Chapter 18: Chapter 17 - Something Offered

The camp lay in ruins around me, and I was no less broken.

I forced myself to move, though, walking even though every nerve screamed to run, flee, hide. If I stopped, if I let myself think too long, the weight of what I had done would crush me. So I bent to the mess—hands trembling—and began to put my pitiful, ruined world back together. The smoke burned my eyes and the damp earth soaked through the stitching in my boots.

Stone by stone, I reset the fire ring, torn and flipped askew and scattered in the raging of our battle. My knuckles scraped raw on the grit, but I welcomed the sting. Better to bleed here, on my own terms, than under his claws. I told myself the order, cleanliness, tidiness mattered—that if he came to kill me, I would not be found in squalor. But the truth gnawed: I was preparing the place where I might die.

Every motion drew his shadow closer in my mind.

The hides he had fouled clung to my fingers, damp and sour with his marking. I scrubbed them until my arms shook, until my breath came ragged, but the stains only spread. Useless. Stupid. I cursed myself, cursed my arrogance, cursed my hands for stealing his kill.

That was the line.

The thought tore through me leaving me ragged and trembling.

It hadn’t been the silence; that had irritated him at best. Not the crude fingers to the trees; anger and frustration, maybe. Not even mocking him by ignoring his storms; even though every human man I knew would have struck me for such a display of defiance. Those he could snarl at and abide by. But this—this insult, to take what he had spent hours stalking, to mock his strength with my petty hands—this he surely could not let pass.

I shuddered, rocking back on my heels, my palms pressed to my thighs as if I could hold myself together by force alone. The stink of the pelt clung to my fingers and seeped into the fabric under my palms.

What justice would he bring? Would he tear me limb from limb? Drag me into the dark and let the wild animals finish me after he cleaved the justice into my flesh? Break me first, grind my stubbornness beneath his heel—make me scream, so the whole forest knew the price of my insolence?

I bent over again, near retching.

I stumbled up and stepped to the next futile task, clutching at the woodpile, stacking and restacking as if order could drive out terror. But my hands slipped. A log rolled, clattered, and I jumped as though it were his footfalls thundering down. My heart galloped, throat raw with a cry I barely smothered.

He is coming.

I knew it as surely as I knew my own name.

My chest shook with the breath I dragged in. I set the log back in place, straight on the pile, forced my hands still, forced my spine straight. If I died tonight, I would die with my camp in order. I would not be found weak or begging.

I turned to the dead and wet embers in the circle of neat stones and urged a fire from dry kindling. My fire smoked again, thin and pitiful, but alive. I stared into it until my eyes blurred. Ash smeared my face, my arms, my knees. I felt like a ghost already, a smear of soot waiting for the wind.

And still I worked, because it was all I could do to keep from collapsing.

The first night I did not sleep. I sat as close to my fire as heat would allow, stoking it high all through the night so the light cast deep into the trees, so I would see his eyes glint before his teeth came for my throat

Every flicker of the fire was a claw. Every gust of wind was his breath. I sat rigid, bow across my knees, eyes fixed on the dark, waiting for the moment he would step into the light and end me.

But dawn came. And he had not come.

The day was spent much as the previous had been, cleaning the mess of my camp. I shouldered logs aside and tamed the trenches to some semblance of neatness and made chaos turn to my favor. All the while my ears were trained on the woods, the birds call, the whooshing of wind my mind bent to wolven howls.

When night came I was ragged and frayed and exhausted.

The ache in my limbs pressed down like a stone, dragging my head toward my knees where I once again sat at the fire’s edge, but terror jolted me awake again and again. Shadows lengthened and broke apart into phantoms that dissolved when I blinked. Still I waited. Surely this was the hour. Surely the sound outside was him.

Morning broke. Still he was nowhere.

By the third day, my fear had worn itself ragged. I moved through my chores like a woman haunted—scrubbing, binding, stacking, my body stiff with dread—but when the sun fell once more and the fire burned low, the woods stayed empty. No growl. No storm. No golden eyes.

My terror ebbed, but in its place came something colder, stranger. Confusion.

The stories had all been clear: the Fenrathi were beasts, blood-thirsty and merciless, incapable of restraint. They killed or maimed at the slightest slight, tore through villages in their hunger for vengeance, lived by cruelty and savagery alone. At court, I had devoured every word of lore I could get my fingers on, every scrap of record, every hushed tale told by firelight. They were monsters, all of them. Everyone said so.

And yet.

This one, the fire-haired Fenrathi I had crossed with, had been… something else entirely.

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He had understood my games and repaid me in kind. Answered insult with insult. Every strike of his hand had been deliberate, precise, intelligent. Too intelligent. Not the dull rage of a beast but the sharp calculation of someone who thought through something, and thought well.

I sat by my fire that night with my knees drawn tight beneath my chin, staring into the smoke as it curled into the branches above.

Three days.

He should have come by now. He should have finished me, claimed his justice, painted the trees with my blood to mark me as a warning.

Instead he had seemingly vanished.

And that unsettled me far more than his fury ever had.

My fingers tapped against my knee as I stared into the coals. Three days of silence, and still I couldn’t rid myself of him. His shadow clung to my thoughts as stubbornly as soot to my hands.

