They didn't knock.
The tollhouse door trembled once as a weight leaned into it softly, testing sweep and give. Ryn stood with his palm on the bar and felt the pressure as a vibration in old wood, the way a block tells you when a wedge is seated. He didn't breathe the next breath. He let it hang, so he could feel the difference between a man's weight the door would hold and a man's weight the door would break under. It wasn't much. He had wedged a chair back under the broken hinge, but chairs lie when you ask them to be beams.
Tamsin's coin walked across her knuckles in a smooth, practiced line. She stood to the left of the door where its swing would show her to no one. She tipped her head toward the rear, toward the cellar hatch. "They'll come stir your rats too," she breathed.
"Burrowers," he corrected without meaning to. She made a face at him that said he could call them kings for all she cared as long as they died like vermin.
Outside, a quiet voice spoke. No anger. No show. "Keep it clean. No shouting. Toms, hook the hinge side. Brant, stay off the line. If it goes to prying, you let me lay the decision."
Not Garron. He had men for this—men he trusted with doors. Ryn filed the names reflexively. The rope burn on his wrist throbbed. The shard under his skin pulsed once, faint. The System was behaved for the moment, a cold weight that watched without saying things. Good.
Ryn tightened the bar with one small draw, then eased it back a hair. He turned his head an inch. "Two?" he whispered.
"Three," Tamsin said. "Four outside the window line. One more in the weeds pretending to be a rock."
He caught himself looking toward the window where light leaked around the shutter and a sliver of view held the bend in the road. He forced his eyes back to the door, because the door was where the world would fail or hold.
Metal scraped at the hinge. A flat hook probed the seam. The men outside had patience. That made them better than most. A hook catches more if the door's keeper shoves back hard. Ryn did not shove. He pushed his palm into the grain until he felt his own pulse in wood, then let his hand fall, slow, and stepped back two paces.
He put his fingers on the jangle line he'd strung ankle-high across the room. Tamsin lifted one foot and cleared it neatly without looking. Ryn reset the mugs so they would sing on a brush. He imagined the space as a diagram: anchor points at table legs and beam, lines hung low, bell of tins ready to complain. The shard's Linework sense colored everything with shallow maps—tension here, slack there, the arc of a thrown weight as a curve linking anchor to anchor. His hands twitched. He did not over-set. Too much twitch and men see your traps before they feel them.
The hook bit. The hinge groaned. The chair hiccuped against the floor and slid a thumb toward failure.
"Now," the quiet voice outside said pleasantly. "Lift."
The door jumped. The bar creaked. Ryn stepped back one more step and let it happen—control was a fat liar; you held it when it made sense, you let go when it didn't. He did not want them in the room. They were coming anyway.
The first pressure was a shoulder, wrong for the jangle line. A boot slid. Mugs chimed, sweet and small, a sound like a dropping chain in a church, and the man swore under his breath and checked his step. Good. The door burst inward the rest of the way and banged off the mattress he'd dragged to muffle, and a man stepped in low and right to sweep the space with a short-hafted spear.
Ryn moved before the sweep.
Quickstep; the word was not a word but an invitation to spend legs on speed now and pay for it later. He threw himself left and past, not into, the spear's arc—past the point where wood wants to bite what it hits. His shoulder grazed the spear's shaft; the friction was a strip of heat. He dropped his weight onto the jangle line to make it sing again, two beats now, and then he kicked the line's tie off the beam. It dropped and tangled the spear-man's ankles. The man stumbled. His point went down. Ryn had a heartbeat to land an ugly thing.
Hook-and-Break was a fancy name for a simple sin: use a line or a limb to borrow an enemy's lever. He grabbed the spear's haft under the man's hands and wrenched it up, hard and sharp, while stamping on the trapped ankle. The angle was terrible for the knee. Something gave there with a mean pop, and the man went down yelling, spear half-wrenched free.
Tamsin's knife flashed over Ryn's shoulder. She went in under the man's arm, one clean thrust to the side of the ribcage and then out, steps light, never getting stuck in her own kill. The man sagged, gasping wet, eyes fixed on some story he thought would save him. Tamsin didn't look at his eyes. She looked at the door again, coin in her hand now, not between fingers.
