Chương 78: Chapter 77 – We Were Set Up

"We were fucking set up." Kalsar's voice tore down the corridor before he did, bouncing off stone that had heard worse and would hear worse again. He came through the archway at a half-run, Raven slack across his good arm, her head lolling against the wound side of his ribs he hadn't let anyone look at yet. The air in here always carried a trace of old candle wax and colder stone underneath it, and tonight there was blood on top of both, his and hers, gone tacky in the fabric.

Rowan was already moving before Kalsar finished the sentence, closing the distance in four strides and lifting Raven straight out of his arms like she weighed nothing.

"Down. Now. Table, floor, I don't care." He didn't wait for anyone to clear a space — just found one and knelt into it, fingers already at her throat, then at the gash along her arm, peeling the makeshift wrap Kalsar had tied hours ago and not liking what he found underneath it. The skin around the cut had gone the wrong colour already, and he swore under his breath, low, more at the wound than at anyone in the room.

Her face was pale under the dirt, lips gone the grey-white of someone whose blood had better places to be than her cheeks. Rowan pressed two fingers to the pulse point at her wrist and counted, silent, his own breathing slowing to match some rhythm only he could hear. Maren reached them a half-step behind, breath ragged from wherever she'd sprinted from.

"Calm down." Her voice climbed higher than she meant it to, and she heard it happen, and pressed her palm flat against her own sternum like she could push the pitch back down by hand.

"Kalsar. Calm down and tell me what happened. Where's Ant. Where's Kris." Sam came through the far door first, cards still fanned in one hand, Duncan a step behind him with his shirt half-untucked. Andy arrived last, unhurried in the way that meant he'd assessed the noise before deciding to run toward it, and stopped dead the moment he saw Raven on the floor and Kalsar standing over her with blood soaked black down one side of his tunic.

"We don't know," Ray said. He'd come in on Kalsar's heel, tiger pressed close against his leg, and for once there was nothing performed about the honesty in it.

"Lost Ant getting out of their camp. Kris was on the wrong side of it to us — hopefully he finds his way back, but they're out there hunting for us right now, and something the size of an elephant is bloody indiscreet at the best of times."

"Inconspicuous," Rowan said, without looking up from Raven's arm.

"That." Kalsar didn't wait for the correction to land before he kept going, pacing now, three steps one way and back, his hand pressed hard against his own side like the pressure was the only thing keeping the wound shut.

"It doesn't matter how well hidden Kris was or wasn't. They were waiting for us. They knew where we'd be coming from. They knew when." He stopped, turned, and the look on his face wasn't fear. It was closer to fury, the kind with nowhere to go yet.

"How does a camp with no lookouts, no dogs, everything dark and quiet, know to have fifteen men standing ready the second we step inside it?"

"How," Maren repeated, quieter now, like she already suspected she wouldn't like the answer.

"The people who knew the whole plan." Kalsar counted them off on his fingers, deliberate, forcing himself to say each name out loud rather than just think it.

"Ant. Me. You. Hazel. Thomas. Raven. Rowan. That's it. That's everyone who knew the whole route, the timing, the entry point, before we ever left this castle. The newer ones only ever knew when we were leaving, not where we were going or how." Nobody spoke for a second. It wasn't the kind of quiet that needed a word like heavy attached to it — it was just people doing arithmetic they didn't want to finish.

"There has to be another explanation," Maren said.

"Someone talking in their sleep. Someone overheard through a door they thought was shut."

"Maybe." Kalsar didn't sound like he believed it, and he didn't try to make himself sound like he did. He lowered himself into the nearest chair like his legs had made the decision without consulting him, one hand still braced against his ribs. He'd known every one of those names for years — some of them longer than he'd known most of his own family. He tried, and failed, to put a face to betrayal and have it stick to any one of them. Every attempt slid off.

Hazel came through the doorway with Thomas a step behind her, both of them slower than the others, both of them already reading the room before either spoke.

"We would never—" Hazel started.

"Not a chance," Thomas said, at almost the same moment, and the two statements landed on top of each other instead of one after the other, which somehow made both of them sound truer. This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it Kalsar looked at them for a long second. Then at Rowan, still working, cutting fresh linen with quick, economical movements. Then at the floor.

"It makes no sense," he said, mostly to himself.

"We'll sweep the whole place," Maren said, already moving toward something productive because standing still wasn't an option anymore.

"Every room. If someone's got eyes on us through some device, a relay, anything — we'll find it."

"That doesn't help right now." Andy hadn't moved from the doorway. His eyes weren't on Kalsar or Maren, though — they were on Mahkir, pacing the far wall in a tight, furious line, fur bristling along his spine, looking for something to tear apart and finding nothing that qualified.

"You wanted a scout. You wanted a feel for how big that camp really was." He looked at Kalsar directly.

