Chương 102: Chapter 101 - The Price of Being Noticed

The relay had gone off just after midday — three short pulses, then a fourth that didn't stop, which Maren said afterward was the pattern for everyone, now, don't finish what you're doing. By the time Ant made it down to the courtyard, Thomas was already coming through the west gate at a dead run with plaster still drying white on one forearm, and somewhere behind him a rider was cutting hard across the field from the Bramholt road, low over the neck of his mount.

"Sam and Duncan are two hours out," Maren said, falling into step beside him, a folded slip of paper crushed in one fist.

"Rowan's closer — he was at Rushbrook, not Stonefall, thank the gods. Raven's already here. She heard the third pulse and didn't wait for the fourth."

"Of course she didn't."

"Hazel's pulling herself out from under something at the forge. She said, and I'm quoting, 'this had better not be another parade.'" It is not a parade, Mahkir said, from somewhere around Ant's ankles, tail up, ears forward, reading the courtyard the way he read everything now — for threat first, curiosity second. Nobody smells like a parade. They smell like a scared clerk.

"Who smells like a scared clerk?" Her. A flick of the tail toward Maren, who didn't hear the aside and kept talking anyway.

By the time they reached the main hall, most of them were already inside — Ray leaning against the doorframe like he'd been there for hours instead of minutes, Rebekah perched on the edge of the long table with her bow across her knees out of habit rather than need, Andy standing off to one side with his arms folded, watching the door the way he watched most things, waiting for something worth his attention to walk through it.

Thomas came in last, wiping the plaster off his arm with the hem of his shirt, and took the seat nearest the door out of some old instinct about being ready to move. The room smelled like beeswax and old stone and, underneath it, the faint mineral tang of rain that hadn't started yet but was close. Cael came through with two others behind him — a man and a woman in Cerlan grey, hanging back near the doors the way staff did when they knew a conversation wasn't theirs to be part of.

He saw Maren before he saw anyone else in the room, and whatever had been sitting on his shoulders on the walk in came off him all at once.

"There you are." He crossed the floor in maybe four strides and pulled her into a hug that lifted her half an inch off the ground, one hand flat between her shoulder blades.

"Look at you. You look—" He held her out at arm's length, studying her face like he was checking it against a memory.

"You look well. Actually well. Not the kind of well people say to be polite."

"I am well," Maren said, and meant it, her voice cracking slightly around the edges on the last word anyway. He let her go, finally, and looked past her — Kalsar first, a short look, the kind two men trade when there's history between them and no need to spell it out. Then Ant.

"So." Cael's eyes moved over him, unhurried, the way a man looks at something he's heard a great deal about and is finally getting to see for himself.

"I take it you've been looking after my daughter."

"She looks after herself," Ant said.

"Better than most of us, most days." Cael's mouth curved.

"That's her mother in her. Won't accept help even when it's offered with both hands." He studied Ant another second, his shoulders easing down out of whatever guard he'd walked in with.

"But you've been good to her. I can see that much just standing here."

"She's invaluable," Ant said, and meant every word of it, plain and flat the way he said things that mattered most.

"Half of what we've built, we built because she understood what we were making before any of us did. I'm not being polite. I mean it." The ease held on Cael's face a second longer. Then it went. Not all at once — more the way a lamp gutters when the wick's run low, the light thinning out before it's gone entirely.

"I wish I'd come with only that to say." He looked around the room, taking in the rest of them, some private calculation running behind his eyes.

"But I have three things, and only one of them is good news. Maybe we should sit." They sat. Cael took the head of the table without being offered it, which nobody seemed to mind, and folded his hands in front of him like a man about to read something he'd rehearsed and still didn't like the sound of.

"Maren reached out to Cerlan some weeks back," he said.

"On the clan's behalf. She asked for chipping technology — for humans and for Kithren both. I understand the reasoning. You've got recruits with no chip and no ceremony behind them, and you want to give them one." He paused.

"Cerlan has denied that request." Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.

"Denied," Kalsar said, flat, before anyone else could react.

"On what grounds?"

"None given. Which tells you as much as any grounds would." Cael's mouth flattened. Whatever calm he'd walked in with was gone now, replaced by a flat, cold edge.

"I sat in the room when the vote came down, Kalsar. I argued it myself. It was refused unanimously, without discussion, inside of two minutes — and in fifteen years on that council I have never once seen a request die that fast without somebody at least pretending to weigh it first."

"So what — we keep turning people away?" Duncan's voice, from somewhere down the table — he must have come in while Ant wasn't looking, still travel-dusty, Sam a silent shadow at his shoulder.

"We just tell them, sorry, come back never?"

"No." Cael reached down beside his chair and set a case on the table — plain, unmarked, the kind of thing that could hold anything.

