The Mountain Ambush

  They were well into their fourteenth year now—three years of drills and bruises had burned away the softness of childhood. Lean muscle corded their arms, and though none had reached their full height, their eyes carried the wary sharpness of seasoned trainees. They were not yet warriors, but neither were they children.

  The bruises from the wolf hunt had long faded, but the scars of first battle remained. They moved like old men until the drillmaster barked them into shape, and then like kids pretending they weren’t hurt. Steel rang on steel, breath steamed in the chill, and the training yard filled with the familiar litany: feet, guard, eyes; again.

  Garrick’s claymore traced slow arcs at first, the big blade a pendulum he could ride without tearing something newly tender. Freyda circled him with her shield up, flicking her rim against the claymore’s edge whenever he drifted.

  “You’re overreaching,” she said.

  “You’re nagging,” he said.

  “Which will you fix first?” Freyda retorted.

  “Whichever ends you talking.” Garrick quipped.

  She drove her shield into his chest hard enough to make his boots scrape the frost. He grunted, set, and knocked her away with the flat of his claymore. It wasn’t anger. It was the only language the yard respected.

  Vaelen watched from an angle, stepping in whenever a blow sought Garrick’s ribs, intercepting with his half-shield like an insult returned. “Eyes,” he said once, no heat, just the warning, when Garrick glanced away to see whether Freyda was smiling. She was. Garrick wasn’t.

  Across the yard, Thane faced a low brazier and a stack of candles. The mage-tutor, an older woman with a voice like a rusted hinge, pointed at the candles and said, “Light one. Leave the others alone. If you scorch my hair again, I am telling the kitchen to feed you water and regret.”

  Thane swallowed. He drew in the form like a diagram: breath, syllable, will. A wick flared, pleased with itself. The candle beside it tried to join the party. Thane pinched his fingers closed and killed that second flame like taking a moth.

  “Better,” the tutor said. “Again.”

  He lit one. He unlit the next when it misbehaved. Sweat gathered at his temples despite the cold. He could feel the shape of bigger spells in his ribs now, like a cough building.

  “Not yet,” he told his own hands under his breath.

  On the far wall, Bruni knelt at a shallow basin with Saint Malty laid across her lap. The chapel-steward had given her a task that mattered and didn’t involve anyone drinking: bless water for the infirmary cots. She set three sprigs of winter mint on the lip of the basin, tapped the hammer’s haft twice on stone (tap, circle, breath), and murmured the little prayer she’d discovered in herself while out on the mountain.

  “Hold with me,” she whispered. It wasn’t the words so much as the way she meant them. Heat gathered, the clean kind, and the water settled from surface tremble to glass.

  The chapel-steward nodded. “Good. A blessing is a boundary. You keep the cold out so the body can do its work. Don’t expect miracles. Expect steadiness.”

  Bruni smiled without looking up. “Steady I can do.”

  By midday the yard had them together again for formations. The trainers pushed them into fours and sixes and eights, snapped them through maneuver calls until their lungs burned.

  Garrick and Freyda anchored one end and made that end loud. Vaelen refused to take his eyes off Garrick for more than a heartbeat, earning him a lecture he didn’t hear. Bruni kept the line honest by driving anyone who lagged back into place with the haft of Saint Malty. Tylane shot at straw men as the line advanced, then slid his bow.

  Arrows thumped the targets with a rhythm that felt like a better heartbeat.

  The switch to steel was uglier. The recruits were getting better at ugly.

  When the shadows cut long across the yard, the bell rang for mess, and they limped toward warmth.

  The hall was packed and loud enough to make thought optional. Trays rattled, elbows jostled. The smell of stew and bread swallowed all complaints. They slid onto their usual bench with the weariness of people who knew they’d earned the seat.

  At the far end, the Guild’s quartermaster rang a spoon against a pitcher. “Orders,” he said flatly. “Beast packs in the northern spurs are taking caravans and shepherds. The Argent roads must be cleared. Three trainee parties will each be assigned a senior ranger as guide and safety net. You will cull, not chase. You will be back inside ten days. You leave at first light.”

  The hall breathed, a sound like a held breath finally released. Someone whispered, “They’re using us to draw the teeth.” Another: “Then don’t get bit.”

