Chapter 97: Rules for Being Caught
Rylia announced the hunt after breakfast, with the calm of a woman suggesting weatherproofing or inventory rotation.
Elian had been standing at the Iron-heart bar with the eastern annex ledger open, trying to reconcile Orra’s reduced labor rate against the newly negotiated black-ale compensation schedule. The dwarf crew had taken possession of Bay One’s finish work with religious seriousness after Bruna confirmed the cask’s quality, which meant Elian had gained enough breathing room to become suspicious of peace. That suspicion proved justified when Rylia set one hand on the ledger, closed it gently under his fingers, and said, “Today you run.”
He looked down at the closed ledger. Then he looked up at her. Rylia wore her dark work-tunic, soft leather bracers, and the expression she got when a decision had already become law. “I have many objections,” Elian said. “Most of them are anatomical.”
“You heard the rail crack yesterday before it failed,” Rylia said. “Good. Now you learn what to do after hearing danger, before danger reaches you.”
Heda appeared on the customer side of the bar with the speed of gossip and the grin of a person who had been waiting for the subject to turn entertaining. “You’re going to love this,” she said, which immediately lowered Elian’s confidence in the entire proposal.
From the stall, Barnaby lifted his head out of his feed and stared at the assembled pack with flat, seasoned dread. He looked from Rylia to Heda, then toward Sif and Varg near the cellar stairs, and finally to Elian. Absolutely not. I refuse to supervise recreational predation. This is how management loses paperwork in the forest.
“I am not being preyed upon,” Elian said.
Skade’s voice came from the rafters above the hearth. “You are.”
Elian closed his eyes for one breath. “I would like my objection noted in the minutes.”
Bruna came out of the kitchen with a tray of clean cups, gave the entire room one narrow look, and set the tray down with more force than necessary. “If you come back bleeding on my floor, you clean it before you faint. If you come back muddy, you stop at the Annex. If you come back dead, I am taking the lockbox and hiring a quieter Tavern-master.”
“That last one seems emotionally severe,” Elian said.
“It is administratively efficient,” Bruna replied, and went back into the kitchen as if that settled the matter.
The rules were explained on the porch while the morning mist still clung low between the trees. Bay One stood to the east with dwarf hammers already sounding against new rail pegs, red and blue cords marking what could be touched, used, or blamed on idiots. Beyond the cleared yard, the western woods climbed into dark pines, thaw-soft earth, old snow pockets, and enough undergrowth to make Elian’s calves begin protesting in advance.
“You get a head start,” Rylia said. “You carry no pack. You keep the short staff. You may hide, misdirect, climb only if you can get down safely, and use anything in the terrain that does not put you in true danger.”
Sif folded her arms, already smiling. “If I catch you, you carry weight back to the start.”
“Of course you went straight to weights,” Varg said.
“It is honest punishment,” Sif replied. “He needs legs.”
Varg looked at Elian with far too much calm. “If I catch you, you explain the mistake that let me catch you, then you repeat the last stretch correctly.”
Elian rubbed one hand over his jaw. “That sounds more frightening than Sif’s.”
“It should,” Varg said.
Heda bounced once on her heels, bright-eyed and barely contained. “If I catch you, I get a prize.”
Elian stared at her. “That rule requires definition.”
“It will be funny when it happens,” she said.
“That is not definition.”
“It is warning.”
From above the porch beam, Skade dropped down without sound and landed beside them. Elian had known she was there only because the back of his neck had started making financial calculations. She looked at him with the empty patience of a closed door. “If I catch you, you never see me first.”
“That also requires definition,” he said.
“No.”
Rylia stepped closer, her shadow falling across him in the pale light. “If I catch you,” she said, voice quiet enough that the others immediately started grinning, “you stop running.”
Elian waited for the rest. None came. Somehow that made the rule worse.
Barnaby had come to the doorway of his stall, which he almost certainly considered dangerous overcommitment. He watched Rylia tie a strip of white cloth around Elian’s upper arm, then snorted as if witnessing a legal error. Marking the target improves predator morale. Poor policy. Terrible optics.
“It is so they can see when to stop,” Elian said.
Barnaby chewed once. They can smell fear, tea, and your poor circulation. The cloth is decorative.
Rylia gave Elian a thirty-count head start.
