On a moonless night at the forest’s edge east of Ashenmire, the orcs made a quiet semicircle around a muted campfire. The place they had chosen was an open crescent bitten from the treeline, a shallow arc where grassland spread down to the south like a low sea, and behind them the northern trees stood close and dark, their trunks black bands in the cloud-stifled starlight. Two heavy game carts waited on sun-cracked wheels, stilled after a day of creaking and heave; their ropes hung slack, and between the spokes dust lingered. A few blood wolves dozed in the shadow past the fire—giant beasts with shoulders as high as a man’s chest, tack still on, heads on their forepaws, ribs rising and falling. Their leather tack creaked when they shifted. One of them huffed through its nostrils, a damp sound, and settled again. It was the kind of quiet that made every small thing clearly audible, as if distance had thinned.
Garthak crouched at the fire with a spit in both hands. He had kept the flames low because he knew how far light traveled across wet grass under a sky without a moon. Fire reached a long way; the smell of cooked meat did, too. His stained leather half-cape hung from one shoulder and flowed down to his elbows. It had a dozen cuts worked into it from thorn and rock. His tunic and boots were plain, oiled as best he could manage; the tunic bore old mends at the elbows and one dark streak from a grease flare. The short cords of his black hair pressed to his skull like rough rope. He turned venison over the coals with a steady wrist, letting fat hiss but not leap. He had learned to cook at a steady heat, to watch the way meat tightened when the flame threatened to run too hot.
He watched the open grass as much as he watched the trees. The crescent of their clearing gave him two fronts to track, one lit by the faint glow of cloud-stifled stars and the other nothing but a wall of trunks and black brush. He kept his head tilted a little, listening. In the timber, flies thudded against bark, and the small, crisp legs of unseen insects made paper sounds over bark. From deeper within the woods an owl loosed a brief, soft question and then another answer like a thought it had remembered too late.
Garthak stood without a word and slipped along the rim. The ground there was a skin of leaf, soft underfoot. He tested each step before his weight committed. He moved with a patience that did not set itself against anything; he went the way water went, in a spread and hedge between bushes. He tested the air for scent, but the wind came from the south where the grassland lay, bringing him only their own smoke thinned to suggestion, warm venison, the musk of the blood wolves, and the cold trace of pond water far off. If elves hunted, there would be a plant break or a human astringency, something sour-green. He found none of that. He found one of their sentries and then another—the first a broad-shouldered woman with a scar over one canine, leaning on a short boar spear and chewing something from a pouch; the second a narrow young male, the boy they had drafted from the last caravan, who had thin wrists but legs that could run all day. Garthak touched both on the forearm as he went by. No one spoke. The night was not for talk. He turned another arc between them and angled back to the fire.
He returned uneasy. Foreign woods sat wrong in the head, and he had learned to obey that wrongness. The forest here on the fringe of the Bonecandle Swamps had a smell of leaf-rot and old lantern resin. The people of Ashenmire kept tar and strange wax for their marsh lights, and sometimes even far from the town’s low palisades and ferry poles he could catch it, a candled tang. He had never liked it. East from Ashenmire the ground lifted more, ran into drier roots and brush thickets that hid the low deer paths well. Farther north of the swamp line the Silvergrove Dominion spread forest like a cover over half the horizon, but he did not know yet with his own senses how far the border wards reached. The blood wolves huffed again when he stepped into the ring of firelight as if they had felt him already and only paused to watch his approach. The closest raised its head and licked its nose, then went back to its heavy-breathed sleep.
They ate in low voices. The flames in their pit were dark shapes with a little fire under them and not much else. Ash clung to meat and cloth but didn’t lift. The orcs chewed and passed slices to one another beneath that tight, self-denying glow. They talked about rations in the Ashmaw Barrens and said as little as they could manage while still saying all there was to say. He could hear them count sacks of cracked grain in the memory of their hands, the feel of them, and the thin rest of marrow fat scraped from bones.
“It is the same in Blackhorn,” said Morgrash, chewing with a slow, exact hunger and swallowing with the patience of a man who had led bands along dry ridges season after season. The scarred old hunter sat under a wolf-pelt mantle that spilled over a reinforced leather hauberk. The pelt’s fur was gray at the tips and black nearer the skin and curled up when it dried in the damp. His boots were weathered, soles patched twice. He had shaved the sides of his head and wore a hunter’s braid that hung heavy with sweat. Just now his hair was bound in a single knot, and the stretched muscles of his jaw worked evenly under skin nicked and cut and burned in old ways. His eyes fixed more often on the treeline than the grass. “Storerooms that should carry to midwinter run short before the frosts. What you see in the south runs in every hall.”