The second man had learned from the first. He ducked the jangle line without being told and came in with a hook instead of a spear, a hafted tool used to pull barge ropes on canals repurposed now to pull men's legs. He swept the hook across the floor. Ryn hopped, not high—high is where swords live—just enough to let iron bite boards instead of bone. The hook snagged a chair leg and flipped it. The chair hit the trip line Ryn had strung higher at knee height. The line snapped free and a tin on it flew and clipped the third man in the brow just as he came in. He cursed and raised a hand to his face without meaning to—humans reach for what hurts.
The quiet voice outside said, mildly, "Pull left. Don't crowd."
They weren't crowding. They were good.
Ryn let pain turn thin and mean behind his eyes. He kept moving in the space he had already mapped. He flipped the small table toward the door—a weak man's push is a trap's hand—and sent mugs skittering across the floor. The spear-man's blood slicked the planks. The hook slid wide. A knife hissed past Ryn's ear and sunk into the plaster by the hearth with a sound like a finger poked into overripe fruit.
The shard under Ryn's skin warmed. The System's words slid in and out of his awareness like fish in shallow water.
[Technique: Hook-and-Break (Basic) — Execution: Clean.]
[Quickstep I — Expenditure: Moderate. Stamina drain increasing.]
The third man pushed forward because bodies behind him put weight on him. He tried to leap over the mess in one go—legs strong, judgement poor. Ryn flung the coil of thin cord he'd palmed—throwing isn't art when the line knows where to go. He looped the man's leading ankle midair and yanked. The man's front foot jerked sideways; his hips turned; his shoulder struck the door edge. The wood cracked under impact. Tamsin, already moving, used his own stagger to put her knife where men are all the same under armor. She pulled and stepped back, eyes flat. The doorframe held.
The quiet voice outside did not change tone. "Back out. Smoke them. No pushing. Toms, your knee's gone. Crawl."
A small iron canister rolled under the door. Ryn's eyes tracked it the way you track a sinking line. He moved before his head told him why. He kicked the canister back toward the door with the side of his boot. Tamsin had already ducked to the floor, mouth open—don't lock your jaw when air goes bad. The canister clicked. It coughed. A foul gray smoke belched. Half in, half out. The door was a box around it. The men outside swore. One kicked it back in, hard, and the canister went off in full this time, a cloud of bitter chalk. Tamsin cursed; her eyes went to a narrow squint. Ryn's burned.
He dropped flat and shoved the mattress toward the door with both feet. It folded over the canister like a big, dumb hand cupping a coal and smothered most of the plume. His throat still seized. He coughed hard enough to see the world blink gray. Pain Gate dulled the knife of it.
Through the smoke, a shape lunged—a man with a shield, of all things, a slab of wood with iron rim held properly. He used it to batter the mattress aside, stepping on it to pin it, clever. He pushed into the room in a crouch, shield forward, short sword tight above it, the blade's edge nicked. Ryn's buckler looked sad in comparison resting against the wall where he'd left it; a guilt he'd take later. He had no shield now. He had lines.
The shieldman's foot came down on a mug and slipped. He caught himself, strong legs, but that was the beat he gave Ryn without intending to. Ryn's hand found the rope he'd stretched waist-high across the second slot and yanked at the loose end. The rope, wrapped around a beam and tied in a quick-release hitch, fell and became a snare across the shieldman's knees. He didn't fall; he stumbled, but Ryn was already moving into the face he had made.
He went left of the shield, not around. He stepped on the edge of it and used it like a step, ignoring the short sword's flicker. The blade kissed his ribs and bit half an inch and withdrew silk-smooth. The Pain Gate did its poor duty. Ryn's hands went down on the shield rim and pushed. It jerked. The man behind it held it, strong. Ryn kicked the man's leading thigh just above the knee, hard, and then the flat of his foot hammered the shin just below the knee on the other leg, breaking the timing of the man's balance, which is a kind of break that doesn't show in blood.
Tamsin appeared at the man's right like a promise kept and sank her knife under the shield rim into the meat above the hip. The man's breath went out hot. He roared. He did not fall. He twisted his shield and slammed it into Ryn's shoulder with a bone-slap that drove breath away completely. Stars went up behind Ryn's eyes—not pretty ones, the sharp kind that leave splinters. He hung on to the shield rim because the shield rim was an anchor and if he let go he would float into stupid. He pulled himself along it, past it, under it, in the dirt stink and sweat stink, and then he was behind the shieldman and had a line around his neck, the thin cord biting hard.
