CHAPTER SIX

  -How to Kill and Still Say Thank You

  III. The Third Passage: The Ascent

  “Swollen with what he had devoured, the last fish grew wings and clawed his way into the Blue Sky, but no height could hide him from the gaze that made him.”

  –The Song of Creation

  as carved upon the Ulankara Obelisks

  Spring didn't arrive with flowers and soft breezes like the traders' songs promised. It crept in under the snow like a thief. One morning, Chanyu stepped outside and sank ankle-deep in heavy slush instead of hearing the clean crunch of frost. The air smelled different, too. Less like stone and cold iron, more like mud and rot and something waking up under both.

  Water dripped from the eaves in slow ticks. A bird called once from deeper in the trees and stopped. The forest went quiet again.

  The Hermit watched him squint at the yard.

  "Don't look relieved," he said. "The ground's soft now. Easier to break your ankle in that mess than on ice."

  "I'm not relieved," Chanyu said. "Just wet."

  He lifted his boot and watched a string of brown water fall back into the churned mud.

  Iye sat on the windowsill, tail flicking, safe from the slop. "You look like something they dragged out of a river," she said.

  "That's how I arrived," he said. "You were there."

  "You used to smell worse," she said.

  The Hermit tossed him a short length of rope. It slapped against his chest, heavier than it looked.

  "Good," the Hermit said. "You'll smell worse again by the end of the day. We're going hunting."

  Chanyu's head came up. "I know how to hunt," he said before he could stop himself. The words carried a shard of pride. "I grew up on the Steppes. I know tracks, wind, how to shoot from horseback. I've brought down gazelle and wild goat. Sometimes a wolf, usually young or lame, desperate enough to risk a rider."

  The Hermit raised an eyebrow.

  "You know how to hunt where you can see from one horizon to the other," he said. "Where the sky tells you the weather a day ahead and the wind has room to run. This isn't that. Here, the trees lie."

  "Trees don't lie," Chanyu said.

  "They tell you only what's in front of your nose," the Hermit said. "In a forest, your ears and nose work harder than your eyes. You'll see."

  He nodded toward the shed. "Get the bow. The one I cut to your length. Not mine."

  Chanyu went. The bow was simple, rougher than the polished ones he remembered from home, but it bent cleanly when he tested it. He reached for the weight of a thumb ring out of habit, found nothing, and adjusted his grip. His fingers found the new calluses at his palms and along his first knuckles and settled into place without the old tremble.

  He followed the Hermit into the trees. The world changed as soon as they stepped past the last line of packed mud around the cabin. Sound thickened. Snow still clung in patches where the sun hadn't reached, but the earth showed through in dark strips and rings, raw where the thaw had broken it open.

  The Hermit's boots made almost no noise. Chanyu tried to match him and felt clumsy with every step.

  "Listen," the Hermit said softly without turning his head. "What do you hear?"

  Chanyu drew in a careful breath.

  "The wind," he said. "Branches. Our feet." He hesitated. "My feet… Water. Far away."

  "Direction," the Hermit said. "Don't point. Just think it."

  Chanyu closed his eyes for half a heartbeat, feeling the way the sound sat in his chest. "Ahead. To the right," he said.

  "Good. Now stop listening to the loud things."

  Chanyu frowned. "Loud things are the ones that matter."

  "Loud things kill you," the Hermit said. "Quiet things warn you. A bird that shuts up. Snow that shifts. A branch that doesn't move with the wind."

  The Hermit lifted his hand. The forest seemed to hold its breath with him. For a moment, there was nothing but the drip of melting snow and the faint rush of far water, before Chanyu heard it. A faint scratch of claws on bark. A flutter of wings. The tiny crack of something dry breaking.

  Something cold slid behind his eyes. Pale lines blinked into the air.

  [Skill in use: Novice Death's Awareness]

  [Death hears every step.]

  [Tag: Unverified.]

  [Error… Skill has not been acquired.]

  [Retrying…]

  [Searching… Skill acquired… Skill cannot be found.]

  [Error… Skill has been found on alternate thread.]

  [Warning… Thread mismatch.]

  [Rollback failed…]

  The lines stayed an instant too long and flickered like a dying flame. Chanyu swallowed. That wasn't right. He shook his head once. "To the left," he whispered.

  "Good," the Hermit said. "Now watch what happens if I do this."

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  He took three heavy, careless steps forward, snapping a branch under his heel on purpose.