“They argued in Blackhorn?” Rurn, thick-necked and more at home with a butcher’s saw than a sword, tore grease off a slice with his tusks, not easy because his lower lip had a notch where a wound had knitted less than true.
“They argued,” Morgrash said, “and they repeated themselves. Counting does little when the numbers stay thin and truth is already known.” He shifted the axe at his side so its haft didn’t slip out from under his belt. There were carved marks in the wood, abstract angles that caught and held a thumb without cutting through skin. He wiped his fingers on his hauberk and continued: “If it comes to it, our people must seek our future in the north. We do not endure hunger. Not for long.”
Garthak listened and turned the spit at steady intervals. The venison had taken on a tender, deeper color and no raw bright showed. He carved a strip free and passed it to Morgrash, and then to the boy, and then to the others. The fat was clean and didn’t smear; a good deer. They had dressed it at dusk—a cut buck with a missing point and a wound on the flank where it had run against something or taken a graze. It had bled well, heart-pumped. That was why they had chosen this half-hidden crescent: the open side to watch for anything on the grass and the shadowed timber behind them where they could slip as needed. Their carts could be up and moving in half the time of a worse camp, and the blood wolves were loaded with tack because he had thought it better not to strip it off.
Morgrash’s glance settled on Garthak after a while. “When the guard shifts, rest. Before dawn I want the lay of this ground set in your head.” He tore off another piece of meat. “If the absent five don’t return by morning, we put the search on you.”
“They are already late,” Garthak said. He put the knife point into the fire to sterilize the edge and watched the thin lick of heat clean it. “They were due at last light. If they stayed for sign they should have sent one ahead to say so.”
“They didn’t,” said a woman whose name was Dorgin. She wore her hair in three knots and had a braid of old copper wire on her left wrist like a lucky charm. “The track where they went north shows it. Heavy stride. No one turned back.”
“They could be meat-drunk,” someone muttered.
“Five hunters do not all turn foolish at once,” Morgrash said, and there was no heat in it. “They know we run tight.”
Garthak cut himself a thumb-length of deer. He hardly tasted it. “If they are across the line,” he said after he swallowed, “then at night an elf outmatches an orc.” He looked to the trees as he said it, listening again. “We should be careful about how much pride costs us in the north woods. Not many of us see elves by daylight, but the difference between their night and ours is not one man’s worth. It is a stack of them.”
“That is true,” Morgrash said without a flinch or the need to argue. “It is also true that if we sit and let hunger keep us in one place, it will break us without malice and without a foe to blame.” He set his slice aside, chewing at the inside of his cheek as if it had a grain caught there. “We go south if the night proves wrong. We go to Blackhorn. The empty skins and quiet cookfires along the way will report for us. The mouths on our borders will not hold patience. Starving bands at the edges of elf and human lands will spark fighting. Every child in the Barrens knows this. I would rather see a fight cleanly chosen than let it rise by chance and trap our young under it.” He glanced at the boy and then away without calling him out. “Remember that.”
Garthak nodded. The name Blackhorn settled a weight in the air like a thing set down on a table. He imagined the capital’s iron ring of stakes and banners, the split stone of its central causeyard, the way the one high tower held drumbeats at the top and sent them across the drier part of the Barrens, calling men to muster. He had carried those rhythms since he was first put on the path with a map-slate in his hand. He thought of the flat north-south lines and the mark for Ashenmire drawn as a circle with radiating ferry poles. He thought of the Silvergrove Dominion, trees on trees, capital Fenrialis set deep where the lights never reached down all the way. He had not seen Fenrialis, but he knew it was a closed city and quiet, and that the border wardens took their rules the way a man took a scar—accepted, wearing.
When the guard changed, Garthak banked the coals low and folded his half-cape under his head as a cushion. The ground there had a little give where roots ran under it. He lay on his side near the fire and let his eyes shut one at a time for a while so that he did not stop seeing when the lids lowered. Morgrash settled near the carts, counting in his head, and the boy sat with his back against a wheel with a drawn short-bow across his knees and his hand inside the loop of the string like a promise to himself. Garthak spoke without opening his eyes, because he could tell by sound where Morgrash sat.
