Chương 67: Chapter 66 - Gerald Approves

The wind came down cold off the ridge, and Kalsar didn't slow for it.

"Again," he said.

"Guard up." Ant's arms ached in a way he hadn't felt in days—not the sharp burn of a fight but something duller, ground in. Two mornings straight, before the others were even awake, Kalsar had pulled him out past the treeline with two wooden practice swords and made him work through the same six forms until his shoulders screamed. No Mahkir. Kalsar had been clear about that the first morning, blunt as ever.

"Kithren's not always going to be there," he'd said, tossing Ant the practice blade.

"Boy needs his own hands." So it had been forms. Kalsar called it Kalsar-ryu—said it flat, almost embarrassed by it, like a man who hadn't gotten around to naming the thing properly and didn't much care to.

"Until I think of something better," he'd muttered the first time Ant asked. Six movements meant to be run together until they stopped feeling like six movements at all. Guard, step, cut, recover, back to guard. Over and over until Ant's feet knew the pattern better than his head did. Kalsar barely spoke during it—just corrected with a tap of his own blade against Ant's elbow, his hip, the angle of his wrist. Two words at a time. Higher. Late. Again.

Now, walking the road toward Marrow's Hollow with the pack settled heavy across his shoulders, Ant could feel yesterday's session in every step.

"You're favoring the left," Kalsar said without looking at him.

"I'm not."

"You are." Kalsar's pace didn't change.

"Compensating. From the drop-step yesterday. Fix it before it becomes yours." Ant adjusted, and Kalsar grunted, which was as close to praise as the man gave. Hazel walked a few paces back, whetstone already out even though there was nothing sharp enough on her to need it, running it over the edge of a spare blade out of habit more than necessity.

"You two going to talk shop the whole way? Some of us like a bit of scenery."

"There is no scenery," Rowan said cheerfully, gesturing at the flat brown stretch of scrubland on either side of the road.

"Unless you count that dead tree. I've named him Gerald."

"Gerald's seen better days," Hazel said.

"Gerald's seen better centuries." Rowan hopped over a rut in the road, landing with more energy than a man walking his fourth mile that morning should have.

"I like to imagine he watched the war. Just standing there. Judging everyone."

"Everything judges you," Hazel said.

"Trees. Rocks. That look Kalsar gets."

"I don't have a look," Kalsar said.

"You've got several," Hazel said.

"There's the disappointed one. The very disappointed one. And the one where you don't say anything, which is somehow worse." Kalsar didn't answer that, which Ant privately thought proved her point. The road narrowed where it crossed a shallow creek bed, dry this time of year, and they picked their way over the stones single file. Rowan went first, humming something tuneless under his breath, then stopped and turned around before Ant had even reached the far bank.

"You've been quiet," Rowan said to him. Not pushing, just noting it.

"Thinking."

"About the forms?"

"About how much my arms hate me." Rowan grinned.

"Good sign. Means it's working." He fell into step beside Ant once they'd cleared the creek, dropping his voice a little, not enough to be secret, just enough to be between them.

"Kalsar's not wrong, you know. About the Kithren thing. Saw plenty of unclanned fighters back in my contract days who leaned so hard on their bonded partner they forgot how to swing a blade themselves. First time the partner goes down, or gets separated—" He didn't finish it. Didn't need to.

"I know," Ant said.

"Doesn't make it less annoying."

"Nothing good ever does." Kalsar had drifted up beside them without either of them noticing, the way he did.

"Annoying's the point," he said.

"Comfortable's how you die." He tipped his chin toward the road cresting the next low hill.

"Two more hours, we make Marrow's Hollow border markers, if the pace holds."

"Border markers," Hazel repeated.

"Not the village itself?"

"Village is another hour past that." Rowan answered before Kalsar could.

"Markers are just old stones. Somebody's idea of a boundary, back before anyone cared much about boundaries out here."

"Charming place," Hazel said.

"Wait till you see the inside," Rowan said, and the way he said it didn't sound like a compliment. They walked in silence for a stretch after that, boots on packed dirt, the only sound the wind moving through dry grass and, somewhere off to the left, a bird Ant didn't recognize making a call like a rusted hinge. Kalsar dropped back to check the treeline out of old habit, scanning without seeming to scan, the way he always did whenever the road opened up flat and exposed like this.

"Ant." He said it low when he came back up alongside.

"Tonight, if we're still on the road, we run through the forms again before sleep. Ten minutes. No more." The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

"You said two mornings and we'd move on."

"I said two mornings of just the forms." One corner of Kalsar's mouth ticked up, there and gone.

"Didn't say I was done with you."

"Course not," Ant muttered, and Kalsar's eyes creased at the corner in a way that told Ant he'd heard it and didn't mind. Hazel had caught up on Ant's other side by then, whetstone finally put away, arms crossed loose over her chest.

"For what it's worth," she said, "you're better than you were a month back. I've seen enough green fighters come through to know the difference."

"Feels like I'm barely holding a blade some mornings."

"That's what better looks like, most days." She said it plain, no softening to it, which somehow made it land harder than if she'd tried to be kind about it.

"Anyone tells you it feels good the whole way through is selling you something." Rowan, a few steps ahead now, called back over his shoulder.

"Gerald agrees."

"Gerald's a tree," Hazel said.

"Gerald's wise." The road bent south not long after, curling around the base of a low rise, and the ground started to change under their boots—less scrubland, more packed earth worn smooth by years of cart wheels and boots that weren't theirs. Ant felt it before he saw anything, some pull in the air that said people, more people than the four of them, closer than the empty road had suggested.

