Chương 6: Chapter 7: Cat Got Your Leg

I woke in The Cataract with my whole body already arguing against the day. For one breath, perhaps two, I did not know where I was. The ceiling above me was too close and too private, the air too still without the coughing and muttering of the timber loft, and the bed beneath me held my weight with a softness that felt almost indecent.

Then memory returned: Henrick's tired face, the copper coin landing in the innkeeper's palm, the key, the door, and the room that was mine only because I had paid dearly enough for one night of it. I lay there longer than I should have. That was the first mistake. The bed was poor by any honest measure, with a mattress that sagged in the middle, a blanket that scratched at my neck, and some old stain darkening the wall near the washbasin where damp had found its way through the plaster.

Yet compared with the loft boards above the yard, it felt like temptation, because I could stretch without knocking another man's boot, breathe without tasting stale wool, and close my eyes to hear only muffled voices below rather than the whole weary machinery of labour preparing to begin again. That comfort made me ashamed. I sat up slowly, testing each injury as if my body might have changed its mind during the night and decided to punish me properly after all.

My shoulder pulled, my ribs ached, and the bite near my wrist pulsed beneath its bandage with each heartbeat. The pouch beneath my folded coat waited with the same cold patience as the axe beside the bed. FUNDS CONFIRMED Your current funds are 1 copper and 64 iron pieces. Breakfast was included, though The Cataract seemed determined to make a man fight for it.

The common room had filled before sunrise with stranded travellers, ferrymen, merchants, guards, and road-tired easterners all drawn into Dunmere by the broken crossing. I stood near the wall with my bowl and ate slowly, listening because there was nowhere else to put my attention.

A ferryman claimed the lower dock would need three days before loaded wagons could cross safely, a trader with a split lip swore something had taken two mules north of the reed road, and near the hearth, the ember-haired elf woman from the day before spoke quietly with another traveller in a language that sounded like dry leaves passing over stone. I should have been thinking about the forest. Instead, I thought about the room.

Forty-eight iron for another night if the price held, more if the innkeeper decided the crossing had worsened, salt if I wanted Merris to stop mourning every hide I brought him, rope if I meant to drag anything larger than a hare without splitting my hands open, sharpening soon, boots sooner, and food when the room stopped including it.

I had believed the danger was in earning coin, but coin had its own hunger once earned, sitting in the pouch and demanding to be protected, stretched, multiplied, and defended from every open palm in town. By midmorning the fear had ripened into urgency. I left The Cataract with my axe, Orven's knife, the remaining cord, and enough arrogance to call it planning. A sensible man would have gone low, taken Common prey, sold clean hides, and paid for another night without bleeding for it.

I knew this clearly while crossing the market, while passing Merris's stall and pretending not to see him glare at the mud already drying on my boots, and while walking all the way to the markers. Then I turned east toward the marsh runs where hunters sometimes found Iron reed-cats. They were not large animals, which was how I lied to myself. Not large, not rare, not beyond me.

Lean things, long-bodied and pale-eyed, with flat heads and claws shaped for mud, they took hares, fish, injured birds, and occasionally dogs that strayed too near the reed beds. Orven had never hunted one without a second man and a hooked spear. Orven had also spent years choosing not to hunt at all, and by then I had begun treating his wisdom as if it belonged only to the life I had already left behind. I had neither a second man nor a hooked spear.

I went anyway, because hunger and coin had begun speaking in my head with the same voice. The marsh swallowed sound differently from the forest. Trees made a roof over fear, held it close, and gave shape to every snap and whisper. The marsh spread fear outward until every reed seemed to move for its own reason.

Water lay black between roots and grass shelves, insects gathered where the air warmed, my boots sank often and sucked at the soles, and each time I pulled free I felt coin leaving me in the form of leather, stitching, and wear. I found the first signs near noon. Prints marked the soft mud, longer than my palm and clawed deep near the edge where something had lunged from water to land. Tufts of grey-white fur clung to a broken reed, and the smell was sharp, almost musky.