“If they fail to return by morning, we should go searching,” he said. “We will lose more if we wait.”
“You think they are dead,” Morgrash said, and it wasn’t a question.
“I think we should plan for that and hope to be wrong,” Garthak replied. “We can haul meat back if we find them caught in something they set. If we find sign of elves or humans we can report it clean. If we fail to find them, then at least we are doing something other than sitting on our hands.”
“Weighing the hunt against the report,” Morgrash said. “I have weighed it. I do not like the measure.” In the dim light his face had fewer lines. The old scars on his cheek and under his eye and on his throat were all one dark color. “We could abandon the hunt and turn for Blackhorn.”
“If we leave now,” Garthak said, “we carry little, and we add ourselves to the tally of empty bellies. If we stay and press, we risk men and perhaps a quarrel we cannot win. There is no good path.” He opened his eyes and turned his head toward Morgrash. “I want to lead a search if the morning comes without them.”
“You will,” Morgrash said. “An orc is made for battle, not famine. But I would rather fight on ground chosen. Remember this: if the southern bands begin to break to raiding on the border, humans and elves both answer with force. We will have to choose where to stand. I am tired of hunger calling the tune.” He put his head back, closed his eyes, and the flat lines of his face eased.
The night went on and the air cooled a little. Somewhere beyond the timber line a marsh opened and closed to itself like a breath. The insects kept steady company, and the owl didn’t call again. The blood wolves shifted together at one point as if in a dream and one placed its muzzle against another’s shoulder. The fullness in Garthak’s stomach was more math than sensation. The deer they had dressed at dusk had been clean meat and good weight; he had held its heart for a moment in his hand as he cut it free and thought of the texture of the muscle more than anything—a thing still, only an object, but a shape that had once timed the creature’s steps in the grass. He slept the way scouts slept: four breaths shallow and then a deeper one, wake, listen, sleep again.
The break came without warning. A blood wolf charged in from the dark between one breath and the next.
Garthak didn’t know it was from the missing party at first. All he knew was that a mount bolted out of the timber in a low leap and skidded in the grass with tack flapping. The cart-wheels rattled when it struck the hub and bounced aside. He was on his feet with one hand on his spear and the other reaching for the wolf’s reins before he had fully left sleep. The beast’s flanks lathered with a wet foam that showed black in the fire’s low glow. Its chest was spattered with blood and the insides of its hind legs were slick. Its eyes rolled and fixed on nothing. It made a whine and a low rattle of breath all at once, a cut-off yelp that told of a run that had not ended right.
For a half-second, no one moved. Then every voice spoke at once in the hush that followed; unease turned to a shout the way a taut rope snaps when you lean too hard.
“Where is the handler?” Rurn asked, but it came out as if he already knew.
“Smother the fire,” Morgrash said. He did not shout. He made the command a hard line. “Stamp it. Now.”
Garthak grabbed a scraper and pulled coals back, beat at them with a folded blanket. Two others tossed damp earth. The light sank from low to lower and took away the flicker on their faces. Without the underscore of the fire, the night returned to how it had been: thinner, without warmth, full of other sounds that had waited their turn. The blood wolf tossed its head. The tack’s buckles rang.
“We move,” Garthak said. “An orc is no match for an elf at night.” He heard the sharpness in his voice and did not hide it. The evidence was at their knees and chest in a pulse that did not know where its rider had gone.
“Agreed,” Morgrash said. “Set the carts. Lash everything fast.” He put his hands on the wolf and steadied it with a good, firm press along its neck, palm flat. His fingers left streaks where the lather thinned. He lifted the reins and tied them to a cart post. “Rurn, on harness. Dorgin, help him. Boy—shield and bow to hand. We move south at once.”
They went to their work with practiced quickness but not the speed of panic. The meat went to the carts first—a bundle of wrapped strips, hanging haunches bound in hide, the good fat saved in a skin. Ropes lay over and under in a pattern that kept the weight where the axles would bear it. Packs went on shoulders and arms, straps bit down. The blood wolves that had slept now stood with their ears high, heads turned to the trees. One lifted its lip without a sound, a small flash of tooth in a shadow. Garthak kept his eye on the black wall beyond the limited fire-glow that nothing now warmed. He thought he saw a shape move among the trunks, a change in the dark that didn’t match what wind would do.
“Hold,” he whispered to the boy. “Do not run. Move when the line moves. Stay with the cart.”