"This isn't official. It has nothing to do with Cerlan, and if anyone asks, you never saw me hand it to you." He slid it toward Maren.

"It's ours. Family stock, older tech, the kind we don't manufacture anymore because the newer lines are cheaper to run. It'll do everything the Cerlan-issue equipment does. Slower, maybe. But it'll do it." Maren stared at the case like it might bite her.

"Dad, if they find out—""Then they find out I did right by my daughter and paid for it. That's a trade I'll make every day of the week." He said it simply, no drama in it, the way a man states a fact he settled with himself a long time ago. He's going against his own clan for her, Mahkir said, quiet, just for Ant. That's a good man. There aren't many of those. Ant didn't answer out loud. He didn't need to.

"Second thing." Cael's hands came back together on the table, and whatever ease had crept into the room went out of it fast.

"You've been assigned three vortices. All three in your territory, all three due cleared inside the week."

"We've cleared vortices before," Raven said, from her spot against the far wall, arms crossed.

"That's not news."

"Two of them are medium-risk. Standard for your classification, nothing you haven't handled." Cael's eyes stayed level.

"The third is rated high-risk." The room didn't erupt. It just came apart at once — half a dozen voices starting on top of each other, none of them landing clean.

"High-risk isn't for medium clans," Andy said, cutting through it, flat and certain.

"High-risk vortices get farmed by clans with fifty Epics on the roster. We've got one."

"I'm aware of the classification system," Cael said, dry, though there was no real bite in it.

"I helped write half of it, thirty years ago. I know exactly what I'm telling you, and I know exactly how it sounds."

"Then tell them it's a mistake." Kalsar's voice had dropped into the register Ant had learned meant he was one wrong word from standing up.

"Tell them to reassign it before it gets somebody killed."

"I can't." Cael said it simply, no apology dressing it up.

"It's been decreed. Decreed assignments don't get walked back on my say-so — not even mine. I could take it to the full council, and by the time they finished arguing about it, your week would already be gone." Silence sat on the table a moment, the kind that came from a dozen people all doing the same math and none of them liking the answer.

"There's a third thing," Cael said, into it.

"And this one isn't from the council. This is from me." He looked around the table once, slow, like he wanted to be sure every face in the room heard this part directly.

"Someone with real pull has taken an interest in your clan. I don't know a name. I don't have proof I could put in front of a council and have anyone act on it. But I've sat on that council long enough to read which way requests move, and I know what it looks like when one dies for no stated reason inside two minutes. I know what it looks like when a small clan suddenly gets handed a vortex three grades above its station." He spread his hands, palms up.

"Whoever's behind this isn't small. At minimum you're looking at a strong medium clan with real connections. It could be higher than that. It could be considerably higher." Nobody spoke. Even Duncan, for once, had nothing to say. Cael let it sit a moment before he went on.

"I'm not telling you this to frighten you," Cael said, quieter now.

"I'm telling you because you need to know it before it gets you killed. Clear these vortices — you have to, there's no version of this where you don't. But watch yourselves doing it. Grow fast. Grow careful. Because whatever this is, I don't think three tasks is the whole of it." Ant sat with that a long moment, feeling the room's attention settle on him the way it always did once the quiet had run long enough that nobody else was going to be the one to break it.

"Thank you," he said, finally, and meant it.

"For all three things. Even the ones that ruin the week." Cael's mouth twitched at the corner and stopped there.

"You're welcome. For what little it's worth." He rose then, and the room came apart into its own smaller conversations almost immediately — Kalsar and Raven already talking low and fast about which vortex to hit first, Duncan loudly informing Sam that this was, in his professional opinion, an absolute nightmare, Sam saying nothing at all.

Cael caught Maren's sleeve before she could follow the noise, pulled her a few steps toward the window, out of the worst of it, though not so far that Ant couldn't still catch pieces of it if he listened.

"You could still come home," Cael said, low, not performing it for anyone.

"Just for a season. Let the dust settle, let me handle the council end of this properly. Nobody would think less of you."

"I'd think less of me," Maren said. He looked at her a long moment — pride and fear sitting on his face at once, neither one winning.

"That's what I was afraid you'd say." Ant let his attention drift back to the table before either of them noticed he'd been listening at all. The noise had settled into something more useful — Kalsar with a hand flat on the map, Hazel leaning over his shoulder, Rebekah already running numbers on gear stock under her breath. Ant stood, and it took a second before the room noticed and quieted down to hear him.

"So they want to test us." He said it plainly, the way he said things that had already stopped being questions in his own head.

"Fine. So be it." He looked around the table — Kalsar, Maren, Raven, Hazel, all of them, waiting.

"They wanted to notice us. Let's make sure they regret it."