  The small sounds vanished. Chanyu blinked. "They stopped."

  "They fled," the Hermit said. "Or froze. Either way, they'll take a while to start up again. When I was a young fool, I didn't listen for them. I listened only for what I thought I wanted. It cost me. Don't make that mistake."

  He moved on, light again. After a while the small sounds returned, tentative. They tracked a set of deer prints Chanyu would've missed if the Hermit hadn't pointed them out. On the Steppes, hooves sank deep in wet ground or dust. Here, they left faint crescents in the soft, half-melted snow where leaves had insulated the ground.

  "The forest keeps its tracks close," the Hermit said. "Don't try to read the whole story at once. Read one step, and the next.”

  They followed, circling, weaving through undergrowth. Twice Chanyu thought he saw a shape between the trees and raised the bow, breath held. Twice the Hermit set a hand on the string and pushed it gently down.

  "You're looking too high," the Hermit murmured. "These aren't your tall-steppe gazelle. They move with the ground. Look for the break in the brush, the notch where something living pushed through."

  Chanyu ground his teeth. "So tell me what I'm missing," he whispered. "I'm looking and I'm not seeing it."

  "That would teach you very little," the Hermit said. "If I lend you my eyes, you'll never learn to use yours. Read the brush. Decide after that.”

  They came at last to a small clearing where the earth dipped in a shallow bowl. Patches of bare soil showed through the muck. The air smelled strong and musky.

  "Here," the Hermit said. "They come to lick minerals where the ground sweats. We wait."

  Waiting was the worst part. On the Steppes, you chased. You galloped. You screamed and thundered and loosed arrows at full run. Here, he stood still with his bow half raised, muscles tight, feeling the damp creep up through his boots. His mind tried to wander. To the fort, to the pit, to the cabin's warm fire. To what the Steppes might look like now. To whether anyone at home believed he was almost dead. Maybe they wouldn't care.

  He tightened his grip until his fingers protested.

  "Don't strangle it," the Hermit whispered. "You'll need your hands later. Ease."

  Chanyu forced his fingers to relax around the wood. When the deer finally came, he almost missed it. It slid into the clearing like a piece of the forest had come loose. Brown-gray, ribs faint under winter-thin flesh. Its ears twitched constantly. Its hooves made almost no sound in the mud.

  "It's small," Chanyu breathed.

  "Which means it's still alive after this winter," the Hermit said. "Don't underestimate anything that can do that."

  The deer lowered its head to the bare patch of earth and began to lick.

  Chanyu drew the bow. On the Steppes, he would've taken the shot from horseback without thinking. His body would've known the distance, the drop. Here, the trees felt too close. The air felt thick. He could feel his own heartbeat in his fingers.

  "Breathe," the Hermit said very quietly. "In. Out. Don't make this arrow about all your ghosts. It's just a line between you and meat."

  Chanyu let the string go. His vision pinched for a blink before it snapped back. Pale lines blinked into the air again.

  [Skill in use: Novice Death's Trajectory]

  [Death doesn't miss its mark.]

  [Accessing…]

  [Error… Skill has not been acquired.]

  [Fallback… Borrowed instance detected.]

  [Warning… Unstable.]

  The lines held for a breath before they broke and vanished. He swallowed. He'd blamed the first one on the pit. On pain. On the edge of dying. But it kept happening. And he could still read it. The bow snapped, and his thoughts went with it. The arrow flew. For a moment he thought he'd missed, but the deer lurched, stumbled, and went down with its legs folding under it.

  He stared. Blood seeped into the dirty snow. Not as much as the pit. Not the same kind of red. This was clean. This was food. He almost laughed. It came out as a shaky exhale instead.

  "Not graceful," the Hermit said. "You pulled a little at the last instant. But it'll feed us. Go."

  Chanyu went. Up close, it wasn't as small as he'd thought. Its eyes were still open. He forced himself to meet them and close them with his thumb.

  "Thank you," he said in the steppe tongue, the prayer his uncle had taught him when he was very small.

  The words felt rusty in his mouth. He felt the Hermit's gaze on his back.

  "Good," the Hermit said quietly. "If you learn how to kill and forget how to say thank you, you become the kind of thing I left the world to get away from."

  Chanyu looked over his shoulder. "Is that what you were?" he asked.

  The Hermit's face shut like a door.

  "Rope," he said. "Tie the legs. We drag it back. You'll learn how to cut more than air today."