The boy nodded with a single hard jerk, mouth set. He might have been thinking of Blackhorn and its drums, of mothers who told children that drums meant order and that order meant safety. He raised his shield and it was one size too big and good because of it.
Arrows came like a weather shift. One beat of air without them, then the next full of them, and the beat after that told everything. No hiss, only a short heavy sound like a stick hitting bark. One orc went back with a shaft sprouting from just below his collarbone. He stumbled into the cart’s corner, seemed to close his arms around himself, and sank there. Another took one under the ribs and turned half around to understand the feeling, then fell forward into the ring of coals with a soft, angered breath. The coals hissed as skin and cloth met them. The sudden red flare when banked ash rose and fell and an ugly heat smell lifted, fat and fire together. He didn’t scream. He had no time.
“Shields!” Morgrash’s voice cracked down over the clearing. Wooden shields came up in a click of leather and iron bosses. Garthak grabbed a spare from where it leaned against a cart and slung it to the boy in a quick, flat arc. It struck the boy’s wrist hard enough to make him grunt, but he set it with a small shift of his elbow just as a third arrow came past where his throat had been a breath before and lanced the handle, thudding with a jolt that turned the boy’s shoulder. There was a field of hard drumming then—shafts against wood and iron, against leather and the cart’s boards; a fast rattle like rain on a roof. Garthak crouched, his back to a wheel, and set his spear point up and out. His eyes moved without stopping. The urge to push into the trees and meet the threat burned his muscles like a demand, but he knew the ground, knew what night did when the other side liked it better than you did.
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The flight ceased. There was a quiet that rode on the tail of it and Garthak knew the kind of quiet it was: an interlude chosen for breath and order, not mercy. The missing blood wolf snorted and shook its head, frantic and lost.
Five elf guards stepped out of the brush all at once and drew blades. They wore simple, mobile cuirasses and light guards at shoulder and shin. They were not taller than the orcs, but they carried themselves with an easy poise that made them all feel one size more. Light from the few coals drew pale lines on their faces and lit their eyes cold as water. Garthak could not see string gear or quivers on those five; these were the blades that closed distance. He knew by that sign that others had set the arrowstorm, and the shape he thought he had seen now had a spine and ribs.
“Shields!” Morgrash shouted again, and as the words left his mouth the orcs rose from cover with weapons bare. Dorgin swung a hatchet that had dressed more meat than men. Rurn took up a long-handled cleaver, chopping as if through bone. The boy kept his shield up and the short-bow held short behind it, breathing in quick nasal puffs. And Morgrash himself stepped forward, axe held in both hands, feet set low. He had a look on his face that was not anger but focus, the same as when he cut a pelt from hip to skull with a measure that kept hide from tearing. His scar lines looked almost even.
They charged. The narrow ground between the cart and the brush cramped the movement, and the first clash had a messy look to it as men tried to put force into tight lines. Steel slid on steel. Wood buckled and bounced. An elf ran his sword under Dorgin’s first swing and clipped her forearm so that she dropped the hatchet and reeled, more surprised than hurt at first, then hurt. Morgrash took the elf’s attention for himself at once, stepping into the man’s reach and turning the blade with his axe-haft before it bit. He took a light cut across his ribs where a point went wide and left a smile of bright under the leather but nothing deep. He took another, smaller one along his left forearm that bled quickly and wet his grip.
He answered in the way he always had when he was bored with cuts. He put the axe in a line that had no frill and set the edge where it needed to go. He split the elf on the return stroke, not square down the middle—the angle put the blade through chest and shoulder, ribs to collar—but enough. The elf went down hard and did not rise. The weight in Morgrash’s arms transmitted into the haft in a familiar way, an old language that did not require him to think even under night with men moving fast around him.
For a breath and half, the orcs held. The five elves checked and reset, one of them shifting to cover the new gap with an efficient half-step that said he had done this before, here and elsewhere, and did not plan to make a kind of error men made when they got angry. It could have gone on like that, with small changes in small tight spaces that add up.
Then horses screamed.
Garthak heard the sound out in the meadow just beyond the open arc of their clearing. Light came with it, the soft, controlled low of hooded lanterns or shielded candles moving in a direction. He could see shapes in the grass, the heave of horse flanks, and the riders leaned forward over their mounts’ necks the way men did when they planned to be quick and precise. They slipped sideways through the mouth of the crescent and put arrows out even before horse-sweat smell reached the orc line.
