Chương 87: Chapter 86 — Home Water

The road into Bramholt stopped being a road about a mile out and turned into a river of people instead. Ant hadn't expected the smell to hit first — roasting meat skewers, spilled ale gone sticky in the dust, hot canvas baking under a sun that didn't care whose banner it shone on.

Every clan colour he'd ever heard of and a hundred he hadn't seemed to be represented somewhere in the crowd crushing toward the gates: green and gold, black and silver, a clan in orange that Duncan swore was called the Marigolds and refused to stop saying out loud.

"Marigolds," Duncan said again, delighted.

"Who lets a clan call itself the Marigolds."

"Someone who's won four years running," Kalsar said, not looking over.

"Laugh it off the sand, not before." Mahkir walked at Ant's hip with his ears up and swiveling, tracking a noise-source every few seconds and losing it to the next one. This is loud. You'll survive it. I know I will. His tail flicked once, twice. I like it. Of course he did.

"Feels wrong, doesn't it," Duncan said, apropos of nothing, watching a clan in deep blue haul a covered cage past on a cart.

"Half of us here, half of us not."

"It'll feel worse if we lose both bases while we're gone," Ant said. It came out lighter than he meant it, and heavier than he meant it, both at once.

"She's not going to let that happen." Rowan, from just behind, easy as always.

"You know that." Ant did know that. It hadn't stopped him running the numbers on the walk out of HQ — how thin the clan was spreading itself, how much of it depended on people staying exactly where they said they'd stay.

Maren had made the case herself, at the gate, before anyone else could make it for her: I'm the least experienced fighter we've got — by a lot, I mean, it's not close — and if I'm standing at the rail at Bramholt I'm just dead weight, I'm not helping anyone, but here, I can actually — I'm actual use here.

She'd said it fast, tripping over the middle of it and landing on her feet anyway, hands full of the ledger she wasn't bringing to Bramholt at all, and Kalsar had looked at her for a long moment and then just said, "Good call," which from Kalsar was closer to a medal than most people ever got. She was running both bases now — HQ and the new holding both — until Thomas came back through with real numbers on the second garrison.

"Thomas go through yet?" Duncan asked.

"This morning," Rowan said.

"Took the portal at first light. Wants to see what he's actually got before he puts anyone near the walls — decent hands or not, he won't know until he's stood in front of them."

"And Hazel?"

"Forge." Ant said it flat, because there wasn't much more to it.

"She wants my gear finished before this thing's over. Brightvein doesn't forge itself, and she wasn't leaving that half-done to come watch me stand around in a bracket."

"Practical woman," Kalsar said.

"Terrifying woman," Duncan said. Nobody argued that one either. The registration line took the better part of an hour, funneled between two ropes toward a row of tables where clerks with clan-neutral grey sashes checked names against ledgers and stamped forearms with ink that glowed faintly under the shade of the tent flap. Kalsar walked the whole approach like he already knew where every table led, which — Ant realized about halfway through — he probably did.

"Kalsar." One of the older clerks looked up from his ledger and stopped writing entirely, pen hovering, staring like he was checking the face against a memory before he'd trust it.

"Kalsar Redwin. I thought you'd hung it up."

"I have. This is my clan's business now, not mine." Kalsar didn't offer anything else, but the clerk straightened in his chair anyway, and the line behind them noticed it too — a ripple of attention moving down the rope, names getting traded in whispers. That's Redwin. Nineteen years unbeaten in the Common bracket, retired before anyone could take it off him.

"You're entering—" the clerk started, pen already moving toward the line he expected to fill in, and then stopped, checking his own ledger like it might have changed since he last looked at it.

"Xylock's in the Rare bracket now?"

"Xylock." Kalsar said the name like it settled something.

"He's mine to second, not mine to fight. Different thing." The clerk wrote it down, hand a fraction unsteady, still working out how the four-armed brawler he'd watched come up through the Common ranks twenty years ago now had two arms he didn't remember. Ant said nothing. There was clearly a whole history sitting in that man he'd only ever seen the edges of. Ray went two spots down, giving Striata's details with a flourish he hadn't needed for anyone else's turn.

"Striata. S-T-R-I-A-T-A. Female, tiger-type, Common grade, and before you ask, no, she does not bite the judges, that was one time and the fellow deserved it." Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences. The clerk didn't ask. Ray told her anyway.

"He's nervous," Rowan said quietly, falling into step beside Ant once they were through, the crowd thinning as they moved into the tent-city proper.

"Talks more when he's nervous. You noticed."

"I noticed." Ant watched Ray up ahead, arm around Duncan's shoulders, already working some story about the Marigolds into a bit that had Duncan laughing before the punchline landed.

"I didn't pick him because he was the safe choice."

"No," Rowan said.

"You picked him because you wouldn't pick between the other two, and he was standing there not needing picked between." Ant didn't answer that, because it was true and there wasn't much to add to true. Camp went up fast — Kalsar's doing again, barking positions like he'd walked this exact patch of trampled grass a hundred times before, which by now Ant was fairly sure he had.

Rowan got a cookfire going, the smell of it curling out over canvas and packed earth, and for a while the whole thing felt less like a competition and more like a fair. Sam sat with his lance across his knees, saying nothing, watching the flow of strange clans go by with the patient attention of a man cataloguing every single one of them for later.

