First light found Hoden already at the stone mouth.

  He stood at the shallows’ edge with his shoulders squared, a dark shape pressed against the river’s pale surface. Dawn laid a thin wash of colour across the stones Teshar had stacked—amber bleeding into grey—and the V-shape forced the current into its narrow run as obediently as it had yesterday. The water worried at the edges, pushed and tested, but it still took the channel.

  Hoden worked with clipped, resentful efficiency. Not Kelon’s patient steadiness, reading current the way he read faces. Not the sure economy Siramae’s hands carried into everything they touched. Hoden’s movements were sharp and deliberate, the movements of a man who believed his skill should announce itself more loudly than it did. Each time a fish flashed into the pocket, his fingers snatched it out fast and hard, twisting as he hauled it free—as though the fish, too, had offended him.

  Teshar watched from the bank, half-screened by reeds. The faint smear of ochre above his brow had thinned with days and rain, more a rust shadow than a mark, but it still drew looks when people noticed. He kept his weight forward, ready to move, the way Marlek had taught him to stand when someone close was angry and hadn’t yet decided what to do about it.

  Varek sat on the higher bank with his stick across his knees, watching Hoden’s hands and the shallow hollow where the pebbles would go. He didn’t speak. He didn’t need to. The fact of him sat in the air like weather.

  Hoden glanced up and met Teshar’s eyes without blinking. The look said everything it needed to: I’m here because you put me here.

  He looked back down and dragged another fish out with a rough twist.

  Teshar wanted this to be simple. Punishment that taught. A rule that held. The mouth feeding the band until it became ordinary, like the fire and the thorn ring—things people stopped arguing about because they were just there.

  But since the counting had begun, every movement around the mouth carried weight. People watched. People stored what they saw.

  A footfall whispered through wet grass behind him.

  Kelon stepped into view, spear held low, hair still rumpled from sleep, eyes already working. He flicked a glance at Hoden, then at Teshar.

  “Arulan wants you,” Kelon said.

  Something tightened under Teshar’s ribs. “Now?”

  “By the fire.”

  Teshar’s gaze snagged on Hoden. If he left, it would look like backing down. If he stayed, it would look like he valued stones over the elders’ word. Neither was true. Neither would matter.

  He made himself step away from the bank.

  “Varek’s here,” Kelon murmured, reading the glance. “He’ll keep it honest.”

  Teshar nodded once. “Stay near,” he said anyway.

  Kelon dipped his head and followed.

  The camp woke into a thin, cold morning. Smoke rose from the central fire in a cleaner column than it used to—the vent slits Siramae had driven into the shelter roofs had stopped the air from sitting heavy inside. It had cost warmth. It had cost the comfort of doing things the old way. It had also stopped the coughing that had plagued the children since they’d made camp here, so the cost had been paid and gone quiet.

  Arulan stood by the coals with his staff planted in ash, as if the staff pinned the fire in place. Marlek crouched at the meat rack, his stone blade working in the slow, sure strokes of someone who’d learnt to make a tool last. Siramae sorted herbs beside him, her fingers moving through stems and roots with the same unhurried certainty she brought to everything.

  Arulan looked up as Teshar reached him.

  “Did Hoden stand?” Arulan asked.

  “He stands.”

  “And he counts?”

  “He counts.”

  Arulan’s gaze went past Teshar toward the river bend, measuring distance on instinct. He tapped the staff once, soft in ash. “Good. Then the band eats and remembers both.”

  Marlek kept cutting. Siramae’s fingers didn’t pause on the knot.

  Arulan looked back at Teshar. “You three’ll fish and gather this morning,” he said, a small gesture drawing in Kelon and wherever Naro had got to. “The rack is low. Take the younger ones with you.”

  Teshar nodded. Work. Useful, manageable work. He felt his shoulders ease a fraction without meaning to.

  “Stay to the near bank,” Arulan added. The words were quiet, but they had weight behind them, the kind that came from something seen rather than something worried over. “There are wolf prints on the path. Kelon’s seen them.”

