The fire came over the ridge at forty miles an hour, and it sounded like a freight train dragging a forest behind it.
"Count off!" Wade Callahan yelled.
Nobody could hear him over the roar. He counted them by touch instead, a slap on the shoulder for each yellow fire shirt as it went past him. Martinez. Becker. The Okafor kid. Dale. Sweeney. Rita, last, limping on the ankle she'd rolled at the saddle.
Six. All six inside the safety zone, a scraped half acre of dirt and rock below the ridgeline.
"Shelters! Get them out, get them down, feet to the fire!"
They knew the drill, because he'd made them run it until they hated him. Six foil shapes went down on the dirt, flapped once and lay flat.
Wade turned for his own spot at the edge of the scrape. The air had gone orange. Pine needles were lifting off the ground ahead of the front and drifting down into his hair, still glowing.
He ripped the shelter case open on his hip. The foil came half out and caught on the strap.
He yanked it.
The ridge went white.
Stone. Cold stone, under his cheek.
Wade lay still and took inventory, because that was what you did after a hit. Hands and feet, working. Lungs, which hurt. Face, which hurt more. His shirt stank of smoke and scorched cotton, and somebody nearby was clapping.
A lot of somebodies.
He pushed up onto his elbows. The floor was gray flagstone, swept clean. A ring of chalk and silver ran around him on the stone, and when he put his palm flat on the line it was warm, like a tailgate in August.
His line pack was still on his back. The shelter case hung open on his hip, the foil spilling out of it in a crumpled silver tongue. His gloves were in his back pocket, where they always were.
"My crew," he said. His voice came out of him like gravel. "Where's my crew?"
Nobody answered. The clapping got louder.
He was in a hall the size of a church, with banners on the walls and windows of colored glass forty feet up. People in velvet and fur stood in tiers behind a rail, applauding. Men in breastplates lined the walls with spears.
Four other people were sprawled inside the circle with him.
The nearest was a guy in his late twenties in a navy suit with no tie, already getting up. He had good teeth and the kind of haircut that cost money. He was grinning before he'd figured out where he was.
"Okay," the suit said. "Okay. This is a lot. This is a lot, my guy."
Beyond him a woman in scrubs sat with her knees pulled up, breathing through her nose. A big man in a security guard's jacket was on all fours, coughing. A lean woman in running tights was already on her feet with her fists up, turning in a slow circle.
None of them wore yellow.
Wade got to his knees. His hands were shaking. He looked at them, and they kept doing it, so he put them flat on his thighs.
"Did anybody see six firefighters?" he said. "Yellow shirts. Shelters out."
The woman in scrubs looked at him. Then at his shirt, which was singed brown across one shoulder. She didn't say anything. Her face said enough.
A herald in a red tabard stepped up to the rail and banged a staff on the floor.
"Heroes of another world! Be welcome in the Kingdom of Aldmere, by the grace of His Majesty Halvard the Third!"
More applause. The suit waved at the crowd with both hands.
"Each of you has been granted a Slate," the herald went on. "Will it open, and the Slate will show the class the heavens have chosen for you. Your class is your calling!"
"What does that mean?" the runner said. "Will it open. Will what open?"
"Your Slate, lady hero."
"Thank you. Super helpful."
The suit was already doing it. He frowned at the air in front of his face, the way you'd frown at a tough putt, and a pane of pale light unfolded there. It hung at chest height, thin as paper, glowing at the edges.
"Oh, no way," the suit said. "No way. Radiant Champion!"
The hall went up like a stadium. Somebody threw a flower.
The herald bellowed it again. "Radiant Champion! The first in thirty years!"
"I'll take it," the suit said. He turned and pointed at the crowd. "I'll take it!"
The other three opened theirs. The woman in scrubs got something called an Arcanist and said, quietly, "I'm a pharmacist." The big man got Bulwark and said, "Figures." The runner got Sword Saint, looked at the light for a long moment, and said, "I've never held a sword in my life."
Each name got a roar.
Then the whole hall turned and looked at Wade.
He didn't want to do it. He wanted somebody to tell him whether Rita had gotten her feet pointed at the fire. But a hundred people were waiting, and the herald was lifting his staff, and it was a stupid place to make a stand.