"Hold, Kett!" someone outside snarled. The shieldman made a noise that was both a laugh and a cry and then his knees buckled and he fell forward and Ryn went with him, riding his back down, weight on the line, not cruel, not kind. Necessity is a dull knife.
The quiet voice outside said, almost approvingly, "Back. Leave it. Smoke's done. Pull back."
Footsteps retreated. The spear-man on the floor gurgled in his little ocean. The shieldman's fingers tore at the line around his neck and slowed and stopped. Ryn kept weight for one more count, then let go and fell backward on his elbows, chest heaving. The room stank. He blinked tears and snot and eased his breath to something that didn't scrape.
Tamsin crouched with her back to the wall, knife low. She slid her coin back into some pocket Ryn couldn't see. Her eyes went to the window, to the door, to the back room, to him, calculating costs. "Three down," she said. "Two breathing. One not. More outside." Her voice was a dry scrape. "They were careful. They'll get more careful."
Ryn nodded because he could not speak yet without coughing bits of his lungs into his hands. He got up on bad legs and went to the door and put his palm against the wood. He felt nothing. He cracked the shutter and made a slit to the outside and listened with his skin. He caught a fragment of words on the road.
"…not worth the blood. Leave it. He'll come when it's quiet."
The quiet voice, again. He took his men away when the house bit. They would circle. They would decide whether to come back at night and set it on fire or to mark it as more trouble than it was worth and leave it to rot. If Garron had time, he would come. Ryn had no wish for either man. He wanted them to go away forever. Men do not go away forever.
His stomach clenched as though punched. He bent double with it and spat on the floor. Blood, black in dim light. He rinsed his mouth with a handful of water from the crock and spat again into the hearth. It came clearer this time. He straightened with an ache that made him think of winters where wood is scarce.
The System lifted a finger like a schoolmaster too fond of his own voice.
[You have repelled: Incursion (3).]
[Experience gained: +22.]
[Quickstep I — Progression 34% -> 67%.]
[Hook-and-Break (Basic) — Upgrade Available with practice.]
[Status: Level Up acquired (pending).]
"Later," he said, his voice shredded. The cold rectangle paused as though listening. He wondered again if it heard him. He wondered if it cared. He doubted it.
From under the floor came the faint scritch of nails or teeth. The salt line Tamsin had poured under the cellar door glittered in a thin stripe like frost. There were certain laws left in the world. Salt bit, even in a place with no sea.
Ryn picked up the shieldman's dropped short sword and balanced it, felt the difference between its weight and the pry bar's honest pull. The sword lied with beauty. He put it down. He picked up the shield and turned it, set it on his left arm, and the weight of it settled into a groove his body didn't know it had until now. He looked at the buckler leaning against the wall and felt foolish for having left it there when the door first moved. He slung it on his hip. He kept the stolen shield. He would use the buckler when speed mattered more than cover.
Tamsin went to the spear-man and searched him with quick, impersonal fingers. She took a pouch and a folded strip of parchment and left the man his water flask. She tossed the pouch to Ryn without looking. He caught it by reflex. Coins chinked. He frowned. "Useful?" he said, skeptical.
"Noise," she said. She gestured with her knife. "Throw it when you need men to look at silly things." She paused. "And when you need salt I am not carrying."
He looked at the parchment. It was a writ of passage—Guild issue—co-opted, the name scraped off and another inked over in a different hand. The stamp had been pressed too warm; the wax ran a little. He folded it again and tucked it into a crack in the wall. Some other day, if there was one, it would be a small lever.
He went to the cellar hatch and listened. The scratching came again, right at the edge where the salt lay. He smelled a faint acrid stink. He shifted his weight and the floor answered. He considered going down. The System would like that; the ledger liked tidy rooms. His ribs hurt. He lifted his shirt and looked. The cut from the shieldman's sword was a line, shallow but long, gummed with blood. He should clean it. He could go down. He could. He should not.
"Later," he said to the cellar. It didn't care either.
Tamsin tilted her head. "You'll have another visit," she said. "Before full dark or after it. They might send the quiet ones, or they might set the roof. I think you should move, but I know you won't."
He shook his head. "He'll come. If I go, he eats someone else on his way and it's my fault." He heard the shape of it as he said it and recognized the lie he was telling himself and did not stop. "I can hold. For a few. There's water. There's a culvert. There's a line of trees to the north. If we must run, we run then, not now."
