Chương 69: Chapter 68 - Sam And Duncan

Ray reached the table first, arms already spread wide like he was about to embrace the whole room.

"Duncan. Sam." He said it easy, loose, like men he'd shared beer and worse with a hundred times before.

"Been an age." Duncan was up before Ray finished the second name, chair scraping back hard enough to catch the attention of the two tables nearest him. He wasn't smiling. His eyes had already gone past Ray, cataloguing the four people behind him — Kalsar first, lingering there the longest, then Hazel, then Ant, then down at Mahkir stalking low near Ant's leg.

"Five of you," Duncan said. Flat. Not a question.

"It's fine, it's fine—" Ray started.

"Didn't say it wasn't." Duncan's hand hadn't moved toward anything, but his weight had settled differently, back onto his heels, ready to go either way depending on what happened in the next handful of seconds. Beside him Sam hadn't stood at all. He'd gone still instead, in the particular way Ant recognized from Kalsar — eyes doing quiet arithmetic, tallying weapons, exits, distances, without any of it showing on his face.

"They're with me," Ray said, quicker now, hands up, palms out.

"Friends. Well — new friends. Reasonably trustworthy. I vouch for them, personally, on my own considerable reputation."

"Your reputation," Duncan said, "got you thrown out of the Bramholt garrison twice."

"Once was a misunderstanding."

"Twice, Ray."

"The second time was also a misunderstanding," Ray said, wounded, "just a different one." Duncan's shoulders dropped, the readiness draining back out of them the same way it had come in. He huffed a laugh, short and dry, more breath than sound.

"Sit, then. Since you're already stood there looking pathetic about it." Chairs got dragged over from the neighboring table, wood scraping loud against packed dirt. Kalsar took the seat closest to Duncan without appearing to choose it — angles considered before anyone else had finished sitting down, same as always. Hazel settled beside Ant. Rowan took the last open spot, next to Ray.

Duncan's attention had already found Kalsar and stayed there, the way a man's eyes go to the biggest thing in a room out of pure instinct. He looked him over — shoulders, forearms, the way the bench groaned faint under him — and gave a slow nod, the kind a man gives another man he's already decided he could work with.

"Now you," Duncan said, "look like you've actually swung something heavier than a coin purse."

"Occasionally," Kalsar said.

"Occasionally." Duncan grinned, wide and easy.

"Modest. I like that." He leaned forward onto the table, forearms thick as most men's thighs.

"So. Five of you, dressed like you've got somewhere to be, and Ray hauling you over here like he's showing off a prize hog." His eyes narrowed, more curious than suspicious now.

"That's a recruiting look, if I've ever seen one. And I've seen it plenty."

"Sharp," Ray said, delighted, like Duncan had done a magic trick.

"Not sharp. Obvious." Duncan waved it off, already turning back to Kalsar, already half-decided the conversation belonged to him.

"So. You're the one running this lot?" Kalsar's eyes flicked, once, toward Ant. Small. Barely a movement at all. Then back to Duncan, and he said nothing, which said everything if a man knew how to read it. Duncan didn't. He kept talking, warming to it, already half-turned toward Kalsar like the conversation had settled itself.

"Sam and me, we've been sat in this dump three months now doing nothing but guard work for merchants too cheap to pay proper coin. Man gets restless. Man wants something worth—""Wrong one." Sam's voice cut through it, quiet, barely raised above the noise of the room, and somehow it landed harder than anything Duncan had said in the last minute. Every head at the table turned. Duncan blinked at his brother.

"What?"

"The small one." Sam nodded once, toward Ant, not unkindly, just stating something he'd clearly already worked out and was only now bothering to share.

"He's the one you saw the look go to." Duncan turned his whole body this time, taking Ant in properly for the first time since they'd sat — really looking, none of the earlier dismissal in it now, cataloguing height and build and the general lack of anything that screamed dangerous. His mouth twisted, more puzzled than cruel. This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

"Not interested," Duncan said, already half-turning back to Kalsar.

"No offense meant. If he's leading, that says plenty about the rest of you." He said it like a door closing, final and without much heat behind it — the kind of dismissal that didn't need to be loud to land. He's not wrong to be careful. Mahkir's voice, low, only for Ant. But he's making his decision on nothing. Show him he's wrong to doubt you. I don't need to prove anything to him. You don't. But we need him and his brother, and he's about to walk us out that door because you look like nothing worth following.

A pause, dry as ever. So prove it, or let's find someone with worse instincts. Ant didn't answer out loud. He was already moving. The familiar feeling of mana leaving him, the light bending around him as it always did, erasing him from the table's view mid-motion — Duncan's sentence still hanging half-finished in the air, mouth open on a word nobody would ever hear the end of. Three steps.

