Wren moved his right hand out from under the blanket and held it flat in the dark. Brand side up.
He did not sit up.
He kept his other hand where the man could see it and his breathing even, because the man had been in this room long enough to have already finished deciding whatever he came to decide, and moving fast wasn't going to change the decision.
If anything, moving fast would confirm whatever the knife was for.
The Brand sat in his palm, raised lines that had stopped being raw a week ago and gone permanent.
The man looked at it for a long time without touching it or speaking.
Wren counted the seconds by the sound of his own pulse.
Then the man looked at Wren's face.
"Arnulf Grau," the man said. He did not offer his hand. "Arnulf is fine."
Wren said nothing. Arnulf already knew his name.
◆ ◆ ◆
Arnulf set the whetstone on the floor and laid the knife across it handle-up and put both hands flat on his knees.
The gesture was deliberate,both weapons visible, both hands visible, the arrangement of a man who had done this kind of conversation before and understood that trust started with geometry.
No preamble or easing into it.
He had been in Veldtgrun twenty years ago.
There was an Aschenschlund there,a man named Brecht,who had been managing his count carefully and doing reasonably well with it, until the Council decided they were done waiting and began forcing devours on him.
'Forcing.'
Wren let that word sit.
Forcing devours meant pinning someone near kills until the compulsion took over.
It meant someone had used the involuntary acquisition mechanic as a weapon against its own holder.
When the count hit zero, Brecht stopped being Brecht.
Arnulf described what he looked like in two sentences.
Both of them were specific.
The room was quiet after them for a moment that stretched longer than the sentences had, and Wren did not ask him to repeat them because once was enough for something like that to stay in a room permanently.
'Folkwin had taken eleven devours in three weeks and stopped recognizing faces. Brecht had been forced to zero and stopped being a person entirely.'
Two data points on the same line, and Wren was standing somewhere on that line at 97%.
"My class is Wiedergänger," Arnulf said. "A-Rank."
He looked at the Brand again and then at Wren. "I get stronger the more damage I take. I have been working that gap for twenty years."
"What does working it look like?" Wren said.
Arnulf looked at the scars on his own forearms without any expression. "Like that."
He looked back at Wren and the next words came out in the same flat tone he used.
"If your Soul Integrity drops below 25%, I end it before you become what Brecht became. No discussion or second check."
The words landed in the dark room like a blade set quietly on a table.
Not a threat, just a terms sheet.
"How do you plan to watch the number?"
"I ask you," Arnulf said. "And you tell me, because you should have rules about the count."
He let a pause sit. "I've been watching you for six days. You follow your rules."
'He was here before I arrived.'
Wren looked at Arnulf's hands on his knees.
The burns across the heel of both palms were old and deep, the kind left by heat work done young and done often for years.
Forge hands.
Different forge, different lifetime, but Wren recognized the marks.
"How do I know you won't act before 25%?"
"You don't." Arnulf's voice didn't change.
"But I haven't yet, and I had four chances today. You brought in two Rissklaue and you crossed a threshold and you're sitting three feet from me right now." He said it without any particular weight.
"If I wanted to act early, I wouldn't have come to make a deal first."
Wren thought about that.
It held up.
A man who wanted him dead would not have sat at the foot of his cot sharpening a knife loudly enough to wake him.
That was courtesy or a test.
"In exchange?" Wren said.
"I will keep your secret in this settlement." Arnulf looked at the cloth wrapped around Wren's left forearm, at the fresh blood browning through it.
"And I train you properly." He paused. "You've been staying alive, and that's worth something but staying alive and fighting are two different things, right now you're doing one of them."
He held out his hand.
Wren looked at it.
He thought about Brecht and the two sentences Arnulf hadn't added to.
Also about the fact that Arnulf had been in this settlement before Wren walked through the gate, meaning he hadn't come here because of Wren, had some other reason to be on the edge of the Ashwilds.
And had simply adjusted what he was doing when a new Aschenschlund showed up.
'He's not offering to save me, he just wants to make sure the end is clean if it comes to that and in the meantime, he'll teach me to fight.'
It was the most honest arrangement anyone had offered him.
He took Arnulf's hand. The grip was solid and then Arnulf let go and put his hand back on his knee.