She looked at him with that flat interest again, measuring whether his stubborn would get her killed. "I'll stay," she said after a beat. "For now. If you go soft, I go. If you start asking me to die for a wagon, I go faster."
"Not a wagon," he said. "A road." He rubbed his thumb over a scar on the shield rim. "There's a difference."
Her mouth twitched. "Not to me," she said. Then softer, "Maybe to you."
They cleaned. They moved the dead men to the corner and covered their faces with a cloth. Tamsin did it without comment. Ryn murmured something under his breath he would later deny was a prayer; it was just a list—of what they had and what they used and the names of those who had given him things: Marla, Dorran, the wheelwright who once slapped his hands out of the path of a spoke and said, "Use your head after your hands." His head hurt. He rubbed a palm over his face and it came away gritty and streaked.
He allowed himself one sip of the poppy tincture and then put the stopper back in with a click that felt like conscience. He stitched the line under his ribs with three needle bites while Tamsin held the skin taut and did not look away. He didn't thank her. Thanking people in the middle of work is a way to drop a beam.
He set more lines: one from the mantel to the leg of the big table, set high, just at throat level for a man stepping over the mess without looking up; one from the window latch to a tin that would sing if the shutter moved. He rubbed animal fat on the floor just inside the door to make a treacherous patch that would look like dull wood. He scrubbed blood off the section of the floor he meant to use as landing space. He dragged the shieldman's shield mark against the grime to camouflage the bright smear of his own shoe. It was tedious work. Tedious work is how you live.
When the shadows under the window had stretched to a different color, a tapping came at the shutter. He was across the room before he knew he was moving, buckler up, knife low. The tap came again, a small sound, not the sound of a man's impatience. Tamsin cocked her head. "Bird," she said. "Your scout."
Ryn frowned. He did not keep birds. He slid the shutter a finger's breadth and looked with one eye. On the sill, a small wooden bird sat, its head cocked, wings out, carved from dark wood. It had not been there an hour ago. He reached and pulled it inside quick and shut the shutter. He turned the bird in his fingers. Sereth carved birds. He had said once: "Leave a mark gentler than your boot."
The bird's belly had been hollowed. Inside, a scrap of paper was folded thin. Ryn teased it out with a nail. On it, words in Sereth's precise hand.
"Bridge. Two hours. Bring only what you can carry. Burn the rest if you can." Under it, a mark like a fishhook. A place to meet.
He felt relief and terror together, like stepping into cold water with a fever. He showed Tamsin. She blinked. "He's breathing then," she said. "For now."
Ryn nodded, throat tight. He tucked the scrap into his pocket. "Two hours," he said. "He'll have a choke."
"He'll have a last stand," Tamsin said. "He's that type." She did not say she disliked that type because she stood in a house with one.
Ryn forced himself to sit for ten minutes and let his hands be still. The System took the quiet as permission to crawl out of its hole.
[Level Up applied.]
[Level: 3.]
[Stat Growth: Agility +1, Vitality +1.]
[Skill Increase: Makeshift Trap II (efficiency + another 5%).]
[New Passive: Steady Breath I — Minor stabilization of aim and hand tremors under stress.]
[Status:]
Name: Ryn
Race: Half-Elf (Unregistered)
Level: 3
Strength: 7
Agility: 10
Vitality: 9
Mind: 8
Perception: 9
Tenacity: 8
Corruption: 4% (Shard Sync: 9%)
He rolled his shoulders. The ache under his ribs had gone from sharp to present. He flexed his hands and watched how the tiny tremors settled faster than earlier. He did not like the way he liked it. He stood.
"We'll go," he said. "In an hour. Leave it set. If they come after, let them slice themselves on it."
Tamsin grinned without joy. "That's art," she said.
They parked the dead out of sight. They buried nothing. The ground was stone and time was expensive. They took water, salve, linen, coil of cord, nails, meat, the stolen shield, the buckler, the short sword, two oil jars, the brass whistle wrapped in cloth, the pry bar fast under his belt, the map scrap in his pocket. Ryn looked at the ledger on the desk, swollen with damp, and wanted to take it because he is the kind of man who thinks if he keeps track it will be real. He left it, because he had learned today that some things you want to make true are not helped by arithmetic.
