"You should make him walk, you know."
Maren said it without looking away from the road ahead, though her eyes cut sideways toward the lump in Ant's coat, clearly repeating herself on purpose. It was the second time since they'd set off that morning she'd broached the subject, apparently convinced Mahkir was missing some valuable training opportunity by refusing to use his own legs for anything longer than a fight.
Mahkir opened one eye long enough to give her a look somewhere between contempt and genuine pity, then buried himself deeper into the fabric, tail curling tight, as if wishing the pair of them luck with whatever foolishness they intended to get up to without him watching.
"He's not going to walk," Ant said. "He's decided the coat is his now. I stopped fighting it around the time he set your lab on fire."
"He could build endurance."
"He could," Ant agreed. "He won't."
Maren made a small, frustrated sound and let it drop, for now, though Ant suspected it would resurface again before the day was finished. She'd been that way most of the morning, persistent in small ways, circling back to ideas she'd already raised as though repetition alone might eventually change the outcome. Nothing was ever fully settled with her until she'd tried it from at least three different angles.
They'd left before proper daylight, Maren moving through her own house quickly, already three tasks ahead of herself, clearly having stayed up most of the night sorting supplies rather than sleeping. A pack for each of them. Food that would keep. Water, and a change of clothes for Ant that fit close enough not to be a problem. She'd tracked down an approximate location for her old instructor through channels she hadn't fully explained, contacts within the clan's records that could apparently trace someone even after he'd gone to considerable effort to disappear.
"He's not hiding, exactly," she'd said, over breakfast eaten standing at the kitchen counter because sitting down felt like it would take too long. "But he's made it clear he doesn't want to be found casually. Whatever address he's settled on, it's not registered anywhere obvious."
The trail led them here, to a village that didn't appear on any map worth consulting, somewhere past Arnwick and Billgern, in the stretch of ground no surveyor had bothered to follow further, seven miles beyond the edge of Carrow Well, the town Maren called home. Not much more than a couple of hours' walk at a steady pace, but the road grew progressively less maintained the further they walked, and by the time the sun had climbed only partway into the morning and the first buildings came into view, it had degraded into little more than a suggestion of a path, rutted and uneven, clearly used by very few people who had very little reason to hurry.
The village itself made the district Ant had grown up in look almost welcoming by comparison.
Buildings leaned into each other, the wood grey and weathered, structures that had given up on maintenance decades ago, the only visible signs of habitation a handful of chimneys and washing strung between houses that looked otherwise abandoned. Nobody came out to greet them. Nobody, as far as Ant could tell, was even watching them arrive, though he had the distinct impression that had less to do with nobody noticing and more to do with nobody caring enough to make it obvious.
Maren slowed as they entered. For the first time since they'd left the house, she looked uncertain.
"This is considerably less welcoming than I expected," she said quietly, as though raising her voice might attract attention she didn't want.
Ant recognised it immediately. Nobody here asked questions, because questions only invited them back, and help never came free, not when owing someone was the price of it. It wasn't friendly. It was, in its own way, honest, and something in him eased at the familiarity of it.
"You get used to it," he said.
"Is that meant to be reassuring?"
"Not particularly."
An old man passed them on the narrow street without so much as a glance in their direction. He didn't slow, didn't look, didn't care who they were or why they'd come. Further down, a woman pulled her door shut the moment she caught them looking her way, the message clear without a single word needing to be spoken.
Keep your nose out of my business. It seemed to be the village's universal greeting, understood by everyone without ever needing to be said aloud.
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"So where is he," Ant said, keeping his voice low, scanning a row of identical grey buildings without much hope of finding anything useful in any of them.
"I don't know." Maren's admission came out flatter than he expected, none of her usual confidence behind it. "It all looks the same to me. I don't have anything to go on beyond the general area."
Ant felt his patience thin, frustration surfacing before he could stop it. "So we walked seven miles on a hunch with no actual plan for what happens once we got here."
"I didn't say that."
"You said you don't know where he is."
"I said I don't know yet." Enough edge came through that he decided, wisely, not to push it further, though the muttering continued anyway, mostly under his breath, something about bringing a research expert along only to watch her fail at the first real test.
He kept looking anyway. There wasn't another option.
