long table with drinks going round, Kris folded into a chair at the end of it looking faintly embarrassed by the attention, answering questions about the wall in short, practical sentences that didn't waste anyone's time. Andy rejoined them a while later, hair still damp, dropping into the seat beside Ant. This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road.

If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

"She's happy to be out of the box," he said.

"Not thrilled with the river. Says it's small." A pause.

"She's not wrong."

"We'll find her something bigger eventually," Ant said.

"Don't make promises to a hydra you can't keep," Andy said, but there wasn't much weight behind it. Maren had already pulled paperwork toward her, sorting names into rooms with the same brisk efficiency she brought to everything, talking half to the table and half to herself as she went.

"Outbuildings are fixed up enough to live in, forge included — Hazel, that one's yours whenever you're ready to see it. And we finally got paid for the vortex. Enough to keep us fed and moving a couple months, if nobody does anything stupid with it."

"Someone always does something stupid with it," Kalsar said.

"I was hoping you'd be the exception." Kris, Andy, Ray, Sam and Duncan drifted out not long after to go pick which of the outbuildings they wanted, Duncan already loudly campaigning for whichever one had the biggest kitchen, something about a man needing room to actually cook rather than "crouching over a fire like an animal." The rest settled into the main hall — Maren's doing, same as the rooms, the same room she'd already decided would be their command centre whether anyone had agreed to that yet or not.

"Hazel." Maren looked up from the paperwork with the particular hopeful expression of someone about to ask a favor she already suspected wouldn't land well.

"Any chance you could build us an iron gate? For the gap in the wall." Hazel didn't look up from the mug she was turning slowly in both hands.

"I forge armor. Weapons. Things with an edge." She let it sit a second, dry as the stone outside.

"If I'd known signing on meant fence work, I might've turned Kalsar down at the door."

"It's not fence work, it's a—""It's fence work with delusions." Maren gave her a look of theatrical betrayal that lasted exactly as long as it took Hazel to crack the ghost of a smile, and then they were both back to business like the exchange hadn't happened.

"Right." Maren set the paperwork down properly now, the room's mood turning with it.

"Shell Razor. We haven't learned much. They haven't come at us — Thomas here's been convinced they would any day now, which is half of why the wall went up so fast."

"One of us had to think about it," Thomas said, unbothered.

"Raven's been watching. Carefully. Never close enough to be noticed."

"Fifteen to twenty," Raven said, before anyone asked.

"That's what I've counted, across however many passes I've made. No read on strength. No idea if there's more I haven't seen." She let that sit a second before adding, flat, "Even with the new names at that table, they outnumber us."

"Quality over quantity," Duncan said, ducking back in through the door with Sam and Andy just behind him, Kris trailing last.

"Small team," Kalsar said, already turning it over out loud the way he did when a plan was forming faster than the words could keep up.

"Moves fast, takes what it can, and gets out clean the second it looks bigger than we thought."

"I was thinking me. You." Raven's eyes went to Ant, then swept the newcomers once, weighing.

"Him. Rest of you — I don't know what you're capable of yet. Whether any of it suits this."

"I'm in." Ray leaned forward off the wall he'd been holding up.

"Never one to say no to a bit of covered opportunities."

"Covered?" Raven's eyebrow lifted a fraction, the closest she came to open confusion.

"Covert," Rowan said, not looking up from the mug he was nursing.

"That's what I said."

"You said covered. Like a blanket."

"Same difference." Ray waved it off, already moving on before anyone could argue it further.

"Point stands. There might be something worth lifting while we're in there. Purely reconnaissance, of course."

"Purely," Kalsar said, in the tone of a man who didn't believe it and wasn't going to fight about it tonight. The table talked it through after that — who'd move quiet, who wouldn't, who'd only slow the rest down trying. Andy said flatly that Hexa would announce herself from a mile off no matter what he did about it, so he'd sit this one out until he was actually needed.

Duncan and Sam admitted, without much shame, that sneaking wasn't their strength — Sam's exact words were that a lance doesn't do subtle — and that they'd rather hit something head-on than crawl toward it.

"I'll come," Kris said.

"Your Kithren's a little large for creeping through a camp unnoticed," Kalsar said, not unkindly.

"He'd stay outside it," Kris said.

"Edge of whatever perimeter they've got. If it goes bad and you need to fall back fast, having something that size waiting could buy the room to do it. Or turn the whole thing, if it comes to that." Kalsar considered it long enough that the room noticed him doing it, then gave the kind of short nod that meant the idea had passed whatever test he'd run it through. Ant looked down. Mahkir had gone quiet on the bench beside him, ears up, clearly listening to every word of it.

"What do you think," Ant said, low enough it stayed between them. Makes sense. Mahkir didn't look at him, eyes still on the table, watching the plan settle into place around it. Straight in and hit hard would be quicker. Be over faster too, one way or the other. A pause, dry even by his standards. Suicidal, if they've actually got the numbers Raven thinks. Ant sat with that a moment, weighing it the way he weighed most things — not analytically, just turning it until it stopped feeling wrong.

"Tomorrow night," he said, and the table went quiet around the words, settling into it the way rooms do when a decision's finally landed instead of just circling.

"If everyone's clear on their part by then." Nobody argued.