He wedged the door with the bar on the inside and tied a rope from the bar to the base of the table at a clever angle so that any shove would tighten the knot and any man with a hook would have to cut the rope blind. He set the jangle line high this time, for hands not feet. He poured a thin stream of oil across the threshold and laid a rope along it. If men pushed through in a rush and stepped on it, the rope would move, dragging burning oil across boots. He did not plan to be here to watch. The idea of the line burning after he left made him feel lightheaded and wrong and he accepted that because the choice was between that wrong and a worse one.
They slipped out through the back window, over the nettles. Tamsin took point, placing her feet in a precise dance that made no noise in dry grass, knife reversed in her hand so the blade sat along her forearm. Ryn followed, the shield on his left arm, the buckle of the strap biting his bicep. The shard under his skin lay quiet, as if satisfied he had settled into its rhythm. The humming in his teeth was faint now, like the residue of a song.
They cut across the scrub to avoid the road. The sun slid toward the west, gold going orange. Birds—actual birds—burst up from the bramble at one point with a clatter that stretched his nerves until they whined. Tamsin glanced back, amused. "Easy," she mouthed, and then pointed with a chin. "There," she mouthed. Ryn followed where she looked.
Garron's men moved down the road in a steady unhurried flow, seven, eight? More behind. They weren't hurrying. They were collecting bodies, cutting coin purses, pulling arrows out of dead men's gear. Two carried a stretcher. A covered form lay on it. Ryn could not see the face. He did not need to.
They put distance between themselves and the road. The bridge lay up the next rise and down into a shallow creek bed. Sereth loved bridges. He understood that water and wood tell each other truths about weight and time.
They came to the bridge at the same time as a gust of wind that brought the smell of wet stone and rust. The bridge was not a grand thing—logs cut flat and pinned with iron dog spikes. One rail was missing. The stream below was a trickle, brown with silt. On the far bank, Sereth had stacked a low barrier of stones and brush into a shape that could be mistaken for five different things until you were on top of it. A line of rope hung slack across the near side just above shin height. Ryn saw the anchor stones for the rope and the shallow trench beyond where the earth had been loosened.
"Don't step there," Tamsin said. She pointed to a patch of dirt that looked the same as the rest. "That's where he wants your foot."
Sereth emerged from shadow as if he had been carved there. He looked older than this morning. He looked as old as the road. He nodded to Tamsin and then to Ryn and then to the shield on Ryn's arm with the faintest glimmer of humor. He held a bow—it was not fancy, but he held it with the casual possessiveness of a man who could argue with wind if wind insisted.
"You're late," he said.
"The road argued," Ryn said. "We argued back."
Sereth's mouth tilted. "Good." He glanced past them. "She didn't make it," he said, flat. It was not a question. Ryn shook his head once. Sereth looked away. He said nothing else. Some men are knives; they prefer to cut questions in half rather than ask them.
"You can hold this?" Tamsin asked.
Sereth looked at the rope stretched across the near side. "We can make them spend an hour," he said. "Maybe two, if they come with numbers and pride."
"They come with patience," Ryn said. "And a man who dislikes knots."
Sereth grunted. "Then we feed him ugly loops."
Ryn showed him the brass whistle. Sereth sucked his teeth softly. "Bad toy," he said. "Don't play without knowing the game." He pointed with his chin toward the far bank. "There's a weir down and left. He'll try to flank. I set teeth there, but he'll send a man who knows how to lose a foot and keep going. Don't be that man."
Ryn nodded. He stepped to the rope and set his hand on it. The Linework sense lit it like a drawn line on a map. He followed it with his fingers to the anchor on the right—the spike he had seen on the way in. He checked the knot Sereth had tied. It was a simple turn and two hitches, not pretty. It would hold and then give when it should, which was after someone put their weight where they thought weight could rest.
Footsteps on the road. Voices. Not close yet. Close enough that his body tightened without his permission.
The System chose that moment to swan in with its ledger as if anyone had asked.
[Milestone Progress: Defend under pressure (2/3).]
[Class Options trending: Scavenger (27%), Runner (22%), Trapper (51%).]
[Note: Conditional unlock approaching: Field Control (Rook) — criteria unmet.]
He nearly swatted the words away with his hand like flies. He almost told it to pick a better time to talk about what sort of man he was going to become. He almost smiled, too, because he heard Marla's voice in his head: "You can pick, or you can remember what you're good at and let that pick for you." He did not speak to any of it. He tied a new line instead. He hung a small bell from it this time—not noise for men, noise for him.
