Chapter 17. Ambush

Wren had been staring at the map long enough that the ink was starting to float whenever he blinked.

Team twenty-eight’s pulse sat two fingers’ width from his thumb, crawling south along the ridge line at the pace of a clock hand. It hadn’t deviated once in twenty minutes, which was the part that was bothering him. A carrier hiding from an ambush made small corrections, drifted off the obvious line, hesitated at junctions. This one was walking a ruler.

“Anything?”

Halden, crouched behind the fallen trunk to his left with a wind glyph half-shaped on the back of his hand. Halden had been asking anything every couple of minutes since they’d taken position, and Wren had stopped minding because at least it was a voice in the hush.

“Same line. Same speed.”

“On the path?”

“Dead centre.”

Halden muttered a word Wren didn’t catch and went back to watching the gap between the trees.

Six of them, on this stretch. Two teams who’d found each other an hour ago and run the numbers. At the tenth hour of a fourteen-hour exam, the logic wasn’t complicated: nobody had a flag, the clock was winning, and the map was telling them a flag was walking into the last approach to extraction whether they deserved it or not.

Under any other circumstance the two teams would have been at each other’s throats by now, and both sides understood this plainly; they’d sort that part out later, with fists or with a foot race to the extraction line, whichever came first.

But twenty-eight was twenty-eight, and twenty-eight had the Axiom on it, and neither team was stupid enough to try that alone. Better to pool six hands, take the flag off the Aridis boy while they still had the numbers, and then figure out afterward which of them got to walk it home. Halden’s team had proposed the arrangement and Wren’s team had agreed inside a minute.

They’d set their positions carefully: Two archers up the slope with line of sight on the path. Halden and a Kaelith girl called Vess behind the big trunk at the choke. Wren and Jorah at the rear with the map and the signal glyphs, close enough to call the shot but far enough back that anyone coming through the gap would have three layers of trouble to eat before Wren ever lifted a hand.

Being the one at the back had been his own request, and he’d said so plainly when they were picking spots. Decent with theory, good with maps, middling with a staff, and not the sort of person you wanted holding the line against whoever had carried a flag this far into the day.

He thumbed the edge of the map and watched the pulse crawl a fingernail closer.

“Who do you think it is?” Jorah said, quietly, from the moss beside him.

“Twenty-eight.”

“I know it’s twenty-eight, Wren. I mean who.”

Wren didn’t answer right away.

Everyone in the grounds knew the roster whether they admitted it or not. Twenty-eight was Vael, Solenne, and Aridis. It had been called out at the balcony that morning along with every other team, and the plaza had gone a particular kind of quiet for about a half-second afterward, and Wren had felt the cold thing in his chest that everybody had felt, and he’d pretended along with everybody else that the cold thing was curiosity.

Jorah nudged him with an elbow. “Hey. Who.”

“You know who.”

“Say it anyway.”

“No.”

Wren’s father had been telling him about the Axiom since he was seven years old. Not as a bedtime story but as the shape of a cliff in his own backyard, delivered in the same voice other fathers reserved for warning their sons about cavalry formations or winter storms.

The Axiom was coming. The Axiom was being trained. Every door his father had opened for him, every tutor he’d hired, every coin House Halis had spent polishing its only son, would one day have to survive whatever the Axiom turned out to be. Wren had grown up in the long shadow of a boy he’d never met.

By ten he’d built a picture in his head: tall, severe, a face that refused to move, hands that did terrible and precise things to the air around them. At fifteen the picture had hardened into a face he could see without closing his eyes, and his older sister Ila had told him very gently, one night on the back porch, that he should probably stop building the picture because the real one was going to be nothing like it and the disappointment would cut the wrong way.

He’d sort of met the real one that morning. From across a crowd. Three seconds of a glimpse during the announcements, which hadn’t been enough for a face, only the shape of a boy standing too still among other boys who weren’t.

Now that shape was walking down the path toward him with a flag.

“Jorah.”

“Mm.”

“If it’s really him. What do we do?”

“The same thing we’d do if it wasn’t.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the one I’ve got, Wren.”

He looked down at the map. The pulse had crept another thumb-width closer — sixty paces, maybe less — and when Wren lifted his head to check the path, the path was empty.

That didn’t make sense. Sixty paces was well inside his line of sight through the gap in the trees, and there should have been a carrier walking down it. There wasn’t. Just open dirt and the ordinary business of the canopy, and a pulse on the parchment that kept inching forward at its steady pace.

“Halden. I can’t see them.”

“What do you mean you can’t see them?”

“The flag’s at fifty-eight paces and the path’s empty.”

Halden looked down the same stretch of ground Wren was looking at, and his frown deepened after a second or two. “That’s not possible.”

“I know.”

“Off-path, maybe. Through the brush on one of the flanks.”

“I’ve been watching the flanks for twenty minutes. Nothing’s moved out there.”

“Then your map’s magic’s not right.”

“Check yours.”

Halden pulled his own map from his belt and unfolded it against his knee. His mouth worked for a second without anything coming out of it.

“…That’s strange.”

“Strange how?”

“Strange the same way yours is strange. Flag’s right there on the line. Path’s empty.”

Vess’s head came up behind the trunk before he could finish. “Sound. Due north.”

Wren hadn’t heard anything. Vess was Kaelith, and her ear had twitched a half-second before she’d said the word, so he looked the direction she was looking and saw the same quiet as before.

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“What did it sound like?”

“A footstep.”

“And the next one?”

“There wasn’t one.”

Up the slope to the right, a branch cracked behind the nearest archer. Wren turned in time to see the man half-rise from his crouch to check over his shoulder, and by the time Wren’s eyes got there the archer was already gone. The other archer shouted something from further along the ridge and the shout broke off before it became a word.

Halden was on his feet, Vess was already throwing a barrier up between the choke and whatever was coming off the slope, and Wren’s hands had started shaking in a way they hadn’t shaken all day. He pressed the map flat against his thigh to keep it from rattling.

“Movement,” Jorah said beside him, though it came out more like a question than a warning. He was pointing at the gap in the trees ahead of them, where there was nobody to point at. The map said twenty-two paces but the gap said no one.

Then Vess’s barrier broke. Wren didn’t catch how — he was still staring at the empty gap — and by the time he turned his head she was already on her back in the moss and not getting up. Halden spun toward the movement, cast into empty air, and a beat later there was a small, contained gust at ground level that Wren barely heard over his own pulse, and Halden was on the ground too.

“Jorah —”

Jorah was already moving. Staff out, reinforcement lighting up along his arms, two steps forward into a high guard. He was the best fighter in their cohort by a long margin; his father had paid for three years of private instruction before the trials, and Wren had watched him spar a visiting instructor last winter and walk away without a mark on him.

A boy stepped out of the treeline on Jorah’s right. Brown hair, tired face, the Vael crest on his collar.

Wren recognized the crest before the face, and in the time it took him to recognize either, Vael had closed the distance and taken apart Jorah’s guard with a couple of movements Wren was too slow to track. Jorah went down. Vael caught him on the way, set him into the moss, and slipped back into the trees without so much as glancing at Wren.

Then Wren was alone.