  “Yes,” Teshar said.

  Siramae glanced up from her herbs without looking directly at him. “Your hands are still stiff from yesterday’s scraping,” she said. “Warm them in the water before you grip anything, or you’ll lose a fish and earn a cramp.”

  “I’ll manage.”

  Her eyes came up then, brief and level. “You’ll manage better if you listen.”

  Marlek didn’t look up from the rack. The corner of his mouth shifted once—not quite a smile, more the shape of one, pressed down before it could show.

  Naro appeared from between two shelters as though conjured by the word ‘fish’, boots half-laced, already carrying two baskets with the confidence of someone running slightly late to something they’d agreed to yesterday. He set one basket at Teshar’s feet.

  “Ready,” Naro announced.

  “You’re not laced,” Kelon said.

  Naro looked down. “Close enough.”

  “You’ll lose a boot in the mud.”

  “Then I’ll fish with one boot. It’ll be a story.” He crouched and laced it with the speed of someone who had lost the argument before it started. “Where are the little ones?”

  Ketak and Raku were already hovering nearby, waiting with the barely contained energy of boys who wanted to be first to the river and knew better than to run yet. Seli had appeared behind them with a reed basket tucked under one arm, watching Naro’s boot with open judgment. Yarla stood slightly apart, already scanning the path ahead, her attention moving the way Kelon’s did—not restless, deliberate.

  Teshar looked them over. Then he looked at the path, at the day, at the wolf prints he hadn’t yet seen but Arulan had named.

  “Single file,” Teshar said. “Feet on the firm patches. Anyone who goes in the mud carries the baskets home.”

  Ketak raised his hand. “What if we go in by accident?”

  “Baskets,” Naro said cheerfully. “No exceptions. Life is cruel.”

  They moved out through the thorn gap and down the path where the ground softened with damp. The morning air smelled of reed-sweetness and things underneath it—mud, rot, the particular mineral sharpness the river gave off where it ran over stone.

  Teshar walked with his eyes on the ground. The ground told the truth in a way voices sometimes didn’t. Deer tracks crossed the bank in neat clusters, split hooves pressed clean. A boar had churned a patch of mud somewhere upriver, leaving it raw and dark. Then the wolf prints, running parallel to the path in a straight line, claw marks pressed clean into the softness.

  Close enough to make the skin on his neck pull tight.

  Kelon crouched and touched the edge of one print without pressing it. “From last night,” he said, low enough that only Teshar heard. “Edges dried.”

  “Pack?”

  “Two sets I can read. Maybe more where the grass is thick.”

  Teshar filed it. He’d tell Arulan when they returned.

  Raku had spotted the prints and was leaning in with the specific bright-eyed interest of someone who hadn’t yet learnt to calibrate his own risk. Naro put a hand on Raku’s shoulder without ceremony and steered him on.

  “Keep walking,” Naro said.

  “I was just looking.”

  “Look from further away.”

  Raku went, scowling, but he went.

  They set up at the near bank where the reeds grew thick and the current slowed. The stone mouth worked upstream—Teshar could hear the channel running, a sharper sound than the open water—and this stretch of bank sat quieter for it, the flow gentled on the downstream side.

  Work settled into its own rhythm. Baskets went into the water. Lines dropped. The younger ones learnt to hold still—Raku especially, who had to be corrected twice before his feet stopped shuffling and the fish stopped fleeing the shadow of him.

  “You’re talking with your feet,” Seli told him, with the precision of someone who had recently discovered that saying true things gave you authority.

  “I’m not talking, I’m standing.”

  “Your standing is loud.”

  Raku went still with the expression of someone saving a response for later.

  Naro worked the line beside Kelon, hooks coming up empty with a frequency that didn’t seem to trouble him. He had a quality with waiting that looked like contentment and was probably boredom held very still. He watched the bank. He watched the way reeds bent downstream and the way a flight of birds had lifted from the far tree line and not yet come back.

