Chương 144: Chapter 143 – Let's See What This One Does

The briefing room was fuller than Ant had ever seen it. Every chair taken, people standing two deep along the back wall, more still crowding the doorway, everyone talking over each other to be heard. The air already smelled of packed bodies and hot wax, half the candles burned low from however long the room had been full before he'd arrived. Kalsar didn't wait for quiet. He never did.

"Natalia reached out on the way back. Team's secured. They were tracked most of the way, but there's nobody better at handling heat than her, so nobody worry about that part." He closed the subject before it had a chance to open, and moved past it before anyone could ask a follow-up question.

"Now. The split." No notes. He never needed them.

"Two teams, two hundred each, Kithren included. Sewer gate side: myself, Garrick, Andy, Duncan, Rowan, and Petra." A flicker crossed several faces at that last name, a quiet acknowledgment that didn't need saying out loud.

"Two Epics draw their attention off the house while we work the gate."

"And the village side?" Thomas leaned forward, already halfway to standing before Kalsar had finished the sentence.

"You, Ant, Rebekah, Natalia, Hazel." Kalsar's eyes went to Ant directly.

"Mahkir goes with you. Fire's fire, and Thomas needs him close to watch what the wall does once it goes."

"Marcus's lot too," Maren added, checking something off a list only she could see.

"Ben, Priya, Nadia."

"Right." Kalsar was already fixed on whatever came next.

"Maren stays at HQ, coordinating." The room didn't go quiet exactly. It just seemed to, for a second, everyone's attention swinging toward Maren the same instant her spine straightened.

"No." Kalsar actually looked at her properly then.

"No?"

"I'm not staying behind again." The words tumbled out ahead of themselves, quick and unpolished, the sound of something she'd rehearsed in her head and lost the order of the moment her mouth caught up.

"I mean, I know somebody needs to coordinate, I do, but it doesn't have to be me, does it. I trained Gareth and India for exactly this. That's the whole point of training them. And I can fight, everyone keeps forgetting I can actually fight, and I'm always the one who." She caught herself mid-word, stopped, started again slower.

"I'm always the one left at the gate. Every time. What was the point of any of it if I'm still just the girl who watches the door?" Nobody answered straight away. Bring the girl, Mahkir said, unprompted, apparently deciding the room needed his opinion whether anyone had asked for it or not. I miss fighting with Axel. I've known him longer than anyone else here. Ant caught Kalsar's eye across the room and gave him a look of approval.

"Fine." Kalsar breathed out through his nose.

"What is it with these kids, all wanting to grow up so fast. Join Ant's team, then. Gareth and India run the desk. If either of them cracks under the pressure of it, though, that's on you for how you trained them, not on me."

"They won't crack." Maren said it with more certainty than she'd managed in the whole rest of the sentence before it.

"Good. Settled." Kalsar swept the room once, checking off faces one by one, and then turned back to Ant. Something in how he did it made the room quiet down on its own, without anyone asking it to.

"Ant." Not boy. Something gone that had always been there before, and Ant caught it the instant it changed. Kalsar didn't explain the choice and didn't need to.

"Two more things."

"Go on."

"Raven's team ran into Kris last night. Marigolds' base, not ours. His elephant, at least, so we're assuming the rest of him's attached to it." Kalsar delivered it plainly, no build-up, no softening it first. Several of the older members went quiet at the name, the ones who'd been there for what happened with him the first time. Ant needed a moment before he could get the question out.

"He's there. Actually there."

"Actually there." Kalsar held his gaze, giving him nothing to read past the statement itself.

"Doesn't change the plan or your job tonight. But you deserved to hear it plain, not secondhand."

"Had a contact of mine asking around too, weeks back now, for anyone who's turned up jewellery made off old vortex leftovers. People find things sometimes, no idea what they're holding, sell it on as pretty rather than useful." Kalsar's voice stayed level, but Ant had known him long enough to catch what it wasn't saying yet.

"He's found one. Blue." The room didn't need it spelled out further. Andy was already watching Ant instead of Kalsar, the way his attention always drifted the moment the subject turned toward Mahkir, even sideways.

"Where."

"Village called Fenhollow. Half a day past Marigolds' outer boundary, a little south of it." Kalsar folded his arms.

"If it's what I think it is, you buy it. That kind of edge could be the difference between winning this clean and winning it ugly." Ant felt the desire rise fast, the same one that had been there under every conversation about Mahkir's evolution since Grinenfeld, and disliked himself a little for how quickly it came.

