Chương 70: Chapter 69 - Andy Part one

The fire in the Rusted Nail had burned down to embers by the time Duncan slammed his fourth — or maybe fifth — mug down hard enough to make the table jump.

"Here's a question." He pointed a finger the size of a sausage roll at Ant.

"You go invisible. Yeah? Actually invisible, not — not tavern-drunk invisible, real invisible."

"Something like that." Ant didn't elaborate. He'd learned that much, at least — the fewer specifics he handed out about the system, the fewer questions came back.

"Could you get behind the bar? Right now? Grab a bottle of the good stuff and nobody the wiser?"

"Probably." Duncan's whole face lit up like a man who'd just been handed a holy purpose.

"Do it."

"Absolutely not." Rowan didn't even look up from the dice game he'd lost three rounds running.

"You want the whole village thinking this place is haunted by morning? Bottles floating off the shelf on their own, tankards sliding down the bar — they'll board the doors and burn incense."

"Would be a good story, though." Sam. First thing he'd said in twenty minutes.

"It would." Ray raised his own mug in salute.

"A real — a real testicle to the man's skill." Silence. Duncan's eyebrows climbed. Sam looked, very deliberately, at his drink. Rowan just shook his head and said nothing, which somehow made it worse. Ray, entirely undeterred, raised his mug another inch like the point had already been settled.

"I'm saying the sentiment carries." Nobody argued the point further. Wasn't worth it, not at that hour, not with that much ale already gone. Duncan laughed loud enough that a table near the door turned to look, and even Sam's mouth twitched at one corner, just once, before he went back to his drink. Ant caught Kalsar's eye across the table.

The older man hadn't touched a drop past his first mug, sat there with his arms folded, watching the whole table with the patient, faintly amused look of someone observing weather he had no plans to stand in.

"You're not drinking," Ant said.

"Someone has to remember the way back to the room."

"Fair." Kalsar let that sit a moment before he added, "I've also seen what happens to men who match Duncan drink for drink. It isn't dignified."

"Heard that," Duncan said, not remotely offended, and poured himself another. The night went on longer than it should have, the fire dying down to nothing behind them and nobody moving to feed it. Morning came like an unwelcome friend. Ant woke on the floor of a room he didn't remember choosing, tangled in a blanket that smelled faintly of woodsmoke and someone else's boots, and lay very still for a long moment considering whether moving was strictly necessary as a life goal.

"Rise and shine." Kalsar's voice cracked through the room like a hammer on stone, entirely, offensively unaffected.

"We've work to do." A groan from the direction of the window. Might have been Rowan. Might have been the window.

"Who do we target next?" Kalsar again, louder if anything, arms crossed like the previous night hadn't touched him at all.

"Keep it down." Rowan's voice came out flat and wounded, muffled into a pillow.

"You're a foghorn. You are, personally, individually, a foghorn."

"Andy," Ant said, because someone had to answer and his skull was already ringing too loud to make it worse by staying quiet. He pushed himself upright against the wall and waited for the room to agree to hold still.

"Ray said he spends most of his time at the lake." He looked around properly then — really looked — and the room was emptier than it should have been. No Ray. No Sam. No Duncan. No Hazel.

"Where's everyone else?"

"Sam and Duncan keep a place of their own, other side of the market square," Kalsar said.

"Ray's staying with them. Said it was easier than explaining a tiger to an innkeeper twice in one week."

"Understandable," Rowan mumbled.

"Hazel took her own room. Said she wasn't sleeping anywhere near this lot snoring."

"Also understandable." They found the other three's lodging by following the smell of something frying — Duncan, it turned out, cooked loudly and with total confidence and no apparent regard for portion sizes, and the small rented room had gone thick with the smell of fat and woodsmoke. Sam sat by the window sharpening something that didn't need sharpening. Ray was asleep sitting up, chin on his chest, one boot on and one off.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"Morning," Duncan said, far too pleased with himself for a man who'd matched Kalsar's warning and lost.

"There's more if you want it."

"There is not more," Sam said, without looking up.

"There's exactly enough for the two of us and you've already decided to give half of it away."

"I contain multitudes."

"You contain a hangover." Ray woke somewhere in the middle of that exchange, blinked twice, cracked his neck to one side then the other, and announced with total conviction that he felt "remarkably vindictive," which nobody bothered correcting because it was, in its own way, close enough to true.

They collected Hazel on the way through the square — already awake, already dressed, already eating something that looked considerably more sensible than anything on offer at Sam and Duncan's stove, and entirely unimpressed by the state of the rest of them, arms crossed like she'd already guessed how the night had gone.

"You all look like something the lake spat back up," she said, falling into step beside Ant.

"Accurate."

"I'm not carrying anyone if they fall in."

"Also fair." It took the better part of an hour, several pots of coffee strong enough to strip paint, and language from Rowan that would have made his mother — wherever she was — genuinely proud, before the group managed to reassemble as something resembling functional at the edge of the water. The lake stretched out grey and flat under an overcast sky, big enough that the far shore was just a smudge of green, no clear edge to it at all from where they stood.