  After a while, without looking up from his line, Naro said: “You know what’s down there.”

  Teshar didn’t look up from the water. “River.”

  “Beyond the river. Past the second bend, where the grass opens. We heard the stags three mornings ago from camp. The rut’s on.” A pause. “Torek’s group headed out yesterday at first light.”

  Kelon’s line went still in his hand.

  “Arulan said near the bank,” Teshar said.

  “Arulan said near bank for fishing. Gathering’s different. Siramae needs water-plants from past the second bend—she told me yesterday, you can ask her.” Naro’s voice carried the specific lightness of someone who has pre-checked his facts. “Also I want to see the stags.”

  “That’s the real reason.”

  “The water-plants are a real reason. The stags are a bonus.” His eyes came up, not light now. He’d been carrying the thought all morning. “We wouldn’t go near the herd. Just down the bank. Far enough to gather. Close enough to see.”

  Teshar looked at the river. He looked at the wolf prints they’d passed. He looked at Raku, who had stopped pretending to fish and was listening with his whole body.

  He shouldn’t.

  He knew he shouldn’t. He’d drawn marks in the dirt and made children repeat them until the words stopped shaking. He’d been the one holding the line.

  “Children stay here,” he said. “With the baskets.”

  Raku’s face dropped like a stone.

  “That’s not fair,” Ketak said.

  “I’ll come,” Yarla said at the same moment, which was more practical and more alarming.

  “You won’t,” Teshar said. He looked at Seli. “You know the hook. You’ve caught fish before.” He looked at Yarla. “You know where camp is. If we’re not back before the sun moves two hands, you take them back.”

  Yarla held his gaze a beat longer than comfortable, working out whether to push. Then she nodded—a nod with the quality of a door closing.

  Ketak glanced at Raku. Raku stared at the river and said nothing. Which was unusual enough that something cold moved through Teshar’s stomach. He filed it and turned downstream.

  They moved along the bank where the reeds thinned, and the ground firmed. Downstream, the river broadened, its voice dropping from chatter to something lower and more deliberate. Willows trailed fingers in the current. Birds worked the shallows ahead of them, lifting in small bursts and settling further on, as if leading them somewhere without meaning to.

  Then the smell.

  Warm dung under the morning damp. A heavy musk that clung to the grass the way oil clung to skin, lying at the height of something breathing and alive. The three of them slowed at the same moment without a word between them.

  Naro’s hands went still at his sides.

  They moved into the reeds and crouched, parting the stalks with two careful fingers apiece.

  Grassland opened ahead.

  Wide, pale, drenched in early light that made the frost glitter where it still lay in the shadow of the tussocks. And moving across it—the herd. Dozens of bodies, does unhurried at the edges, younger males circling the margins with the jittery attention of those who knew the drama wasn’t theirs today and watched anyway.

  And the stags.

  Two of them had squared off in the middle of the field, antlers locked, muscles bunched under hides that steamed in the cold air. The sound when they drove together was hollow and resonant—a crack that rolled across the grass and came back smaller from the tree line. One of them reared and drove forward. Antlers crashed. Hooves tore dark sprays of soil.

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  Naro let out a long, slow breath. “Look at them.” He wasn’t performing. The lightness had gone completely out of his voice.

  Part of Teshar wanted to catalogue it—season, behaviour, pattern. The simpler truth sat underneath: food. Power deciding where it lived. The herd is indifferent to the watching.

  Kelon wasn’t watching the stags. His eyes moved across the grass around the herd, reading the shapes in it, the bent stems, the stillness that was slightly too arranged.

  Teshar followed his gaze.

  There.

  Low shapes move with the slope rather than against it. Figures pressed flat, spears horizontal, faces dusted with ash and earth until skin became grass and grass became skin. Spaced in a curve around the herd’s downwind flank—a shape that curved like a palm, like a net, like the V in the river: something built to make panic choose a direction.

  Torek’s hunters.

  They’d been there the whole time.