He used the first ten counts to walk with dignity. He used the next ten to realize dignity wasted distance. By the final ten, he was running through the western tree line with his coat tails snapping behind him, the short staff in one hand and his boots already sinking into thaw-soft moss where the snow had retreated.
The forest received him with unhelpful enthusiasm. Branches snagged his sleeves. Old pine needles slid under his soles. Meltwater hid under brown leaves and punished misplaced confidence. The trail Heda had chosen for their earlier ridge outing had at least pretended to be a trail. This section of woodland behaved like it resented witnesses.
Elian slowed after the first rise, partly because Rylia had told him that panic was expensive, and partly because his lungs had begun making persuasive arguments. He listened.
Behind him, nothing obvious moved.
That was worse.
The yard sounds faded quickly: hammer strikes, Bruna’s voice, Barnaby’s occasional commentary, the deep work-song of Orra’s crew. In their place came the small sounds of the trees. Water slipping off needles. A branch springing back after his shoulder brushed it. His own breathing, which sounded dramatic enough to report him to the enemy.
He forced himself to move sideways instead of straight uphill. Varg had mentioned that inexperienced runners fled in clean lines. Clean lines were easy to follow, easy to cut off, and easy to mock afterward. He angled across the slope, stepped on stone where he could, and used a low stand of winterberry to hide his change of direction.
For one pleasant minute, he believed this might work.
Then Heda laughed somewhere above him.
It was a small sound, bright and delighted, carried through the trees from a direction he had not considered because it involved far too much vertical confidence. Elian looked up too late. Heda dropped from a low branch with both arms spread and hit the ground in front of him, knees bent, tail high, eyes shining.
He pivoted so fast his left boot slid.
Heda moved faster.
She did not tackle him. That would have been Sif’s answer. Heda simply hooked two fingers through the back of his belt, redirected his momentum, and spun him half around until his shoulder bumped lightly against a pine trunk. His staff ended up pointed at a fern. Heda ended up close enough to grin directly into his face.
“Caught,” she said.
Elian gathered what remained of his breath. “You were in a tree.”
“Yes.”
“That feels like cheating.”
“You were on the ground.” She tipped her head, ears forward. “That feels like poor imagination.”
He wanted to argue. Unfortunately, the evidence surrounded him in the form of forest, gravity, and Heda looking pleased enough to bottle.
She tapped the white cloth on his arm. “Prize.”
“What prize?”
Heda looked him over with exaggerated seriousness, as if selecting livestock at market. Then she reached up and pulled the strip of cloth from his arm in one quick tug.
“That is the marker,” Elian said.
“It was.” She tied it around her own wrist, bright against her fur. “Now it is proof.”
“That seems operationally dangerous.”
“You’ll get another.” Heda leaned closer, nose twitching once near his collar. “Also, you smell very proud for someone caught by the first hunter.”
“I was adapting to terrain.”
“You were congratulating yourself behind a bush.”
“That is a cruelly accurate summary.”
Heda’s grin softened by half a fraction, which somehow made it more dangerous. “Your punishment is embarrassment.”
“That lacks structure.”
She set both hands on his shoulders, turned him gently but firmly toward the lower slope, and pushed him into a jog. “Run back to the marked rock and start again. This time, look up before the forest laughs at you.”
Elian jogged because walking would have admitted too much. Heda paced beside him for several strides, light as spite, then vanished into the trees with the stolen cloth around her wrist.
By the time he reached the flat marker stone near the start line, Rylia was waiting with another strip of white cloth. Her face gave nothing away, which meant she had enjoyed every second.
“Heda caught you in four minutes,” she said, tying the new marker around his arm.
“I am choosing to view that as useful data.”
“You should.” Rylia’s fingers lingered just long enough to make him aware of the warmth under the cloth. “You looked only where your own body could go.”
“That is a highly specific insult.”
“It is a good lesson.”
Barnaby, who had somehow positioned himself at the edge of the yard without crossing fully into the woods, snorted over the fence rail. First failure: vertical negligence. Recommend avoiding trees, cliffs, roofs, rafters, tall grass, haylofts, and Heda.
“That list removes most of the world,” Elian said.
Barnaby’s ears tipped back. Correct. Stay indoors.
The second run lasted longer.