  The druid drifted toward the quartermaster like a shadow deciding to move. He spoke a single sentence too soft for the recruits to hear. Whatever it was, it made the quartermaster’s face go still. The druid stepped back without another word, and the hall felt tighter for it.

  Assignments followed. Names read like bread portions. Their senior ranger would be Mera, scarred, spare, and built for mountains. “Keep them breathing,” the quartermaster told her. “If you bring me dead children, I’ll send you back for the ones who killed them.”

  That got a brittle laugh from all but Mera.

  When dismissed, the six returned to their shared bunk room.

  The air felt tight the way it always was before a march, full of boots creaking and buckles clinking. Garrick sharpened too late, the rasp of steel against stone steady as breath. Freyda sat on her bed, tightening her braid until it tugged at the skin around her eyes. Bruni fussed with rolls of cloth, tucking the blessed strips into her belt. Vaelen checked Garrick’s kit piece by piece as if Garrick couldn’t be trusted. Garrick pretended not to notice.

  Thane lit a candle with a whisper. The wick flared; the second stayed dead this time. He looked proud for a blink and then guilty for it.

  Tylane lay flat on his back, staring at the rafters. The dream came on like it always did: black edges, a weight in the chest, the jaguar circling a serpent in silence. This time the cat turned its head toward him. The ember eyes found him. “Soon,” they seemed to say.

  He woke hard, skull cracking the bunk above.

  “Ow,” Thane muttered from the top bunk. “My dreams don’t hit back.”

  “Lucky,” Tylane said.

  Bruni leaned up on one elbow. “Cat again?”

  “He’s closer every time,” Tylane admitted. “Closer than he should be.”

  Freyda pulled the strap of her shield tighter and said, “If he’s close enough to bite, point him at the right people.”

  “I don’t point him,” Tylane said.

  “Then ask nicely,” she said.

  The room settled into silence again. Some slept. Some didn’t. In the dark, the six of them lay close enough to hear each other breathe, each waiting for first light and the mountain waiting beyond it.

  Lady Ironclad’s voice echoed in Garrick’s memory: “Form before fury.” She had drilled it into him in their yard back home, making him repeat it until his arms ached. Now, as steel rang in the night, Garrick set his stance. At last he understood what she had meant.

  The party left the safety of stone walls and warm lamplight at dawn, boots biting into the mountain path as it snaked under pine and frost. The Guild had split the recruits into three hunting parties with a veteran scout assigned to each. The brief was simple: find and cull the beast packs that had been preying on caravans. Simple never meant easy.

  Garrick walked point with the scout, cloak pinned back, claymore wrapped in oilcloth across his shoulder. Freyda kept pace at his side, shield slung, hair in a tight braid that said she was done pretending this was just practice. Vaelen shadowed Garrick like a second cloak, a half-shield riding his arm, eyes steady and hard. Bruni trudged behind them, Saint Malty, her consecrated hammer held like a promise. Tylane moved lightly, bow in hand, gaze always one ridge ahead. Thane brought up the rear with a staff that looked too long for him and a book that never left his satchel.

  By dusk, the pine trees thinned onto a rocky shelf with enough wind to keep the mosquitoes down. They made a fire tight and low behind a break of stone. The other two recruit parties camped within shouting distance on the same shelf, three islands of orange light in a blue mountain night.

  They ate in the way hungry teenagers eat: quietly, focused, wolfing bread and salted meat like they’d steal from their own hands. The scout, a scarred woman who gave her name as Mera and nothing else, checked the perimeter twice, spat once into the wind, and said, “No singing. No stories. Keep your boots on.”

  “Comforting,” Freyda muttered.

  “Don’t need comforting,” Garrick said. “Just vigilance.”

  “Vigilance?” She smirked. “Is that the part where you pretend you’re not terrified so the rest of us will be inspired?”

  “It’s working,” he said.

  “It’s annoying,” she said.

  “You’re welcome,” Garrick condescended.

  Vaelen scooted his bedroll closer to Garrick’s without comment. Bruni huffed a laugh and didn’t say a word about it. Thane, unable to help himself, cracked his book open and traced a finger over a diagram until Mera snapped it shut with two fingers and a look.

  “Eyes up. Ears open.”

  Tylane didn’t sit. He stood at the edge of the firelight, facing the dark like it was a thing he meant to meet halfway. He hadn’t meant to speak at all, but the words slipped out, small and odd. “He’s closer tonight.”

