The System Chose the Weakest Man

Chapter 027: Bram Holt

They walked until the firelight was a small orange smudge behind them.

Bram didn't speak. He moved through the dark with a heavy, patient tread, shield slung over his shoulder, sword still bare in his hand. Ethan followed a step behind, his heart beating a slow, hard rhythm. His skin was warm, warmer than it should have been. The Kindling trace, he realized, running quietly under his ribs, answering to the nerves in his chest.

Be calm. He pressed his palm flat to his sternum. Be calm.

At the crest of a low ridge Bram stopped. Below them the camp glowed like a coal in the ash. Beyond it the plain stretched flat and grey, empty to the horizon. He turned.

"Sit," he said.

Ethan sat on a flat rock. Bram didn't. He stood with his arms folded over the shield's rim, the scar on his face a pale seam in the dark, and studied Ethan the way a man studies a horse he's been offered at an honest price.

"Thirty-one years I've been fighting," he said. "Twenty-six of them with a shield. You learn to read people. You have to. A man's footwork, how he stands, where he looks first when something moves. It tells you whether he'll stand or run." He paused. "You carried forty kilos for twelve hours and never sweated. You saw the hounds before Selka did. I watched you wake the porters and put them behind the cart a full minute before anyone else knew there was a fight. And you killed a Level 10 Ember Hound with a rivet hammer in one blow."

"I got lucky."

"Twice."

"Three times," Ethan said. "I'm very lucky."

Bram didn't smile. Something in his face flickered, and the window beside his head flickered with it.

[Bram Holt. Level 31. True attitude: Conflicted. Weary. Worried for someone far away.]

Conflicted. Ethan held his breath. It was different from before. Before it had been tired and sad. Now there was a sharper edge to it.

"I'm not going to ask what you are," Bram said slowly. "I think I'd rather not know yet. But I want you to hear something first, and I want you to look at my face while I say it."

Ethan looked.

"About a month ago, in Greywatch, a man bought me a drink. Grey coat. Silver chain. Very pleasant. He said the Wardens would pay for certain kinds of information. Oddities. A strong null. A hunter acting unlike himself. A boy with a broken nose." Bram's gaze didn't leave Ethan's face. "A hundred crowns, for a name. Two hundred, for a boy."

Ethan's blood went cold.

"I don't read," Bram added dryly. "Can't. Never learned. So I've never seen the posters."

"Then you don't know what I look like."

"I know exactly what you look like. I'm looking at you." He lifted his chin toward Ethan's nose. "It's a very distinctive nose."

Ethan's hand twitched toward the hammer.

"Don't." Bram's voice was perfectly calm. "If I wanted you dead, we'd have been done a minute ago. And if I wanted you taken, I wouldn't have walked you out of earshot." He lowered himself, slowly, onto a rock facing Ethan. His shield scraped on the stone. "I haven't decided what to do."

"Why not?"

"Because the Wardens pay well."

He said it flatly. He said it like a man putting a heavy thing down on a table.

"I have a daughter," Bram said. "Wenna. She's twelve. Lives with my sister in the south. She was born small and she's never gotten strong. The healers in the south say she'll need treatment for years. The Wardens have the best healers in the kingdom, and they pay the best prices for a hunter who knows how to keep his mouth open." His hand drifted to his chest, to the hard lump under his shirt, and rested there. "I don't like it. I've never liked it. But I send her coin every month, and every month it isn't enough."

The locket. Ethan's throat tightened.

"So you tell me," Bram said. "I watched you save two porters tonight, and I watched you not take credit for it. That's a rare man. I can count the ones I've met. So help me understand why I should keep my mouth shut."

Ethan said nothing for a long time.

The window glowed softly beside the older man's head. Conflicted. Weary. He thought of what Rhea had said once, in an alley behind a tannery. Be careful what you say yes to. He thought of nine names on a page. He thought of a gate closing on a gloved hand.

"I can't tell you what I am," he said at last. "I'm sorry. If I did, you couldn't un-know it. And it would make you choose between your daughter and me."

Bram's eyes narrowed.

"But I'll tell you what I'm not." Ethan met his gaze. "I'm not a threat to Wenna. I'm not a threat to you. I've never hurt anyone who didn't come at me first. And if you give the Wardens my name, I won't stop you." He took a breath. "I'd only ask you to tell them one more thing. That I carried four people's worth of weight tonight. That I'd rather have been left alone."

For a long, long minute neither moved.

Bram took his hand from his chest.

"That's the most honest thing anybody's said to me in a year," he murmured. "Gods help us both." He looked out across the grey plain. "I'll think on it. I make no promise."

"I'm not asking for one."

"Good." Bram rose, grunting, with one hand on his knee. "Go back to the fire. Sleep, if you can. I won't."

Hargo came back at first light.

He walked into camp as if nothing had happened, with his axe on his shoulder, humming. Somewhere in the dark he'd found his boots and his courage and an astonishing talent for rewriting an evening. He stopped at the edge of the firelight and put his hands on his hips.

"Well!" he boomed. "Nobody's dead. Good. I was scouting the perimeter. A leader has to know the ground. You'll be glad to hear the main body of the pack is broken."

Nobody answered.

"You're welcome," Hargo said, after a moment.

Selka stared into the fire. Doran examined his fingernails. Hal and Wrenna were packing in silence. Mira sat cross-legged beside Pol's cart with her jaw clenched so tight the muscles stood out.

Hargo looked at the scorched ground, at the nine hound carcasses in a row, at the splintered water barrel. "A fine kill," he said. "Selka, your arrows. Doran, a spirited effort." He clapped Bram on the shoulder. "Well held, old man."

"Hm," said Bram.

Ethan kept his eyes down. A prickle of heat ran up his collar, and he looked, and the neck of his tunic had gone faintly brown. A thin wisp of smoke curled upward.

Kindling.

He took a long breath and pressed his palm to the cloth until the heat faded.

Be calm.

"And you," Hargo said. "Porter."

Ethan looked up.

"You carried the load, yes? Good. Don't drop it." Hargo waved a hand. "Move out in ten."

He strode off. Ethan sat motionless, staring at the ground.

"Idiot," Mira whispered, from behind the cart. "I'm going to put a frog in his boot."

"Don't."

"A very large frog."

"Mira."

"Fine." She sniffed. A pause. Then, softer, "You saved Wrenna's life."

"We did."

"I'm still putting a frog in his boot."

On the far side of the camp, Bram Holt was kneeling in the ash, checking the buckles of his shield. He did not look up.

But he had been watching. Ethan knew it by the weight of the silence between them, like a hand pressed flat on his back.