Three shafts took Morgrash. The first hit his left arm between elbow and shoulder, went in and lodged deep enough to bind the muscle. He grunted and shifted as if to reach for it and then thought better. The second hit low at his side in the meat just above the beltline and drew his breath hard without giving it back. The third took him in the throat. It didn’t go through the thick of him to the other side; it stuck, and he staggered with his head set forward and his jaws together, as if trying to keep anything he might say tight between his teeth. His hands opened. The axe bit the ground and planted like a half-buried sign. An elven blade came over and down and he took it across the neck in a finishing stroke that put him to the ground. He went to one knee and then down. He didn’t roll. He didn’t have enough left for that. His wolf-pelt mantle slid off his shoulder with a soft sound, like a word kept to oneself.
The line buckled. The orcs gave ground with the sense of men who understood late that the night belonged to someone else. The second or third mounted archer put arrows into men still making up their minds where to place their feet. One orc bent to lift Dorgin, who had fallen with her left hand numb and her hatchet under the cart, but he took a shaft at the joint of his hip and fell on top of her. Another caught an arrow in the mouth. He flung his head back as if the sky had yanked him hard by the hair, dropped his sword, and lay on his back with his lips moving around the shaft without forming a word.
Garthak was not thinking about any of that in a way he could describe later; he was making decisions in short lines drawn from what his eye told him. He moved to the left where the elves on foot pushed and took a low step in to meet a man who had too much reach for this tight place. The elf pivoted his sword on a wrist and tried to slash up from Garthak’s thigh to his chest, a cut that would have opened him with a long slice, but Garthak had his spear in his right hand and he brought it up with a hard twist, put the haft to the sword’s flat, trapped it a moment, then thrust. He rammed the spear beneath the elf’s rib in a hard, simple motion with all the weight his leg could give. The point went in and lodged. The elf blew out through his nose, a strong breath, and sat down by accident. Garthak yanked the spear free. The sound was all muscle and wet cloth. He didn’t watch the man fall away; he didn’t have time to claim the feeling that he had done something useful. He didn’t even feel the warm fleck that landed on his cheek.
He looked once at the shape on the ground that had been Morgrash and knew with the kind of knowledge that goes straight in and sits that the fight left to make there would be a stand that ended the same way, only slower. He could have stayed; he had done that before. But his gut said the same thing his mind had told him earlier: at night, under the trees on the edge of the Silvergrove’s wards, an orc did not meet an elf head-on and win. The calculation came without shame. He set his teeth and cut his will into the largest outcome he could make with the men he still had. He took a breath and made it a shout.
“Scatter!” he roared. “Scatter to the forest! Now!”
He turned and ran. He did not run straight; he went in a line with small breaks in it where the brush offered cover. He did not throw his spear because a spear in hand would keep a pursuer from taking him, and he wasn’t yet sure who else had followed him from the camp or whether his cry had drawn the remainder. Behind him he heard the boy’s footfalls and then lost them to the shouts and horses and the thin, quick hiss of more arrows. Someone tried to follow with a cart and cursed because a wheel jammed in a dip. The blood wolves exploded in a spray of motion—one leaping clear of its tie and turning to bite at horse legs with a wicked, hoarse bark; one spinning and pulling against its tack until a strap snapped like a struck belt and it fled into the brush without a rider. The one that had come from the missing five stood confused, trotted three steps toward the forest as if memory lay there and then three steps back toward the camp, and then simply stood with its mouth open wide as a catch basin, breathing air hard as if it had never learned how to do it right.
An orc fell before he reached the trees. Garthak felt rather than saw the impact; a rush of air against his cheek where a shaft passed and a body hitting ground in a way that telegraphed ended motion. He put himself another step left and then two steps right and slipped into the blackness under the first branches. He passed a stump and a standing hulk of an old trunk that had split and knit itself around its injury, and he ducked a low branch without needing to see it because he remembered that when he had patrolled. He had not known then that he was memorizing where he would run later.
The forest took the rest. Sound changed. The open meadow stripped sound away; the trees held it, slowed it. The thin hiss of arrows between trunks lost volume and then returned even closer as the pursuers adjusted their aim. He could hear men behind him but only as intention, not as names. His breathing sawed even and then uneven for a moment and then even again. He dragged in air that tasted of leaf and old leaf, of small mushrooms, of dirt, and of the faint, dry perfume of a crushed fern.