He thought about it the way you'd think about reaching for a radio.
The Slate chimed and unfolded in front of him.
```status WADE CALLAHAN | Level 1 | Tamer Health 125 | Spirit 30 Might 8 | Grace 7 | Grit 12 | Wits 11 | Spirit 6 Bonds: 0 of 1 ```
It was writing in his own words. He could tell, somehow. The letters were the blocky print he used on incident logs, and the numbers lined up the way he'd line them up on a whiteboard.
The herald squinted at the pane across the circle. He opened his mouth. He closed it.
"Tamer," the herald said.
Silence. One beat of it.
Then the hall laughed.
It wasn't a surprised laugh. It was the laugh of a joke everybody already knew, a laugh with a history. Old men in fur laughed with their heads back. A lady by the rail covered her mouth. One of the guards against the wall laughed so hard his spear wobbled.
"What's a Tamer?" Wade said.
That made it worse.
The suit looked over at his pane and winced. He actually winced, like he'd seen a buddy's credit score.
"Tough roll, my guy," he said. He stuck out a hand. "Trent Maddox. Enterprise sales. I'd say it's a numbers game, but your numbers kind of suck."
"Wade."
"Wade. Love it. Strong name." Trent shook his hand once, hard, and let go to wave at the crowd again.
Wade looked at his Slate. Might 8 and Grit 12, with no idea what any of it was measured against. Trent's pane, from where he stood, had a lot of numbers in the teens and a gold border.
Tamer. Fantastic. He'd been demoted to dog-catcher in a world with dragons.
Except he'd played every monster-collecting game they ever made, from the cartridge ones on up. Every single one had a useless class, the one the forums laughed at for a month. It was always the one nobody had figured out yet.
He filed that. Right now his hands were still shaking.
The herald moved on to speeches. Velvet people came down off the tiers to touch Trent's sleeve. Guards herded the five of them out of the circle toward a side door.
Wade was the last one out. That was habit too.
An old man stood by the door in a gray robe with silver thread at the cuffs. He had a soft face and a short white beard, and he was the only person in the hall who wasn't laughing. He didn't look amused or sorry. He looked like a man watching a pot he'd put on forty years ago finally start to boil.
As Wade passed him, the magister said, very low, "You stayed out until the last one was in."
Wade stopped dead. He turned.
"What did you say?"
The old man blinked at him, mild as milk. "I said nothing, Master Callahan. You're tired."
"You know my name."
"It was on your Slate. Magister Oriel Dask, at your service. I summoned you." He smiled. "Go on. They'll feed you."
A guard put a hand on Wade's shoulder. Wade looked at Dask a second longer. The old man had already turned to talk to someone else.
In a long room with a table, they were fed. Roast bird, black bread, a pitcher of cider. Wade ate because his body told him to.
"So when do we go home?" Trent asked the herald, through a mouthful of bird. "Ballpark."
"After the clearing, lord hero."
"Clearing what?"
"The Thornwild." The herald said it with pride. "His Majesty sends all five of you south to Thornreach, to lead the clearing of the Thornwild. It is the great work of the age."
Wade figured a forest. Timber. Maybe a road. He'd cut a lot of brush in his life. He could cut more.
"Love a big project," Trent said. "Love it. What's the timeline?"
The king's road south took six days by guild coach. Trent worked the coach like a client dinner, asking the driver about his kids and the outriders about their swords, and by day three the outriders were laughing at his jokes. The pharmacist, Priya, slept with her head against the window. Doug, the big guy, asked Wade twice about fire and listened both times. Lena did push-ups at every stop.
Nobody had heard of the Bitterroots. Nobody had heard of Montana. Wade stopped asking on day two.
At night he lay awake and counted to six.
Thornreach, on day seven, was a boom town. Raw timber walls, mud streets, sawmills screaming on the river, and more men with swords than Wade had seen in one place outside a movie. The air smelled like smoked meat and fresh-cut pine and horse.
The Adventurers' Guild had the biggest building on the square. Inside, it was all dark beams and noise. A long counter ran down one wall. Behind it sat a man in a good green coat with a ledger open in front of him and a quill in his hand.
