CHAPTER NINE

  -Today You Run

  Among the clans they say:

  A child is born twice: once from the mother’s blood, and once from the story that gives him his name.

  – Old clan proverb

  “The formation is intact,” he said slowly. “Feels the same as it has since you two showed up. No one’s broken it. But something pushed.”

  He looked up, not at the rafters themselves but through them, eyes following the invisible ring he’d tied around the forest.

  “…or someone.”

  Iye’s ears flattened. “They found you,” she said.

  “Who?” Chanyu asked.

  Neither of them answered. The knock at the door was polite. Three crisp raps. Not loud. Not hurried. The kind of knock a guest might use at a fine townhouse in a city. The kind of knock that didn’t belong in a cabin at the heart of a warded forest.

  The Hermit’s eyes closed for a single breath. When he opened them again, the softness Chanyu had begun to recognize over the last two years, the quiet amusement and the small flashes of approval, was gone. Something else looked out now. The same man, but with all the doors inside shut and barred.

  “Stay behind me,” he said.

  He crossed the room in three steps and lifted the bar from the door. The wood swung inward on a rush of cold.

  Six figures stood in a loose line across the yard, and a seventh was just drifting back to them, the one who had knocked on the door.

  They wore armor like the Hermit’s. Not identical; the marks etched on their breastplates were different, the curves of their pauldrons shaped to different shoulders, but the make was the same. The same forged care, the same deliberate weight.

  Each carried a different weapon. A spear whose head was dark as old blood. Twin curved blades that twitched in one man’s hands like restless birds. A long sword. A sword and shield. A staff capped in iron. A short, ugly axe.

  All of them wore the same mask. White skulls stared in at the cabin. Smooth bone. Blank eye sockets. Teeth bared in an endless grin. They looked like the death-marks painted on storm banners in steppe stories, only made solid in bone and leather and strapped over living faces. Chanyu’s mouth went dry. For a moment none of them spoke. The one in front tilted his head.

  “Hey, Aeterius,” he said.

  The words came in Zhanar, but not the way the guards or traders in the fort spoke it. Some vowels ran too long, some consonants snapped short, like a man who’d learned it far away and never bothered to smooth the edges.

  “Long time.” His voice had a young, bright edge to it, knife-sharp, like a blade nobody had bothered to polish. “Forgive my Zhanar. It’s been a while since I had reason to use it. But I thought I should, since you’ve been hiding out here so long. Do you still remember our mother tongue, or did you trade it for theirs too? I heard you crawled off to die somewhere. Didn’t think to look this far east. Or this deep in the dirt.”

  The name landed in Chanyu’s gut, hard. Aeterius.

  He looked at the Hermit. Until now, he’d only ever called him “Hermit” in jokes and muttered curses. Something inside him slotted into place with a sick little click.

  The Hermit didn’t answer. He stepped over the threshold and let the door fall most of the way shut behind him, so that only a slice of the yard showed. He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t call the visitors by any name.

  Inside the cabin, Iye’s fur rose.

  “I’m going to assume those are your friends,” she murmured. “Because if they’re enemies, we’re very underdressed.”

  The man in front spread his hands a little.

  “What?” he said. “No welcome? No ‘brothers, it’s been too long, come in out of the cold’? You really have forgotten your manners.”

  Another voice, older, from the back of the group.

  “It’s been a long time,” the older man said. “Let him have his little sulk. I’m more interested in how he stayed breathing this long.”

  Steel whispered against leather as someone shifted his grip. Chanyu’s heart hammered. His fingers twitched toward the practice blade propped against the wall and stopped. That piece of wood might as well have been a toy in front of those men.

  The Hermit, Aeterius, spoke at last.

  “How did you find me?” he asked.

  The one in front laughed softly.

  “Still a slowpoke, aren’t you?” he said. “The ‘how’ doesn’t matter. You were supposed to be a mark scratched off a ledger years ago. All that matters is you’re not. You’re here, at the edge of nowhere, acting like you’ve forgotten everything about home. And if this crooked little formation is your best work now, you really have lost your touch.”

  Iye’s claws bit into the wood of the shelf. Chanyu felt her power stir, the way it had when she’d healed him in the snow. The hairs on his arms rose.

  “I’m not part of you anymore,” the Hermit said. His voice went very soft. “If you value your lives, turn around. Walk out of this forest. Forget the way in.”