He let the tangle take his friends as it took him, not from disloyalty but from the practical knowledge that to survive this they had to break the trail. He shaped his path with an orienteer’s mind, cutting across where he knew there were stones or low, soft ground that would hide his footprints or throw scent into loops. He moved with his head low and the spear held close. Twice he put his shoulder through brush hard enough to have made noise if the brush had been alive; both times the branches were dry and only clicked.
There were small distances where the arrows hissed between trunks, and one struck a tree to his left with a hard thunk that told him the shot had been good but the lane had been wrong. He ran in a way that didn’t feel like running because he had learned to let his body carry him when the mind needed to work on maps. After a while—a stretch of thudding heartbeats that could have been ten breaths or a hundred—he broke into a quiet clearing.
It was not a large place. It had the roundness of something that had shaped itself because a wide, old tree had fallen there long ago and brought its neighbors with it, and then the life had filled the hole without knowing what had made the hole. The air in it had a cool taste, and the noise of the chase did not come all the way in. Tiny lights drifted above the ferns at knee-height and higher—fireflies—and there were other small flying things among them with gauze wings and slow, exploratory flight paths, delicate creatures he could not name because he had been taught to name only things that could be hunted or would hunt him. They bobbed as if each was thinking a simple thought and then changing its mind. The ground beneath them was soft with moss and old leaf and the top of a rock that showed like an old knuckle set proud.
He slowed. His breath eased. The stillness, which should have spoken of danger in a forest where his pursuers moved, spoke instead of a hold beyond that motion. His feet went from a low, bent-kneed run to a walking pace without his permission. He felt his ears come out of the tightness they had held in the last span and his head rose.
In the hush stood a deer.
It was pale in the general dark, not white but near it, the sort of color that looked like sandblasted bone. Its antlers were handsome and would have weighed well on his back if he had strapped them. The right antler bore a chip at one point so that the tip was missing, a broken tine. On its flank was a wound, not fresh-open bleeding but a long graze that had scabbed and broken and scabbed again from brush. Its legs stood firm. Its ears looked past him at nothing particular and then turned to him with a small flick. It did not lower its head in fear.
Garthak took one breath. He had dressed a deer with a missing tine at dusk on the edge of camp. He had held its heart in his hand. He remembered the shape of the muscle and the clean weight of it. He remembered the nick in the antler he had thought of earlier, when he had handed a slice of meat to Morgrash. He told himself in words as simple as the ones he used for the map—north, south, east, west—that this might be the same deer, or some echo of it. That thought steadied his heart. With it, the pressure of the night eased as if pressing off the sides of his ribs.
Then the arrow struck him from behind.
He felt the impact as a hard fist against his back and then an intrusion past muscle and into the place where breath’s mechanics lived. The shaft drove through his chest. The world changed shape. His lungs filled but not with air. His left hand failed and lost the spear—not a gentle loss but a drop; the spear fell from his fingers and skidded on moss and stopped with its point at his boot. He put his right hand flat to the ground because that was the only thing that made sense to do next, and his fingers felt cold damp. He could not pull in air on his own in any measured way. He made some kind of sound that was less than a voice.
He went to his knees. The position felt reasonable and honest, which surprised him. He thought he would want to fight it more. He tipped onto his side and lay on the soft, damp ground. He looked once more at the clearing. The fireflies had taken on a blur now. The small delicate winged things did not break their little flights. The deer was not there. He could not say when it had gone. He looked for its form and found only the place where he would have put it in his mind if he had to tell someone where it had been.
The noise from the trees that had been pursuit softened now that it had done its work. Two figures came into the clearing without haste. They came like men who had finished their running already and now preferred to move in a way that left everything where it had been. They were elves, dressed in plain, mobile gear. One wore a modest cuirass with straps that sat clean on his shoulders and did not shift as he walked, his brown hair bound tight so his head’s shape made clear sense under the night; this was Lethien. The other wore a simple leather tunic and trousers, a bow in his hand and a quiver set at a practical angle over his back; his hair was short and fair, and his pace was a measure like how a craftsman counted, not too fast and not too slow; this was Serael. They both stood arranged in their own thoughts before they spoke aloud.
Lethien reached Garthak first and went to a knee. He put two fingers against Garthak’s neck with a light touch. He did not dig, and he did not look as if he expected to find anything. He watched Garthak’s face while his fingers read the skin. The act had the quiet of tending to a task, not the heat of finishing an enemy. His mouth was a straight line.