"Edric Crane," the man said, rising for Trent. "Factor of the Thornreach chapter. An honor, Champion."
He gave the other three warm welcomes and guild badges of polished brass. He looked at Wade last.
"And the Tamer."
"Wade Callahan."
"Master Callahan." Crane sat back down. His voice was smooth as butter on warm bread. "I'm afraid I can't offer you rank."
"Why not?"
"Tamers have been barred from guild ranks for two hundred years. It's the law, and the law is older than me." Crane dipped his quill. "Assess a beast, settle a cow. Dog-catchers with a Slate. Nothing personal, it's the rate."
Trent made a sympathetic face over Crane's shoulder. "Brutal, my guy."
"So what am I supposed to do?" Wade said. "The king sent me down here."
"The king sent five," Crane said. "He was generous with the fifth." He made a note in his ledger and didn't look up again.
Wade stood at the counter a moment longer. Then he walked down to the far end, where the light was worse and the line was shorter.
An old man sat there behind a stack of paper, in a clerk's black coat gone gray at the elbows. He had a long, tired face and ink on every finger.
"Postings," the clerk said. "No rank needed for a posting. Anyone can take a posting."
"What've you got?"
He didn't look up. He slid one sheet across the counter.
The Slate chimed.
```status [POSTING] Clear vermin from the old border fort. Reward: 5 marks. ```
"Five marks," Wade said. "Is that good?"
"It is not." The clerk wrote something in a book. "Cinderwatch. Half a day along the forest road, east. A posting gives you the claim to the ruin for a year. Take the well rope. The bucket's gone."
"You've been there?"
"Tobb Merrin," the old man said, as if that answered it. He still didn't meet Wade's eyes. "Thirty years at this desk. Take the rope, Master Callahan."
Wade took the rope.
On the way out he passed a board covered in notices. Most were for beasts. Thornback boar, 5 bits. Briar pack, 2 marks. One near the top was printed in bigger letters than the rest.
CLAN CAMP. 40-200 MARKS. PAID ON PROOF.
He didn't know what it meant. He noticed it anyway, and he noticed that the men reading it were smiling.
The forest road ran east along the edge of the Thornwild, and the Thornwild was dry.
Wade could see it before he was a mile out of town. Tall pines with their lower limbs still on, which made ladders for fire to climb. Grass between them gone the color of straw. Brush packed thick in the draws. He stepped off the road once and the needles crackled under his boot like cellophane.
Early summer, the clerk had said. The dry season was still weeks out.
Wade looked at the slope of the ground, which ran up and away to the north in long ridges. He looked at the wind, which came from the southwest and pushed the grass tops toward the hills. Fire would run up those ridges like it was late for something.
Old habit. He'd been reading country like that his whole working life. His hands had stopped shaking somewhere around the third day. Now they just felt empty.
The sun went down behind him. The trees turned black against an orange sky, and he didn't like the color.
That was when he heard the swearing.
It came from up ahead, off the road to the left. It was a woman's voice, furious and steady, in a language he didn't know. Then it switched to one he did.
"Rot-gutted, pox-rotten, son of a tick-bitten sow!"
Wade came around a bend and stopped.
A net hung from the limb of an old oak, ten feet up. It was the heavy kind, tarred rope, cinched shut at the top. A trip line ran from it across the game trail into the brush.
There was a woman in it. Upside down.
She was long, and that was the first thing he saw. Long legs folded wrong in the mesh, arms pinned, a copper-red braid hanging straight down past her face. Tall ears stuck up through the net, pointed like a fox's, black at the tips. The left one had a notch cut clean out of it, an old notch, healed white at the edge.
A tail was tangled in the rope behind her. A full red brush of a tail with a white end, wound three times through the mesh and furious about it.
Her eyes found him. Amber eyes, with pupils cut like a cat's, narrowed to slits.
"Oh, good," she said. "A human. Come to collect?"
Wade didn't answer. He looked at the net and the trip line and the knot that held it, the way he'd look at a hang-up tree over a fireline. Then, without meaning to, he thought the word he'd read on his Slate a week ago. Assess.