Sereth slid to the low barrier and crouched, bow across his knees. Tamsin disappeared into a stand of willow where the shadow and leaves would hide her until the moment her knife decided it was time to be seen.
Ryn stood at the bridge's mouth, shield on his arm, buckler ready to sling, short sword in hand because maybe this time a sword would be the tool the world wanted. He dug his heels in a little and felt the planks under his boots. He put his palm on the rope across shin height. He felt it hum. The shard under his skin thrummed back, a small twin sound, and he prayed to nothing that the hum would not climb. He breathed. He looked down the road. He saw the men come.
At their head, a woman with a spear, taller than Ryn by an inch, eyes as pale as winter sky. She walked with a limp like an old argument that had never been settled. She carried the spear low, point not waving, and her jaw did not clench because she was not thinking about the man at the end of it. She was thinking about the road.
Ryn's mouth went dry. He had met her earlier from twenty paces away when she'd staked heads at the bend. He had not liked her then. He liked her less now. He looked at the spear's head and the way it had been ground and knew it had been done with care and grit. He looked at the way she set her weight and knew she would see lines if he was lazy. He did not intend to be lazy.
"Fall back," Sereth said, barely audible. "Let them step."
Ryn stepped back a pace, then another, until his heel found the divot he had dug earlier to remind his foot where balance would be. He lifted the short sword because sometimes a man needs to see the point to behave himself. He tilted the shield a hair to his right because a spear's point likes the seam between shield and wall. He breathed once, slow.
The first man in their line didn't hurry. He came to the rope and paused, measured, stepped over it high and careful. He put his foot where a man without patience would have put it, on the compacted dirt just past, where Sereth had loosened the earth and set smooth stones under the top layer. The foot slid. The man stumbled and flailed and caught his balance by planting the spear he carried like a cane. The spear bounced in the wrong direction—Sereth had half-sawed the plank at that point; it flexed and sprang. The man went down in a hard kneel and swore.
The woman with the spear gave him a look like the one Marla reserved for boys who said they'd done a job and hadn't. She put her foot on his shoulder and stepped off him to pass. She did not jump. She did not trip. Her spear point came up just enough to be insult without being invitation.
The rope hummed under Ryn's fingers.
"Alright then," Ryn said under his breath to no one. "Let's see which of us likes knots less."
He gave the rope the faintest tug and felt the anchor give precisely as he and Sereth had set it to. The loop hidden under leaf litter pulled tight a third of the way across the bridge. The woman with the spear checked her step at the last second and didn't put her ankle in it; the man behind her did. He yelped and yanked and sat down hard, cursing. The third man tripped into him. Bodies clattered like dropped tools.
Sereth's bow spoke once. A hiss and a thock and the fourth man put his hand to his neck and made a sound like a kettle when the lid jumps. He fell without the drama he had imagined for his death. Tamsin's knife did not appear; she was not ready yet.
The woman with the spear moved like a dancer with a mean teacher. She planted her spear, vaulted lightly over the sprawled men, landed on solid planks, then, without looking, jabbed the butt of her spear at the rope line. She hit it clean, hard. The anchor gave too much and the line went slack.
"Clever," she said, almost friendly.
Ryn did not answer. He didn't pull the rope back taut yet. He let it lie like a exhausted snake. He took two steps back, gave ground, let the bridge feel like a thing you could cross with work. Men like Garron's liked work.
The woman took her weight to the right as if about to pivot into a thrust at Ryn's shield. Ryn lifted the shield to meet it. She did not thrust. She swept the spear low at knee height. He jumped. She smiled and kicked the shield rim. The kick, not hard, made the shield ring in his bones, threw his timing off. The point came in when his knees were wrong. He twitched the shield enough to ride it. The point scraped the edge and bit into the leather strap. His pulse went cold. He pulled his arm back and the spear ripped the strap free. The shield dropped crooked, hanging half by the hand grip. She pulled back, annoyed, not impressed. He saw a scar on her lip that meant someone had tried to teach her with a fist and failed. He did not like the idea of being her lesson today.
"Tamsin," he breathed.
"Now," Tamsin murmured from the willow, and her knife went as a small dark bird across the space and kissed the tendon at the back of the spear-woman's forward knee. The woman's leg buckled. She stabbed herself with her own spear point by accident low in her shin and hissed, eyes flaring not with pain but with focus.
