She closed the last of the distance and stopped a comfortable pace off, close enough to talk without raising her voice, far enough that it didn't feel intrusive. The afternoon light was starting to slant low across the path, and somewhere off past the trees a bird called twice and went quiet.
"I'm Maren, by the way." She said it easily, a small smile on it that read as genuine rather than practiced. "Sorry, I should have led with that instead of just staring at you from a distance for five minutes." Her eyes flicked briefly to the trim of her own armor. "I represent the Cerlan clan. You've been very carefully not looking at the colors since I started walking over, so I'd guess you'd already worked that out."
He had been avoiding them. She'd noticed anyway, and that told him more than the armor and the careful approach already had. She paid attention to small things, the kind most people let pass.
"I noticed," he admitted, which was more than he'd meant to give her.
She held his gaze a second longer than the words needed, clearly deciding whether to say more, then let it go without comment. One more small thing noted and set aside.
"That was quite the fight." She glanced back at the scorched patch of ground, genuine interest in it rather than suspicion. The smell of it still hung faint in the air, burnt grass and something scorched underneath, sharp enough that it caught in the back of his throat. "I was starting to make my way over before your Kithren showed up. Two against one felt a little unfair. Then things resolved themselves rather more thoroughly than I expected."
"You didn't need to." Ant moved Soul Render to his other hand, more to have something to do with it than out of any real need. His arm still ached from where he'd braced against the second boy's swing, a dull throb he was doing his best not to show. "It worked out."
"Clearly." She smiled again, more careful this time. "Can I ask your name?"
"Ant."
"Just Ant?"
He held her gaze a moment, weighing whether a surname was a door he wanted open this early in a conversation he hadn't chosen and hadn't decided to trust. She waited without hurrying him, giving no sign that his answer mattered to her one way or the other.
"For now," he said.
"Fair enough." A pause, then, lighter than the question probably deserved: "What clan, if you don't mind my asking? You've clearly had training, even if the sword work still needs a bit of polish."
He chuckled internally at her thought of him having training. Did Mahkir really count? Still, she had already seen him fight and she had also seen Mahkir so a name wasn't going to make anything any worse, but refusing outright would only make her a lot more curious than she already was. While she didn't appear hostile in any way, quite the opposite, her curiosity still felt somehow dangerous.
"Silverwing," he said. "Formerly."
Her expression didn't move right away. He continued to watch her closely for any reaction that felt out of place. A half second passed before her face registered what he'd said.
"Formerly," she repeated, gently, not quite a question.
He said nothing else, and let her see that he wasn't going to. She noticed, didn't push, and let it go. The corner of her mouth eased, just slightly. He'd seen it once before, on Claire's face in the market.
"Can I ask you something else? Stop me if it's too forward. I have a bad habit of not noticing I've overstepped until well after I've done it."
He said nothing, which she seemed to take as permission.
Her Kithren settled onto his haunches a few feet off, ears turned toward Ant, quiet and unhurried the same as he'd been for the whole walk over. Maren reached back without looking and rested a hand against his shoulder, an idle touch that didn't need to mean anything, just habit.
"If your Kithren's capable of what I just watched, why fight with a sword at all? Why not let him handle it from the start?"
The question hit a nerve, one he had not prepared for, friendly as her tone had been. He thought about deflecting, something vague about preferring to handle things himself, a half-truth about the sword being new and untested. Neither arrived fast enough to stop what actually came out.
"He's only level three."
The words were out before he had time to work out what he was saying. He'd spent the last hour being careful about what the boys got to see and what he kept back, and she'd undone it in under three minutes without seeming to try. Level three. A number that didn't line up with anything she'd just watched him do.
Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
Her hands stopped moving. She just stood there, looking at him.
"Level three," she repeated slowly. "That's not possible."
She took a step back, small and instinctive, putting real distance between them for the first time since she'd walked over.
"No Kithren at level three should be able to take out a Kithren at level five. Let alone two, working in coordination." She said it flatly, without having to think about it. "The stat gap alone should make that mathematically impossible regardless of skill. Whatever fought those boys should have needed to be level six, minimum. Seven, more likely, to handle them with that little effort."
Ant said nothing. There wasn't anything useful to say that wouldn't make it worse. He watched her instead, waiting to see where the numbers took her next.
"I mean." She caught herself, backtracking fast, the words tumbling out ahead of her own composure. "I could be wrong. I'm not, though. I've run these numbers a hundred times, it's the first thing they teach us, growth curves and stat bands and... I'm not wrong. That's what's bothering me."