"Whereabouts is he, Ray?" Kalsar hadn't dropped an ounce of volume, and Rowan flinched visibly at every syllable. Ray blinked at him.

"Do I look like his personal tracking device?" He gestured vaguely at the water, at all of it, at the whole enormous circumference of the thing.

"I said he spends time at the lake. I did not say where on the lake. There is a difference."

"There is a considerable difference," Kalsar agreed, already walking.

"He's not wrong to be annoyed," Duncan offered, jogging a little to keep pace.

"This is a big lake."

"It's an outrageous lake," Ray said.

"Somebody should tax it." They walked the shoreline for the better part of an hour. Reeds. Mud that sucked at boots and didn't want to give them back. A heron that watched the whole procession pass with what Ant chose to interpret as judgment, unmoved by any of them, unimpressed by the whole affair. Rowan tried, twice, to start a conversation about whether herons could be recruited, and got no traction either time.

"What's he even like?" Duncan asked, stepping over a half-sunk log without slowing.

"Sam and me, we know him to nod at. Never actually spoken more than ten words to the man."

"Good fighter," Sam said.

"Better than good. Doesn't talk about it."

"Rumor is he trained some of the Emperor's own." Ray said it with the particular reverence he reserved for stories he hadn't personally verified.

"Before the — the altercation. Man put someone through a table."

"For what?" Hazel asked.

"Depends who's telling it." Ray shrugged.

"In one version the fella laid hands on Andy's Kithren. In another version Andy just doesn't like tables."

"Nobody's seen the Kithren, though," Rowan added.

"Not once. Not in all the years he's been coming here."

"Convenient," Kalsar said, in the tone of a man filing something away for later rather than commenting on it now. Ant didn't say anything. He was watching the water, thinking that a man who kept something hidden that long probably had his reasons, and that whatever they were, they weren't going to come out easy. No Andy. Not yet.

"This is useless," Ant said finally, stopping to press the heel of his hand against one eye.

"There has to be an easier way than just — walking the whole lake."

"Nothing's useless with a bit of patience." Rowan, somehow cheerful despite everything, was already pointing.

"Look." Ant followed the line of his finger. A pier — small, grey, weathered to the color of driftwood — jutted out from a stretch of shoreline half-hidden by a stand of willows. A figure sat at the end of it, still as the water itself.

"There," Hazel said.

"Told you patience works."

"You didn't say that. Rowan said that."

"I was thinking it very loudly." They approached slow, not out of caution exactly, more the sense that a man sitting that still for that long deserved to be come at carefully. The boards of the pier creaked under six sets of boots, one at a time, an uneven rhythm that should have carried. He didn't move as they closed the distance. Didn't turn. Didn't so much as blink when Duncan, easily the heaviest of them, stepped onto the wood behind him.

"What do you want?" The voice came before any of them had said a word, low and gravel-rough, still pointed out at the water.

"An opportunity," Ant said, and stepped forward, taking the lead for once instead of falling back and letting Kalsar carry the room. Somewhere behind his ribs Mahkir's presence pressed close, quiet, watching through him rather than at him. Careful, Mahkir said. Man's been staring at nothing for an hour. Doesn't mean nothing's staring back. Noted. Also he smells like he hasn't moved from that spot since spring. Not helping. Andy didn't answer. Didn't turn.

"We're a new clan," Ant said into the silence, because someone had to fill it and it clearly wasn't going to be the man on the pier.

"Looking to recruit. Won't lie to you — we don't have much gold. Can't promise you glory either." He paused, chose the next part carefully.

"But we're a family. We can offer you a place in that. If you want it." He let it sit. Let the silence stretch past comfortable, into the kind that made Rowan start shuffling his boots against the pier boards.

"Come on." Kalsar's arms stayed crossed, already done with this conversation whether the conversation agreed or not.

"Let's go, boy."

"Fight me." Andy turned his head for the first time. Grey eyes, tired at the edges, fixed now on Ant like he'd only just decided the group was worth the effort of looking at.

"Why would we do that?" Kalsar again, a half-step forward. His weight dropped low, gaze sharpening to a point, and Ant caught it immediately. Andy's eyes had picked up a faint glow, sweeping over the group. Xylock first. Then Vulcan. Then further down the line.

"If I'm joining a clan," Andy said, unhurried, like he had all the time in the world and fully intended to spend it, "I at least deserve to know if their Kithren can handle themselves."

"Fine." Kalsar didn't glance back. Behind him, Xylock uncoiled from where it had been trailing at the group's edge and stepped forward, four arms settling, old rune-markings faintly visible along its limbs even at rest.

"Not you." Andy was looking past Kalsar now. Past Xylock entirely. His eyes had settled somewhere over Ant's shoulder, glow steady, unblinking.

"That one." He raised a hand, pointed — not at Kalsar, not at Xylock. At Mahkir.

"Because whatever it is, I don't know. But I've been around enough Kithren to know one thing for certain." He finally stood, unfolding off the pier with the slow deliberateness of a man who hadn't been in a hurry for a very long time.

"That's not a Flaming Lynx."