  “That’s the real hunt,” Kelon murmured, low enough to barely be heard. “The stags are noisy. The hunters are the work.”

  Teshar raised two fingers and closed his fist: stop. The sign he’d been drilling into the children all week. Naro looked at his hand, looked at his face, and went utterly still—which was all Teshar had needed.

  The waiting ended the way hunts ended, without announcement.

  The hunters rose together—not a roar, not a war-cry, just bodies snapping upright into sudden, coordinated motion. They ran. Spears lifted. The line became a funnel.

  The herd exploded.

  Fear moved through the deer like a wave hitting a shore—the outside animals plunging inward, the inner ones driving outward, the whole mass becoming a single panicking thing that couldn’t agree on a direction. The two stags, still locked in their argument, wrenched apart and bolted in opposite directions with the stunned look of creatures whose priorities had just been revised.

  Straight into the open. Straight into the channel the hunters had made.

  A spear flew and buried into the flank of a younger stag. The animal screamed.

  The sound went through Teshar’s chest and sat there. It wasn’t clean. It wasn’t the way fire-stories made it. It was pain made loud, and it said plainly what a hunt was when you stripped the story back to the bone.

  “It’s hit,” Kelon said, very quietly.

  Another spear drove in. Then another. Men closed like a net drawn tight. The stag went down. Dust rose. The herd streamed away beyond the slope, and the fallen animal and the ring of hunters stood in the grass like an island after a flood.

  Teshar found his hands had locked tight around the spear shaft. He forced the fingers open one by one.

  Then the second movement.

  Not deer.

  Wolves.

  They came out of the grass the way the hunters had—low, patient, spaced. Grey bodies moving with the same unhurried certainty, the same willingness to have waited as long as it took. Hunger that had found its method.

  “They’ll try to take it,” Naro said. His voice had gone small.

  The hunters’ formation tightened without discussion, the way it did when people had practised a thing together for years. Spears came up. Bodies drew in until shoulders almost touched.

  A wolf darted forward, testing. A spear jabbed out and drove it back. Another circled wide, reading distance and nerve, looking for the thin place. The pack moved as a single thought distributed across six bodies.

  “They’re not charging,” Teshar said. “They’re testing. Charging costs. They’re waiting to see who breaks first.” He heard himself say it with the slightly surprised feeling of understanding arriving in the act of speaking it aloud.

  “They’re not going,” Naro said.

  “No,” Kelon said. “They’re waiting.”

  A voice at the back of Teshar’s mind said: This is what Varek means. Too far from the fire. Not a distance measured in steps. The moment your only wall is the people beside you.

  A hunter barked a command. Another pulled a dark-wrapped club from his belt and struck it hard against the ground. Sparks jumped. Fire caught. Then another. Then another.

  The hunters shouted together—deep, unified, voices merged into a single sound larger than any one of them. They stamped. They waved burning clubs. They made themselves into something a wolf’s memory said was dangerous.

  Not bravado. A wall built of heat and noise and shared nerve.

  The wolves hesitated. One feinted and skidded back from flame. The hunters surged as a line.

  That broke it.

  The pack scattered into tall grass. A final howl climbed the air and thinned into distance. The field went quiet except for men’s breathing and wind through flattened grass.

  Naro let out a breath he’d been holding since the wolves appeared. “That was close.”

  “They nearly had it,” Kelon said.

  “But they didn’t.” Teshar kept his eyes on the hunters below. “Because the men were ready. Because they held together.” He said it as a lesson, and felt the lesson arrive in himself at the same time.

  Nobody below dropped their guard. Firebrands stayed lit. Men moved fast and methodically: opening the belly, draining heat, working against the clock of cooling meat and returning appetite.

  They shouldn’t have gone down.

  Teshar knew it before his feet started moving. He knew it the way he knew when he’d made a mistake with the stone mouth—a hollowness in the chest, truth arriving slightly too late to be useful. The hunt was over, the hunters were close, and the impulse to be near a thing rather than watching it from a distance was something he hadn’t finished burning out of himself.

