Cassian woke the next morning to the sound of hammering somewhere nearby, steady and unhurried, the kind of noise a village makes when nothing is wrong yet.
He’d slept in a small room off the back of Doran’s house, a straw mat and a wool blanket that smelled faintly of resin, the same scent that seemed to live in every building here. For a moment, lying there with sunlight coming through a gap in the shutters, he forgot exactly where he was. Then he remembered all at once, and the familiar tightness settled back into his chest before he’d even sat up.
Toma was waiting outside when he stepped out, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, looking like he’d been there for a while.
"You sleep like the dead," Toma said. "I knocked twice."
"Sorry."
"Wasn’t a complaint. Come on. My father wants to show you the rest of the village before the council meets."
Cassian fell into step beside him. In daylight the place looked even larger than it had the night before, stone paths winding between houses built into the hillside itself, some of them carved directly from the rock rather than built on top of it. Gardens grew in terraced rows along the slopes, thick with roots and herbs Cassian didn’t recognize. Somewhere below, a river cut through the valley floor, and a handful of people worked along its banks with nets and baskets.
They passed a wide, low building with its doors thrown open, where three men worked hides stretched across wooden frames, scraping and stitching with a patience Cassian had never had the luxury of learning back home. Further along, a woman knelt over a shallow stone basin, grinding something dark and fragrant with a heavy pestle. The smell of it, bitter and sharp, reminded him instantly of the ink on Toma’s arms.
"That’s for the marks," Toma said, catching him looking. "Takes a full day to prepare properly. Longer if the particles from the hunt weren’t clean."
"How many people know how to make it?"
"A handful. It’s not a secret, exactly. It’s just not something most people bother learning if they’re not going to use it themselves." Toma shrugged. "My father knows. So does Yara. I’m supposed to be learning, eventually, whenever I stop finding reasons to avoid sitting still for it."
"How many people live here?" Cassian asked.
"A few hundred. Maybe a little more." Toma pointed toward a cluster of larger buildings near the river. "Storehouses, down there. We don’t trade much with the east, so we grow and hunt almost everything ourselves. What we can’t grow, we take from the forest."
"And nobody from my side ever finds this place?"
"Nobody’s supposed to." Toma’s voice carried the faintest edge of pride. "The deal with your father kept your Hunters out of the west entirely. Past that, the forest does the rest of the work on its own. It doesn’t want to be found, if you know how to listen to it."
Cassian thought of the years he’d spent hearing stories about the west, about teeth in the dark and Hunters who never came back. He wondered now how many of those stories had simply been true things pointed at the wrong reason.
They walked on until they reached a wide clearing near the edge of the village, where a dozen or so men and women stood gathered around a long wooden table, voices low and clipped in a way that had nothing to do with casual conversation. Doran stood among them, arms crossed, listening more than talking.
"The council," Toma said quietly. "Hunt leaders, mostly. A few of the elders."
"What are they talking about?"
Toma’s jaw tightened slightly. "Come find out. It concerns you as much as anyone, now that you’re staying."
They came close enough to hear the tail end of an argument between a broad-shouldered woman with a hunting spear strapped across her back and a thinner, older man with ink running the full length of both arms.
"Third week in a row," the woman was saying. "The eastern ridge trails are empty. Not thin. Empty. No deer, no boar, not even the small game that usually can’t be bothered to hide from anything."
"Animals move," the older man said, though he didn’t sound especially convinced of his own argument. "Seasons change. It happens."
"Not like this. Not all at once, across every trail on that side of the territory." She shook her head. "Something’s pushing them out. Something big enough, or wrong enough, that even the boars are running instead of standing their ground."
A third hunter, younger than the woman but older than Toma, folded her arms tight across her chest. "My group turned back a hedgehunt early yesterday. Halfway to the ridge, every dog we brought just stopped. Wouldn’t go another step no matter what we did. Never seen anything like it. Not fear, exactly. More like they knew better than we did."
The older man waved a hand, though with less conviction than before. "Dogs spook at all kinds of things."
"Not that pack. Not ever."
Doran finally spoke, his voice cutting through without needing to be raised. "Has anyone actually seen it?"
Silence answered him at first. Then a younger hunter near the back of the group spoke up, reluctant. "I saw tracks. Three days ago, near the old stone crossing. Big enough that I didn’t stay to measure them properly."
"What kind of tracks?"
"I don’t know." The younger man’s voice dropped lower. "I’ve hunted this forest my whole life. I didn’t recognize the shape of them at all."
The council fell quiet again, the kind of quiet that carried more weight than any of the words before it. Cassian felt Toma go still beside him, all his earlier ease draining out at once.
"That’s not good," Toma murmured.
"What does it mean?"
"It means something’s moved into our forest that isn’t supposed to be here. Something strong enough that even the things that usually eat each other would rather run from it together." Toma’s eyes stayed fixed on the council. "The west has always had its dangers. We know most of them. We’ve mapped them, hunted them, earned marks off half of them over the years. This is something new."
Doran’s gaze swept the gathered hunters. "Until we know more, nobody hunts past the eastern ridge alone. Groups of four or larger only, and everyone reports back before dark, no exceptions." He paused, something heavier settling into his voice. "If the animals are running from it, that should tell you everything you need to know about whether you want to meet it."
The council began breaking into smaller conversations after that, voices low and urgent, plans already forming about which trails to avoid and which to watch. Doran finally noticed Cassian and Toma standing at the edge of the clearing and made his way over, some of the calm from the night before still holding, though it looked thinner now.
"You heard all that," he said.
"Most of it," Cassian replied.
Doran studied him for a moment. "I’m not telling you this to frighten you. You’ve had enough of that already, more than most people your age ever will." He glanced back toward the council, where the woman with the spear was still arguing with the older man in low, insistent tones. "I’m telling you because you live here now, and that means the forest’s problems are your problems too, whether you asked for them or not."
"Do you know what it is?"
"No." Doran’s honesty came without hesitation, the same way it had the night before, by the fire. "I’ve lived in this forest my whole life. I’ve fought things in it that would have killed most men twice over. I don’t know what’s out there now, and that bothers me more than knowing would."
Toma looked at his father. "Are you going to go after it?"
"Not yet. Not until we understand what we’re dealing with." Doran’s eyes drifted toward the tree line beyond the last houses, toward the ridges the young hunter had mentioned, still and green and giving nothing away. "Whatever it is, it’s patient enough to stay hidden for three weeks while it empties out half our hunting grounds. That kind of patience usually belongs to something smart. Smart is worse than strong, most days."
Cassian followed his gaze toward the trees, and for the first time since arriving, the quiet beauty of the place felt a little less like safety and a little more like the held breath before something changed.
Toma exhaled slowly beside him, some of the color gone from his face. "First real threat since the stag season two years back. Maybe longer." He didn’t sound scared, exactly, but something in his usual flatness had cracked just slightly. "I don’t like not knowing what we’re up against. Never have."
"Neither do I," Cassian admitted.
He thought of the forest back east, the one that had taken his home and his father and everyone he’d ever loved in a single night. He’d told himself, walking into this valley, that he was done being caught unprepared by the things hiding in trees.
Apparently the forest had other plans for him already.
"I want to help," Cassian said, before he’d fully decided to say it out loud.
Doran looked at him for a long moment, something unreadable moving behind his eyes. "Not yet," he said, not unkindly. "Rest first. Learn the forest we already understand before you go looking for the part of it we don’t."
Cassian didn’t argue. But he kept his eyes on the tree line long after Doran and Toma had turned to walk back toward the village, and he didn’t stop thinking about it for the rest of the day.