  “Who is?” Freyda asked, mouth full.

  “The jaguar,” Tylane said. “From the dreams.”

  Bruni swallowed. “Omen cat. Fine. If it shows up, someone feed it your boots.”

  “I sleep with my boots on,” Tylane said.

  “Right; your face then,” Bruni mused.

  They settled in uneasy pairs, blades within reach. The wind changed. Somewhere below, rock clicked against rock. Mera’s head came up like a hound’s. She stood and killed the fire with a boot.

  “Up,” she whispered. “All of you. Now.”

  Silence stretched thin.

  It snapped with the hiss of an arrow.

  Mera moved first, shoulder-checking Garrick to the ground as a shaft hissed through where his throat had been. A shout broke in the darkness, then two more, far to the left, where one of the other recruit parties had made camp.

  Bandits flowed out of the dark like water, lean men in piecemeal armor, faces wrapped in cloth. Their knives were the mean kind, short and fast, made for work that didn’t need to be clean.

  Garrick rolled and came up in a crouch, ripping the oilcloth off the claymore. Freyda stepped into a shield stance, planting her heel against rock. Vaelen interposed himself in front of Garrick without being asked.

  “Finally,” Freyda said, eyes alight.

  “Try not to enjoy this,” Garrick said.

  “I’ll try not to enjoy your instruction,” she shot back, and bashed the first bandit to reach her in the teeth with the rim of her shield.

  The two forces crashed together.

  It was nothing like drills. The dark was a living thing, wind dragged smoke and grit across their eyes, and the only orders were the ones you shouted and couldn’t hear. Bruni met a knife man with Saint Malty in a rising arc that snapped his arm like kindling, then drove the hammer head into his sternum with a cry that wasn’t a cry at all but a guttural prayer.

  “Saint Malty, hold!”

  Bone gave way before Saint Malty. The knife man went down and didn’t get back up.

  Tylane dropped two men in quick succession, two arrows, two choked grunts and then the press was too close. He slung the bow and pulled steel in one motion, twin blades swinging freely. They felt right. He stepped inside a clumsy swing and used one blade to divert and the other to open a man’s throat. Warmth sprayed his cheek. The man looked surprised, then folded. Tylane blinked hard, stepping through, blades finding more work.

  Thane’s heart was a hammer. He scrabbled for the words Mera never let him say aloud and found them anyway. The first bandit who leaped over the embers toward him took a bolt of force to the chest that punched him back into the dark like he’d been yanked on a rope. Thane stared at his own hand. "I...”

  “Again!” Bruni barked, not looking at Thane.

  Thane complied. Three darts of glowing force burst from his palm without asking permission and sought three different chests with unnerving hunger. Three impacts, three bodies stumbling, swearing, falling. The old book hadn’t lied: magic found its mark whether you did or not.

  The leftmost camp screamed. A different voice answered, low, savage, older. Not a recruit. The strongest and meanest of their assigned veterans had decided to live. That party would, too, if they kept near him.

  Mera moved like the blade she wielded. She cut a man behind the knee and shoved him off the shelf before his scream got his breath. “Hold the center!”

  “Which center?” Freyda said, parrying and bashing.

  “The one with me in it,” Garrick said, stepping past her to take the weight of three at once. He swung too big because the claymore only swung big, and the nearest bandit flinched from the gale of it, buying Vaelen time to ram a shield edge into a throat.

  “Stay behind me,” Vaelen said.

  Garrick smiled without humor. “Try the others.”

  “I’m watching you,” Vaelen said. “They can watch themselves.”

  “Remind me to lecture you on chivalry after I live,” Freyda said. “Or never.”

  “Never is good,” Garrick grunted, and cut a man from collar to belt.

  The bandits didn’t break. They wheeled and came in again, steady, practiced. They didn’t expect resistance this stiff from kids; it made them angrier.

  Someone in the dark shouted, “Take the tall one!” and three men surged at Garrick at once. Vaelen met them with shield and blade, taking a slash across his forearm that opened him from wrist to elbow, hot and slick.

  Garrick shoved Vaelen back with a snarl. “Drop your guard again for my sake and I’ll...”

  “Die more nobly?” Freyda said, knocking one off the ledge with a shield punch. “We’re outnumbered, you two bicker after.”