I crouched too long studying it, pleased with myself for recognising anything at all, and that pleasure should have warned me. The reed-cat found me before I found it. It came from my left without sound, a pale streak low across the mud. I moved because something colder than thought passed through my ribs a heartbeat before impact.

The first claw missed my throat and opened my shoulder instead, pain flashed white, and my wild swing struck water with a flat slap that sent mud across my face as the cat vanished into the reeds. I stood panting, one hand pressed to my shoulder while blood ran hot between my fingers. A sensible man would have left then, and I knew it with such clarity that staying required effort. There is a kind of fear that sends men running, and another that pins them in place until pride grows over it like mould.

I thought of The Cataract, the innkeeper's hand closing around my copper, Henrick's offer, Merris's warnings, and the loft I could not return to without becoming smaller than I had been when I left. The reed-cat had cut me, and somehow in my tired, narrow mind that made retreat feel more expensive than staying. It struck twice more before I landed a clean blow. The second attack tore my sleeve and scored my forearm, while the third came from behind, driving claws into my back and weight into my knees.

I fell forward into mud and reeds, swallowing foul water, the axe half trapped beneath me, and its jaws closed on the back of my shoulder, not deep enough to kill but deep enough to own me if I panicked. I panicked. For a moment there was no skill in me, no Iron rank, no hunter, only an orphan thrashing in black water while something tried to worry him open. My hand found the axe haft by touch, but I could not swing, could not rise, and could not overpower it.

The reed-cat pulled backward, and pain dragged a sound from me I did not recognise as my own. Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere. Then Desperate Counter stirred. Not like Axe Strike, which had become cleaner, narrower, almost thoughtful. Desperate Counter was uglier, a door kicked open in a burning house. I stopped fighting the pull and gave myself to it, letting the cat drag me half onto my side until its weight shifted over my hip.

I drove my elbow back into its wounded muzzle, not to hurt it but to make it flinch, then rolled with the movement instead of against it. Mud took us both. Its claws lost purchase, and Orven's knife was in my left hand before I remembered drawing it. I drove the blade under the jaw and up. The reed-cat convulsed against me, all muscle and wet fur, its claws raking blindly across my ribs as the knife caught something vital. I held on because letting go had become the shape of death.

It thrashed once, twice, then sagged into the mud with its body half across mine. For a long while, I could not move, and the system waited until I understood exactly how little triumph had been involved before it spoke. ABILITY ADVANCED Desperate Counter has advanced from Common to Iron (early). When you are trapped, wounded, overpowered, or unable to make a clean attack, your body now better converts panic into a brief survival response.

You can better use an enemy's pressure, weight, and momentum to create a narrow retaliatory opening. For one bitter moment I wanted to laugh. Advancement should have felt like triumph. Instead, I lay beneath a dead animal in a marsh, bleeding from four places, one boot half-filled with black water, and understood that the system did not care whether wisdom came before survival or after. It only marked what the body had learned. Getting the reed-cat back to Dunmere took the rest of the afternoon.

The carcass was not heavy compared with a boar, but it was awkward, and every time I dragged it the torn skin across my shoulder pulled open again. I tried to dress it in the marsh and did badly because my hands shook too much. The pelt was valuable and I knew I was ruining parts of it, which made me shake worse, and by the time I bound it in sacking and lashed it to a branch frame, flies had found the blood on my sleeve. Merris saw me coming before I reached the stall.

He said nothing at first, which was becoming his worst habit. Then he set aside the knife he had been using, came around the stall, and looked me over with an expression stripped of humour.

"Reed-cat?" I nodded. Merris looked from me to the carcass and back again.

"Alone?" I said nothing, and he muttered, "Of course alone. Because the gods forbid stupidity be shared fairly among men." He examined the carcass in short, sharp movements, pausing whenever his fingers found damage I had caused rather than the fight.

