Chương 103: Chapter 102 – Favours From Strangers

The map room's lock still looked embarrassed to be there, Ant thought. Maren turned the key anyway, out of habit now more than ceremony, and the room filled up around the long table the way it always did lately — too many bodies for a space built for half that many, everyone finding their spot by memory rather than assignment, chairs dragged in from the hall when the bench along the wall ran out of room. Everyone had an opinion before anyone had a plan.

Duncan wanted to know why the vortex assignments had come as coordinates instead of a proper survey. Rebekah was arguing with Ray over which of them was carrying the heavier pack. Maren was talking over both of them about the relay schedule, and Raven had stopped trying to be heard at all, arms crossed, waiting for the noise to burn itself out on its own. Kalsar's palm hit the table flat enough to rattle the inkwell.

"Enough." The room went quiet fast enough that Duncan actually flinched.

"Three vortices, two teams, and whatever's left of us going wherever we're going." He had Cael's assignment sheet open flat, the co-ordinates for all three vortices marked out in a tight official hand, one hand pressed on it to keep it from curling shut.

"Let's not waste the morning being polite about who does what. Say it plain and we'll argue the details after."

"I'll take the harder of the two mediums," Raven said, already at the map, finger down on the spot Cael's co-ordinates marked northwest of the second holding.

"Ray's better in tight ground than open, and this one's got a ravine running through the middle of it, going by what he left us. Thomas reads structure faster than any of us — useful if there's anything down there that isn't just meat and teeth. Maren and Rebekah round it to five."

"Five for a medium clear," Kalsar said, nodding once.

"That's sound. More than sound — that's generous, if anything."

"I checked twice," Maren said, quieter, the way she always got when she'd done homework nobody asked her to do.

"Five's the recommended floor for medium-risk, not the ceiling. We're not short-handed. We're careful." Ray, leaning against the doorframe with his arms crossed, huffed through his nose.

"Careful. Yes. That is absolutely the word I'd have chosen, given the option, for a woman who once talked me into climbing a collapsed tower because the artifact she wanted was — and I quote — 'probably still up there.'""It was still up there."

"It was still up there," Ray conceded, with the exact tone of a man losing an argument on principle while winning it on fact. Sam didn't look up from the second folder, the one with the other vortex's site notes clipped inside.

"We'll take the other one, then." Three words, and the room adjusted around them without needing more.

"Hazel and I," Duncan said, "and the two new ones. Brian, and — Desiree, is it?" He said the name carefully, the way a man says something he's only heard twice and doesn't want to get wrong in front of the person it belongs to.

"Kalsar cleared them both through the second round of training last week, and Sam and I have had them on patrol rotation since — this isn't just Kalsar's word for it. Good hands. Brian's slow to commit to a swing but hits like he means it once he does. Desiree's faster than either of us, and calmer than she's got any right to be for someone who's never seen a vortex up close." Ray tipped his head from the doorway.

"Brian's still green, though."

"He's green," Sam said, not looking up.

"He's also the hardest hitter we've got outside this room." Nobody added anything to that. There wasn't much left to add. One corner of Kalsar's mouth twitched up and stopped there.

"Nobody in this room's arguing with you, Sam."

"Good," Hazel said, already reaching for the pack at her feet like the matter was settled. Ant counted it off in his head — five and five, both mediums covered, both teams stacked with enough experience that nobody at the table had raised a single objection. He looked at the third folder, still closed, still sitting untouched in the middle of the table, nobody willing to be the one who opened it first.

"And the high-risk one," he said.

"Waits," Kalsar said. Flat. Final.

"We're not walking into that shorthanded because the calendar says a week."

"It doesn't wait. That's the problem." Ant said it plain, no heat behind it, but he didn't let the point go either.

"Cael didn't say inside the week, give or take. He said inside the week. All three, or whoever handed us that vortex on purpose gets to call the assignment failed the moment it ticks over, and I don't like our odds explaining that away." He looked around the table once, at both teams already sorted.

"We clear the mediums fast. Not reckless — fast. And we hit the third the day the second one's done, however we're standing by then." Kalsar didn't answer right away, and when he did, the trainer in him wasn't bothering to hide behind the subordinate anymore.

"Fast costs you on a medium clear. Corners get cut whether you mean to cut them or not."

"Then we cut the right ones." Ant held his eyes.

"But that's the fallback, not the plan. If we get a yes today — especially from a clan with an Epic willing to stand with us — this whole conversation gets a lot easier. Fresh hands on the high-risk site, and nobody who just fought a medium clear has to turn around and fight another one exhausted." He paused, long enough for it to land.

"So Kalsar, Andy, and I move today, not in three days, and we push for the strongest clan willing to say yes. If we come back with help, the mediums get cleared the way they should be — properly, not rushed. If we don't, then it's on your teams to move fast, because somebody still has to be standing in front of that third vortex by week's end." Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"You've never rushed a clear," Kalsar said. Not an accusation. Just one fact set down next to another, waiting to see which one Ant picked up.

"No."

"I've also never had seven days to save a clan," Ant said.

"First time for both of us, then." Kalsar breathed out through his nose, plainly unhappy about it, and didn't push the point any further.

"Your call."

"It's the right call," Ant said, and meant it. Which left the last piece, the one that had been sitting under the whole conversation without anyone naming it yet. Ant looked around the table — Raven's team, Sam's team, both accounted for, both moving out within the hour by the look of the boots already gathering by the door.

"That's everyone," he said.

"Every founding member on this table, gone in one direction or another, same morning." Nobody answered right away. Duncan looked at his boots. Maren's hands stopped moving on the folder in front of her.

