Chương 143: Chapter 142 - No Unnecessary Risks

Raven finished running through the last of the flight roster with the others and turned in time to watch Rebekah drop the final few feet out of the tree, landing soft on the balls of her feet the way Lem had probably taught her without either of them noticing it happen.

"How's it looking up there?"

"Rotation's normal." Rebekah brushed bark dust off her sleeve.

"No changes to the patrol pattern, nothing that looks different from any other night we've watched this place."

"Good."

"Yeah. Good." Raven had already started to turn away when the second word caught up with her. Something in how Rebekah said it. Flat. No relief in it at all, when a clean watch should have carried some.

"What is it?"

"Nothing." Rebekah was already reaching for the lowest branch again. Raven got there first. Not fast exactly. Just already there, before anyone had seen her move.

"We don't have time for you to second-guess yourself. If something's off, or it's bugging you, I need it. Now." Rebekah's shoulders came up a fraction. Raven could be frightening without trying, and everyone who'd spent more than a week around her learned that the hard way once and never needed the lesson twice. Even Rebekah, who joked her way through most things, wasn't above flinching at that voice when it dropped this low.

"Seriously, it's nothing." A laugh that didn't sit right on her.

"There's an elephant. Some Kithren by the wall, I half recognise it and it's bugging me, that's all. Stupid, probably. Ignore me."

"Elephant." Raven's whole face changed, and it changed fast enough that Rebekah took an involuntary step back.

"Show me. Now." They went back up together, Rebekah pointing through the gap in the leaves toward a dark bulk moving slow along the base of the wall, big enough that even at this distance and in this light there was no mistaking the outline. Raven looked at it for exactly as long as it took to be certain, then she was gone, down the trunk faster than Rebekah had ever seen anyone move through a tree. Rebekah stood there a second with her mouth open before her legs caught up with the rest of her.

Something had spooked Raven. That alone was worth being afraid of.

"You. New guy." Raven pointed at Marcus without looking at him properly.

"Communicator. My pack. Now." Marcus didn't ask questions. Whatever this was, it wasn't the moment for them, and he had enough sense to know it, even just a couple of weeks into the clan. He had the communicator in her hand inside ten seconds, and stood back far enough that he wouldn't be caught in whatever came next. Static, then Maren's voice, calm as ever.

"Raven. Is it done?"

"No. We've got a complication. I need Ant and Kalsar."

"Understood." No follow-up, no questions about what kind of complication, nothing but the click of the line being handed off. That was Maren all over, and Raven had never been more grateful for it than she was right now, waiting through the long minute of silence that came after, until Kalsar's voice replaced it.

"Ant's with Mahkir." Firm, already moving past it before she could ask why that mattered.

"What's the problem. Dust not working?"

"Haven't tried it yet. We will shortly." Raven kept her eyes on the wall, on the stretch of it she could no longer make out from down here but knew was still moving somewhere along it.

"Thought you'd all want to know Kris is in the Marigolds base. His Kithren, at least. I'd assume the rest of him's attached to it." Silence on the line. A proper one, the kind that had weight even coming through a small piece of metal, the sort of quiet Kalsar never let sit for long unless something had actually landed.

"Continue with the plan." Kalsar, finally.

"I'll tell the boy myself. This just got interesting." The line went dead before Raven could say anything else, which was fine, because there wasn't anything else worth saying. Kalsar had never been one for long conversations, and tonight of all nights she didn't need him to be.

She handed the communicator back to Marcus without a word and turned to watch the wall again, one thumb pressing hard against the strap of her bow, already running through what an elephant Kithren that size was doing on the wrong side of a war nobody had told him about. Dark came down properly not long after, the kind of dark the whole plan had been built around. Two birds lifted off the ground within a breath of each other.

Marcus's hawk went first, angling toward the sewer grate cut into the far side of the wall, and Shrike followed a beat behind him, low and silent, carrying the first sack of crushed hushstone strapped against her chest. The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement. They had enough dust for three passes. Nobody said out loud that they'd probably only get one.

Voices carried up from inside the wall almost immediately, someone spotting movement, and Marcus's hawk answered by flying badly on purpose, veering and dipping, wings out of rhythm with each other, nothing about it reading as trained. Marcus had worried about this part more than any other part of the plan. He'd grown up inside that wall. If anyone down there had ever seen his hawk fly true, one clean pass would be enough to place it, and everything after that fell apart.

The dark did most of the work for him, cutting the bird down to a shadow and nothing more, and the erratic flying did the rest.

"There! In the sky!" someone shouted from below, and Marcus went rigid where he stood, listening for whatever came next. Nothing did. Just more shouting, confused rather than certain, voices arguing back and forth over what exactly they'd seen and whether it was worth waking anyone for. Shrike crossed the roofline low and quiet, dropped the first sack over the house, and was already banking away before the powder finished settling into the dark below.

