Chương 101: Chapter 100 - Two Months, Give or Take

The water had gone from too hot to just right somewhere in the last twenty minutes, and Ant hadn't noticed the difference until his shoulder blade found the tub's lip and the ceramic bit cold through his skin, which was as good a reminder as any that time hadn't stopped just because he'd finally sat still.

Steam sat low over the water, carrying the smell of the pale soap one of Hazel's apprentices had pressed on him that morning — crushed pine worked into it, sharper than the lavender stuff Rowan kept the infirmary shelves stocked with. It cut through two months of dust in about four seconds flat, which was the whole reason he'd taken the girl up on it instead of waving her off the way he usually did with anything that came with instructions attached.

Mahkir lay stretched along the windowsill, tail hanging off the edge, twitching every few seconds at some private dream — hunting, probably, though he swore up and down cats didn't dream about anything worth admitting to. Ant let his head fall back against the tub's rim and looked at the crack running from the ceiling beam down into the corner, the one Thomas kept promising to get to and never did, and let himself think about nothing at all. It didn't last long. It never did anymore.

You're doing the thing, Mahkir said, not opening his eyes.

"What thing." The thing where you go quiet and I know you're not actually resting, you're just resting somewhere else. In your head. Counting.

"I'm not counting anything." You're counting something. A pause, tail flicking once. Fine. Count out loud. Better than listening to you think it at me. He almost argued. Then he didn't, because Mahkir wasn't wrong, and there wasn't much point pretending otherwise to something that lived half inside his skull. Two months.

Give or take a handful of days he'd stopped keeping precise track of somewhere around the third week, when the front gate stopped being the only thing to watch and became four problems spread across four different stretches of ground.

He thought about the morning it started — not the tournament, that felt like a different life already, but the actual morning after, when Kalsar had walked the length of the crowd outside HQ with a stack of papers under one arm and come back looking like a man who'd aged a year overnight.

"Three hundred," Kalsar had said, dropping into the chair across from Ant like his knees had finally noticed how long the last few days had been.

"Give or take. Andy and I can process maybe fifteen a day if we're not sleeping. That's twenty days just to look them all in the eye once."

"So we don't do it fast," Ant had said.

"We do it right."

"That's the plan." Kalsar had rubbed the bridge of his nose — nothing in his time training fighters had ever come close to this scale before.

"Kithren-bonded ones first. Fastest sort, easiest to read — Andy takes stock of what they've got, I take stock of what they can take. We find out who's worth keeping before we worry about the rest." The rest had turned out to be the harder half. Somewhere in the second week of watching bonded pairs spar and stumble and occasionally impress the hell out of both instructors, Kalsar had come to Ant with a different kind of problem entirely — not who to let in, but what the clan didn't have at all.

"We've got no way to bond the unbonded ones," Kalsar had said, standing in the doorway of what used to be a storage room and was now, apparently, an office.

"Nearly a third of them walked here with nothing. No chip, no Kithren, no ceremony behind them — some too old for the city's version, some who just never got the chance. We turn them away, or we figure out how to give them one ourselves." Ant had sat with that a long moment. He knew exactly what it felt like to stand in a hall and watch everyone around him bond while his own name got called and nothing answered it. He wasn't about to build a clan that did the same thing to people on principle.

"Then we figure it out," he'd said. Figuring it out had meant a second, uglier gap surfacing right behind the first: even if they built their own version of the ceremony, they had no unbonded Kithren to offer anyone, and no one whose actual job was finding, holding, and matching them. A keeper. Someone who spent their days with creatures that didn't have a person yet, learning which ones wanted which kind of person before either side ever met.

Raven had volunteered before anyone finished explaining why they needed one.

"You want someone who reads things before they talk," she'd said, arms crossed, in the clipped way she said most things.

"That's half of what I already do in the trees. Difference is I'll be doing it standing still, which — frankly — sounds like a nice change of pace after four decades of it, doesn't it." Kalsar had looked at her a long second, then broken into the closest thing to a proper grin Ant had seen on him in weeks.

"Scouting's easier now anyway. We're not down to two eyes in the dark and a prayer."

"That's the other thing you built," Raven had said, "which is the reason I'm allowed to sit still at all." He'd gone looking for her once, weeks later, needing a signature on something Maren couldn't chase down herself, and found her in the new pens instead of the office — a low run of stalls and open paddock behind the second holding, the air thick with hay and something faintly electric he still couldn't name.