I thought of the pranks. The patience in them. The calculation. Each one laid with meticulous care, not a single detail wasted. No beast I had ever read of—or ever heard sung about in the bloody tales of soldiers by firelight—could have done such things. No human man I knew of could have, either.

I smirked despite myself, amusement cutting through fear for the briefest of moments, as I remembered the few times I had truly caught him off guard—the snap of his temper, the way his composure shattered for a heartbeat before he recovered and schemed and got me back better than I had him. Oh, he had raged, yes, but not blindly. Never blindly. His fury had always been shaped, deliberate, like a hand closing around my throat without quite squeezing.

Surely he was smart, I thought. Surely his brain burned as brightly as his golden eyes.

And that was what frightened me most of all.

The lore had prepared me for fangs and claws, for savage hunger, for the blunt edge of violence. But not for this—an enemy with patience, wit, and a sense of humor as cutting as his teeth. He was not a beast. He was not a man.

He was something else entirely.

I pulled my cloak tighter and pressed my chin to my knees, the smirk fading from my lips. I had crossed a line I could never uncross, and he had answered with silence. That silence was worse than any howl.

The dawn came pale and gray, the woods hushed as if they too held their breath. I pushed myself upright, bones aching from another night spent half-curled against fear. I rubbed the grit from my eyes, stretched stiff fingers toward the embers of my fire—

And froze.

Something enormous lay at the edge of my camp.

For a moment I thought it only a mound of earth or a low hillock I had somehow overlooked, or perhaps dirt heaved, displaced from a grave waiting for me.

But as the light shifted through the branches, I saw it clearly: a beast, vast and terrible, its shape like an elk yet larger than any I had ever heard of. Antlers branched like winter-bare trees, each point wicked as a spear. Muscles still seemed to ripple under its hide, its legs folded neatly as though it had wandered into my clearing and chosen this patch of grass to rest upon.

It might have been sleeping, save for the blood.

A dark pool spread from the ragged tear in its neck, soaking the soil, seeping into the grass. The stillness of the beast was too complete, too perfect. Death had frozen it in a tableau of false peace.

My stomach turned, my breath caught sharp in my throat. I had seen kills before, had made them myself, but never anything like this. Never a creature so magnificent, brought down and left not sprawled or torn apart, but arranged—laid with the dignity of sleep, as though some unseen hand had shaped its final rest.

My eyes darted to the trees. He had done this, the Fenrathi. Of course he had. No other hunter in these woods would have dared or been able to fell so great a beast and lay it at my door.

It was no prank. No trick. This was something older, heavier, meant to speak.

And I could not yet understand what it was saying.

My breath fogged the cold morning air as I rose, drawn against my will to the great beast. Each step toward the elk-thing felt weighted, my body tense as though expecting it to lurch upright and shake the blood from its mane and leap into the trees. Or for it to be just a dream imagined by my exhausted, fear-torn brain.

I circled wide at first, bow in hand, my boots whispering through the grass. The closer I came, the more the details resolved: the sheen of the fur, the breadth of its chest, the antlers that clawed skyward like the spires of a cathedral. The wound in its neck was clean and deep, a hunter’s strike. No other wounds marked its body, no torn hide or broken bones, not even a tine on the rack had been cracked.

My mind spun.

Was this a warning? A staged reminder of what he could do to me with a single strike, how easily my throat could be opened and my blood soak the ground? What awaited for me for my crime of killing his doe?

Or a mockery? Laid here as an insult, to show me the difference between my clumsy kills and the elegance of his—my struggle, his masterpiece.

Or… something else?

My memory clawed at itself, raking through lore, through the countless fragments I had studied as a girl aching for understanding, for my father’s acceptance. My mind wrapped and bent through Fenrathi customs, half-whispered, half-lost, rumors and tales, legends and lore. First-hand accounts of their strange rites, their rituals of prowess and dominance. Songs sung of savage, barbaric displays, books harping on the backwardness of their customs of courtship and claims.

Males who left offerings at the feet of females they desired. Meat. Hides. Kills.

The betrothal offerings.

My mouth went dry.

The thought rooted itself like a thorn: Was this for me?

I faltered, pulse thundering in my ears. It was absurd—mad. And yet, the care of it, this enormous beast laid at the threshold of my world, the reverence in how the beast was arranged, the precision of the strike… it did not reek of warning. It felt deliberate.

My chest tightened as though bound with wire. If this was what I suspected, if this was some shadow of the old rituals I had pored over in secret, then I had stepped far deeper into his world than I had ever meant to.

I had read of them all my life—tales painted with disgust, derision, always from the safety of distance. A male bringing down a beast alone, offering the kill to the female of his choice before the eyes of his clan. Barbaric, the scholars had written. Bestial. Backwards. To give a woman the power to refuse or accept with something as simple as a meal? Absurd. Wasteful. Laughable.

For humans, a female had no such voice. Women were married off with dowries, coins and land and promises carried by fathers and brothers, while the bride herself was little more than ornament. To think of Fenrathi females choosing—choosing their mate from such costly, bloody gifts—was an offense to all civilized order.

And yet.

The accounts had fascinated me, even then. I had read them in the shadows of the library when no one was watching, lingering over the details, over the notion of a male proving his worth with his strength, his cunning, his effort. Not demanding her hand from her father. Not taking the place at her side by word and vow. Asking her, for herself, her choice.

And here—

This might be an offering. For me.