"You're not fighting and you're still doing that," Ant said, sitting down across from him. Sam considered this.

"Somebody should." Fair enough. Rebekah dropped down beside Ant without asking, close enough that Lem's tail brushed his arm, close enough that he felt the whole left side of his body go stupid and useless in the specific way it always did around her.

"You're doing the thing," she said.

"What thing."

"The thing where you go quiet and pretend you're thinking about something important instead of just being thrown by me sitting near you."

"I'm thinking about the bracket."

"You're thinking about my knee touching yours." His knee was, in fact, touching hers. He hadn't noticed until she said it, and now he couldn't think about anything else, which was — infuriatingly — exactly her whole point. She likes you, Mahkir observed, from where he'd stretched out flat in a patch of sun that had no business being that warm this late in the year. Don't. I'm not doing anything. I'm an observer. A very handsome observer. You're whatever-you-are lying in the dirt. A very handsome whatever-I-am.

The draw happened at dusk, in the open ground between the registration tents and the arena wall proper — a raised platform, thirty-two clan banners strung above it in no order Ant could work out, and a master of ceremonies in the same neutral grey as the registration clerks, with a voice built for exactly this kind of thing.

"Epic bracket first!" His shout carried without visible effort, the crowd's noise dropping half a register to let it through.

"Eleven entrants this year — eleven! — against a full sixty-four slots, so most of you know already what that means for round one." Andy stood with his arms folded, Hexa a low dark shape coiled at his feet, six heads stacked and still. He didn't react to the number. Ant got the sense he'd already done the math himself, days ago, and was only waiting to see if the world agreed with him.

Names went into a barrel — slips of paper, no system involved at all, which struck Ant as strange until he remembered that most of the clans here didn't have a system that could do it any faster. The MC's hand went in, came out, unfolded a slip, called a clan name that meant nothing to Ant. Then another slip. Then —"Oath of Defiance!" The crowd's noise swelled toward the name the way it always seemed to for clans nobody had heard of yet — new blood, the good kind of unknown.

"Drawn against — a bye! Straight through to round two, no opponent assigned!" Duncan groaned like he'd been personally cheated.

"That's the arena's problem," Kalsar said.

"Not ours. We'll take the free round and be grateful for it."

"I wanted to see her fight," Duncan said.

"You will." Andy, unmoving, eyes on Hexa rather than the platform.

"Later brackets don't stay empty. Somebody always shows up with money enough to buy a real one, sooner or later." The Rare bracket filled in faster — more names in the barrel, fewer gaps between them — and Xylock's draw came and went with a real opponent attached, some clan called Ferrowatch with a Rare-grade boar apparently famous enough that half the crowd groaned in sympathy for whoever'd have to face it. Kalsar just grunted, unbothered, and went back to watching the fire. Then Common.

Sixty-four slips, a barrel that took twice as long to empty, and Ant standing there with his arms crossed feeling his own name get called before he'd fully braced for it — Mahkir against some clan he'd never heard of, second round of the first day, no bye, no shortcut. Ray's followed four names later. Striata, third round, same day.

"Good," Kalsar said, when it was done.

"Means you're not fighting each other. Means you both get to watch."

The Epic match came first the next morning, because the arena master wanted the crowd's blood up before the smaller brackets took the sand, and Hexa's bye had, it turned out, only bought her one round's rest before the second bracket filled in overnight — a clan called Deepmire, apparently, that had scraped together an entry fee and an actual Epic-grade Kithren of their own with less than a day's notice, which either meant real money or real desperation and probably both.

The arena floor split the crowd's noise right down the middle when the gates rose — one half stone and packed sand, raked smooth, and the other half a shallow lake carved straight into the pit itself, water dark and still under the morning light, deep enough in the center that Ant couldn't see the bottom. Andy went very quiet.

"Half water," he said, to nobody, and said it again before he'd let himself believe it.

"They drew half water."

"Is that good?" Duncan asked.

"She's a lake-dweller." Andy still hadn't moved.

"Nobody built that arena floor for us. It's just there. It's just—" He stopped, cleared his throat, started over at a lower volume than he'd used all morning.

"It's home water. As close to it as she'll ever get standing in front of a crowd." Ant pulled his Appraisal without thinking about it, more habit than decision at this point, aiming it across the pit at the shape uncoiling on the far bank — a low, heavy creature armored in overlapping stone-grey plates, more built like a battering ram than anything that swam, a pair of curved tusks jutting up from a jaw too wide for its face. [Deepmire's Champion — Epic Grade. Ironhide Basilisk. Level — unreadable.] He didn't say the words out loud. Didn't need to. Andy's face had already done the work — narrowed a fraction, cataloguing, the aura reaching him through whatever sense wasn't a number and never would be.

"Strong," Andy said.

"Land-built. Whatever that is, it wasn't made to fight in water." Hexa went down the bank without waiting to be told, six heads dipping low over the surface, and slid in without a splash — six ripples where there should have been one, the water closing over her like it had never once minded her being gone. The crowd's noise doubled. The basilisk on the far bank went still, head low, tusks dipping toward the waterline it clearly had no intention of following.

Then the horn sounded, and it moved anyway — a lunge straight for the shoreline, jaws already open, aimed at where Hexa's nearest head had surfaced to watch it come.