She was crouched in front of a young, unsteady thing with too many legs and no name yet, not touching it, just watching, the same patience she used to hold a tree line with for six hours at a stretch. She didn't look up when he came in.

"This one's not ready for anybody. Come back in a month." He hadn't argued. Whatever she was reading in it, he trusted her to read it better than he ever could.

The other thing was Sam and Duncan, who'd gone from muscle-with-opinions to the closest thing the clan had to an actual spine over the same two months — patrols now ran across four sites instead of one gate and a fence line, and somebody had to own who watched which stretch of road, who led which five-person unit, who got rotated home before they burned out entirely. Duncan had taken to it the way he took to everything, loud and delighted and constantly recalculating.

"Sixteen units," Duncan had told him last week, practically vibrating.

"Sixteen. Do you know how many units that is? That's — that's a lot of units, Ant."

"It's sixteen," Sam had said, from somewhere behind a stack of route maps, not looking up.

"He knows how many sixteen is." Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

"I'm illustrating the scale of it."

"You're repeating a number you like." Rowan had taken his own version of the gap and run with it quietly, the way Rowan ran with everything — no fanfare, just a growing cluster of trainees who followed him between the four sites learning how to bind a wound before it became a body.

Ant had walked in on a lesson once, unannounced, and found Rowan crouched over a mannequin arm with six recruits packed shoulder to shoulder around him, all of them leaning in like the answer to something important was written on the bandage itself.

"Pressure first," Rowan had been saying, voice low and even, the same register he used on people who were actually bleeding.

"Always pressure first. You can be wrong about everything else and still keep somebody alive if you get pressure right early enough." None of them had noticed Ant in the doorway. He'd let himself out without a word, the smell of antiseptic and clean linen following him halfway down the corridor. Maren, when he found her, rarely looked like a person who'd had a full night's sleep in the entire two months.

Four sites now — HQ, the second holding at Coldwoof, and the two newest additions, Rushbrook and Stonefall both — and every account book, every supply request, every dispute over who'd been promised what ran through her hands whether she wanted them to or not.

"I hired help," she'd told him, three weeks back, not quite meeting his eyes, the way she did whenever she'd made a decision alone and was bracing for him to have opinions about it.

"Two apprentices. Sixteen, both of them. Pre-Kithren, so it doesn't touch our fighting numbers at all — I checked that first, before anything else, I promise."

"Maren. You don't need my permission for staff."

"I know. I just—" She'd stopped, restarted, the way she always did when the good version of a sentence and the anxious version of it were fighting for the same spot in her mouth.

"I wanted you to know before you heard it from someone else and thought I'd gone behind you." He hadn't thought anything of the kind, obviously. He'd told her that. She hadn't quite believed him, which was its own kind of exhausting to watch, but there wasn't a version of Maren that didn't run a little hot on things like that, and he'd stopped trying to smooth the edges off her years ago.

Rushbrook had come to them almost by accident — a two-family clan too small to survive the season on its own, folding into Oath of Defiance the week their well ran dry and nobody closer than three days answered the call for help. Stonefall had come the other way entirely, half a dozen unaffiliated fighters squatting the ruins of some smaller clan's collapsed hold, who decided once word got around what was being built at Bramholt that a real banner beat pretending independence meant safety at that size.

Two territories in two months, neither one planned, both landing in Thomas's lap the same week his crews finally finished the second holding's outer wall. Thomas had taken to calling himself Master Architect the way some men take to a title they'd earned years before anyone thought to hand it to them. He stopped apologizing for caring about mortar and drainage around the same week — just started saying it outright, like everyone should already understand why it mattered.

Ant had walked the new district at the second holding the day it finally went up — a proper outer wall ringing a cluster of low buildings, a tavern with its sign not yet painted, something that smelled like sawdust and fresh-cut stone even from thirty feet off. Thomas stood in the middle of it, directing two carpenters toward a doorframe that wasn't quite square, hands cutting short exact shapes in the air, voice pitched to carry over hammering without ever actually rising.

"Left side down an inch. No — your left, not mine." He caught Ant watching and didn't break stride.

"Found six of them hiding in that crowd. Building specialists. One of them worked stonework for a clan twice our size before it folded — man knows drainage like scripture. Hundred, hundred-fifty a district, comfortable. Tavern first, always. Bakery next. People forgive a lot of hardship if there's bread and somewhere to sit that isn't their own four walls." Then he was back in the argument over the doorframe, and Ant let him go. Hazel's corner of it had been messier.