  He forced them to slow as they came off the rise.

  “Don’t run in,” he said. “Let them see you coming. Slow.”

  One of the hunters turned at the sound of feet. Eyes sharp, spear still dark at the tip.

  “What are you three doing this far out?” The voice was hard and flat. “You have no place here.”

  Raisa.

  Up close, ash and earth still tracked across her cheekbones in the pattern of the hunt. She had been moving quietly through long grass since before first light, and her patience for people who had not been there was limited. She looked at the three of them with the expression of someone tallying a cost.

  Naro drew breath. “We were gathering. The water-plants for Siramae, past the second bend—we came that way, and we heard—”

  “The second bend is upstream,” Raisa said. She didn’t raise her voice. She didn’t need to.

  Naro’s mouth closed.

  Teshar stepped forward, hands visible, voice even. “We heard the stags. We stopped at the reeds and watched. We didn’t move until the hunt was done.”

  Raisa’s eyes moved over the three of them—measuring, deciding how much this was going to cost everyone.

  Torek appeared from the work. He was a broad man, built by a life that hadn’t been gentle—thirty winters on him, give or take, though he didn’t look like he’d been counting. Hair tied back. Shoulders holding the residue of sustained effort. He looked at the boys with the expression of someone who had seen this exact situation before and had a strong view about it.

  “You came down,” Torek said.

  “After,” Teshar said. “The hunt was finished.”

  “The wolves weren’t.” Torek’s gaze fixed on him. “If the pack had broken the wrong way, you’d have been between teeth and a kill in open ground. You understand what that means?”

  Teshar understood. He’d understood it watching from the reeds. He understood it more clearly now, standing close enough to the place it would have happened.

  “Yes,” he said.

  Torek held his gaze. Not cruel. Harder than that. Honest.

  Teshar’s eyes found Marlek among the other hunters, working his knife on a strip of hide, not looking over, but present in the way Marlek was always present: a weight in a place that didn’t need to announce itself.

  Marlek’s shoulders tightened once. The small movement of a man deciding whether to be the one who speaks first.

  A woman’s voice cut across.

  “Hey, Torek.”

  Meera stepped out from behind a hunter she’d been helping, hands dark from work, hair tied back in the tight, practical way. Marlek’s sister, with the dry calm of someone who had been the eldest in a family that required it. She looked at the three of them steadily, without surprise, without performance.

  “Give them some slack,” she said. “They watched from the reeds. Came down after. Didn’t shout, didn’t run in.” Her eyes moved briefly to Torek, as brief as a hand steadying a tool. “That’s more than boys usually manage when antlers are crashing.”

  Torek’s tongue moved against the inside of his cheek, weighing that.

  Marlek set down the blade and crossed to Teshar. He put a hand on his shoulder—not gentle, not cruel, the grip of someone who corrects what belongs to him before someone else does. He didn’t look at Teshar when he spoke. He spoke to the problem, which was the same as speaking to Torek. “They know. No harm done.”

  Shame bit Teshar cleanly. He’d been the one drawing marks in the dirt and making children say the words back until the words stopped shaking. He’d walked past his own marks to look at antlers.

  Torek pointed a finger at them. The gesture was final, not theatrical. “Stay where you’re told. Wolves don’t give two chances.”

  “Yes,” all three said.

  The tension eased without disappearing. Around them, the hunters had already returned to work—wiping blades, tying legs, testing weight. Short words, nothing wasted. They moved the way people moved when the job was more important than how they felt about it.

  Naro leaned close. “Worth it though.”

  Kelon elbowed him without looking.

  Teshar didn’t answer. He’d walked too far. He’d also seen something that fire-stories couldn’t teach.

  When the men were ready to move, they built the sledge in minutes from practice: two saplings lashed with cord, crosspieces notched and tied, a hide thrown over the frame. Teshar watched it come together and felt a sharp, grudging envy. Simple. Fast. Made from what was at hand. The same logic as the stone mouth applied to movement.