Ryn pulled the rope slack with a snap. It lifted off the planks, hissed across wood, and caught around the ankles of the man rushing in to protect his captain. His face hit a plank. His teeth clicked. He went limp. Ryn used the moment to step forward and smash the broken shield rim into the spear-woman's face. Bone gave. Blood went up, bright. She staggered and then recovered and then laughed, a short bark of sound like metal on stone.
Sereth's bow thrummed twice. Men behind her went down with arrows in the meat of their thighs. He wasn't killing all he could. He was making men slow.
The woman lunged at Ryn's face—not the shield this time, not the center, the face. He flinched, because men do, and she turned the lunging thrust into a feint and jabbed the butt into his ribs where the cut lived. Breath went out again, not as easy to call back now. Pain Gate damped the scream; his body screamed anyway. He grinned at her through a mouth that wanted to bite his own tongue, and said, "Hate knots, do you?" because sometimes words make the other man angry enough to get stupid.
Her eyes cooled. "No," she said. "I love them. I cut them in clean lines."
He believed her. He wondered if she had a name. He didn't ask.
She stepped in and Ryn stepped back and the rope across her ankles went taut again because he had fixed it while she had been educating his ribs. She cursed—first sound of true frustration—and slashed down, cut the line clean. Fine. He had other lines. He had lines under his hands and under his teeth and in the way the wood grain ran under his boots. He could keep this up until he couldn't.
Behind her, down the road, Garron's men had slowed. They were forming a wedge, a slow press that would eventually shove across the bridge and roll over the little nests of teeth Sereth had set and turn the fight into a narrow brawl with poor footing. Ryn did arithmetic in a breath. They did not have arrows to spare. They did not have knives to throw. They had a few jars of oil left, and the dry brush under the far bank wanted to tell a new story.
"Fire buys time," he said, a prayer and a curse. He flung an oil jar with his left hand, mostly fingers now because the strap around his forearm had let go and the shield hung heavy and wrong. The jar arced over the bridge. The spear-woman's eyes flicked to it. She did not move to catch it; she did not move to bat it aside. She stepped in, one foot forward, body tight, making herself a small storm in a larger one. The jar hit brush and exploded into wet flame. Heat leapt across the brook in a breath, grabbed the low grass. Smoke rose, brown at first, then black.
Men shouted and fell back because skin hates flame. Sereth put an arrow in a man's hamstring and another in a hand that reached for a burning jar like it would be cooler to toss it. Tamsin made two men bleed without them seeing her.
The spear-woman looked at the fire once with an expression of genuine regret, as if she had been given a problem a little childish for her hands, then she stepped in again and tried to take Ryn's throat with the spear point.
Ryn lifted his short sword and parried clumsily, iron on iron. The jolt up his arm made the old rope burns howl, and his hand almost dropped the hilt. He clenched until bone ground in fingers. The blade slipped, but the point went wide. He could not keep doing that. He didn't have the technique. He had lines.
He let go of the sword with his left hand and pulled the broken shield up and forward, using it as a lever more than a wall. He slammed the rim into the spear shaft and punched it out of true, then stepped into the woman with his shoulder and turned his body to push her off the plank where Sereth had half-sawed it. It bent. It complained. It held. Of course it held. She had chosen the right foot. He grunted something obscene under his breath about craftsmen who didn't understand customers.
Tamsin's second knife found the woman's upper arm and made a shallow cut. The woman swore without heat. "Cowards," she said, pleasant. "Sneaks." She swept her spear point low at the space Tamsin had occupied a blink before. It cut hair. Not skin.
A horn blew from the road behind Garron's men. Short, two notes. Signal. Men began to pull back in good order, some dragging wounded, some carrying nothing and looking ashamed. Garron did not step into view. He did not need to. The wedge unfurled. The spear-woman backed a half-step, then another, never taking her eyes off Ryn's hands. She smiled with her bloody mouth. "Next time," she said.
"Bring a better spear," Ryn said, showing teeth in a way that wasn't a smile.
"Bring a better road," she said, and then she was gone, stepping backward off the planks in three economical moves, then turned and limped with her men, all professional.
Sereth let his bow sag. He didn't straighten. He waited a count of ten before moving, because men sometimes pretend to leave and then like to be sly.
"They go to the weir," he said.
"Of course they do," Tamsin said. "They hate fun."