Around the table, behind the chair, and the moment Soul Render's edge found the side of Duncan's throat, the Concealment broke clean and sudden, stripping Ant back into view in the same half-second the blade made contact. The tavern didn't stop. Dice kept rattling somewhere by the hearth. But their corner had gone dead silent, six mugs untouched, Ray's mouth hanging open around whatever he'd been about to say. Duncan didn't flinch. Didn't so much as tighten.

He sat there with cold steel resting light against his skin and looked up at Ant, eyes moving over him like a man redoing sums he'd gotten wrong the first time. No fear in it. Just arithmetic.

"Well," Duncan said, voice perfectly level despite the blade.

"That's a trick." Ant pulled the sword back, sheathed it in one motion, and said nothing. He didn't trust his voice not to shake, not from fear — from the sheer strangeness of doing something like that on purpose, in front of strangers, without Mahkir doing the fighting for him. Sam was the one who spoke into the quiet after. Two words, dry, aimed at nobody and everybody at once.

"Not so weak after all." Duncan barked out a laugh, short and real, rubbing at his throat where the blade had rested like he could still feel the cold of it.

"Alright. Alright, fair enough." He looked between Ant and Kalsar once, then settled his attention properly on Ant for the first time, all the earlier dismissal gone out of him.

"Perhaps we do have something to talk about." Kalsar leaned in close enough that only Ant would catch it, voice pitched low.

"Well done, boy."

"So," Duncan said, leaning back, folding his arms over that door-frame chest.

"What is it you're actually offering. Ray's said 'new friends' and nothing else."

"Wasn't my story to tell," Ray said, wounded again.

"Convenient." Rowan set his mug down and didn't dress it up.

"We're Oath of Defiance. Small clan, castle near Bramholt, still finding our feet." He nodded at Ant.

"He's the leader. Not because he's biggest or loudest — because everyone at that table decided he was worth following, and none of us decide things like that lightly." Duncan's eyes flicked to Ant again, weighing that against the last five minutes.

"We've got a clan after us," Rowan went on.

"Shell Razor. Hit our headquarters a few weeks back. We held them, but it was close, and the man who led that attack is dead now — the rest of them aren't. We don't know if they're finished or just licking wounds."

"So you want bodies to stand in front of the next lot," Duncan said. Not hostile. Just naming it.

"We want people," Kalsar said, before Rowan could answer. Two words at a time, same as ever.

"Bodies die. People stay." Duncan looked at him a second too long, like he was recalculating something about the big quiet one all over again.

"And the coin?" Duncan asked.

"Because Sam and me eat a lot between us, and guard contracts pay in actual money, whatever else they're short on."

"Fair share of whatever the clan earns," Kalsar said.

"Not a wage you're owed for standing somewhere and taking a hit. A cut of what we build, same as everyone in it."

"That's a worse deal on a bad month."

"It's a better one on a good year," Ant said. It came out steadier than he expected.

"Every contract you've taken so far, you did the job and walked away with nothing to show past the coin in your pocket. This isn't that. You put something in, you get to watch it grow into something that's partly yours." Duncan turned that over, jaw working slightly, not answering right away.

"No strings," Rowan added, quieter.

"You heard me say it to Ray. Means the same for you. You fight because you choose to, not because a contract's holding your throat. Means if you bleed for us, we bleed for you back."

"Pretty words," Duncan said, though something in his voice had eased off the challenge. He glanced sideways.

"Sam. You've got an opinion in there somewhere, I know you do." Sam had been quiet through all of it, turning his mug slow on the table. He didn't look up right away.

"Kithren," he said finally.

"You never asked about ours." The table went still for a second. Kalsar was the one who answered, direct, no hedging.

"A turtle and a Glacier Panther both eat like small armies. We can feed them. Housing, training ground, whatever they need to keep sharp — that's part of the offer whether you two agree to fight or not." Sam nodded once, apparently satisfied, and went back to his mug.

"That's it?" Duncan said, half laughing.

"Weeks of nothing and that's your one question?"

"Wasn't going to say yes on your word alone," Sam said.

"Needed to hear if they'd thought about the ones that matter." Duncan snorted, something loosening fully out of his shoulders now.

"Fair." He looked at Ant, then Kalsar, then back to Ant, like he was still deciding which one of them actually held the weight in the room and hadn't quite settled it yet.

"So. Medium-sized clan against you lot. Means lots of fighting, right?"

"Defiantly," Ray said, with the confidence of a man who'd never once used the word correctly in his life.

"He means yes," Rowan said, not looking up from his mug. Duncan grunted, satisfied, and turned back to Kalsar, the rest of the table taking his weight for a moment like he'd finally decided where it belonged. Sam hadn't said another word since not so weak after all, content to sit and watch the whole thing settle around him without needing to add to it.

"You should've led with that," Duncan said, to all of them. Duncan snorted, loud enough to turn a nearby head, and slapped both hands flat on the table hard enough to rattle the mugs.

"We're in."