  Torek stopped and turned. A grin split his face like a fault line—the grin of a man who has thought of something educational.

  “Naro,” Torek said. “You seem keen.”

  A few hunters looked up. Something about the tone.

  Naro straightened. “Sure.”

  “You’re tough, yeah?”

  “Course.”

  “Good.” Torek’s grin widened. “Then you and your friends can carry the stag back.”

  Kelon said, very quietly, “Bloody idiot.”

  Teshar shut his eyes for one breath.

  The hunters stepped aside from the carcass with expressions of theatrical relief. The boys didn’t get the sledge.

  They got the stag.

  Dead weight. Warm and slack, the body was already stiffening at the joints. Head lolling. Tongue loose. Blood soaking the belly fur into dark, heavy ropes.

  Naro took the forelegs. Kelon took a back leg. Teshar took the other.

  The weight arrived and stayed.

  Naro grunted immediately, the sound of a chest cavity catching something unexpected. Kelon’s face went tight. Strain shot through Teshar’s shoulders and down the length of his spine, a slow burn setting in before they’d taken three steps.

  Behind them, the hunters followed at an easy pace, talking among themselves about where the pack had gone and what the wolf count meant for the next few nights, which was the specific cruelty of men who had already done their hard work today.

  The walk back wasn’t far. It felt different from that.

  The grassland offered no shade. The carcass swung with each step and tugged at their grips. Sweat found the seams of Teshar’s tunic. His hands began to slide on fur and cooling blood.

  He tightened his grip. Skin pinched. Tore.

  Blisters. The hide-scraping the day before had softened the skin in exactly the wrong places. He could feel the fluid gathering under the surface.

  Naro made a sound between a groan and a word. “It’s heavier than it looks.”

  Kelon saved his breath. He had a method for everything, including suffering.

  Teshar kept his mind inside his body: step, step, adjust, don’t stumble. This was punishment. It was also an instruction. If the wolves had broken toward them in that grass, it would not have mattered whose pride had walked too far downstream. They’d have taken the slowest body. Whichever one fell first.

  Mistakes cost everyone. Not as a saying. As a weight in the hands.

  His shoulders burned along the muscle in a way that felt permanent.

  He kept moving.

  Not because Torek demanded it. Because the band would eat this meat. Because Ketak and Raku and Seli and Yarla, sitting by the near bank with baskets full of fish, would chew this fat and stop being hungry for a little while. Because the effort became something different when it was carried toward other people, not less painful, but connected to a reason larger than itself.

  When the trees returned, and shade fell across them, it landed like cooler water. They adjusted grips. The carcass dipped lower. Teshar’s heel caught a root.

  He stumbled.

  Kelon jerked hard sideways, taking the shift and keeping the load from going down. Something wrenched in his back. His jaw tightened.

  “Watch your feet,” Kelon said.

  Teshar nodded once and made his legs obey.

  Camp smoke appeared ahead, rising straight and thin, a grey thread marking the place where people were.

  The children spotted them first—it was always the children who spotted things first, because they had nothing else pulling at their attention. Raku’s shout went up the moment the meat smell reached him, and then all four were running toward the tree line with the particular abandon of children who had been told to stay still for two hours.

  Adults turned. Heads lifted. The camp shifted the way it always shifted at the smell of meat: a ripple from person to person, a language of hunger carried on the air.

  Marlek walked ahead of the other hunters, face unreadable. His boots were clean.

  Siramae stepped out from the shelters and watched Teshar come in with the expression she used when cataloguing damage and deciding how much of it to mention.

  Varek’s gaze cut from the carcass to the boys, and something moved in his scowl that wasn’t entirely disapproval. A flicker of confirmation: so the marked one’s shoulders ache like anyone’s. Filed away for later use.

  Meera pushed through the crowd and looked at their shaking arms and snorted. “Good,” she said. “Now you’ll sleep.”

  At Torek’s word, they lowered the carcass near the fire circle.

