Chương 142: Chapter 141 – New Moon, Old Ghosts

Raven's communicator beeped, telling her that her support was arriving with whatever plan Ant had managed to come up with. She moved down from the trees overlooking Marigolds' base and found Ray and Rebekah talking about some mundane watch from two days before, like the last week hadn't happened at all.

"Ray." Raven cut across whatever he'd been mid-sentence on.

"Our visitors should be entering the village just down that hill. Go meet them. Quietly."

"That will be positively p—""If you finish that sentence with another long word that makes zero sense, I will cut out your tongue and feed it to your Kithren." That earned a disgruntled sound from Striata, somewhere off in the trees.

"Pfft. Even Andy would be more fun than this." Ray acted offended, one hand pressed to his chest.

"No appreciation for the finer arts of literacy." Rebekah giggled, watching him sulk off down the hill, stamping his feet in protest right up until his boot found uneven ground and nearly sent him over. He moved quicker after that, with considerably less stamping.

"Raven, Raven, Raven." Rebekah shook her head slowly.

"Must you always tease him? You know it only ever makes him worse."

"Who said I was teasing?"

"Still acting all prickly on the outside, when we all know you're really a cuddly bear underneath." That earned Rebekah an extra-cold stare, which only got her giggling again before she turned her eyes back to the base. Raven went back through the last day's findings in her head. The steady flow of people through those gates had started worrying her days ago and hadn't slowed since.

If the numbers kept climbing at this rate, the odds of pulling this off would go from difficult to impossible before Ant's week was even up. She climbed back into the tree she'd claimed as her home for the better part of a week now, losing track of time somewhere in the middle of watching whatever movement she could make out from this distance. Three more groups just walked in through the east side, Shrike said, banking once overhead before settling back into her wide, slow circle. Same colours as the last lot.

Whoever's calling people home isn't finished yet. The number didn't sit well with her, though she kept her face doing nothing at all.

"Show me the gate they used." Shrike didn't need telling twice, angling out over the eastern approach without breaking the wide, unhurried circle enough to draw an eye up from the ground.

"Good girl. Easy on the turn — don't give them a reason to look at you twice." That kind of warmth never left her mouth for anyone walking on two legs, and she didn't much care who noticed. Ray's voice, loud as always, was what told her time had passed at all. She gave Rebekah a quick thumbs up and climbed down to meet whoever he'd brought back. Her eyes went over Nadia first, then settled on the young man standing beside her that she didn't recognise.

He rocked back on his heels under the stare she gave him, uncomfortable with it in a way that told her plenty on its own.

"Ant sent us from HQ," Marcus said, quick.

"With some hushstone." Sure enough, she could feel it — some drag in the bond between her and Shrike, a little more effort needed to keep the line open than usual.

"We've got a plan," Nadia added. She laid out Thomas's idea: coat the roof of the house against the wall, set it off, let the reaction do the rest. Raven turned it over while she listened. Doing this in daylight, or even under a full moon, would be suicide for whoever flew it. She'd never shirked a hard job in her life, but she wasn't sending Shrike into that either. A plan started forming in her head while Nadia was still talking.

"Two days from now is a new moon," she said, once Nadia had finished.

"If our luck holds and this cloud cover stays, the stars won't add anything worth mentioning either."

"If it's a new moon, surely that's when it's at its brightest?" Ray asked, pleased enough with the question that he'd clearly been saving it up.

"A new moon means the lit side's facing away from us. It's the darkest the sky gets, not the brightest." She said it the way she'd say anything obvious, without much patience wasted on the correction.

"Oh." Ray went back to kicking a stone across the ground.

"Shrike goes, then," Raven said.

"She drops the hushstone over the house herself."

"Alone." Marcus didn't say it like a question.

"Alone."

"Absolutely not." Nadia had her arms crossed, tail flicking once behind her ankles — always a sign she'd already made her mind up and was only waiting for the rest of them to catch up.

"Stinger's faster in a straight line than Shrike is. If something goes wrong up there, she needs more than one bird in that sky, not none."

"If something goes wrong up there," Raven said, "that's exactly why I don't want two Kithren in a sky that's meant to stay empty all night. One bird's easy to miss. Two, and their watch has something worth explaining to whoever's in charge."

"So Shrike goes up alone, and you don't even tell the rest of us the plan until she's already over the wall." Marcus said it without heat, the same even, unhurried register he used for everything, but he wasn't giving ground either.

"That's not a plan. That's you deciding for the rest of us and calling it one." Raven looked at him a long moment. He didn't look away, which she gave him credit for, quietly, without letting it show. Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

"Fine." Not because he'd won the argument. She just couldn't be bothered dragging it out any further tonight.

"Your hawk flies the wide loop past the tree line, decoy only, well clear of the house. If anything so much as twitches down there, that's his job. Draw their eyes wide, not toward the roof." She turned to Nadia.

"You stay grounded, with Ray. Watch the gate. If Shrike isn't back by first light, that's when Stinger goes up. Not before."

"That's babysitting."

"And what if it is?" Raven said.

"Then it's the babysitting that keeps our Kithren alive long enough to actually finish the job. We're not the ones flying tonight. They are. That's who this is about." Nobody argued that one. Ray had gone quiet, which happened rarely enough that Raven noticed it before he'd even opened his mouth again.

"And what about me?" he asked, and for once there was nothing performed underneath it.

"You and Rebekah keep doing what you've been doing all week. Watch the gate. Count the bodies. Tell Ant if the number changes." Raven let her eyes drift back toward the base, barely a smear of dark stone through the trees now that the light was going, a handful of torches only just starting to catch along the wall.