  The rope bit into Chanyu's palms when he hauled. The deer dragged hard over roots and wet snow.

  They dragged it behind the cabin. The Hermit showed him where to cut so the hide would come away in one piece and how to slide his fingers between flesh and skin instead of sawing mindlessly.

  "Don't waste the hide," the Hermit said. "Don't waste the fat. The bones. The sinew. Every part you throw away is work you'll have to do later to replace what you lost."

  Chanyu's hands grew slick with blood. The smell filled his nose, rich with a metallic tang. It was nothing like the pit. There, decay had chewed at the air. Here, the scent was sharp, clean in a way the pit never was.

  Iye perched on the roof's edge, watching.

  "You're messy," she pronounced.

  "Do you want to help?" he asked.

  "I don't like my paws sticky," she said. "I prefer my meat cooked."

  "Then be quiet," he said.

  She flicked her tail. "You're getting bold."

  "He's learning that he won't be thrown into a ditch for speaking," the Hermit said. "It's about time."

  He said it without looking up from his own work, but the words settled somewhere under Chanyu's ribs and stayed there.

  "Also," Chanyu said, "why are you still in that form? Don't tell me you secretly enjoy being seen as a cat."

  The cat's tail flicked once. If her eyes could've set him on fire, they would have. "I don't enjoy being trapped in this shape," she said stiffly. "But his little tricks still interfere with my true form."

  The Hermit barked a laugh, a real one this time. "Not little tricks," he said. "A formation. New work. It's no surprise you don't know it. This forest is bars I built myself, remember? It keeps curious eyes out and certain spirits stuck in fur until you’re ready to leave."

  Iye's ears flattened. "You could at least pretend you're sorry."

  "If I take it down, other things will notice us," the Hermit said. "So no."

  Later, when the meat was hanging and his arms trembled with a different kind of tired, they went back inside. The cabin smelled of broth and smoke and hide and wet wool. Chanyu drank whatever the Hermit put in front of him without asking what part of the deer it had come from. There were too many questions he wanted to ask: about the forest, the armor in the chest, the tricks that kept Iye in fur. But he'd learned his lesson about questions. When he pushed at something the Hermit didn't want to talk about, the man's face shut like a door. Questions that hit that door didn't come back with answers.

  The question came from the Hermit that night, when the bowl was empty and the fire had burned down to a low red bed.

  "Imagine a street," the Hermit said. "Stone under your feet. Houses close on both sides. No horse. No bow. Two soldiers in armor walking straight toward you. What do you do?"

  Chanyu frowned. "Are they looking for me?" he asked.

  "Maybe," the Hermit said. "Maybe not. You don't know yet."

  He thought about it. "Step aside," he said at last. "Let them pass. Keep my head down."

  "Good," the Hermit said. "You don't make them choose you unless you have to. Now three soldiers. Same street. Same armor. This time they're spread across the road."

  "Then I turn around," Chanyu said. "Find another street."

  "And if there isn't another street?" the Hermit asked. "Walls on both sides. No alleys. No doors open."

  Chanyu's fingers tightened on his cup. "Then I look for a weapon," he said. "A stone. A stick. Anything."

  The Hermit shook his head. "Three men in armor against one boy with a stick is a story with a short ending. Don't chase that one. You look for a cart. A drunk. A crowd. Something moving that you can become part of. If they see you as a problem, they'll stop you. If they see you as just another back, they'll go around you."

  Chanyu stared into the coals. "On the Steppes," he said slowly, "if three riders blocked the path, you charged or you ran."

  "Streets aren't the Steppes," the Hermit said. "Charging only works when there's room to move. In a city, space belongs to whoever makes other people move out of their way. You survive by giving them that space before they ask for it."

  He took a sip from his cup. "Four soldiers," he said. "Two in front. Two behind. They notice you. What then?"

  Chanyu's mouth went dry. "At that point it's already bad," he said. "I talk. I ask what they want. I try to sound harmless.”

  "Better," the Hermit said. "You listen first. Their faces. Their voices. Angry? Bored? Tired? Men who are only bored are easier to walk away from than men who are afraid. Numbers matter, but mood matters more. Learn to read both."

  Chanyu nodded once. His shoulders felt tight.

  "Good," the Hermit said. "That's enough for tonight. Go to sleep. Tomorrow you wake up and we do it again."

  After that, there was nothing left to argue about. Only work waiting for him each morning.