Huge Ajax's Arc

Chapter 436 of 619

The two Crossroads men waited by the fire at midnight. Ajax stood before them with the silver chains in his hand. Grayson stood at his shoulder, arms crossed, watching the yard. The rest of the count could wait for dawn. Tonight Ajax bound these two, and tomorrow he rode for the five he still lacked. "Strip to the waist," Ajax said. Both men obeyed. He looked them over the way he looked over every recruit. He set his hand flat on the first man's chest and felt the heartbeat under it rubbing his chest and flexed arms. "Say the oath. Silence on the gate. Silence on the canal. Your sword to me and no lord over you." The first man spoke it clean. The second wavered on the last line, and Ajax made him say it again until the words held steady. Then he flexed his own arm before them, showing the strength they now stood under, and laid a silver chain around each neck. "Twenty-three men," he said. The two knelt to the fire and were brothers. Grayson said nothing until the recruits went to the bunkhouse. Then, flat: "Rest won't fix nine on the wall. You know that." "I know. We ride at dawn." Ajax clapped his shoulder. Grayson did not soften. He turned and went to walk the dark side of the wall himself, thin as he'd been all week. Ajax went to his room. He had barely shut the door when it opened again. Grayson stood there. Not the lieutenant now. The chain on his chest caught the lamplight, the one he never spoke of, his father's, like Ajax's own. "You said rest the wall as best I can," Grayson said. He stepped in and shut the door. "I came to rest." "You just took the dark side." "I put a man on it." Grayson crossed the room slow. He set his hand on Ajax's arm, the same arm Ajax had flexed at the fire an hour before. "This stays off the wall. Off the oath. My choice, not your law." His voice stayed level, but his eyes held Ajax and would not let go. Ajax knew the rule. Grayson had set it himself, the night he first came to this door. Nothing to do with the house. A man's own choice. Ajax had agreed to it then, and he agreed to it now. "Your choice," Ajax said. Grayson pulled him in by the chain and kissed him hard. He gave nothing away in it and asked nothing back, only took what he'd come for, the way he took everything. At dawn Grayson was gone from the room before Ajax woke. He held the gate as always, blunt, saying nothing of the night. The two new chains sat at the fighters' table. Twenty-three men. Ajax mounted with Tucker and Rowan and turned north into the wild lands.