"Hide is torn. Shoulder cut is messy. Belly's poor. Claws are good. Teeth intact. Meat's not worth much after you dragged it through half the marsh, but someone will buy it salted if they hate their family."

"How much?" I asked. He looked at me then, properly.

"Sixty-eight iron. Should have been eighty if your hands weren't shaking like a priest in a brothel." The number steadied me and sickened me at once. PAYMENT RECEIVED You received 68 iron pieces for an Iron reed-cat in damaged condition. Your current funds have increased from 1 copper and 64 iron pieces to 2 copper and 32 iron pieces. More than the room. More than three days at Henrick's better wage. Enough to prove I had not been wrong, if proof meant counting coin while blood ran down your side.

Merris counted the payment, then held back eight iron. I stared at his hand.

"Salve and bandage," he said.

"From Lysa two stalls down. You can complain after you stop leaking on my floor." I looked from the smaller stack to his face.

"I didn't agree to that."

"No," Merris said, dropping the remaining coins into my palm.

"You agreed to live when you dragged yourself back here. I am merely assisting the decision." I wanted to argue, but the blood on my sleeve had begun dripping from my elbow. Merris saw me notice and looked insufferably satisfied. PAYMENT SPENT You spent 8 iron pieces on salve and bandages. Your current funds have decreased from 2 copper and 32 iron pieces to 2 copper and 24 iron pieces. I should have argued.

Instead I sat on an upturned crate while Lysa cleaned the wounds with something that burned like nettles under the skin and smelled of vinegar, pine resin, and mercy poorly disguised. She had dark hair tied back with a strip of red cloth and the brisk, irritated competence of someone raised around men who considered bleeding a personality. Her hands were quick, not gentle exactly, but careful in a way that made gentleness unnecessary.

"That needs stitching," she said, leaning closer to inspect the tear across my shoulder. I looked away from the needle already waiting beside her hand.

"It will close." Lysa's fingers paused at the edge of the wound.

"It is already trying to." There was a pause after the words that made me look at her. Merris looked too. Lysa's eyes narrowed slightly, not with fear, but with curiosity she was too polite or too practical to name. Then she reached for the needle thread and continued as if nothing strange had happened. Merris said I could pay now or bleed later, and since later had become too familiar a place, I paid. The stitching hurt less than it should have. That concerned Lysa more than it relieved me.

It concerned Merris too, though he hid it behind counting. PAYMENT SPENT You spent 12 iron pieces on wound cleaning and stitching. Your current funds have decreased from 2 copper and 24 iron pieces to 2 copper and 12 iron pieces. By the time I returned to The Cataract, the common room had grown louder. More travellers had arrived, the dock was still damaged, and the innkeeper did not even pretend surprise when I asked for the room again.

"Forty-eight," he said. This time I paid in iron, which should have felt easier and somehow did not. PAYMENT SPENT You spent 48 iron pieces to renew your room at The Cataract for one night. Your current funds have decreased from 2 copper and 12 iron pieces to 1 copper and 64 iron pieces. The same number as morning. I stood there a moment after he gave me the key, too tired to understand why that hurt.

I had killed an Iron reed-cat alone, advanced a skill, and earned more than Henrick would have paid in three days at the better rate. After blood, salve, stitching, and one night indoors, I was exactly where I had begun. No, not exactly. My body knew more. My fear knew more. Lysa had seen something heal too quickly, Merris had seen me choose danger and call it arithmetic, and somewhere beneath the bandage my skin was already closing around the price of the lesson.

Upstairs, the room waited with its narrow bed and cracked basin, unchanged by everything I had suffered to keep it. I closed the door, set the axe down, and sat heavily on the mattress. Pain moved through me in slow waves. Below, The Cataract roared with stranded travellers, eastern voices, and men spending coin as if morning would forgive them. I lay back carefully, one hand pressed near the stitches, and stared at the dark ceiling. I had chosen this. That did not make it noble.

It only made it mine, and ownership, I was beginning to understand, did not soften the cost of anything.