  The spear-bearer snorted.

  “Hear that?” he said. “Our old ghost thinks he can dismiss Roundtable. You taught half of us, remember?”

  “Roundtable,” Chanyu whispered. The word meant nothing and everything at once. He heard the shape of it. A circle. Men sitting at it. Deciding who lived and who didn’t.

  “Listen to yourself, Aeterius,” another said, a woman with a shield slung over her arm. “You vanish for years, leave a mess behind, and now you want to pretend we’re the ones in danger?”

  “You were good at hiding,” the first speaker went on. “I’ll give you that. But not good enough. We’re here, and you’ve run out of little holes to hide in. Game’s over, Aeterius. We found you.”

  Inside the cabin, Iye jumped down from the shelf.

  “Chanyu,” she said.

  Her voice had never sounded like that before. All the dry amusement was gone. There was a line in it now, pulled tight.

  The Hermit spoke without looking back.

  “You wanted to know how to get strong,” he said. “To be like me. To stand in front of death and say ‘not today.’”

  His shoulders set.

  “If you live long enough,” he said, “you say it more than once. You say it until your throat hurts. Every time you wake up afterwards, you’re a little more dangerous. A little less afraid.”

  He glanced over his shoulder. For the first time since Chanyu had known him, the look in his eyes was almost… gentle.

  “Today,” he said, “you don’t say it. Today you run.”

  Chanyu shook his head before he knew he meant to.

  “No,” he said. “I can help. I can—”

  “You’ll die,” the Hermit said. “That’s all you can do in that yard. I didn’t keep you breathing for two years so you could be a distraction that buys me half a heartbeat.”

  He turned his gaze to Iye.

  “Take him.”

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  Iye’s ears went flat. “You don’t get to command me, child,” she said.

  “Take him,” the Hermit said again.

  There was no flicker of shared history between them. Whatever passed in that heartbeat was happening right now: his refusal to move, her refusal to obey, both shoved up against something bigger coming down on the cabin.

  Iye hissed through her teeth, a sound like steam on hot stone. She looked at Chanyu.

  “This will hurt,” she said.

  “Wait—” he began.

  The world tore. If I leave now, I’ll never see him again, he thought, and the chance to choose vanished.

  He’d seen her change before. First in the snow, when she’d crawled out of a crack of green light as a woman-shaped thing, all river-ice hair and a face too smooth to be human. Later at the forest’s edge, when the formation had grabbed that floating, wrong-light body and squeezed it down into a neat, impossible cat.

  This wasn’t like either of those. Her outline blurred and stretched. Fur burned to light. Her eyes went from their usual ice blue to something deeper, an old green that belonged under mountains and at the bottom of rivers. She grew without growing, filling the cabin and somehow still fitting inside it.

  For a heartbeat he saw too many limbs and not enough, wings and claws and smoke and a woman’s face he half remembered from the pit, all laid over each other like someone had stacked different drawings on the same page.

  One of her hands, no paw, no claw, just something that could grab, closed on the front of his shirt.

  The formation cracked. He heard it like glass dropped from a height. Not with his ears at first, but in his teeth and his bones. Lines he’d never seen flared into visibility beyond the cabin walls, tracing a ring through the trees in sickly white-green fire. For a heartbeat the whole forest was a cage drawn in light.

  The lines shattered. The fire went out under an invisible breath. Cold rushed in. Outside, the trees shuddered, the whole forest rocking under unseen hands. Snow leapt from branches. The seven masked figures in the yard laughed.

  “There it is,” the spear-bearer said. “Told you he was hiding something in there.”

  The Hermit’s shoulders sagged a fraction.

  “I’ve spent years tying those bars,” he said quietly. “Seeing them torn down in an instant hurts more than it should.”

  “You shouldn’t have asked,” Iye said. Her voice came from everywhere at once now, humming through the boards, under his skin. “But here we are.”

  The next instant the cabin wasn’t around Chanyu anymore. The cabin stayed where it was; he was simply somewhere else. Wind slapped his face. A wall of rough wood and smoke smell exploded sideways as Iye slammed them through it. The world became shards of roof, flying snow, and a blur of black trunks. They weren’t high enough to clear the trees. Branches whipped at them, close enough to rake his boots, his legs, his shoulders.

  They skimmed just above the ground, too fast to be running and too low to be flying.