She talks fast when she's rattled, Mahkir observed, entirely too pleased with himself about it. I like her already.
Her eyes narrowed, the warmth draining out of them, her attention fixed entirely on him now.
"Would you mind if I checked your level properly?" Still polite, still asking rather than assuming, though the casualness had gone out of the request. He felt the faint shimmer of her reader lenses activate before he'd answered either way, the automatic scan every bonded person's glasses ran without quite waiting for permission.
He knew what it would find.
He almost enjoyed watching her expect an answer and get nothing. The reader came back exactly as blank as it always did.
It didn't satisfy her. The alarm on her face hardened, her focus narrowing to a point. She stepped closer, closing the distance she'd just put between them, eyes fixed on the place behind his ear. Nothing. She checked the other ear to be sure. He was suddenly aware of how bare it was. No chip.
"You don't have a chip."
Not a question.
The familiar tightness came up in his throat. He'd known this was coming the moment he recognized her colors, had told himself watching her approach that he'd give her only what the conversation demanded and nothing more. Her friendliness had made that harder than he'd expected, and he was starting to suspect that had been at least partly the point.
"Why would you remove a chip." Her voice had dropped, careful now, quieter than before. "I've never encountered intentional removal. It isn't simple. You'd need specialized equipment, and even then the risk to the underlying connection is significant. Most people who tried would end up with no readable system at all. Yours is clearly readable. I watched it work."
Ant didn't answer. He turned and started walking instead, the decision arriving without much thought behind it, the same instinct that had carried him through five years of conversations that all went the same way.
He made it maybe six steps before he heard her following.
"Wait." The composure had gone out of her voice, real urgency underneath it now. "I'm sorry, that's none of my business, truly. I asked before I'd properly thought about whether I should."
He kept walking. Don't explain. Walking away was always safer than staying to argue a point nobody was going to believe anyway.
"Unless," she said, and he heard the exact moment the thought arrived for her, the pause carrying real weight, "you never had one."
He stopped.
He hadn't decided to. His feet had simply done it, and he stood on the path with his back to her, still catching up with the fact that a stranger had read him correctly in under three minutes. Five years of nobody bothering to look closely enough to ask the right question, and she'd managed it on a public path with a fraction of the information anyone in his life had ever had.
It took him a moment to place the feeling as anger rather than shock. Five years of Kithered strangers walking past him without a flicker of curiosity. The clan had seen exactly what it expected to see and never looked twice. Claire, who'd known him his whole life, had never once asked the question this stranger had just asked inside three minutes of meeting him.
"I want to help." She'd closed the last of the distance, her voice quieter now, warmer, the sharpness gone. "I don't fully understand what I just watched, but I'm not asking because I mean to report it or use it against you. I'm Cerlan. This is genuinely what we do. We find things that don't make sense and try to understand them properly, instead of deciding they're impossible and walking away."
Ant turned around slowly.
She was watching him with most of the earlier sharpness gone from her face, her hands loose and open at her sides. Behind her, the ape sat exactly where he'd settled, watching them both in complete silence. He hadn't so much as flexed a hand toward the coat where Mahkir sat curled, and Ant found himself wondering, distantly, whether that was training or simply the animal seeing him as no threat at all.
He weighed her offer the way he weighed most things, quickly, against every reason he had to distrust it. She was Cerlan. Her whole clan ran on exactly this kind of curiosity, and it didn't always stay harmless once it had hold of something interesting enough. But she'd introduced herself before anything else and asked before scanning him. People who wanted something from him and had the power to simply take it usually didn't bother with either.
"I don't know you," Ant said.
"No," she agreed. "You don't. That's fair, and I probably deserve the caution after ambushing you with questions on an otherwise ordinary afternoon."
She's not lying, Mahkir said, flat and certain about it. Not about wanting to help, anyway. Whether it's a good idea is a separate question.
Ant noted that too. Mahkir didn't strike him as a creature that was easily made a fool of. If his day with Mahkir had taught him anything, it was that his instincts were worthy of being trusted. He considered Mahkir's point about whether it was a good idea or not. It wasn't like he had a lot of options, and she must have known that, but still, she was giving him the choice.
"I have equipment at home that could tell us more," Maren said. "Properly, not just a lens guessing at a number. It would mean coming with me, which I realize is a strange thing to ask of someone I've known for ten minutes and interrogated for most of them." A faint, self-conscious smile. "I wouldn't blame you for saying no. I'd probably say no, in your position."
She didn't push past that. She just stood there, waiting, her Kithren's tail moving once against the dirt behind her, and let the offer sit exactly where she'd put it, making no move to talk him into it either way.