"Count them how?" Ray said.

"It's a new moon. You picked tonight specifically because nobody can see a thing. I'll be lucky to tell a torch from a person carrying one, let alone give you a real number." She didn't have an answer ready, and that told him as much as any answer would have.

"You don't actually have a job for us tonight," Ray said.

"You just didn't want to say that to my face."

"No," Raven admitted.

"There isn't much for either of you to do. Watch the gate anyway. Tell me if anyone leaves it who shouldn't."

"Comforting," Rebekah said, from where she'd settled cross-legged against a root.

"Wasn't trying to be." Marcus checked the hushstone sack a third time, testing the knot at the neck with two fingers before he let it go.

"How's it meant to spread? Too coarse and it just sits there in a heap and the whole trip's wasted. Too fine and half of it goes wide the second there's any wind worth the name."

"Thomas ground it himself," Nadia said.

"Said it should move like flour."

"Should," Marcus repeated, and didn't say anything else, which Raven understood better than most of what he could have said instead.

"I'll check it myself before Shrike carries it," Raven told him.

"If it's wrong, I'll know from the feel of it long before she's anywhere near that wall." That settled him enough to let it go, though his eyes stayed on the sack a second longer than they needed to.

"Two days, then," Nadia said, and that was the end of it. The first day went the way waiting always did, which was slowly, and the second went worse, which everyone had expected and none of them found any easier. Raven spent most of it stretched flat along a branch thick enough to hold her, scope pressed to one eye until the figures moving along Marigolds' wall stopped looking like people at all and started reading as numbers on a page she kept updating in her head. New guards on the gate by mid-morning.

Older ones rotating out toward what she guessed was the barracks. A supply cart came in off the east road around midday and left empty an hour later, wheels lighter, horses moving faster for it. None of it told her anything she hadn't already worked out days ago. They were digging in, and every hour that passed made the ground under that digging that much harder to shift. Shrike didn't care much for the waiting either.

She stayed close through most of the second day, wings drawn in tight, head tucked low enough that on a person it would have read as sulking. All this sitting around had better earn me something decent to eat when it's done, Shrike said, without lifting her head. Real food. Not whatever Ray calls rations.

"You'll get your rabbit," Raven murmured, low enough that nobody else caught it, one hand moving to smooth the feathers at the back of her neck.

"Two, if you fly well tonight." I always fly well.

"You ate half a scout's boot last spring because it smelled interesting." That was one time. Raven didn't blame her for any of it. There was a version of this plan where Shrike didn't come home from it, and both of them knew that without either one saying it aloud, because saying it out loud would make it real, and neither of them wanted to think about that yet.

"You've gone quiet," Marcus said, crouched a few feet along the same branch, checking a strap on his hawk's harness that hadn't needed checking twice already, let alone a third time.

"I'm allowed to be quiet."

"Didn't say you weren't." He finished with the strap and looked out toward the wall instead of at her.

"Just saying I can tell the difference between you thinking and you sulking. Most people can't." If it had been Shrike asking, Raven would have answered plainly and thought nothing of it. People got the guarded version of her. Shrike got the rest. She didn't answer that.

Below them, Ray had taken to whittling something out of a stick with more focus than the task deserved, shavings collecting in a small pile between his boots, and Nadia sat with her back against a trunk, Stinger's tail curled loose around her ankle, watching the tree line with an ease that held up right until you noticed how often her eyes moved.

The cloud held through the afternoon, thick and low and grey, barely shifting even when the wind picked up around dusk, and by the time full dark settled in on the second night there wasn't a single star in it worth naming.

"Say it back to me," Raven told Marcus, for the second time that evening, because hearing it twice mattered more to her than deciding it once had.

"My hawk holds the loop until first light, whether Shrike's back by then or not. I don't send her in early looking. I heard you the first time."

"Say it anyway." He did, word for word, and she let that be enough. Down at the base of the ridge, Rebekah watched the four of them work through the last of the pre-flight checks — Nadia running a hand along Stinger's folded wings one more time than the check strictly needed, Ray sat on an overturned log with his elbows on his knees, gone quiet, and Rebekah had learned by now that he only did that for things that actually mattered to him.

"You could just say you're proud of her," Rebekah said, settling down beside him.

"Instead of doing the whole brooding routine."

"I'm not brooding. I'm calculating exactly how much I'll never let her live down if this goes wrong in some avoidable way she should've caught coming."

"That's brooding with extra steps."

"It's tactical concern." Rebekah smiled and let it go, watching Raven check Shrike's harness one final time by feel rather than by torchlight, hands moving fast and sure over buckles she must have checked twenty times tonight already. Watching someone this good at what she did get ready left Rebekah a little steadier herself. She didn't have that certainty yet with Lem, not the ease of years spent never having to think about it twice.

Her eyes drifted, unhurried, back toward the base itself — the wall lit thin and orange along its top by torches spaced too far apart to matter much, figures still moving through the yard even this late, more of them than belonged to a clan settling in for a quiet night. And then, without meaning to, without any reason she could name straight away, her gaze snagged on something near the back wall. Too large to be a horse. Too still to be a person on watch.

Something tethered or penned where the torchlight barely reached at all. She frowned. She'd seen that before. She was sure of it, though no memory came with the certainty — nothing solid enough to back it up. Just the animal itself, and an uneasy sense that she should already know why it mattered. An elephant. She sat with the frown a while longer, waiting to see if the memory would surface on its own. It didn't.

"Now where have I seen that elephant before," she murmured, mostly to herself.