  “After what?” Garrick said.

  “After we kill them,” she said, and grinned like she meant it.

  Tylane felt it before he heard it: a pressure in his teeth, a weight in the air like thunder where there was no storm. The dream had been a thin thing, smoke and suggestion. This was a weight that pressed his lungs and sharpened his eyes.

  He pivoted toward the dark beyond the bandits. “Now,” he whispered, without knowing what he was calling, or who.

  The line in front of them bent. Something big and black moved through men like tall grass. A bandit went up and did not come down with the same number of parts.

  A jaguar burst into the firelight, a slab of muscle with eyes that caught flame and made it their own. Duskmaw. His name wasn’t spoken so much as understood the way heat is understood by skin.

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  Tylane’s father’s hunting words burned in him: “A predator never blinks. If you blink, you’re prey.” Tylane held the jaguar’s gaze as it tore through the bandits. Duskmaw blinked once, slow, deliberate, and in that moment, Tylane knew they were bound.

  Bandits recoiled, even the brave ones. Duskmaw didn’t roar; he hit low, tore, and kept moving. A man’s leg went from attached to not. Another man stared down at his opened belly like it had betrayed him.

  “Who brought a cat?” Freyda said, startled into laughter she didn’t mean to make.

  “He brought himself,” Tylane said, and stepped toward the jaguar without meaning to.

  “Don’t you dare,” Bruni snapped, catching his sleeve.

  But Duskmaw was already with them, a living current that severed pressure and let them breathe. He raked one man off Garrick’s back with a casual cruelty that spoke of the wild, then pivoted, mouth red, hunting for the next threat to the boy with two swords. He found one. The bandit chief, a thick-shouldered brute with a scar like a river, stepped forward to meet the cat with a boar spear and a scream.

  Duskmaw took the spear head in his shoulder and bit the chief’s hand off. The chief fell, swinging a knife with his remaining hand, getting a cut in deep behind the cat’s ear. Duskmaw tore out the chief’s throat a heartbeat later then stood over him, panting.

  “Tylane!” Garrick yelled. “Do something about your cat!”

  “He’s not...” Tylane started, then stopped, because the truth didn’t care what he called it. He whistled once a short, sharp, unknown to him until he made the sound. Duskmaw’s head snapped toward him. The cat bared his teeth. Then he stepped sideways and put himself between Tylane and the next man who thought bravery would save his friends.

  Bruni, breathing in gasps, planted her boots over a bleeding recruit from the other camp and set Saint Malty across his chest like a bar. “Saint Malty,” she said, and the word might have been a name or a prayer, “hold with me.”

  It wasn’t healing. Not yet. But when the bandit reached for that wounded boy, Bruni brought the hammer down on his reaching hand and drove him to the stone, then down again to send him away from the world that required hands at all.

  At the edge of the shelf, the third camp was a mess of shapes and panic. One of their veterans, broad, bald, scarred like a plowed field; was reaping with a halberd, keeping his children alive by will and reach. They would survive because he had decided they would. The other veteran, lean and mean as Mera but older, stood on a rock and threw knives into eyes without missing. Those two parties staggered back toward their veterans and then held here, clinging to the two strongest shapes in the night.

  The press changed. The line of bandits wobbled, broken by cat and claymore and the ugly arithmetic of bodies. The ones with nerve left took a last run at the recruits, and the ones without slipped back into the pines the way rats slip under walls.

  A final knot of five broke for them, desperate, all knives, all hate. Freyda kicked one in the knee and cut him as he fell. Garrick took a second and a third with an unorthodox two-step that would have gotten him yelled at on the practice yard yet saved him here. Vaelen took the fourth and almost paid for it; his shield caught on a rock, his footing faltered, and the man’s knife opened Vaelen’s hip. The fifth made straight for Thane, who fumbled his staff, went to his knees, and reached for the only spell left in his ribs.

  He didn’t so much speak Burning Hands as cough it like a fever. Fire leapt from his fingers in a broad fan that turned the last man into a moving torch. The smell hit them all at once. Someone gagged. Thane’s mouth took the shape of a scream without making a sound and he curled his hands in against himself like they were things with which he couldn’t be trusted.

  Then it was suddenly quiet in that cruel way fights end. The wind was back, nudging smoke and the thin sounds of the wounded.