"You got it. They've got one of ours for certain, maybe two. We go get them back, and we go at full strength." He'd spent enough years training fighters who thought waiting was the same as being careful to know the difference cold, and it showed in how flat he said it — no heat, no theatre, just the math laid out plain. Devices, spies, leaks. All of it mattered eventually. None of it mattered tonight.

"Raven isn't fighting anyone." Rowan said it without heat, without looking up, the flattest voice in the room precisely because there was no room in it for negotiation.

"Not tonight. Not for a few days, even with everything I've got."

"We're not waiting a few days." Duncan's voice came out low and flat, certain of itself.

"We go," Sam said, and nudged his brother's shoulder with his own, like the two of them had already agreed on this somewhere between the card table and the door. Kalsar looked around at the six of them — seven, if he counted the fox-quiet fury radiating off Mahkir in the corner — and something in him that had gone slack in the chair found its feet again. He pushed himself up.

"Right," he said, and for the first time since he'd come through that archway, his voice sounded like hope instead of just noise.

"We go."

"Not yet." Rowan was at his side before the second word finished, one hand flat against Kalsar's chest, pushing him back a half-step.

"You'll bleed out on the road before you get anywhere near them." Kalsar looked down at himself — at the tunic, at the wet dark line spreading past his ribs — like he was noticing the wound for the first time tonight instead of the fourth or fifth.

"You have an hour," he said.

"Patch what needs patching, grab what you need to grab. And this time we stay sharp — anyone sending word out, anyone watching how we move, we catch it. If none of us in this room sold Ant out, then somebody out there's got eyes on this place some other way, and I want to know how before we walk into another camp that already knows we're coming." He turned, already counting the room again in his head.

"Andy. Sam. Duncan. Me. Maren. Hazel. All of us." Mahkir moved. Not fast, not violent — just directly into Kalsar's path, close enough that Kalsar had to stop or step into him, eyes gone from their usual amber to a red dark enough to look wet in the lamplight. The aura that came off him wasn't loud. It didn't need to be. It sat over the room like fog rolling in off a river, thick enough that even Duncan, twice Mahkir's size, took an unconscious step back from it.

"Fine." Kalsar said it fast, before the fog had a chance to settle any deeper.

"Mahkir's coming." The fog thinned. Not all the way. Enough.

"I'm coming too." Thomas's voice, when it landed, surprised everyone in the room including, it looked like, Thomas himself.

"That kid took the three of us in and asked for almost nothing back. And Kris. Don't forget Kris. Without him and that Kithren of his we wouldn't have half this place standing — he worked himself half to death on that wall while the rest of us were gone. We have to save them both." He pushed on before anyone could answer.

"If me and Bramble can help pull them out of whatever hole they're in, we will. You all know how I feel about fighting — I hate it, I've always hated it — but if something happens to them and I sat here doing nothing, I won't forgive myself for it. Not ever." Kalsar gave him a short nod, the kind that didn't need words stacked on top of it. Behind Thomas, Bramble rocked from paw to paw, ears back, already reading the room the way he always read his human — nervous, but staying close instead of bolting for the door.

Rowan straightened up from Raven's side long enough to look at the group properly.

"I'll do everything I can to get her moving. I won't lie to any of you — whatever happens out there is likely to already be decided before she's fit to stand, let alone fight." He said it plainly, the way a man talks when he's already decided how the conversation ends and isn't interested in arguing about it.

"I'll keep trying anyway." They scattered then, fast, the room emptying in every direction at once — Sam and Duncan for the armoury, Hazel toward the stores, Maren pulling Thomas aside with a low string of instructions about what to grab from the strongroom, Andy already halfway down the corridor calling back over his shoulder for someone to fetch his gear from the river camp.

Kalsar stood in the middle of it a moment longer, one hand still pressed to his side, watching Mahkir stop his pacing just long enough to look at him — a long, searching look, red-eyed, asking a question with no words behind it that Kalsar answered anyway.

"We're coming for him," he said quietly, to a creature who couldn't answer back except through the fog and the fury and the way he never quite stopped moving.

"Both of them, if we can." The hour went the way hours like that always went — too fast and somehow, at the same time, unbearably slow. By the time the last of it ticked over, they were gathered at the entrance, packs shouldered, weapons checked twice out of habit rather than doubt. Kalsar did a headcount out of the same habit, lips moving slightly as he went down the row.

"Everyone here?"

"Not quite," Andy said, and a shadow rolled across the courtyard from somewhere behind him, long before its source cleared the gate.

"Now we are." He was already smiling by the time Hexa's six-headed silhouette settled in beside him, water still dripping off her scales from the river. Nobody laughed. Nobody had it in them tonight. But Kalsar felt something in his chest ease by a fraction it hadn't eased since the moment he'd realized Ant wasn't among them at the treeline, and he turned toward the gate before anyone could see it on his face.

"Move out."