They moved slowly through the streets for the better part of ten minutes, Maren studying each house with a focus he recognised from the lab, not aimless searching, but a careful, trained way of looking that filtered for details he wouldn't have known to check. He watched doors and windows for anything that suggested activity. She was watching something else entirely, and he couldn't have said what until she stopped abruptly outside a house no more remarkable than any of the others.
"There," she said.
He followed her gaze and found nothing obviously worth the word. A small yard, mostly dirt, nothing cared for the way the neat woodpile two streets back had been. Just a scattering of what looked like scrap, wooden posts sunk into the ground at odd angles, the remains of something that might once have been a target frame, coils of frayed rope looped over a low fence rail.
"What am I looking at."
"Training equipment." She was already moving toward the fence, urgency in her pace now. "Old. Homemade, most of it, not anything you'd buy from a proper outfitter, but genuine. Posts set for striking drills. That frame's for reaction speed. The rope's grip conditioning." She gestured at the assembly, naming each piece and what it was for. "Nobody sets this up unless they actually know what each piece does. Everyone uses duelling constructs and simulation software now, this is considered outdated. Unless you trained the old way, before any of that existed, and never saw a reason to change."
It wasn't much. A handful of worn objects in an unremarkable yard, nothing that confirmed anything beyond the vague possibility that whoever lived here understood combat training in an old-fashioned way.
But it was more than they'd had a minute ago, and Maren was already moving toward the door, determined, having decided this was the lead she was taking, thin as it was. Ant followed, glancing once at the silent street behind them, entirely unsuited to casual door-knocking that might work anywhere else.
Whatever came next, there wasn't a version of this village where doing it quietly was an option.
Maren knocked.
"Get lost." The response came back immediate, without hesitation, in a voice roughened by decades of shouting instructions across training grounds, a habit he'd clearly never fully lost.
Whatever doubt Maren had been carrying evaporated on the spot. Her whole face changed, sharp and delighted, entirely at odds with the words just thrown at them through a closed door.
"It's him," she said, turning to Ant, triumphant. "I'd know that voice anywhere. Nobody else says get lost with that much conviction."
She knocked again, more deliberately this time.
"Instructor Kalsar," she called through the door, "it's Maren. I, no. We need your help."
The correction came out almost before she'd registered making it, the shift from I to we small but immediate. Ant noticed it land, more clearly than she probably intended.
Silence answered, longer than the first refusal had taken. Whatever had changed, it was the name, not the knocking.
Then came the sound of movement, not quiet, not careful, more like something large deciding whatever furniture stood between it and the door was simply an obstacle to be dealt with rather than moved around. A heavy thud, a scrape, another thud closer still. Something clattered, a chair, maybe, knocked aside without apparent concern for whether it survived the encounter, and Ant found himself bracing without quite meaning to, the way you braced for weather rather than for a person.
The door opened.
Ant took a step back without deciding to.
The man standing in the frame was, without exaggeration, the largest human being Ant had ever seen in his life. He filled the doorway completely, shoulders wide enough that he'd likely had to turn sideways just to fit through it, forearms thick with muscle built from decades of use rather than any deliberate effort to look imposing. His hands alone looked capable of ending an argument before it had properly started. Ant was fairly certain that if this man ever stood in front of a crowd, he'd block out the sun for everyone behind him without even trying, and some old, deeply ingrained instinct in him was already telling him this was a person worth taking very seriously indeed.
It took a moment for the sheer scale of him to settle enough that Ant could actually look at his face.
He was old, properly old, deep lines carved into skin that had spent a lifetime outdoors, grey hair cropped close to a skull that had clearly absorbed more blows than it had any right to survive. His beard, more grey than dark, had given up being anything but functional decades ago. A pale scar ran along one side of his jaw, old enough that whatever caused it was long past mattering, though it clearly hadn't been anything gentle. None of it softened the impression he gave. If anything, his age sharpened it. This was a man who had earned every one of those years the hard way, and nothing about him invited casual conversation.
"I thought I got rid of kids like you when I left the academy," he said, in a voice as deep and gravelled as the one that had come through the door, aimed at Maren though his eyes stayed fixed pointedly on Ant the whole time. "What do you want. And why have you interrupted my peaceful retirement."
Beside him, Maren hadn't said anything yet. Ant glanced over and caught her face go unguarded for a moment before she pulled it back into something composed. She'd missed him. She hadn't let herself know that until right now, with him actually standing in front of her.