I slit the rabbitâs belly with careful strokes, the little blade sticky in my hand. The motions were clumsy, hesitant, nothing like the sure cuts Iâd once seen Gren make with a single flick of steel. Still, the skin came free at last. I set the carcass aside for cooking and laid the hide next to the first one Iâd attempted days ago.
That first hide was a disaster. Stiff in patches, gummy in others, already sour enough to wrinkle my nose. Iâd smeared the animalâs brain across the flesh the way Gren once showed me, so certain it would work as neatly for me as it had for him. Instead, Iâd managed something that looked more like a spoiled rag than leather. It would probably rot before I ever figured out what Iâd done wrong.
I pulled the new hide taut across a forked branch, tugging with awkward fingers, and almost laughed at myself. If this one turned out worse, Iâd have two ruined skins instead of one, and nothing to show for it but the stink of my own incompetence. Maybe, if I ever got it right, the hides would be soft enough to line my shelter or stitch into a cloak. But I doubted it.
I shook my head and scoffed under my breath. Everything I tried was pieced together from scraps: lessons never meant for me, glimpses of Gren training boys in the yard, muttered advice from trappers who didnât know I was listening, or instructions copied into books by men who had probably never dirtied their hands with blood. None of it fit together properly. Most of what I did barely worked at allâand what did work, worked so poorly it was almost laughable.
Still, it was mine. My blunders, my crooked efforts, my stubborn mess. I could laugh at how stupid I looked and still keep trying, because some part of me believed that if I kept failing long enough, it might one day look something like survival.
The snares caught rabbits often enough now, but waiting on wire to twitch felt like begging. I wanted more than scraps. I wanted to hunt. So I told myself Iâd make a bow.
The idea sounded noble. The result was laughable.
I bent a green branch with rabbit sinew and called it a bow, though any child could have told me it looked like a stick broken wrong in a storm. My arrows were worseâsticks shaved unevenly, stone chips lashed so loosely they wobbled in the air. They broke, spun, vanished into brush.
The first time I loosed one at a bird, it flopped into the dirt at my feet. The bird flew away untouched, chirping like it had mocked me. I cursed, fetched the arrow, and tried again.
The second snapped on release. The third ricocheted off a tree trunk and nearly clipped me in the ear. I wanted to throw the whole mess into the fire, but instead I gritted my teeth and strung another. I couldnât stop. I wouldnât.
Everything I made was pitiful. My shelter barely held in warmth. My water pouch leaked no matter how I stitched it. My first hide stank so sour I shoved it outside. Most of what I did failed, and what didnât fail worked so poorly it was almost useless.
Almost.
Because this was still mine. Every crooked, stubborn piece of it belonged to me.
Lucen had promised me softness. A room that smelled of roses and sugared fruit. Candles in alcoves that burned too steady, too still. A bed the size of a shipâs deck, canopied and draped in silks dyed the color of blush. I had lain there once, in the center of it all, like a stone dropped into a lakeâbeautifully arranged, utterly unwanted. The sheets were endless, the pillows too many, the jewelry laid out in neat rows like shackles waiting. Perfume had clung to my throat from a bottle I had not touched. Everything perfect. Everything soft. Nothing mine.
Here, the hides might rot, the pouch might leak, the arrows might breakâbut each one was carved by my hands. I would rather stink of smoke and blood than be perfumed and caged. Better failure that was mine than comfort that belonged to him.
I drew again, jaw tight, shoulders burning, and loosed. Another miss. Another curse bitten between my teeth. Another stubborn grip on the bow. My shoulders ached, but I refused to stop. I stared through the trees instead, imagining what I might one day bring down if I could make this crooked thing obey me.
Deer, their twin-prints pressed into the mud, leading deeper into the green. Fat grouse, puffed and heavy, slow to lift if I startled them. Rabbits, quick but still catchable without waiting on wire. If I learned to move quiet enough, maybe even a foxâits pelt warm against my shoulders in the winter.
I built the list in my head, prey upon prey, feeling almost satisfiedâuntil the silence after. And then I heard what I hadnât said.
Not wolves. Not bear. Not Fenrathi.
The realization came slow, seeping into me like cold water down my spine. My bow was meant only for food. Every thought I had bent toward eating, toward hides and feathers, toward living. Not once had I thought of turning it against what might hunt me.
The truth of it made my fingers tremble around the string. This was not a weapon of protectionâit was a tool for a girl pretending at hunting. Against a Fenrathi, it was nothing. A toy stick with clumsy arrows. If one found me here, I would be dead before I even managed to draw.
A shudder rolled through me then, not sharp terror but a thin ripple that left my skin prickling. Fear should have pressed down on me, heavy and suffocating, but it didnât. I could still breathe, still move, still think. Too easily.
I should have been afraid. Every other soul who dared these woods would have lived choking on dread, watching every shadow, bow in hand, listening for the pad of silent feet. But not me. Days had gone by and I hadnât once thought to look over my shoulder.
And that, more than anything, was what made me shudder.
Fear. That was what the Fenrathi were. Terror so sharp it hollowed men out, so heavy it bent them double. I had heard the stories all my lifeâwhispered around hearths, traded in taverns, spat like curses by soldiers who had survived too much.
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Nurses warned children that the Fenrathi came for liarsâeyes like molten gold at the window, claws scraping across the shutters. Those who fibbed too often would be dragged screaming into the dark.
Soldiers from the old wars carried their warnings in their flesh. By firelight they pulled back sleeves and collars, baring ridges where claws had torn them open, crescents of teeth gouged deep into shoulder and bone. They spoke of narrow escapes without pride, only the grim knowledge that each scar was mercy undeserved.