  Garrick stood very still with his sword tip buried in the rock. He looked a little taller and a little older. Freyda lowered her shield and exhaled like it hurt. Vaelen let his shield arm drop and only then noticed he was bleeding badly, the steady patter of it making a dark stipple on the stone at his feet.

  Duskmaw stood, a shadow rimmed in firelight, and watched the dark for more threats. He didn’t look at them like people. He looked at the Circle as if the only reason they still breathed was because he’d decided it so.

  Tylane approached until the cat’s breath brushed his hands. He didn’t reach. He didn’t dare. He just stood there and made the small sound again, the whistle that had hooked the cat out of a river in his dreams. Duskmaw’s ears twitched. The jaguar leaned forward and bumped his forehead once against Tylane’s knuckles, a gesture so small it barely happened, and then sat with a grunt as if to say: fine, this is the place I am now.

  “Right,” Freyda said hoarsely. “We have a cat.”

  “He has us,” Bruni corrected, and knelt next to Vaelen.

  She pressed her palm to the worst of Vaelen’s wounds and felt nothing at first but heat and slickness. She closed her eyes and did what she knew: made the motions she always made when she brewed, circle, tap, breath, except the circle was air, the tap was Saint Malty’s haft against stone, and the breath was a word she’d never said like she meant it. “Hold with me,” she whispered again. “Saint Malty, hold.”

  Heat gathered under her hand. Not fire, never fire, but warmth, a hearth’s worth, the sense of a door shut against the wind.

  Vaelen hissed and then, his breath evened, his shoulders loosened.

  When Bruni moved her hand, the ugly open red slash had lost its edge; flesh knit a little, blood slowed to a stubborn ooze.

  “I… I did it,” she said, and then, to the hammer, almost laughing, “We did it.”

  Garrick stared at his own hands like there was something on them he couldn’t see. He pressed one, tentatively, to a tear in Freyda’s shoulder where a knife had gone wrong. “I’m not sure this...”

  “Try it,” Freyda said, meeting his eyes. “Quit thinking…for once.”

  He put his palm there and reached for something he’d only ever heard about in quiet talks with elders, light without fire, strength without blade. It was clumsy and stubborn. It came anyway.

  Freyda sucked in air and blinked, testing her arm. “Huh.”

  Garrick smiled, surprised. “Huh?”

  Vaelen, bleeding less now, pressed his hand to his own hip, jaw clenched. He didn’t ask anyone permission for grace. He took it like it was his. It came like it had been waiting for him, and he stood straighter.

  Thane couldn’t stop shaking. He held his hands out to the cold air like he could rinse them in it.

  “You’re alive,” Bruni said. “So are we. And so is he,” she added, glancing at Tylane with the great cat at his side. “That’s the math I’m drinking to.”

  Garrick looked toward the two other camps. The veteran with the halberd was still standing, breathing like a bellows, his recruits huddled around him, too dazed to cry. The knife-thrower had her people in a tight knot, counting heads with her fingers, face too tired to read. They’d survived because their strongest had decided to keep breathing and made the world comply. The kids in the middle of those circles had blood on them that wasn’t theirs and the empty look of people who understood something they didn’t want.

  “Name your Circle,” Mera said, voice rough. “Who’s yours?”

  “Garrick,” he answered, lifting his head. “Freyda. Vaelen. Bruni. Tylane. Thane.”

  “And the cat,” Freyda added.

  Mera looked at Duskmaw for a long second. “Fine. The cat.”

  They bound what they could, tore strips from cloaks, packed cuts with clean moss from under the windbreak. Bruni moved like a small storm, touch sure and more than touch now. Garrick and Vaelen worked down the line of their own, hands awkward, faces solemn, learning the exact weight of what it meant to give anything back to a body.

  When it was done as far as it could be done, when the wind had taken the worst of the stink away and the stars had come back out, Garrick sheathed his sword and looked at the jaguar.

  “We don’t have extra rations,” he said, because there were things you said when you were pretending to be normal again.

  “I’ll hunt,” Tylane said.

  “He’ll hunt,” Freyda corrected, nodding at Duskmaw.

  The cat yawned, huge, and lay down across Tylane’s boots.

  Bruni leaned Saint Malty against her shoulder and wiped a line of blood from her cheek with the heel of her hand. “First fight with people,” she said softly.