"There," Rowan said, and pointed. The village sat low in a shallow bowl of land, like it had been pressed down into the earth rather than built up out of it. No wall. No gate. Just buildings that leaned into each other for support, roofs patched with mismatched shingle and canvas, smoke rising thin and grey from a dozen crooked chimneys. A few figures moved between the structures, heads down, moving with the particular hurry of people who didn't like being looked at.

The smell reached them before they'd gone another fifty yards—woodsmoke, and under it something sourer, tallow fat and unwashed animals and the wet-earth smell of a place that flooded more often than it should.

"Home sweet home," Rowan said, though there wasn't much sweetness in how he said it. They came down the slope into the village proper, and Rowan slowed his pace, letting his eyes move over the buildings like he was checking which ones were still standing since he'd last been through.

"Right," he said, quieter now, more businesslike.

"So. This is where you find the people who don't want finding. Nobody worth recruiting's going to be sitting out in the open at midday—too much risk, too many eyes. You want the tavern, past dark, when the day workers are done and the ones with nothing to lose come out." He jerked his head toward a squat building at the center of the huddle, its sign long since faded past reading.

"That's the one. Rusted Nail. Only tavern in the Hollow, so it does double duty as job board, meeting hall, and confession booth, depending who's drinking that night."

"Charming," Hazel said again, and this time nobody argued with her.

"The ones we want," Rowan went on, "won't announce themselves. You watch for the ones sitting with their back to a wall, not a table. The ones who count exits before they count drinks. That's—""Rowan? That you?" The voice cut clean across the open ground, loud enough that a couple of nearby figures glanced over before looking away again, minding their own business the way people in a place like this had learned to.

Ant turned with the others, hand drifting toward Soul Render out of pure reflex before his eyes caught up with the rest of him. A man stood a short way off, maybe mid-twenties, lean in the way of someone who ran more than he ate, dark hair pushed back under a battered cap.

Beside him paced a Kithren Ant had never seen anything like—a tiger, easily the size of a small horse, its coat a deep amber striped through with black, eyes tracking the group with an unhurried, predatory patience that didn't match the grin spreading across its bonded partner's face.

"No way," the man said, already crossing the distance at something close to a jog.

"No way. Rowan!"

"Ray." Rowan's voice had gone warm, surprised.

"What are you—" He didn't get to finish. The man—Ray—closed the last few steps and pulled Rowan into a hug hard enough to knock him half a step back, the tiger padding along behind at an easy walk, unbothered by any of it.

"Missed ya, man," Ray said, pulling back, still gripping Rowan by both shoulders like he needed to check he was real.

"Where you been? You ran off before I had chance to thank you properly, you know that? Just—gone. One day you're stitching up my arm, next day nobody's seen hide nor hair."

"Things happened," Rowan said, a little sheepish.

"It's a long story."

"Everything's a long story with you." Ray finally let go, stepping back to take in the rest of the group with open curiosity, eyes lingering a beat longer on Kalsar's size before moving on.

"You've picked up some company, I see."

"Ant." Rowan gestured.

"Kalsar. Hazel. This is Ray. Best thief in three counties, if you ask him."

"Thief?" Ray pressed a hand to his chest like he'd been struck.

"Naw, mate, that's—that's a gross mis-categorization." He said the word slow, savoring it.

"I'm a proprietor of important artifacts. For a price." The grin widened.

"Very reputable business. Fully legitimate. Well, mostly legitimate. Legitimate-adjacent."

"Ray," Rowan said.

"What?"

"Just tell them what you actually do."

"I acquire things," Ray said, like that explained anything.

"Things people have lost track of. Sentimental value, mostly. I'm practically a philanderer for lost causes." Rowan closed his eyes.

"A what?"

"A philanderer. For lost causes."

"You don't know what that word means."

"I know exactly what it means." Ray didn't miss a beat.

"It means someone who's, you know. Dedicated. Committed to the cause."

"It means someone who cheats on their partner." Ray's face didn't move for a second.

"... Well, that can't be right."

"It's right."

"Huh." He considered this, unbothered, already moving past it.

"Anyway. Point is, I'm no thief. I'm more of a—a facilitator. A liaison, if you will, between an item and its rightful next owner." He paused, clearly hunting for one more word to close it out, and found one he liked the sound of.

"A bit of a libertine, when it comes to important items."

"That's not—" Rowan pinched the bridge of his nose.

"That means something else too."

"Does it."

"It really does."

"Well, you know what I mean," Ray said, waving a hand like the specific words were beneath the point he was making, and the tiger let out a low huff beside him, which Ray answered with a wounded look.

"Don't you start as well." Rowan looked at the others, faintly apologetic.

"It's like someone fed him a dictionary once and he's been trying to get his money's worth ever since."

"Educated," Ray said, pointing at Rowan like he'd proven something.

"That's the word. I'm educated." He looked past Rowan then, taking in the rest of them properly for the first time—Kalsar's size, the way Hazel's hand had never quite left the strap of her kit, Ant standing quiet at the back of it all. The grin stayed, but his eyes went a shade more careful.

"So." He rocked back on his heels.

"Four of you, dressed for the road, turning up in the Hollow with no cart and no goods to sell. That's not a shopping trip." He looked at Rowan, eyes narrowing with theatrical suspicion.

"This has the air of something distinctly clandestine about it." He paused, clearly pleased with the word, then frowned like it had gotten away from him halfway through.

"You don't just wander back into my life for the scenery, is what I'm saying."

"We're recruiting," Rowan said. Ray went still for exactly a second, and then the grin came back wider than before.

"Recruiting." He said the word like he was tasting it.

"Well now."

"Tavern?" he asked.

"Tavern," Rowan said.