Elian corrected for the trees. He kept his eyes moving up and down, watched for branches that bent wrong, and listened for Heda’s bright little betrayals. None came. That, naturally, meant another danger had entered the lesson.
The ground rose in uneven shelves, dotted with dark rocks and old roots. Elian took a deer path along the side of the slope, used a fallen trunk to hide his turn, then cut downhill in a wide arc that would bring him around behind the larger pines. He felt better this time. Slower, yes, but less foolish. He used the staff to test mud before stepping, kept his weight centered, and listened for breath that was not his.
He heard Sif before he saw her.
That was impossible to miss. A faint snap of twig. A heavier shift of brush. Then silence so deliberate it seemed suspiciously proud of itself.
Elian stopped.
A broad smile appeared between two pine trunks ahead.
“Hello,” Sif said.
He ran the other way.
Sif laughed, and the sound chased him through the trees with frankly inappropriate joy. Elian dodged left around a boulder, ducked under a branch, and found a narrow channel where meltwater had cut through the old snow. He used it because Sif was large and the channel was miserable. For seven glorious seconds, the plan worked.
Then Sif did what Sif did with plans.
She went through them.
Elian heard the crash before he felt the ground tremble. He glanced back and saw her come over the boulder rather than around it, landing in the channel behind him with enough force to splash cold mud up both sides. She gained on him in three strides. Elian swung the staff back to make space, as Rylia had taught him.
Sif caught it.
He stared at her hand on the staff. She stared back, grinning.
“That was better,” she said.
“Thank you.”
“Still caught.”
She yanked the staff forward. Elian let go, because keeping hold seemed like a good way to become a decorative banner. Sif caught him around the waist with her other arm, lifted him clean off the ground, and slung him over one shoulder as if he had been delivered in a sack with handles.
“Sif,” he said, with his face aimed at the back of her tunic. “This is undignified.”
“Yes.”
“I object.”
“You are allowed.”
She started walking uphill.
Elian bounced once against her shoulder and decided dignity could be retrieved later from wherever she had dropped it. “What is the punishment?”
“You carry a stone.”
“Of course.”
“A useful stone,” Sif added, as if offering luxury.
They reached a flat clearing where someone—probably Sif, and probably with enthusiasm—had placed a pile of fist-sized fieldstones. She set him down, handed back his staff, then selected a stone that looked innocent until Elian took it and discovered it had ambition.
“Carry that to Rylia,” Sif said. “Jogging.”
“That stone is damp.”
“Then it is cooled for comfort.”
“You have a gift for cruelty with cheerful phrasing.”
Sif clapped him on the shoulder hard enough to rearrange his posture. “You used terrain better. You made me come through bad footing. Good. Next time, make the bad footing cost more.”
Elian looked down at the stone, then up at her. “That was actual feedback.”
“I contain multitudes,” Sif said, clearly pleased with the phrase she had stolen from him.
He jogged back with the stone held against his chest. By the halfway point, his arms had begun filing formal complaints. By the time he reached the start, Rylia took the stone from him with one hand and set it beside the fence.
Heda was sitting on the fence rail with Elian’s first marker tied around her wrist like a trophy. She looked delighted. “Sif caught him by moving through the obstacle, didn’t she?”
“Sif was the obstacle,” Elian said.
Barnaby eyed the growing stone pile with profound despair. Now he is importing rocks recreationally. Expansion disease has reached the training program.
Varg stepped forward for the third run.
She did not grin. That was alarming.
“Your first mistake with Heda was attention height,” Varg said. “Your first mistake with Sif was assuming an obstacle has the same cost for every body. With me, your mistake will probably be planning too late.”
“That is very confident.”
“Yes.” Varg handed him a fresh marker strip. “Run.”
The third run was the worst because Varg did not chase like a predator.
She hunted like weather with a notebook.
Elian started faster than before, then slowed on purpose once the trees thickened. He had learned enough to distrust his first instinct, which felt like progress until he realized Varg had probably counted on that too. He angled uphill, then doubled back along a stony shelf. He avoided clear mud. He watched the branches. He listened for the heavy directness of Sif and the delighted betrayals of Heda.
Varg gave him nothing.
That made him think harder, which was exactly how she caught him.
