Chương 59: Chapter 58 - War At Home

The tree line thinned out into open scrubland by midmorning, and Maren was the one who broke the quiet.

"We need horses," she said.

"Or a cart. Something. This is the fourth time we've walked this stretch on foot and my feet have opinions about it now that they didn't have before."

"Cart needs a road," Raven said, from somewhere behind.

"You seen a road out here?"

"I know. I know — a car would be faster, before anyone says it. My father had one back in Cerlan territory, and it's useless past the first mile out of any real town. Nobody's touched these roads in years, not since everyone started focusing on competing with other clans. Everyone's too busy holding their own ground to fix somebody else's road." She kicked a loose stone out of her path like it had personally offended her.

"So. Horses. Or a cart. Something with legs, since apparently that's all this country still respects." Ant wasn't listening. He hadn't been listening for the last mile, if he was honest about it, walking with Soul Render's weight settled against his hip and Mahkir riding quiet on his shoulder, both of them turning the same thing over without saying much to each other about it. Magic wasn't supposed to exist. Not really. Not as something a person carried around inside them and called up on purpose.

Wraithkin fed off scraps of it, sure, old leftover residue from something that had died out three hundred years ago — that much he understood, or understood enough to nod along with. But that wasn't the same as having it. Wasn't the same as a stat screen quietly telling him Magic: 15 like it was nothing, like it hadn't rewritten something fundamental about what he was allowed to be. You've gone somewhere again, Mahkir said, not opening his eyes.

"Just thinking." You think loudly. It's distracting.

"Sorry." He wasn't, particularly.

"Kalsar's Kithren absorbs magic. Has for years, apparently. Turns it into strength, speed, whatever — but it's still just a conduit. It doesn't keep it. Doesn't use it as magic." He kept his voice low, under Maren's ongoing case for a cart.

"I didn't absorb it into anything. I just — have it now. Like it's mine." So ask him.

"I'm going to." You've been going to since we left. That landed harder than it should have, mostly because it was true. He'd had the conversation half-built in his head a dozen times since the vortex — Kalsar, can anyone do this, is it the gem or is it me, is it whatever's wrong with you that's also wrong with me — and every time he'd found some reason to put it off another hour. Easier to walk. Easier to let Maren argue about carts.

"Soon as we're back," he said, mostly to himself.

"Today." Raven's osprey had been up the whole walk, same as always, wide slow circles a few hundred feet above the treetops, close enough to keep the group in sight and far enough to see past the next rise before any of them reached it. Ant had stopped noticing it the way you stop noticing your own heartbeat. Background. Constant. Nothing worth a second look. Until it screamed. Not a call. Not the thin, ordinary cry it gave when it spotted game or marked a turn in the path.

This came out ragged and enormous, cutting straight through Maren's sentence and every other sound in the clearing, and the bird folded its wings half in on a dive that looked less like hunting and more like falling. It hit Raven's forearm hard enough to stagger her.

"Raven —" She didn't answer him. She was staring at the bird, one hand already braced against its chest like she needed something solid to hold onto, and whatever passed between them through the bond drained every bit of color out of her face in the space of two seconds.

"They're under attack." Her voice came out flat, too flat, the kind of flat that only happens when a person is working very hard not to let it crack.

"The clan. HQ. Right now. Still — it's still happening." Nobody asked her to repeat it. Ant was already moving before he'd decided to, and it didn't feel like a decision at all — more like his body had simply stopped waiting for one. He heard Maren swear behind him, heard the scrape of Raven's boots finding their stride, felt Mahkir's claws dig briefly into his shoulder before four legs hit the ground running alongside him instead. Bags came off.

Nobody said to drop them, they just did — the survey folder, spare rations, anything that wasn't a weapon or a person, left scattered across the scrub without a backward glance. Ant didn't remember making that choice either. He remembered the ground going by faster than he'd known his own legs could take it, breath tearing at his chest in a way that should have slowed him down and somehow didn't, Soul Render's weight the only steady thing left in the whole blurred stretch of world. Reading on this site?

This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original. Fifteen minutes. That was all it took, in the end — fifteen minutes that felt like both nothing and forever, the castle's grey shape rising up out of the tree line long before Ant thought it should, sound reaching them before sight did. Metal on metal. Something roaring, low and furious. A scream that cut off too fast to belong to anyone he wanted to think about.

"Wait." Raven had a hand out, chest heaving, sweat cutting tracks through the dust on her face.

"Wait — we go in blind, we're one more problem for them to manage instead of help. I need the count first."

"There's no time for —""There's time for this." Something in her voice made him stop, just for a second, just long enough. She was already looking skyward, one hand raised, the osprey peeling off from where it had been pacing them and climbing hard toward the castle's broken roofline.

"Give her ten seconds. Ten seconds buys us knowing what we're running into instead of guessing." Ant made himself hold still. It was the worst ten seconds he could remember living through, worse than the vortex, worse than the cavern floor with Wraithkin closing in from every side, because at least there he'd known what was in front of him. Raven's eyes had gone somewhere else entirely, distant and unfocused, the bond doing whatever it did between them.

