Chương 150: Chapter 152 – Together

Nathan's body still sat where Duncan had left it, and nobody had moved to do anything about that yet. Ant would deal with it in a minute. Right now there were four people in this room who owed each other honesty, and he intended to have it before any of them walked back outside.

"Rebekah." Ant caught her before she could slip out with the others, Lem trotting at her heel.

"I need to ask you something, plainly. Why didn't you tell me?" She stopped, but didn't quite look at him.

"Because I needed to be sure before I said anything."

"Sure of what?"

"Of you." She turned then, and there was none of her usual lightness in it.

"I've known for a while that you never managed to bond during your ceremony, and somehow ended up with a Kithren anyway, and somehow ended up leading a clan on top of that. Most people assume the clanless are just people who never bonded, for whatever reason, but that's actually rare. Most people do bond. What people forget is everyone who loses that bond afterward. People like Rowan."

"That's who the clanless were built for," Ant said.

"To help them. To protect them, when nobody else will." Her voice had an edge to it now that hadn't been there before.

"I know what you've heard about us. Extortion, forcing people into servitude in exchange for a Kithren, as if we're running some kind of black market."

"I've heard that, yes."

"And who do you think spread it?" The words came out sharper than Ant expected from her.

"Clans don't like it when the people they discard find somewhere else that actually wants them. It's bad for their reputation if the story gets out that someone can lose everything and still find people willing to take them in without conditions attached. Easier to call us thieves and slavers first." Ant didn't have an answer ready for that.

"My plan, if you want the honest version, was to get close to you. Earn your trust, and then ask if the clanless could join Oath of Defiance properly." She said it plainly, no attempt to soften how calculated it sounded out loud.

"We survive on our own, but surviving isn't the same as living well. No land of our own, no real standing, nothing to stop a stronger clan from deciding one day that we're worth pushing off whatever ground we've claimed. And every one of us watched your clan go in outnumbered, badly, to pull one man back out of captivity, and that man was you. It told me more about what kind of home this could be than anything I could have learned asking around." She went on before he could respond to any of it.

"We take in anyone who comes to us, no coin owed, no debt attached, no conditions beyond contributing what they're able to once they're able to again. Most can't fight anymore, not without a bond to carry them through it. We find work for them regardless. A clan that only wants people who can fight is just an army wearing a different name." She let out a breath.

"We've barely had a moment to breathe since I have known you, and there's a great deal more I should tell you, tell all of you, but that was always the heart of it." She held his gaze now, steady.

"That's the truth. All of it." Ant thought about every time she'd stood beside him without being asked, every small kindness that had never once looked like it was building toward anything.

"I wish you'd just told me," he said.

"I wouldn't have turned them away. Rowan should be proof enough of that on its own."

"And yet," she said, "he was clanless himself before he joined you, wasn't he. After he lost his Kithren."

"That's different."

"You may think so. Most people don't." She let that sit a moment.

"I had to be certain before I told you any of it, but my goal was never to hurt you, or to lie to you for the sake of it. For that much, I am sorry." She left without waiting for him to answer, Lem slipping out the door behind her heels. Ant stood there a moment longer than he needed to, turning over everything she'd said. He believed her. That was the strange part. He'd been ready to be angry about it, and somewhere in the middle of her answer he simply wasn't anymore.

He didn't know yet what he'd tell the rest of the clan about the unclanned, or how quickly, but he knew already that Rebekah wasn't the villain in it, whatever else this night had turned out to contain. A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation. Ant turned to Andy next, still standing near the window with his hands folded behind his back.

"I need to know what you actually know about Mahkyros. I heard you say that name once before, the first time you met Mahkir." Andy didn't pretend not to remember.

"My aura sense isn't a system reading. It never has been. It's mine, whatever I am, however it works. When I felt Mahkir for the first time, it wasn't like anything I'd ever come across before, older and rawer than any Kithren I'd read, with something underneath it I couldn't place at all." He paused, choosing the next part carefully.

"I'd heard the old stories about Mahkyros the way anyone hears old stories, half legend, half nonsense passed down by people who'd never actually seen anything themselves. I knew there was supposed to be an egg somewhere, if any of it was true at all. I never had proof of anything. I stayed anyway, because whatever I was feeling off him was worth staying for." You could have told me, Mahkir sent, quieter than Ant expected.