The deal was done.
Seventy-two points sat between him and the line Arnulf had just committed to acting on.
Seventy-two at current rate, fewer at B-Rank.
Much fewer at A.
And things above C-Rank were already in the Ashwilds around the settlement and would keep being in the Ashwilds.
"How old are you?" Wren said into the dark.
"Forty-six."
"Have you done this before? Watched someone."
Arnulf was quiet for a moment. "Once."
"What happened to that one?"
"He made it." The words came out steady.
"He's in Feldmark now. Different problem, different outcome." He reached down and picked the knife up from the whetstone and slid it into the sheath at his belt.
"Brecht was different. The Council made him what he was." He picked up the book from the floor. "You're making your own choices."
'Someone survived.'
Wren let that land. Folkwin had not survived nor Brecht but someone in Feldmark had, Arnulf had watched it happen, and that was a different kind of data point than anything Wren had collected so far.
"What did the Feldmark one do differently?"
Arnulf was quiet long enough that Wren thought he wasn't going to answer.
"He found someone to watch the count before it got critical. He had a ruin he could use for partial discharge and he had a reason to stay under the line." He looked at the book in his hand without opening it. "In that order. The reason came last and it mattered the most."
"What was the reason?"
"Ask him yourself when you get to Feldmark." Arnulf lay down on the cot across the room and opened the book. "That's where we're going anyway."
◆ ◆ ◆
Mathild appeared in the doorway.
Coat on and boots on, which meant she had been awake and nearby and waiting for the conversation to reach its end.
She looked at the two of them and at the space between them where the handshake had just happened and nodded once.
"I knew the moment you walked in," she said to Wren.
"The shape of the Brand burn. I've seen it once before. Seven years ago."
She unfolded her arms. "He lasted three weeks. Two bad devours in the first four days because he didn't understand what the pull felt like until it was already happening."
Wren thought about the deer on the trail with Ingrid and his hand already halfway to the carcass before her voice cut through.
'He'd almost been Folkwin.'
"Eisenwall's hunters are already moving," Mathild said, looking at Arnulf.
"Someone in the checkpoint network east of the ridge is asking after unregistered travelers. The description is specific enough to mean they have a face, not just a Brand shape."
"How long?" Wren said.
"Ten days, maybe eight."
Eight days.
The number landed in his chest next to the other number and they sat there together, 97% and eight days, two countdowns running at the same time in different directions.
She let that land and then kept going.
"I've been holding something back since the night you arrived. I wanted to see what you were before I decided whether it was useful." She looked at his palm in the dark.
"Two days southeast of here, deep into the Ashwilds, off any track I've ever seen on a regional map. I found it eight years ago following a wounded animal, I have not been back and I have not told anyone about it who did not need to know."
She described what she had found.
Stone she didn't recognize,not anything quarried from local rock, not fitted in any construction method she had seen in thirty years on the edge of the Ashwilds.
Carvings covering every surface she could reach from the ground, columns of marks that looked like Brand shapes but older and far more regular, running up walls at heights that would have needed scaffolding to carve.
Scaffolding that would have rotted away long before her grandmother was born.
"The marks went all the way to the ceiling," she said. "Every surface, inside and out. There were rooms I couldn't get into because the doors were stone with no handles and I couldn't find any mechanism."
She was quiet for a moment.
"There was one other thing. In the outer courtyard,a platform, low to the ground, with a slot in the top the right size and shape for a hand." She looked at his palm. "For that hand, I think."
She pulled the door half-closed and looked at Wren through the gap.
"Whatever this is," Mathild said, "it didn't start with us."
She closed the door and her footsteps moved away at the same pace she used for everything.
Wren stared at the dark where the door had been.
Hunters in eight days.
A ruin two days southeast with carvings that matched his Brand on stone no one recognized.
A platform with a slot the shape of his hand.
Arnulf having just agreed to kill him at 25% and also having just mentioned there was a person in Feldmark who had made it through.
Three data points in the right direction.
More than he'd had at any point since he woke up face-down in grey dirt with a resurrection scar .
He lay back on the cot and looked at the ceiling, the water stain in the upper left corner hadn't changed in those days.
He closed his eyes.
[Soul Integrity: 97%] [Active Talents: 2]