But scars were not the worst of it. The whispers that chilled deepest were of Fenrathi who could walk as men. They said the beasts could wear our shape like a cloak and move unseen among us. Comrades who had shared bread and watch for days were revealed at last by a trick of lamplightâthe gleam of gold eyes where none should shineâbefore vanishing by dawn and leaving only torn throats behind. Old women warned never to trust a stranger without a flame at hand, for light betrayed them. Their eyes reflected fire like animals even when cloaked in human form. Villages that forgot this rule woke to empty beds and stolen children.
And then there was their justiceâunmistakable, merciless, precise. Trappers, hunters, even farmers who strayed too far or took what was not theirs returned bearing the proof carved into their bodies. A leg for trespass. A hand for theft. An ear for ignoring a warning. Each punishment brutal, but never random. Those who lived long enough to speak always swore the same thing: as terrible as it was, it had made sense.
I once read the words in a book, back when there had still been a truce. The author was a scholar who traveled with an envoy and wrote what he saw with the careful detachment of a man who wanted to sound braver than he was. The Fenrathi weigh trespass not by word, but by act, he wrote. Their punishments are swift and exacting. To cross their border unbidden is to risk a leg. To steal what is not freely given is to risk a hand. To ignore a warning is to risk an ear. Death is not always the penaltyâbut the body will always bear the mark of guilt.
That truce was long gone now. The Fenrathi were kill on sight, and anyone who saw one either ran or was killed in return.
And here I was, deep in their woods, three rabbits already taken, arrow after arrow loosed at birds and foxes, trespassing without thought. If a Fenrathi ever found me, I knew the price would be more than I could pay. They would take my legs for walking where I should not, my hands for touching what I had no right to, my tongue for daring to live in their land as though it were mine.
The thought made me shudder.
And yet⦠I wasnât afraid.
Not the way I should have been. Not with all the stories etched in me since childhoodâthe claws, the masks, the merciless justice. I should have been sick with terror, trembling at every crack of branch, straining to hear padded feet in the dark. But I wasnât.
Even now, I did not want to go back. I would rather stay here, scraping an existence from land that wasnât mine, than return to silks and lies. I would rather sleep beneath smoke-stained hides than beneath Lucenâs perfumed sheets.
If a Fenrathi found me, I hoped they would see I meant no harm. I did not think I could reason with oneâthey would not care for words, not in a human tongue. But I would stand. I would speak the truth, and let them judge me. Let them take whatever they thought justice requiredâleg, hand, tongue. If that was the balance needed for my trespass, I would pay it.
And after, I would still keep going. Crooked bow, leaking pouch, stinking hides and all. I would keep walking their woods, keep snaring their rabbits, keep pulling my life from the earth like weeds from between stones.
Because even here, with punishment hanging like a shadow, this life was mine.
By the time I gave up the bow for the day, the light was thinning, shadows stretching long between the trees. My shoulders burned and my fingers ached, but I carried myself back to camp with the same bull-headedness that had kept me drawing string long after sense said to stop.
The fire was low, a blackened ring of stones and ash that smoked more than it burned. My lean-to sagged where the branches bowed, patched with moss and scraps of hide that still smelled sour. The water pouch I had left propped against a rock was already dripping, a dark stain spreading into the dirt.
Nothing here was grand. Nothing would last. The hides would rot, the bow would snap, the pouch would split, the shelter would cave in under the first real storm. All of it was pitiful.
But all of it was mine.
Every scorched rock, every crooked stake, every bitter scrap of hide. Every snare, every cracked twig, every stubborn ember I coaxed from smoke. It was clumsy, it was small, it was laughableâyet it belonged to me in a way the silks and perfumes never had.
I sat by the fire and fed it another stick, watching the sparks rise. Tomorrow it might all fall apart. But tonight, it was enough. Tonight, I belonged here.
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He prowled the ridge, silent as shadow, when something sharp and wrong broke the line of the earth.
A shaft of wood, half-buried in the dirt, lodged crooked between roots and stones. No feathers. No clean cut. Just a stick driven where no stick should be. He slowed, nostrils flaring.
Her.
The stink of her clung to it so thick it turned his lipâsmoke, sweat, stubbornness ground into every splinter as though she had clutched it a hundred times. He lifted his head, tasting the air. Her trail spread wide here, heavy and careless. Broken branches, grasses pressed flat, soil kicked and stamped. She had circled this place, lingered long, searching.
Far from her camp. Too far.
A growl rolled up from his chest, deeper, sharper than before. If she had stayed where she belongedâin her little nest of hides and snares, scratching at rabbits and tending her fireâhe might have left her to it. Harmless. Contained. But here she was, wandering, fouling more of his forest, leaving her stink in places that were his.
He crouched over the shaft, claws curling into the dirt. Up close, the thing showed itself for what it was: not a branch, but a crude arrow. No hunterâs tool, only a childâs toy, spat crooked from the bow she must have made. Lost. Forgotten. And she had scoured the ground like a desperate pup to find it, trampling half his trail in the effort.
His teeth bared, fury flaring hot in his chest. He had hesitated too long. She was growing comfortable. Dangerous.
And yetâhe reached. With a ripple of sinew and bone his paw shifted, fingers unfurling, rough and long. He took the shaft, turned it once between his claws. Pathetic. But not without intent. The girl was no hunter, yet she had tried. A short, rough breath escaped him, half a scoff, half something like approval. If she kept at it, one day such things might even fly straight.
He snapped it clean in two. The crack rang loud in the hush of the trees. He tossed the fragments aside and rose, disgust thick in his chest.
His growls, the reek of his frustration, sent shivers through the underbrush. Foxes melted away, tails low. Coyotes slunk back the way they had come, whimpering. Even a bear, bold with hunger, caught his scent and veered hard, lumbering off toward safer ground.
They knew better than she.
And perhaps the human girl would learn soon enough where exactly she foolishly treaded.