Ryn breathed, not steady. He tugged the line that had been cut and retied it with a new knot, this one ugly on purpose. He rubbed his ribs briefly with the heel of his hand and hissed. He did not look at Marla's absence on the road because her absence was now a thing with teeth and he had enough teeth to manage. He looked instead at the weir, low and gray and wet.
The System slid in with the indifferent affection of something that is very sure of itself.
[Experience gained: +28.]
[Improvised Bomb I — Progression 62%.]
[Hook-and-Break — Upgrade Available: Intermediate (requires practice under pressure x2).]
[Milestone: Defend non-combatants in motion (1/2). Minor Corruption cleanse.]
He felt something ease in his chest at "cleanse" and hated it. He did not want to be their idea of clean. He wanted to be a man whose hands did not shake now that the line had held for a minute. He shook them anyway. Then he lifted them and settled the shield back onto the strap, adjusting it and fixing the leather with a small nail and some profanity. He checked the buckler. He made small things right so the next big thing would have a chance to go wrong with permission rather than by surprise.
"Two hours bought," Sereth said, eyes on the smoke line in the distance. "Maybe less. He'll feed a man to the weir and then feel out your teeth again."
"Then we feed the weir something worse," Tamsin said. She had no poetry in her. Ryn liked that.
Ryn looked at the creek. The water was low, and where it ran over the weir it made a small music that did not care about men at all. He imagined oil on that slick, fire chasing down water like a story turned upside-down. He imagined ropes strung low and shallow to catch shins. He imagined a jar thrown at a man's chest, smashing not a face but a plan. He thought of the tollhouse and the cellar scratching and the brass whistle and the shard humming cool under skin.
He thought of the word that had popped up twice in his vision like a fish: Trapper. He thought of the other word, a rumor: Rook—field control. The System was keeping tallies of what he was. It would try to make him into a neat box. He could choose the box. He could also cram too much into it and break it.
He turned to Sereth and Tamsin. "We set lines. We hold here. After dark we move. The Guild will come hard when smoke stops and pretend they did the work. We'll be gone."
Tamsin snorted softly. "You don't pay, they call you thief. You pay, they call you stupid."
"Don't worry." Ryn bent to pick up a stone and placed it on the line where it would drop and make a sound he would recognize. "They'll come soon enough with papers."
Sereth eyed him. "You sound like a man who intends to keep his hands," he said.
Ryn flexed his fingers, felt the rope burn pull, watched the shard under his skin make a faint ghost under the film of grime. "I intend to keep them," he said. He did not add, for now.
On the road, smoke thinned. The sun slipped. The world's edges sharpened. Across the stream, something slithered under a mat of ivy and went quiet. Ryn set a line there, tight enough that his knuckles went white. The hum in his teeth lined up with the taut in the rope. It sounded, briefly, like Marla's laugh when a mule behaved. He closed his eyes and then opened them and checked the knot again.
Downstream, out of sight, the weir waited. Upstream, behind a bend, a tollhouse leaned with one hinge broken and a bar set against a door that would hold until a hand with patience and a hook came to tell it what kind of day it would have. The System breathed in his skull as if it shared his chest. He did not like sharing with it, but he could not put it down on a bench and walk away.
He stepped into his space, into his lines, into his ugly art, and let his hands make the small decisions they knew how to make. That was how you held off a tide. Not with better speeches. With rope. With wood. With the kind of stubborn that made men like Garron grind their teeth.
At dusk, a horn blew again, three notes now, from the weir. Tamsin's head tilted. Sereth lifted his bow and drew without thought. Ryn leaned on his rope and felt the line hum like a wire in wind, and he measured how much he cared for the man who would step on it.
Somewhere behind them, far up the road, under the tollhouse they had left, a thin scrabbling noise became a soft thump and then stilled, as if something had figured out a line it liked and then found out it didn't. The world is full of small victories. He would take them. He would take all of them.
He did not know yet that by the time the next horn blew, he would have to choose between a crate of coin and a boy with a broken ankle. He didn't know he'd choose the boy and then hate himself for wanting the coin anyway. For now, he set a line and waited.
The spear-woman limped into view at the weir, eyes bright in the failing light, and grinned like a wound. "Again," she called softly across the water.
"Again," Ryn said, and felt the system coil in his bones like a nod. Then the night came down between them and oil danced on water.