He came to a split between two routes: a narrow deer path through young pines or a shallow ravine with wet stones at the bottom. Heda would expect him to miss the upper branches. Sif would punish the ravine by making it irrelevant. Skade would already be behind him. Rylia would know which route he wanted before he chose it.
Varg would know which route made sense.
So he chose the unreasonable one.
He took the ravine.
Halfway through, with both boots sliding on wet stone and his staff braced against the bank, he understood the trap. Varg had never needed to chase him. She had only needed him to choose the option that made him slow himself.
She stood at the far end of the ravine with arms folded.
“Elian,” she said.
He stopped, breathing hard. “I was trying to be unpredictable.”
“You became inefficient.”
“I dislike how short that correction is.”
“It is short because the mistake was simple.” Varg pointed to the young pines above the bank. “That route was narrow but stable. Your body could have moved through it cleanly. You chose the ravine because you were thinking about my thoughts instead of your feet.”
He leaned on the staff and looked up at the pines. The path was obvious now. Annoyingly obvious. “Punishment?”
“You repeat the last two hundred paces. Correctly. Then you explain why.”
He stared at her.
Varg stared back.
“I preferred the stone,” he said.
“I know.”
The repeat was humiliating in a useful way. Varg walked behind him at an even pace while he climbed out of the ravine, backtracked to the fork, and took the young-pine path. It was tight, scratchy, and full of branches determined to catch his sleeves, but his footing held. He reached the far end faster than expected.
Varg nodded. “Explanation.”
Elian caught his breath and tried to sound less like a man losing a debate with his own lungs. “I chose the ravine because I wanted to defeat your prediction. I treated surprise as more important than movement. The better answer was the path that preserved speed and balance, even if you anticipated it.”
“Good,” Varg said.
“That is all?”
“Yes.”
“Somehow that feels worse than being carried by Sif.”
“It should,” Varg replied, and handed him back toward the start.
By the time Elian returned, the morning had worn into him properly. His coat was streaked with mud, his hair had escaped its tie, and the second white marker had been replaced by a third, then a fourth. Heda had collected one. Sif had one tied around the handle of her hammer. Varg, with no humor at all, tucked hers into the edge of the tally board she had apparently brought into the woods.
Rylia looked him over with an expression that mixed pride, possession, and the kind of measured concern that meant she was not done.
“Enough?” Elian asked.
“For this half,” she said.
He looked at her. “This half.”
Skade appeared beside the nearest pine without any visible approach. Elian only knew she had moved because his entire body disliked the information. She held a fresh strip of white cloth between two fingers.
“Tomorrow,” Skade said.
Elian took one slow breath. “You have been watching.”
“Yes.”
“And taking notes.”
“No.”
That was somehow less comforting.
Rylia stepped closer and tied the final clean strip around his wrist rather than his arm. Her fingers were careful over the spots where branches had scraped him. “Today you learned height, force, and route choice. Tomorrow you learn silence.”
Skade’s dark eyes did not blink.
Heda, still on the fence, leaned toward Sif and whispered loudly, “He is going to hate that.”
“I can hear you,” Elian said.
“That means today worked,” Heda replied.
Barnaby looked at the mud on Elian’s boots, the stolen cloth trophies, the stone pile, the staff, the pack, and the woods waiting beyond the fence with entirely too much patience. He lowered his head with the weary grandeur of an administrator who had read the next page and disliked every line. Phase one complete. Subject remains alive, embarrassed, and increasingly portable. Recommend ending program before shadows become involved.
Elian looked at Skade.
Then at Rylia.
Then back at the forest.
“Barnaby may have a point.”
Rylia’s mouth curved, slow and warm and deeply unfair. “He often does.”
“Then we are stopping?”
“No,” Rylia said, touching the back of his wrist where the fresh marker sat. “Tomorrow, you run from the ones who wait.”
The woods beyond the yard shifted under a small wind. Pine needles whispered together. Somewhere in the distance, water moved under old snow.
Elian tightened his grip on the staff.
“I miss inventory,” he said.
Heda laughed first, Sif second, and even Varg let out a quiet breath of amusement. Rylia only leaned down, pressed her cold nose once to his temple, and murmured against his hair, “You will survive.”
Skade had already vanished.
That, Elian decided, was the least reassuring part of the entire day.