"He says you could have told him," Ant said to Andy.

"I could have," Andy said.

"I didn't have anything real to tell you. A feeling isn't proof, and I've spent enough of my life being punished for theories I couldn't prove yet."

"You could have told me it was a feeling," Ant said.

"Instead of nothing at all." Andy considered that longer than Ant expected him to.

"You're right. I could have. I chose not to, and I won't pretend that was entirely about proof rather than my own pride getting in the way of it." It was the closest thing to an apology Ant had ever heard out of him.

"For what it's worth, I don't regret watching. I regret not saying so sooner." Ant looked between the two of them, then around the room at what was left of his people.

"Does everyone here have some agenda for helping me?" It came out harder than he meant it to, frustration finding the nearest open door.

"Rebekah wanted my clan for her people. Andy stayed for a feeling he never bothered sharing. What's next, am I going to find out Kalsar's been keeping something too?"

"Course I have," Kalsar said, without missing a beat.

"Everyone has something they haven't told you. That's what being a person is. Doesn't make any of it a betrayal." He shrugged, the question rolling off him without any visible effect at all.

"Come now. It's not as though you kept nothing from us until you were good and ready either."

"That's not the same thing."

"Isn't it." Kalsar folded his arms.

"Judge them by what they've actually done for you, not by whatever reasons sat underneath it. Every one of them has fought for you well past what they owed you. I'm not making excuses, and I'm not saying I agree with how any of them handled it. But that part, at least, you should trust." Ant let out a breath he hadn't realized he was holding.

"Thank you, Kalsar. You always know exactly what to say to me when everything else gets to be too much." He shook his head slightly.

"And you're right. Even now, none of you know everything. You don't know about Adran. That he's not dead." Kalsar's eyebrows went up, further than Ant had ever actually seen them move before.

"Well, he is dead," Ant added, already hearing how it sounded.

"But he isn't gone. I don't even know how to explain it properly myself yet."

"Later," Kalsar said, after a moment.

"I think we all need to sit down and actually talk, properly, once there's room for it." He glanced toward Nathan's body, still slumped over the desk.

"Someone will need to deal with that as well, and decide what we tell the rest of the Marigolds about how their leader died. That's not a conversation for tonight either, but it's coming."

"Duncan," Ant said.

"Duncan," Kalsar agreed.

"I won't pretend I don't understand why he did it. That doesn't make it simple." He nodded toward the door.

"Right now, we still have people outside on their knees waiting to find out what happens to them. That comes first." Ant led the way out. The compound looked different in the time they'd spent inside, quieter, the worst of the smoke thinning out overhead. He looked out over the Marigolds fighters still kneeling in the dirt, over his own people standing watch, over all of it, and thought about every battle that had brought him to this exact point.

He was no closer to the bottom of any of it than he'd been a year ago. Every answer he got only opened three more questions behind it. We keep going until we run out of questions, Mahkir sent. Silverwing is your clan, Adran said, quieter and older sounding than either of them. It is time you took it back. For that, you will need Rebekah. And you will need the Marigolds standing beside you as well.

Ant looked around once more at what remained of tonight, at Kalsar and Andy falling into step behind him, at Natalia already moving among the wounded, at Rebekah somewhere out there still working through whatever this had cost her too. He didn't have every answer. He wasn't sure he had more than a handful of them yet. A mother he knew almost nothing about. A clan that had hated his family for three hundred years without ever explaining why to the people living it.

An ancestor who wasn't quite a ghost and wasn't quite alive either, waiting somewhere in the back of his own head for the right moment to speak again. But he had enough to stand up in front of what was left of two clans and tell them something true, and for tonight, that would have to be enough. Ant stood at the front of what was left of the crowd and looked out over all of them, enemies an hour ago, waiting now to see what he'd decide to do with them.

The noise of shuffling and low talk died down as he stepped forward.

"Marigolds," he said, clear enough to carry to the back of the crowd.

"Today is our first step. We came here as enemies. What we've found instead is that we've all been puppets, every one of us, pulled by strings none of us could see until tonight, and no more of that starting now. From this point forward, we decide our own futures. Nobody else's hand on the strings. And we do it together." End of Act 3