“Nothing,” Lethien said after a breath. His voice sat low and even. “Death confirmed.”
Serael nodded. He looked into the trees and then down at Garthak and then up again. He did not let his eyes dwell, but he did not keep them from what they took in. He drew the arrow that had punched through, put a hand to the shaft on the far side of Garthak’s body, and broke it cleanly at the center so he could withdraw the parts without tearing. He did it the way a maker takes a peg from a hole. He put both pieces aside so no creature would cut itself without reason. “This makes five groups since last Firstday,” he said. “A week—and this one is the fifth.” He glanced to the arrows that had lodged in the tree to their left, saw where shots had failed to run the lanes, and cataloged it with a small movement of his eyes. “We have eight deer counted slain in that span. Eight taken between the line marker and the old upland path. The numbers will not hold steady if we allow this rate.”
“The southern border will need tighter warding,” Lethien said. He stood and rolled his shoulder as if adjusting weight. “We have held light for the travelers in the Bonecandle when the ferry lines are rebuilt and the roads marked, but we didn’t make those projects so that orcs could run live hunts to our woods in the hungry months.” His tone was not angry. It was clear as a duty told out. “If the Ashmaw moves north, the line must meet them with enough weight that the pressure turns.”
Serael glanced back the way they had come. He listened for the rest of their wardens and horses. He clicked his tongue once, a dry, small sound. “Procedure says we field-notate, clear bodies, and sweep for stragglers until first light. We’ve run the chase hard enough for this segment. There’s a chance one or two may try to loop to the marsh line. The mud will take them from their own feet. We’ll pick them in the morning if they choose badly.”
“Agreed.” Lethien’s face was unsentimental even under the small halo of a firefly that wandered too close. He looked down at Garthak a final time and made a simple comparison in his head not out of contempt but to set the file right: a male orc, tall, with a half-cape stained by long use, a pathfinder’s look, and the calm marks around the eyes that told he had not loved panic in his life. Lethien courted no joy in this. He preferred results that did not require the number of bodies this week had given him.
He lifted a hand from his side and made a soft whistle between two fingers at his lips. It was a delicate sound at odds with the shape of the night, an understatement like most of what he did.
Two silver-furred wolves slipped from the brush. They were not blood wolves, built for riders; they were narrower and quieter, their heads lower, their paws finding placement with almost dainty precision. They padded to the body and sniffed; one lifted its head to look at Lethien as if to ask once, permission. Lethien dropped his hand back to his belt. The wolves went to work with the same practicality that had guided the elves a moment before. They cleansed the body as they had cleansed many, quick and efficient, not tearing at random but working in an order that kept the ground near clean. They didn’t tug with joy; they did a task. The air darkened with the smell that followed it. The delicate winged things drifted higher at the edges of that circle, but the fireflies stayed.
Serael turned away from the wolves and took out a small slate-board from his side pouch, and with a grease pencil he set marks in columns—group five, eight deer, breach point near eastern Ashenmire upland, engagement under moonless conditions, mounted archers support effective, two foot blades wounded, one dead—morning sweep planned. He slid the pencil back. “We move,” he said.
Lethien nodded. He cast his eye once more around the clearing and then to the trees that the orc had broken through. He saw the line a man had cut and the turn where it meant to throw pursuit. He measured the mind that had made it. “He was good,” Lethien said, and this he allowed himself to put to words. “He should have chosen a different ground.”
“Another will,” Serael said, and then they went, because going was the rest of their job. They stepped out of the clearing to the sound of the wolves working and the small noises of the small flying things moving. The fireflies drifted and were not counted. The elves moved without their feet making much more noise than the creatures did.
The night reset behind them. It did not ask questions. The crescent at the forest’s edge held the broken shapes of carts and dropped rope and a little smoke from coals ground into ash. There would be new marks in the morning and people to make sense of them. South lay the Ashmaw Barrens, where men counted and recounted and chose on thin lines between hunger and pride. North lay the Silvergrove’s strict borders, run by wardens who planned before they bled and who kept a ledger of eight deer slain this week and five orc groups driven or killed to defend their line. Far to the east, Ashenmire slept with low lights and a smell of resin over its water, oblivious for now. At the edge of the clearing where Garthak had seen the pale deer, ferns moved once more as if a small animal had brushed through. The tiny lights bobbed, reset their uncurious patrols, and forgot.
Episode 2 continues in Episode 25.