  “Stop!” he shouted. “We can’t just leave him!”

  Iye’s grip tightened until the fabric at his chest creaked.

  “You can’t just die with him,” she said. “Close your eyes.”

  “No,” he rasped. “You can help him. Please. Help him.”

  “I can’t,” Iye said. “I don’t get to kill people just because I want to. Close your eyes.”

  He tried. The air clawed at them. The world was a smear of white and black and cold. He looked anyway. Through gaps in the branches he saw the clearing with the cabin shrinking behind them.

  The seven skull-masks spread out across the yard, weapons lifting. The Hermit walked forward to meet them with empty hands. His hand flicked, and a blade that hadn’t been there a heartbeat before flashed in the winter light. He hit the first skull like a falling star. The sound reached them a moment late. Steel on steel, steel on bone, the hollow crack of someone slamming into the cabin wall. One of the masks went down and didn’t get up.

  “See?” Chanyu gasped. “He can—”

  “Count,” Iye said. “Six.” She was breathing hard. He’d never heard her do that.

  Another clash. Another skull-mask reeled back, armor dented. The spear swept low. The Hermit leaped, rolled, came up behind the shield-woman and drove a narrow dagger into the gap under her arm. She spasmed and dropped.

  “Five,” Iye said. Her voice shook.

  The world tilted. The broken edges of the formation scraped against them like invisible glass. Her free arm, wing or whatever it was, flickered in and out of shape as she tried to shield him from it. Chanyu twisted in her grip.

  Two of the Roundtable had broken off. He saw them now at the edge of the clearing, already driving forward at a dead sprint, skull faces turning toward the streak of impossible green light tearing between the trees. Toward them. They were keeping pace with Iye. That shouldn’t have been possible.

  “They’re coming,” he said.

  “I know,” Iye snarled.

  Branches exploded around them as a spear whistled past, close enough that he felt the air move against his cheek. It hit a tree ahead and sank deep, humming.

  “Drop him!” a voice shouted from behind, carried thinly on the wind. “Just kill them both!”

  “I’d like to see you try,” Iye hissed.

  Something flickered at the edge of his vision. The one with the twin blades lifted his empty hand and cut it through the air, fingers tracing a quick shape that tugged at a memory of the way the Hermit lit the hearth-fire.

  Iye twisted in the air. The world spun. For a moment Chanyu saw nothing but sky, a flat pale strip between the treetops. Whatever was holding her up failed. They fell. The impact drove the breath from his lungs. Snow and dirt blasted up around them. Iye took the worst of it, her body between him and the ground. They plowed through a screen of brush and slid down into a shallow ravine half-choked with rocks and deadfall.

  The trees closed tight overhead. The sky was a thin strip of gray. Iye pushed herself up. She was smaller now, forced back down into something he could almost understand, but it wasn’t the neat cat-body he’d grown used to. Her fur was patchy where it flickered into bare skin. Her outline frayed at the edges. Light leaked from her eyes in thin green threads.

  “You all right?” she asked, sounding breathless.

  “No,” he said. “Are you?”

  She laughed once, short and sharp. “I’ve had better days.”

  Footsteps pounded above them. Snow slid from the lip of the ravine as two figures in white skull masks appeared, outlined against the strip of sky. One had the spear. The other carried the twin blades.

  “There,” the spear-man said. “They dropped into the ravine. They hit hard.”

  “Good,” the knife-man said. “Look at her. She’s already burning herself out. We just have to clean up what’s left.”

  He dropped lightly down the slope.

  Chanyu scrambled to his feet, hands empty. The practice blade lay somewhere back in the cabin. Out here he had… nothing. His fists. His teeth. The way the Hermit had taught him to move.

  Run, the Hermit had said. He didn’t. Iye was still twitching in the snow, her shape fraying at the edges. Chanyu stepped between her and the descending men and lifted his hands.

  “This is very stupid,” Iye said behind him.

  “So why does it feel right?” he said.

  The knife-man moved. For a few heartbeats, training held. Chanyu slid inside the first cut by inches, feeling the wind of it kiss his throat. He stepped in on instinct and slammed his shoulder into the knife-man’s chest the way the Hermit had drilled into him on a dozen bruising afternoons. For one glorious instant, the man staggered.