"We're about to move a four-hundred-person operation. I'm not walking off in the middle of that to go shopping."

"Everyone in this room is more than capable, with you or without you." Andy said it before anyone else could answer for him, his voice never once rising.

"That's not in question. But if there's a version of this where you're stronger, and that's the difference between winning and losing, then not going isn't caution. It's negligence." He let the last word sit there plainly, which somehow made it land harder than if he'd pushed it. Ant looked around the room. Hazel, arms folded, gave him a small nod meant only for him. Thomas hadn't looked up from the map at all, and Ant took the silence as its own answer. Kalsar just waited, quiet and still.

He only ever looked that certain when he already knew what the answer would be.

"Fine." Ant scrubbed a hand back through his hair.

"I'll go alone, fast as I can, and catch up before the wall goes. Someone give me the coordinates."

"Paul," Kalsar said.

"My contact. He'll meet you at the north crossroads outside Fenhollow, take you to her himself." Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

"Her?"

"Her." Kalsar didn't elaborate, and something in his refusal to say more told Ant not to bother asking twice. Hazel spoke up from near the back, the first thing she'd said the whole meeting.

"Take extra rations. Nobody thinks of it when they're moving fast, and everybody regrets it by the second day." She wasn't looking at Ant when she said it. She was already checking the straps on her own pack, expecting the advice to be taken without argument.

"Noted," Ant said. They moved out within the hour, four hundred people and their Kithren funnelling out through HQ's gate in two long columns that split at the treeline, one bearing east toward the sewer side, the other curling south toward the village. Thomas walked the whole way with his eyes half on the horizon and half on some private calculation Ant couldn't follow, muttering distances and load figures to himself under his breath.

"Longer we leave that house coated, the harder it goes off," Thomas said, apparently to Ant, though he hadn't looked over once.

"But every extra hour's an hour something inside that place could work out its own Kithren's gone deaf and dumb on them. We're not sitting on this long."

"How long."

"Two days. Three if we're patient and stupid in equal measure." Thomas glanced sideways at last.

"I'd rather not find out which." Ant peeled off from the column not long after, cutting back toward the stables before anyone thought to argue that running a day's distance made any kind of sense, Mahkir at his heels without needing to be asked. He took the fastest horse the stablehands had without a fight and was gone before the animal had fully settled under him, Mahkir keeping pace alongside at a dead run that didn't seem to tire him at all.

Mile after mile went by the same way, and the hours passed slowly around them, a quiet that left Ant too much room to think. He thought about the empty cave near Grinenfeld, the torn page, the gem that had thrown an error at him instead of doing what a gem was supposed to do. He thought about Kris, still somewhere behind that wall he was riding toward, and made himself stop thinking about it before it could turn into something worse. Not today.

Today was an errand and nothing more, or that was what he kept telling himself for most of the afternoon. By the time the light started going gold and low, the ache had settled into his legs and lower back, the plain result of hours in the saddle longer than his body wanted. Fenhollow came into view over the last rise, a small huddle of stone and thatch built into the curve of a low hill, smoke rising thin from a dozen chimneys, the smell of woodsmoke and turned earth carrying further than the village itself.

Paul was waiting at the crossroads exactly where Kalsar had said he'd be, a narrow man in a coat too heavy for the season, already talking before Ant had fully dismounted.

"There he is, there he is. Kalsar's boy, I take it, though you're taller than he described, and quieter too, if the description's anything to go by, which it usually isn't." His eyes went to Mahkir and stayed there a good deal longer than they'd stayed on Ant.

"And that's him. Bigger than I pictured, even knowing what I know."

"I'm told you can take me to her."

"I can, I can, we'll get there, no need to rush a man off a horse before he's caught his breath." Paul fell in beside him without being asked, already moving.

"Big day for the old clan, I hear. Word travels, even out here, though never as much as I'd like." He said it light, almost careless, watching Ant sideways while he said it.

"Whatever's got four hundred of you on the move at once must be worth something to somebody."

"Just business," Ant said, and left it there.

"Course it is. Course it is." Paul didn't push, though Ant caught the small disappointment in it, the look of a man keeping the non-answer for later just the same as he'd have kept a real one.

"You'll want to leave him outside, by the way." He nodded at Mahkir without breaking stride.