"HQ's not empty," Maren said, quick, like she'd been waiting for the gap to say it into.

"Gareth and India can hold the desk. I trained them myself — six weeks on nothing but paperwork and protocol, and another two shadowing me on the relay. They know what needs a decision now and what can sit until someone's back to make it. And we've got the communicators. Anything past what they can handle, they reach us, and we're never more than half a day out either direction."

"They're eighteen," Ray said, not unkindly, just laying the fact on the table where everyone could look at it.

"They're trained, and Maren vouches for them." Ant kept his voice level, no heat in it.

"That carries more with me than a number on a form ever will. She trained them herself — I trust her judgment on who's ready for a desk more than I trust my own on half the things I've had to decide this year." Maren went faintly red at that, the way she still did whenever praise landed on her directly instead of sideways through the work.

"Then it's settled," Kalsar said, and closed the folder under his hand like a gavel coming down.

"Move." The gate courtyard filled and thinned inside twenty minutes, the way it always did now — packs shouldered, Kithren loaded onto the newer wagon Thomas had built with a false floor for exactly this, quick words traded that were half instruction and half the kind of thing people said to each other before walking into a fight, dressed up as nothing much at all.

"Watch the ravine's edge," Kalsar told Raven, low, just for her.

"Loose ground reads solid on that kind of survey half the time. Test it with your Kithren before you trust your own weight on it."

"I've read worse ground than a survey blind," Raven said, and the corner of her mouth ticked up, which was as close as she and Kalsar ever came to trading affection out loud. Duncan hauled his pack up onto one shoulder and turned back toward Ant with the grin already halfway up his face.

"Try not to start a war with anybody while we're gone. We'd hate to miss it."

"We're asking for help, Duncan. Not declaring anything."

"That's what they all say," Sam murmured, from somewhere behind his brother's shoulder, and was gone through the gate before Ant could decide if that was a joke. Ant found Gareth and India by the relay desk a few minutes later — a boy who still looked like he was bracing for someone to tell him this was a test he'd already failed, and a girl beside him with her arms crossed and her chin up in the specific way people held themselves when they were determined not to look as young as they were.

The relay itself sat between them on the desk, its charge light steady, a stack of Maren's protocol notes squared off beside it with the corners already worn soft from being read too many times.

"You need anything," Ant said, "you reach us. Anything that feels wrong, even a little. I'd rather get called out here for nothing than find out later you sat on it because you weren't sure it was worth the interruption."

"Understood," India said, fast, like she'd rehearsed it. Gareth just nodded, and Ant let it go at that, because he remembered what it had felt like to be handed something too big and told to hold it steady, and the last thing that version of himself had wanted was somebody hovering to check if his hands were shaking. They'll be fine, Mahkir said, at his ankle, tail low and unbothered. Or they won't, and we'll know by evening. Either way, standing here isn't fixing it.

"You're a comfort." I'm accurate. Different thing entirely. The road out toward Ravensworth's ground ran east past the fork where the Rushbrook path split off, the better part of a morning if the weather held, and the weather looked like it intended to hold — flat grey sky, no wind worth mentioning, the kind of morning that made the miles feel longer than they were simply for having nothing in them to notice.

"Ravensworth first," Kalsar said, mostly to fill the quiet, walking with the loose-limbed pace of a man who'd covered worse ground on worse mornings.

"Mahkir put their Umbra down clean in the fourth round. That's not much of a grudge to work with, but it's enough of a door to knock on."

"Who else," Ant said, "if they say no."

"Stormvale Wardens next — Hexa handled their Talonrest well enough in the Epic rounds to make it worth the walk." Kalsar counted them off without slowing his stride.

"Blackthorn after that, out at Ashmere, if we're still asking come evening. Their Epic fighter went all the way to the tournament final — biggest ask on the list, so it's the one we save for last, not the one we lead with." They passed a relay tower a while later, off the road's edge, its base scorched black and its upper platform empty — decommissioned, or abandoned in a hurry, hard to tell which from a distance. Kalsar didn't slow down to look at it.

Andy did, the reading-look he got when his aura sense caught on something, gone again before Ant could ask what he'd found. Ashmere. The word sat in Ant's chest a moment before it turned into anything he could put a name to. Then it clicked. Claire. Back at the market, months ago now — before Mahkir, before any of this. She'd mentioned a breach, a village gone quiet before anyone even noticed the threat was there. Ashwell. That's part of Ashmere, isn't it?

You went somewhere else, Mahkir said, catching it before Ant said a word out loud.

"Ashwell," Ant said.

"Months back, before you — before any of this. Somebody told me it took three clans to shut down a Wraithkin breach out this way. If Blackthorn's sitting on that ground now, that's not just a clan with a strong roster. That's a clan that's already stood in the kind of mess we're about to ask them to stand in again." Kalsar's eyebrows went up slightly.

"That's not nothing. Might be worth leading with, if the fight report doesn't open the door on its own."

"And not Marigolds," Ant said.

"Obviously."

"Obviously," Kalsar said, dry.

"And not Deepmire either, much as I'd love five minutes with whoever trained that Silt of theirs to eat absorbers for breakfast. Clans that size don't need us. They'd take the meeting as a courtesy and forget our name by dinner." Andy hadn't said much on the walk, eyes on the road the way they usually were, but he spoke up now, unhurried as ever.

"Whoever we meet today already knows why we're here before we open our mouths. Word like that moves faster than we do." They walked on, the road bending east ahead of them, and nobody said anything else worth interrupting the quiet for.