  Chanyu’s heel struck something solid. A broken branch from some tree they’d crashed through. He snatched it up without thinking, the weight rough in his hands, all wrong, but still a stick, still a line he could swing. He brought it up just in time to knock aside the next slash.

  The man recovered. Chanyu wasn’t fast enough. He wasn’t strong enough. He hadn’t had enough years. The makeshift staff jarred his arms numb. Steel kissed his side. His world narrowed to pain and snow and the white leer of a skull-mask leaning close.

  “Brave,” the knife-man said. “Pointless, but brave.”

  Something roared. Iye hit them like a storm. Her half-held form blew apart. For a heartbeat she was huge again, too much light and too many angles to look at directly. Her claws, hands or whatever they were, swept through the ravine. One of the knives went spinning away, ringing against stone. The spear-man shouted and crashed back against a tree.

  The forest itself seemed to cry out. The last tatters of the formation tore free. Whatever had been choking her shape for two years gave way with a shudder that made Chanyu’s bones ache. Power flooded out. It was too much. Iye staggered, reeling under a blow he couldn’t see. Light bled from her eyes, her mouth, the cracks opening along her skin. She slashed blindly at the skull-masks, forcing them back.

  “Run,” she rasped.

  Chanyu couldn’t feel his legs properly. He didn’t know if the wet warmth on his belly was his blood or someone else’s.

  “I’m not leaving you,” he said.

  “Now you decide you’re stubborn,” she muttered.

  The spear punched through her. It came from the side, a clean, practiced thrust that slid between ribs. For a second it looked almost gentle, like someone had leaned a stick against her. Then the barbed head burst from her back in a spray of light and something darker. She gasped.

  Chanyu screamed something wordless and threw himself at the man holding the haft. He never reached him. Cold speared into his own chest. Not from steel he could see, but from something that slid between his ribs and stole his breath from the inside. The world tilted. He hit the ground on his back. Above him, the ravine’s lip was a ragged line. Snowflakes drifted down, lazy things, utterly indifferent.

  Iye lurched, grabbed the spear with both hands, and pulled. The wood cracked. The man on the other end shouted. She twisted, driving what remained of the shaft deeper into herself to drag the masked face close, close enough that he had to look into her eyes.

  “Looks like today’s the day you meet your maker,” she whispered.

  The air around her flared green, so bright it hurt. The man shrieked. When Chanyu’s vision cleared, his mask hung empty on the broken spear. Whatever had been inside it was… gone.

  The other warrior dragged himself up the slope, scrambling away on hands and knees, leaving a smear of red on the snow.

  Iye sagged. Her gaze found Chanyu.

  “Looks like ‘not today’ ran out,” she said hoarsely. “For both of us.”

  He tried to answer. Blood bubbled in his throat instead. She crawled toward him, leaving streaks of light and red on the ground. Bits of her were already coming apart, thin shreds of green drifting up instead of falling, like ash that had forgotten how to go down. He felt her hand on his face, a feverish chill that burned and froze together.

  “Listen,” she said.

  The sounds of battle from the cabin were faint now. Steel on steel. Shouts. The crunch of something heavy hitting the earth. A roar that might have been the Hermit, or Aeterius, or the forest itself finally breaking.

  Her fingers pressed against his chest, over his heart. Light spilled from her into him, the same wrong green that had pulled his blood backward in the pit. For a moment it tried to do it again, to drag him back toward the living. It stuttered, faltered, failed to catch.

  “I can’t pull you back this time,” she breathed. “Stupid boy. You were supposed to run.”

  Something in him tore free. It wasn’t like before. Not the slow slide into dark in the pit, not the way his blood had crawled backward under her hands. This was sudden, knife-sharp, like stepping through a door he hadn’t known was there.

  For a heartbeat he saw himself from above. A boy sprawled in a ravine, eyes wide, mouth red. A dying spirit hunched over him. A broken spear. Snow. Then darkness rushed up, eager.

  Words blinked into it, thin pale scratches in glass:

  [Skill: Practicing Death]

  [Second passage recorded.]

  They weren’t in any language he knew, not truly, but he understood them the way a man understood falling. His last thought before it took him wasn’t a prayer, wasn’t a curse. It was the Hermit’s voice.

  Today you run.

  Not today, Chanyu thought. Not today. Not today. Not today. The words beat time with his fading pulse.

  The world went out.

  Somewhere behind the dark, the forest burned, and a man named Aeterius stood or fell alone.