Her lips moved without much sound behind them, counting something, tracking something.

"Eight," she said finally, snapping back all at once.

"Eight of them, all together, center ground outside the main doors. Kalsar's Kithren and Kalsar himself, engaged. Hazel and Vulcan beside them, shoulder to shoulder — she's not going anywhere near a beast at their side that wasn't in a nest built entirely out of steel a moment ago." She swallowed hard.

"Thomas is further back. Bramble's with him. I can't — I can't see Rowan. He's not in the count. He's not anywhere she's looking." That last part hit harder than the rest of it combined. Rowan didn't have a Kithren. Rowan had never been meant to be anywhere near a fight like this.

"We're going," Ant said, and it wasn't a decision this time either — it was just true, the way the ground was true, the way breathing was true. Mahkir was already moving before the sentence finished, both of them breaking into a dead sprint toward the sound of steel and screaming and the smoke starting to rise thin and grey above the castle's broken roofline.

Behind him, he heard Raven and Maren share one look — nothing spoken, no time left for it — and then their footsteps joined his, closing the last of the distance at a dead run. The castle came up fast now, its grey bulk swallowing more and more of the sky with every stride, and Ant slowed just enough to get the words out before momentum swallowed the last of the distance.

"Split up." He was already peeling off toward a stand of scrub to the east, breath tearing, not stopping to see if they'd heard him properly.

"You two, Kithren with you — south side, come in through the old wall gap. I'll take the east."

"That's not —" Maren started.

"Just do it." He didn't have time to explain the rest. Didn't want to, either, not yet, not with Raven close enough to hear every word of it.

"Go. Now." Raven grabbed Maren's arm and hauled her toward the southern line without another question, the two of them and Axel breaking off into the long grass, and for one strange second Ant felt the space between them open up like something physical, a gap he'd made on purpose and hadn't told either of them why. Because there was a reason. There was a reason he wanted them somewhere else entirely when he did what he was about to do next.

"Concealment," he said, out loud, the word tearing out of him half a command and half a plea, and his system answered before his own body had any idea what it was supposed to feel like. Mana left him all at once, fast enough that his knees nearly buckled with it, a rush like something had reached in and pulled a fistful of him out through his chest.

He felt it spread — not just around himself, but out and around Mahkir too, a thin shivering pressure settling over both of them together, and something in him went weak with relief at that. He hadn't known. Hadn't been sure, not really, whether the skill would only take him, whether Mahkir would end up standing there in plain sight while Ant vanished around him like a coward. The light bent.

He couldn't describe it any better than that — the world around them didn't change so much as fold, edges of grass and stone smearing gently around where they stood, nothing sharp enough to call an outline anymore. He held a hand up in front of his own face and it was there, obviously there, and also somehow not, his own fingers gone strange and unfamiliar just from staring at them too long. It didn't touch sound.

That much was obvious immediately, because the first thing Mahkir did with his newfound invisibility was try to break into a dead run toward the fighting.

"Slow down." Ant caught a fistful of fur, dragging him back half a step.

"We're hidden. Not silent. If you go crashing through that grass like something's chasing you, it won't matter what they can't see." He could already feel the drain working against him, steady and fast, an itch behind his sternum where the mana kept leaving.

"This won't last. A couple of minutes, maybe. We need to make it count." Mahkir's ears had gone flat, every line of him straining forward, want written into the whole shape of his body. But he obeyed — dropped low, moved with Ant instead of ahead of him, the two of them slipping into the open ground toward the fight with nothing but their own two shadows to give them away. The view that met them was worse than anything Ant had let himself picture on the run back.

Kalsar was down on one knee, blood soaking dark through a shirt gone to ribbons across his shoulder and side, cuts too many to count individually, the kind of damage that didn't come from one clean hit but from a dozen smaller ones he hadn't been fast enough to avoid. His Kithren stood over him, one arm bent at an angle no joint was built to survive, still holding position anyway, still snarling at whatever pressed closest.

Hazel looked marginally better, on her feet at least, though her breathing came in short, controlled bursts that told Ant everything about how much it was costing her to stay upright. Vulcan burned beside her, heat rolling visibly off its scaled back — but the attackers had learned that fast, keeping their distance, working her from range instead of closing in, patient in a way that made Ant's stomach turn. Thomas hadn't moved.

He stood half behind Bramble's bulk, lips working around words that weren't coming out right, eyes wide and fixed on the fighting like he couldn't look away from it and couldn't look at it properly either. Bramble himself didn't look much steadier — hunched, favoring one side, but planted, refusing to give ground even with nothing behind him but a man who'd never thrown a punch in his life. Twenty seconds.

Ant felt the number more than counted it, mana bleeding out of him in a thin, insistent trickle that told him exactly how little time was left. It was now or never.