Fire and metal don't forgive a slow hand, and half her new apprentices still had one. Her first batch of forged armor had come out warped enough that she'd sworn for a solid two minutes without repeating herself once, a personal record Kalsar still brought up whenever he wanted to watch her slam a hammer down without warning.

"They're getting better," she'd told him last week, streaked in soot, the forge behind her radiating heat he could feel from the doorway, the whole room thick with hot iron and scorched flux.

"Slower than I'd like. Everyone's slower than I'd like at the start. Doesn't mean they won't get there." Which left one role nobody had filled. His own. A vortex team was supposed to run five deep. His ran three: himself, Rebekah, and Ray, and had for two months now, because everyone else worth having was already buried in some other piece of the four-site machine they'd built, and finding two more who met the bar Mahkir insisted on had turned out to be its own kind of impossible.

Small as it was, the team had still managed two clears in that stretch — enough, apparently, to tip Ant into Level 11 without any real ceremony to mark it. Mahkir hadn't been so lucky. Whatever he needed for Level 9 now sat behind a number so large it barely felt real anymore, some monstrous pile of experience two vortex clears hadn't so much as dented. Not impossible, Mahkir had said, the last time Ant tried to complain about it out loud. Simple. They just need to not slow us down or die in the first five minutes.

That's the whole standard.

"That's not a low bar for a novice." Then find better novices. Easy for him to say. Ant had watched a dozen promising candidates spar well enough against Kalsar's training partners and then freeze the first time something with too many eyes came at them out of actual violet dark. Vortex work wasn't the arena. Nobody handed you a forfeit when it got bad.

The water had gone from just-right to lukewarm while he sat with all of it, and he finally reached up, wiped the damp from his face, and pulled the interface forward the way he always did now — not asking, exactly, just wanting, and having it answer. [System — checking status.] [MAHKIR — Level 8. Strength 39, Agility 53, Magic 57, Endurance 34. HP 95/95, Mana 135/135. XP: 6, 475/32, 000 to Level 9.] [ANT — Level 11. Strength 50, Agility 59, Magic 38, Endurance 57. HP 87/87, Mana 175/175. XP: 4, 650/11, 800 to Level 12.] He read it twice. The Level 8 jump had landed the morning after the Talonstrike fight — eight strength, ten agility, ten magic, five endurance, thirty apiece onto Mahkir's max HP and mana — though he hadn't stopped moving long enough in the two months since to actually look at it. His own climb into eleven had crept up quieter: two strength, three agility, five magic, two endurance, ten more on each pool, the two vortex clears doing exactly what he'd already half-expected.

Endurance had crept the furthest without him noticing — he'd have sworn it sat lower than fifty-five a season ago, but conditioning did that sometimes, built itself in the background while he was busy watching everything else. Bigger numbers than two months ago. Not nothing. Still not enough.

He knew what was still out there — the tournament's other champions who'd studied him and Mahkir like a problem worth solving, all of it circling somewhere past the edge of what this soak was supposed to let him forget for one evening. Stronger wasn't the same as strong enough. You're doing the counting thing again, Mahkir said.

"I finished counting." Doesn't sound finished. He didn't get the chance to argue, because the door opened without a knock, and Maren's voice was already halfway into a sentence before her eyes actually caught up with the room.

"Ant, I need to — " She stopped dead in the doorway, one hand still on the frame, and went red from her collar to her hairline in about half a second flat.

"Oh — oh, gods, I'm sorry, I didn't — the door wasn't — I should have knocked, I'm so sorry, I'll just—""Maren."

"—come back later, that's fine, this can wait, I don't know why I didn't check the—""Maren." He'd already grabbed the towel off the stool beside the tub, wrapped it around himself as he stood, water sheeting off onto the stone floor. She still hadn't looked directly at him, eyes fixed somewhere on the wall over his left shoulder like it had personally offended her.

"What's wrong?" She's not looking at you, Mahkir observed, unhelpfully, from the windowsill. I find this fascinating.

"Nothing." The word came out too fast, too bright, the way her good news always did when it was tangled up with something she hadn't decided how to say yet.

"It's nothing, it's — I got word. My father's coming. He said he has some news for us." Maren had never once sounded nervous saying the word father before.