  It hit the ground with a weight that felt like the end of something.

  Teshar’s arms went slack. Blood rushed back into his hands in a wave of prickling heat. He flexed his fingers and watched pale blisters rise tight under the skin.

  Torek clapped his hands once. “That,” he said, loud enough to carry, “is what it costs when legs go further than sense.”

  A few people laughed—not cruel laughter, the kind that let tension out and turned fear into a story rather than a funeral.

  Arulan stepped forward, staff tapping the earth once.

  He looked at Torek. “Meat.” One word, but it carried what gratitude sounded like when it came from someone who chose words carefully.

  Then his gaze moved to the three boys.

  It stayed on Teshar a beat longer than the others. Teshar pressed his tongue to the back of his teeth and held the elder’s eyes.

  Arulan didn’t scold. He had a way of leaving silence shaped like a lesson and waiting for you to fill it yourself.

  “We have been making rules,” Arulan said. The camp stilled around his quiet voice the way it always did—not from fear, but from the understanding that his words were addressed to all of them at once. “Rules by the river. Rules at the fire. Rules about trust and counting.” He paused. “Rules mean nothing when the ones who speak them choose to step past them.”

  The words fell like stones into still water. Teshar felt each one.

  Varek’s jaw moved, but he said nothing.

  Arulan lifted his staff and gestured toward the grassland beyond the trees. “Torek’s words are now a rule. No young person beyond the second line of trees without a hunter. Not to watch. Not to gather. Not to prove anything.” He looked at the boys. “You carried the meat. That’s the price paid. It’s enough for today.”

  A murmur moved through the band—adults accepting the rule with the particular tired willingness of people who had understood it was coming.

  Arulan added, quieter, eyes on no one and somehow everyone: “The land is wider than our stories. It doesn’t know our names.”

  The words settled like ash.

  Teshar looked at his blistered hands. He thought of Hoden at the stone mouth this morning, counting pebbles that weren’t his idea into a hollow that wasn’t his, watched by someone five years his junior whose stones had changed the camp’s shape. Hoden’s careful eyes, storing everything.

  He thought of Raku going quiet when told to stay. The particular quality of that quiet.

  Some lessons arrived fast, with weight and consequence, in open grass.

  Some arrived slower. In the gap between a child being told a rule and a child deciding whether to test it.

  Siramae found him before the meat was portioned, which meant she’d decided the hands couldn’t wait.

  She pressed a bitter paste into the blisters without ceremony, cleaned the split skin on his knuckles with water that stung, and wrapped both palms in strips of hide.

  “Don’t tear them open,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “Then act like it.” She said nothing else about the afternoon. She didn’t need to. The paste worked in silence, and so did the lesson.

  That night, after the meat had been portioned and children shooed from the knives, Teshar sat at the edge of the firelight with his wrapped hands resting in his lap. Naro lay nearby, performing the groaning of a man who had carried a stag for the benefit of any audience still awake. Kelon sat against a log, rolling his shoulders slowly, working the ache out of them one rotation at a time.

  Beyond the shelters, the dark pressed close. A wolf called from far off—distant enough to ignore, close enough that no one around the fire pretended they hadn’t heard it.

  Teshar held his bandaged hands near the coals until the heat reached the tight skin underneath.

  He thought about the hunters moving through the grass. The line. The way six individual bodies had become one thing with one purpose. The wolves are doing the same from the other direction, hunger distributed across six patient frames.

  He thought about Hoden at the stone mouth, counting pebbles that weren’t his idea, watched by someone younger than him whose stones had rearranged what the camp could do. Resentment as steady as the current.

  He thought about tomorrow, and Raku’s bright-eyed restlessness by the near bank, and the specific way Raku had gone quiet when told to stay—not settled, not resigned. Storing something up.

  The fire cracked and settled. A spark lifted, spun once on the updraft, and died before it found anything to catch.

  Smoke rose cleanly through the vent slits and vanished into a sky that held no warmth and gave none back.

  Tomorrow would bring what it brought.