  “And not our last,” Garrick said.

  “Keep the boots on,” Mera said. “We’ll move at first light.”

  Freyda nudged Garrick with her shield as she passed, too tired to smile and doing it anyway. “Next time you tell me not to enjoy myself, try doing it without getting stabbed.”

  “Next time you listen, try doing it while you’re listening,” he responded.

  “I can’t hear you over all your nobility,” Freyda said, cupping one hand to her ear.

  “Then stay behind it,” Garrick chided.

  “Not a chance,” Freyda assured him.

  Vaelen watched them and said nothing. His eyes kept the edge they’d had all night, and he stood just close enough to Garrick’s shoulder to count as a wall.

  Thane lay down and stared at his hands until his eyes burned. He didn’t know yet how to carry the weight of burning a man and being glad he’d done it. He would learn, because people did.

  Tylane didn’t sleep. He sat with his back to the cat and the cat’s heat at his spine, eyes on the dark where men had come from, ears tuned to every click of stone. In the space where dreams used to live, there was only breath, slow and deep, a rhythm that wasn’t his, and the sudden, absolute knowledge that whatever line had separated the two of them was gone now.

  Duskmaw flicked an ear in Tylane’s hair and rumbled once. The sound settled a part of him that training never could.

  The mountain night moved on. Three small campfires burned. The living lived. The dead waited for morning.

  For the first time since the six had set foot in the Guild and the bleeding began, they stopped it—Bruni with Saint Malty, Garrick and Vaelen with hands that knew how to hurt and now learned how to help. It didn’t make them whole. It made them ready to try again.

  The mountain shelf stank of iron and smoke when dawn finally scraped its way over the ridge line. The dead still lay where they had fallen: bandits, and a few recruits from the other circles, frozen in the positions of their last choices. The living moved among them with the stunned quiet of people who hadn’t yet decided what the night had taken from them. if they’d lived or only delayed dying.

  The Circle sat together at the edge of the camp, boots muddy, weapons slack across their knees. No one wanted to speak first.

  It was Bruni who broke the silence, wiping her hammer with a strip of cloth so torn it could barely hold the blood she scrubbed away. “We did more than swing,” she said at last. “We healed.”

  Freyda pulled the strap of her shield tighter. “Don’t know if I’d call it healing. Garrick fumbled at my shoulder until it hurt less.”

  “It worked,” Garrick muttered. “Didn’t it?”

  She rolled the shoulder, winced, then shrugged. “Fine. It worked.”

  Garrick looked at his hand, still flexing the fingers like he couldn’t believe what they had done.

  Vaelen too had a new steadiness about him, his wound sealed enough to walk without the limp he’d earned. He caught Garrick’s glance and nodded once, a grim acknowledgment that whatever had happened on the mountain was no fluke.

  Thane hadn’t lifted his eyes. His hands shook when he held them out, and when he pressed them to his chest, he whispered, “I burned a man alive.”

  “You saved us,” Bruni said, matter-of-factually.

  “I burned him,” Thane repeated. “The smell.....” His words broke off.

  “Then remember it,” Bruni said. “And next time, aim the fire sooner so none of us die before the stink comes.”

  That got a rough laugh from Freyda, a startled one from Garrick. Even Thane let out a small, guilty sound that might one day grow into humor.

  Duskmaw sat beside Tylane like a shadow stitched into the light. His head rested low, breath steady, the cut behind his ear clotted and drying. No one had dared approach him in daylight until now.

  Garrick eyed the cat like it was another weapon they hadn’t chosen.

  “We keeping him, then?” he asked.

  “He’s keeping us,” Tylane said simply. He brushed the cat’s shoulder with the back of his hand. Duskmaw didn’t flinch. He leaned into it with the weight of belonging.

  “Good,” Bruni said. “First thing that makes sense in days.”

  The march back to the Guild was slow. The two other trainee parties limped alongside them, propped up by their veterans. Many were wounded, some badly. They looked hollow-eyed, shamed and grateful all at once. One recruit, no older than Tylane, had succumbed to his wounds during the night, and his body was carried in silence on a litter.

  When the gates of the Guildhall opened, the courtyard stilled. Trainers, quartermasters, even kitchen boys froze at the sight: six battered recruits… and a jaguar at their side.