The Slate chimed.
```status [ASSESS FAILED] Assess cannot read a mind that can say no. ```
He looked at that for a long second.
It hadn't said invalid target. It hadn't said error. It said she had a mind that could say no, and that was the reason it wouldn't work.
"Well?" the woman said. "Are you going to stare, or are you going to fetch the others?"
Wade let the box fade. He pulled the belt knife the coach driver had given him on the fourth day, a cheap thing with a bone handle, and walked to the trunk.
"What are you doing?"
"Hold on to something."
"Hold on to what? I'm in a net!"
He found the anchor line where it was tied off around the trunk, high as his head. He got his left arm up under the net where her shoulders were, so her weight would come onto him and not onto her neck. Then he sawed through the rope.
The net dropped. She came down onto his arm and his chest like a sack of grain with knees, and they both staggered. She was heavy with muscle and she smelled like pine smoke and crushed grass.
For one second her face was right next to his, upside down, close enough to see the freckles across her nose.
He set her on the ground and let go. He stepped back.
She was out of the net in three twists, faster than he could follow. And then there was a knife at his throat. A real one, longer than his, held by a hand that didn't shake at all.
"You cut me loose," she said. "Why?"
"You were upside down."
She stared at him. Her eyes were very close now, right side up, amber and slit and full of a hundred questions she wasn't going to ask. Her mouth was a hard line. It was a good mouth. Furious, chapped at the corner, a scar so small he only saw it this close.
He didn't look away from her. He didn't look down at the knife, either. He'd been around enough angry people to know you didn't.
"That's it?" she said. "Upside down?"
"You looked like you'd been up there a while."
She was tall. Nearly his height. Her clothes were leather and green wool, cut for running, laced tight. There was a quiver strapped across her back with three arrows left in it, and no bow.
Her eyes went over him the way his had gone over the net. The boots, the scorched shirt, the hands that hadn't grabbed. A human who'd cut first and asked nothing, and she didn't seem to know where to file him.
She took the knife away from his throat one finger's width.
"What do you want for it?"
"Nothing."
"Humans always want something."
"Then I'll let you know when I think of it."
Something moved in her face then. It wasn't trust. It was closer to a puzzle she didn't have the pieces for.
"You're not a hunter," she said. She looked at his shirt, at the scorch marks, at the empty hands. "You're not a soldier. You don't even have a sword."
"I'm a Tamer, apparently."
Her ears went straight up.
"You're a what?"
"It's a long story. Who set the net?"
She looked past him at the trip line, and her lip curled. "The Ashen Hounds. Bounty men. They string nets all along the forest edge this time of year." She bent and yanked her braid out of the mesh. "Four days I've been watching their lines. I knew where every snare was. Then I didn't."
"Are you hurt?"
"No."
"Your ankle's bleeding."
"It's a scratch. I don't need help." Her ears flattened back against her skull when she said it, sharp and quick, and then came halfway up again as if she'd caught them.
"Okay," Wade said.
"Okay?"
"You said you don't need help. Okay."
She looked at him like he'd done a magic trick. She seemed to be waiting for the rest of it. A price. A hand on her arm. He kept his hands where they were.
"What's your name?" he said.
"No."
"That's a strange name."
The corner of the furious mouth twitched. She killed it fast.
"You're going the wrong way, human," she said. "There's nothing east but the burned fort and the forest."
"The burned fort's where I'm going."
"Why?"
"I'm clearing vermin. Five marks."
She opened her mouth to answer.
A horn blew in the trees to the north.
It was a long low note. Another answered it from farther west. Wade turned toward the sound. Through the black trunks of the pines, maybe four hundred yards off, he saw a light. Then three more. Then a dozen, moving fast between the trees, spread in a line the way a crew spreads to walk a fire's edge.
Torches.
Under the horns he heard dogs. Not barking. Baying, high and eager, the sound of animals that had found what they were sent for.
The woman had gone very still beside him. Her ears were turned toward the sound like dishes.
"Those are mine," she said. "The hunters, I mean."
She looked at him. Then at the road east, and the dark beyond it.
"Run, human."