She came back for the second without needing to be told, took it from Raven's outstretched hand without a word between them, and went again. Marcus's hawk got there first this time.

"They're putting Kithren in the air," Marcus said, watching his hawk bank hard overhead.

"I'm sending him wide, north. Pull their eyes off her." Not every Kithren struggled once the light went. Some of them saw better in the dark than any of them ever would in daylight, and Marcus's hawk was already gone by the time Raven finished the thought, an outline swallowed by open sky within three seconds. Shrike came back at speed and landed hard on Raven's shoulder, feathers rough with effort, breathing fast against her ear.

A few moments later Marcus's hawk followed her in, dropping onto Marcus's shoulder with a wing held wrong, favouring it in a way he was clearly trying not to show even as he winced through it.

"He took one out." Marcus's voice had gone tight, all the earlier calm gone from it.

"The others aren't far behind. We need to move." They know something's wrong, Shrike told Raven, low and quick against the side of her head, her feathers still trembling with the effort of the run. I wasn't seen. I wouldn't risk the third bag.

"No," Raven said, already scanning the treeline for the fastest way in.

"We don't take risks we don't need. Two's better than none." She reached up and smoothed a hand once down Shrike's back, quick and unthinking, the kind of touch she never gave a person without meaning something specific by it. With Shrike it cost her nothing at all. They went, all of them, deep into the treeline where the dark did more to hide them than any of them could manage on their own. The forest didn't stay quiet for long.

Somewhere behind them, low and steady, came the sound of something hunting through undergrowth with purpose, not the aimless rustle of a startled animal but the kind of noise that meant a trail had been found and was being followed with intent.

"Village," Raven said. Somehow she managed it at a whisper and nobody treated it as anything but an order. Ray took point without being asked, Striata moving ahead of him through brush that should have slowed all of them down and somehow didn't, her instincts finding the gaps in the dark before anyone else could see they were there. They made good time.

Better time than any of them had a right to, given what was coming up behind, and Raven found herself grateful, not for the first time, that Ray had bonded to something built for exactly this kind of night. Two Kithren broke through the trees off to the left. Built for speed, all long legs and low bodies, nothing about the pair of them suggesting a fight was what they were for.

"Take them out," Raven called, and all three flying Kithren answered at once, wings cutting the air above her head. They needn't have bothered. Striata was already on the pair before the order had finished leaving Raven's mouth, and whatever those two had been built for, it wasn't this. Both went down unconscious inside a minute, out cold before either had landed a real hit. The delay cost them, though. Seven more Kithren came through the same gap a breath later, and these ones weren't built for speed at all.

These ones were built for exactly this.

"Run," Raven shouted, and this time nobody argued or slowed to ask why. Rebekah dropped back just far enough to loose arrow after arrow into the treeline behind them, not enough to stop anything twice her size but enough to make it think twice, Lem's wind riding along each shaft so it landed without a sound to give her position away. She kept her eyes on Raven's back the whole time, not the enemy, watching for the moment someone needed pulling clear rather than the moment someone needed hitting.

Shrike and Striata worked the edges, hit and gone before anything could pin them down, because the one thing none of them could afford was letting these things get ahead and box them in before they reached the village at all. The village finally came into view through the trees. Ray stopped dead. Raven ran straight into his back and hit the ground hard enough to knock the air out of her.

"What are you doing," she managed, half a word short of a shout, before she saw what he'd already seen. A figure stood in the open ahead of them, and beside it something larger than anything else in this fight so far, coal-dark and smoking faintly along its spine even at rest.

"Down!" Ray was already flat on the ground and so was everyone else a half-second later, Raven still tasting dirt from the fall. Fire went over their heads in a single roaring sheet, catching the pursuing Kithren mid-stride and sending them scrambling back into the trees, half the treeline behind them going up in flame within seconds, the heat of it reaching them even flat on the ground. Ray climbed back to his feet first, dusting himself off with an ease that would have been infuriating from anyone else.

He didn't so much as glance back at the fire.

"Took your time, Natalia." Nobody else moved yet. Raven stayed down another second longer than she needed to, watching the last of the flames climb through the canopy behind them, counting the bodies still moving out there against the ones that had stopped. Seven had come through that gap. She'd only make out five now, and none of them were coming any closer. She got up slowly, brushing leaf mould off her knees, and looked at Natalia properly for the first time.

Cindermaw's smoke was already thinning, curling off its spine in long grey ribbons into the dark overhead.

"You were supposed to be at the gate."

"I was at the gate." Natalia didn't smile, exactly, but something close to it moved through her voice.

"Kalsar has a way of making a short conversation feel urgent. Called it interesting. I decided interesting was worth checking on." Raven looked past her, back toward the wall, toward the house somewhere behind it now carrying two full sacks of hushstone dust settled into every crack it could find, and toward whatever Kris's elephant had been doing pacing the base of that wall, calm, unhurried, nobody down there giving it a second look.

"It is," she said.

"Interesting's one word for it."