  Behind them, the other two trainee parties limped through the gates with their senior rangers. Fewer faces than had left. Rangers called names, counting who had made it back and who hadn’t. No one raised their voice. Loss was measured in silence.

  Waiting at the edge of the yard stood the Guild’s favored party. Whole. Unscarred. They had been kept back on “reserve duty,” tasked with drills and guard shifts inside the walls, while others went north to cull the beasts. The Guild had thought it safer to preserve their promise.

  Now they watched, silent and stiff, as the Circle staggered home with a beast of their own.

  Whispers rippled like a sudden gust of wind. “Is it real?” “Did they summon it?” Even the favored six shifted uneasily, caught between envy and awe.

  Duskmaw padded forward without fear, golden eyes sweeping the courtyard. He moved like he belonged, and no one dared block his way. The Circle followed in his shadow, their place among the recruits altered in an instant.

  In the infirmary, the healers worked quickly. Most wounds were seen to, though the scars would stay. The six, though, had already started to change themselves.

  A priest with ink-stained fingers paused over Bruni’s bandaged palm. “You’ve touched the Source,” he said quietly. “Without symbol. Without sanction.”

  Bruni bristled. “I asked the Brewfather to hold with me. He did.”

  “The Brewfather,” the priest repeated, weighing the words. “Goram Brassmantle?” He drew a small bronze token from his pouch—etched with a foaming tankard circled by four barley stalks—and pressed it into her hand. “Carry his mark, then. A blessing is a boundary. You keep the cold out so the body can do its work. Don’t expect miracles. Expect steadiness.”

  Bruni closed her fist around the token and nodded once. “Steady I can do.” Saint Malty, her grandfather’s sacred hammer, rested across her knees like a benediction.

  Across the room, Garrick and Vaelen were given pendants of silver, each bearing an open hand holding a beam of light, the sign of Aurelion, the Hand of Truth. “Symbols of your vows,” the priest said. “When you are ready to speak them.”

  Garrick bowed his head solemnly. Vaelen closed his fist over the pendant and did not open it again.

  Tylane was last. To him, the priest offered a plain medallion of steel. “For when you choose,” he said. “Not every ranger walks with Isera, the Verdant Watcher, but many who dream of jaguars find their way to her. Keep it until you name your truth.”

  Tylane turned the medallion over once, thoughtful, and slid it into his pocket.

  Freyda received a symbol she hadn’t asked for, a small stamped plate offered with the same steady hand. She set it aside. “My shield is my god,” she said, half a joke, half a line she wasn’t ready to cross. No one pressed her. Not yet.

  Thane was summoned to the mage’s library. The tutor set a leather-bound spell book in his hands. “This one will not fight you,” she said. “It will guide you. Compare it to the one that found you, see which whispers truer.”

  Thane felt steadiness glide under his fingers and didn’t know whether to be comforted or afraid.

  Weeks blurred together. Training drills resumed, harder and sharper. But the six carried themselves differently.

  Garrick’s voice steadied formations. Freyda mocked and needled, her grin a weapon as much as her shield. Bruni’s blessings became ritual, cloth strips dipped in holy water pressed into cuts before sparring. Vaelen shadowed Garrick closer than ever.

  Thane’s control grew. A candle lit and stayed lit. A stray spark died midair at his command. Once, when he managed both at once, he laughed out loud, then covered his mouth in shame.

  And Duskmaw never left. He stalked beside Tylane in drills, silent but ever-present. At night he lay across the bunkroom doorway like a guardian statue. The other recruits whispered and watched, half in awe, half in fear.

  One evening, Bruni raised her mug in the mess. “To the cat,” she said.

  “To the cat,” the others echoed. Even Garrick smiled.

  It was past midwinter when the quartermaster gathered the recruits again. His voice was as flat as ever, but the words carried more weight.

  “A robber baron has taken the northern mountains,” the quartermaster said, voice flat but carrying. “The men you fought were his. He’s sworn blood for blood, and he marches this way. The Guild will be tested. A siege is coming.”

  The words rippled through the hall. Some paled. Others clenched fists. The favored party stood behind the quartermaster like a promise the Guild still meant to keep. Garrick and his circle only looked at each other. They had seen death already and knew what was coming. A t their feet, Duskmaw growled low, as if he too understood.