"Small village. People notice things they've got no business noticing, and she likes her business quiet."

"Not a chance," Ant said, and that was the end of it. Ant tied the horse off at a post outside the crossroads inn, tossed a coin to a boy loitering nearby to keep an eye on it, and followed Paul, Mahkir at his side the whole way, Paul still talking, something now about a leaking roof three doors down that apparently nobody in Fenhollow could agree on how to fix.

The house sat at the edge of the village, modest from the outside, warmer within than Ant had expected, tallow smoke and something faintly floral hanging in the air, firelight throwing long shadows across walls hung with more trinkets and oddments than any one room had a right to hold. The woman who opened the inner door to them looked perhaps twenty-six, dark ringlets loose around her shoulders, dressed in a way that made no secret of knowing exactly how she looked and choosing it deliberately anyway.

Her eyes went to Mahkir first and stayed there a long moment before she caught herself and looked to Ant instead, saying nothing about it either way.

"Paul." She said his name as both a greeting and a question.

"Selene, lovely as ever, and I've brought you someone worth your time, or so he tells me, and I've learned not to argue with a man in that much of a hurry." Paul was already talking over whatever she might have said next.

"Kalsar's boy. He'll explain himself better than I can, I only carry the message, not the details, that's always been the arrangement between us and I'd rather keep it that way. I'll wait out here, catch up on all the news I've missed since Tuesday." She looked Ant over once, slow and deliberate, the appraising look of a merchant sizing up goods rather than a person meeting one, then her gaze flicked back to Mahkir, and she stepped back to let them both in.

"I don't have much time," Ant said, before she could set the pace of the conversation herself.

"I need to be somewhere else by tomorrow. I'm told you might have something I'm looking for."

"Everyone's told something." She folded her arms, entirely unmoved by the urgency he'd tried to put into it.

"Why does a boy in this much of a hurry care about a useless bit of jewellery?" The lie came easier than he expected, and that bothered him more than the lying itself did.

"My mother had a piece near enough the same, blue stone, the setting cut the same way. She's gone now. I've been trying to find another for longer than I'd like to admit." Something in her face softened, just slightly. Sympathy, maybe real, maybe rehearsed on a hundred other buyers with a hundred other stories. She crossed to a low cabinet, drew out a small wooden box, and set it on the table between them without ceremony.

The stone inside caught the firelight and held it, a deep blue with threads of lighter colour drifting through it, moving even while it sat still. Magic Gem, the voice said. Confirmed. There it was. Ant gave nothing of it away, holding his expression steady.

"A thousand gold," he said.

"For sentiment. I know it's worth less than that on paper." Her eyes narrowed, just slightly, the number landing wrong against whatever she'd expected.

"Nobody offers a thousand for sentiment."

"It really is sentiment." He held her gaze, let just enough of the truth of that part show through to steady the rest. She studied him a long moment before naming her own price, gauging how much he'd pay before he stopped believing the story himself.

"Three thousand." Ant didn't answer straight away either. Agreeing too fast, after the way she'd reacted to a thousand, would only confirm the suspicion she clearly already had.

"Two."

"Three."

"Two. I don't carry three on me, and I'm not walking back through Paul a second time over the difference." He kept his voice even. His pulse hadn't caught up with it. She weighed it, weighed him, and finally shrugged one shoulder, the gesture of someone deciding the sale wasn't worth the extra argument.

"Two, then. Sentiment's cheap enough tonight." He counted the coin out onto the table and took the box before she could change her mind, tucking it away without letting himself look at it again in front of her.

"Pleasure doing business." She was already turning back toward the cabinet, already done with him. Paul was waiting exactly where he'd left him, and started talking again before Ant had even reached the door, something about a cousin of his who'd once sold a ring for less than half what it was worth and regretted it for years, though he was careful, Ant noticed, never to ask what had actually happened inside.

Mahkir stayed close at Ant's side, quiet, tail flicking once in a way that meant he had opinions and was choosing not to share them yet. Ant let Paul talk the whole way back to the crossroads and offered nothing in return. Some things weren't his to know. He rode clear of the village before stopping, Mahkir keeping pace the whole way, and found a quiet stretch of field once Fenhollow's lights had shrunk small behind them.

He dropped down against a fence post, Mahkir settling beside him, and opened the box in the dark where nobody but the two of them could see his face if this went wrong. The stone sat in his palm, cool and blue and still.

"Let's see what this one does."