CHAPTER FOUR — The Hunt-Song (2)

Kellen considered this. The wind moved through the pines. Somewhere below, the white lights kept climbing, slow and certain.

"Okay," he said slowly. "Okay. That's their whole system, isn't it. The Veil, the Old Law, the trial, the white robes — it's all one big closed circuit. The mountain accuses, the Circle judges, the Veil remembers. Nobody on the outside ever gets to say different."

"Yes."

"So here's the thing about closed circuits." He leaned forward, and the fool's mask slid off his face in one smooth motion, and the thing underneath was sharp and quick and awake. "Closed circuits only work if you never let outside power touch them. Your elders have spent three hundred years making sure no human ever gets near the books. You know why? Because the second an outsider with a laptop looks at your math, the whole thing falls apart."

She stared at him. "You're not holding a laptop."

"I'm making a point, Chief. The point is: your Circle doesn't actually want me dead because I'm a threat. They want me dead because a human is a witness, and witnesses break closed circuits." He tapped the side of his head. "So let's stop running like we're guilty of their crime and start thinking like people who are about to win. Question: what does the Circle need, right now, to close my file?"

She frowned. "What?"

"To close the file on me. They can't keep a body hunt going forever. The tribe is watching. The other guardians are watching. They pronounced you a deserter and sent the white robes after both of us — but a hunt costs something. It costs men. It costs the Veil's attention. They'll get tired. They'll want a result. So I ask again: what closes a hunter's file?"

"Proof." Her voice was quiet. "A body. Or the wolves' remains of one. The Veil records what crosses it both ways — a human entering the mountain has to be accounted for as leaving, or as being taken. If it's not accounted for, the hunt never ends."

"There it is." Kellen grinned. It was a terrible, beautiful grin, the grin of a man who had just spotted the flaw in a three-hundred-year-old house of cards. "They need a body. So we give them a body. Not a real one. A convincing one. We leave your ghost-dogs a nice little present on the eastern border — torn clothes, your mountain's black blood, enough mess that the Veil clocks a human taken by wolves — and the file closes. The circuit breaks. They stop looking, because the mountain tells them they can stop looking."

Isola was silent for a long moment. Below them, the white lights climbed.

"That is," she said, slowly, "the most cynical thing I have ever heard."

"And yet?"

"And yet it would work." Her eyes were distant, thinking. "If the evidence were planted where the Veil could read it — and if the right person reported it — the Circle would accept it. They'd have to. It's how the law reads itself. A human crosses in, the wolves take him, that's the whole story." She looked at him, and there was a flicker of something in her face that might have been admiration, might have been horror. "You would fake your own death."

"I'm a content creator, Chief. Faking things convincingly is, legally, my entire job." He held up a finger. "Except this time it's not a sponsorship. This time it's life or death. Which, honestly? Better rates."

* * *

They would have argued longer, but the mountain chose that moment to answer for them.

A branch snapped. Not far. Not below. Near.

Isola was on her feet with her blade in her hand before Kellen finished drawing breath, pulling him down behind a spine of rock, her body curved over his like a shield and a threat at the same time. Kellen's heart did its breakdance thing. He was getting tired of his heart's life choices.

A voice came out of the pines, low and bored and thoroughly unimpressed:

"Well. This is a sight. The legendary Chief Guardian, on her belly behind a rock, hiding behind a human like he's a very expensive handbag."

Isola didn't lower the blade. But something in her shoulders loosened — infinitesimally.

"Macy," she said. "Don't."

A woman stepped out of the mist. She was short, round-shouldered, dressed in the patched gray of a border quartermaster, with a coil of rope over one shoulder and an expression on her face like she had smelled something gone off in the pantry. She looked at Kellen. She looked at Kellen again.

"Oh, no," she said. "Isola. No. Tell me he's a mushroom. Tell me you're hugging a mushroom."

"He's — " Isola started.

"He's very clearly a him." Macy sighed, a great, world-weary sound. "I have stood where you are standing. I have loved a thing I couldn't afford to love. And I am telling you, from the bottom of my heart and also from my professional opinion as the person who has to clean up after the Chief Guardian's life choices — this is a terrible idea. A spectacular one. Chef's kiss of a terrible idea."

"Thank you," Kellen said. "I've been saying that."

Macy's eyes cut to him. "Oh, he talks. Is that a human accent? I love it. Say something else. Say 'check engine light.'"

"Check engine light."

"Ladies." Macy clutched her chest. "Ladies, I have heard that. In my car. That noise killed my transmission. I have a whole trauma around that noise." She looked Isola dead in the eye. "You fell for a man whose voice sounds like the thing that makes your check engine light come on."

"It's called vocal fry," Kellen said. "It's very trendy."

"I'm sure it is. In whatever sad little puddle you crawled out of." Macy turned her scrutiny on him, head to toe, the way an appraiser looks at a chair she suspects is fake. "Let me see your hands."

"Why?"

"Because Isola has the hands of a woman who has broken bones with them, and I need to know if yours are the hands of someone who can actually defend her, or the hands of someone who —" she grabbed his wrist, turned his palm over, squinted "— someone who has never held anything heavier than a microphone. Oh, look. Calluses. Shallow ones. From a prop stick. You've never had a real fight, have you, human?"

"Every fight I've ever had has been extremely real," Kellen said. "Usually it's with my producer."

"Your producer."

"He's a nightmare. Worse than the wolves. At least the wolves are honest about wanting to kill me."