Cassian’s arms still ached from two straight days of Doran’s training by the time Toma knocked on his door before dawn, and some smaller ache from the girl at the well hadn’t fully faded either, no matter how many times he told himself it didn’t matter. He hadn’t slept well. He rarely did anymore. But when Toma said the word patrol, something in him sat up straighter than the soreness alone could explain.
Toma was already waiting by the storehouses when Cassian arrived, brown hair pushed back off his forehead, a hunting knife strapped to one thigh and a coil of rope slung over one shoulder. He’d filled out in ways Cassian was only starting to notice now that he wasn’t half-starved and terrified for his life, muscle sitting heavy across his shoulders and forearms in a way that made him look older than thirteen without ever quite looking grown. Two other hunters stood with him, a lean, quiet man named Corin and a sharp-eyed young woman named Petra who couldn’t have been more than sixteen.
Corin barely looked up from checking the fletching on his arrows as Cassian approached. Petra, on the other hand, looked him over with open, unhurried curiosity, the way someone sizes up a new tool before deciding whether to trust it with anything important.
"So you’re the stag boy," she said.
"I guess word travels fast here."
"Faster than you’d think, for a village this size." She almost smiled. "Toma won’t stop talking about it. Don’t tell him I said that."
"You’re late," Toma said, though there wasn’t much heat in it.
"Your father kept me an extra hour."
"He does that." Toma tossed him a smaller knife, handle first. "For emergencies. You’re not hunting today. You’re watching."
"Watching," Cassian repeated, unable to keep the flatness out of his voice.
"Watching," Petra confirmed, adjusting the strap on her bow. "You’ve killed a Ridgeback Stag with your bare hands and a bad attitude. That’s not the same as knowing how to hunt something on purpose, without half-dying in the process."
Cassian couldn’t really argue with that, so he didn’t try.
They set out along a trail Cassian hadn’t walked before, cutting east and slightly north, away from the empty ridge the council had spent so much time worrying over. The morning air still held the last of the night’s cold, and mist clung low between the tree trunks in a way that made the whole forest look like it was still deciding whether to wake up.
"Stay behind Corin," Toma said quietly, once they’d walked far enough that casual conversation felt wrong. "Watch where he puts his feet. Not where he’s looking. Where he’s stepping."
Cassian fell in and watched. Corin moved almost without sound, placing each foot with deliberate care along the outside edges first, testing weight before committing to it, avoiding the dry leaves and loose stones that would have cracked or shifted under someone less careful. It was nothing like the reckless crashing through undergrowth Cassian had done for three months on his own, driven by hunger and desperation more than anything resembling skill.
"How do you even see the good ground in the dark like this?" Cassian whispered.
"You don’t see it," Corin said, without turning around. "You feel it. Eventually your feet learn before your eyes do."
They walked for the better part of an hour before Petra raised a closed fist, and everyone stopped at once, dropping low without a word passing between them. Cassian copied the motion half a second late, heart already picking up.
"There," Petra breathed, barely audible, pointing through a gap in the brush.
A small herd of deer grazed in a shallow clearing ahead, ordinary ones this time, nothing like the antlered giant Cassian had fought alone. Toma studied them a long moment, reading the wind with his face tilted slightly, judging distance and angle in a way Cassian couldn’t begin to follow.
"Petra takes the lead buck," Toma murmured. "Corin circles wide, cuts off the retreat toward the ravine. I’ll hold the center in case anything breaks wrong."
"What do I do?" Cassian whispered.
"Stay still and stay quiet. That’s the whole job today."
Cassian did, watching the three of them move into position with a coordination that looked almost rehearsed, though he doubted they’d planned a single step of it in advance. Petra’s arrow took the lead buck cleanly through the chest before the herd even fully registered danger. The rest scattered exactly toward the ravine, exactly into Corin’s path, and it was over in less time than it had taken Cassian to work up the nerve to attack the Ridgeback Stag alone.
Nobody had needed to raise their voice. Nobody had bled. Cassian sat with that for a moment, turning it over, comparing it against every fight he’d survived through nothing but brute stubbornness and fire.
"That’s it?" he asked, once they’d regrouped over the kill.
"That’s most of it," Toma said, checking the buck over with quick, practiced hands. "The fighting part people always want to hear about is the smallest piece. Most of hunting is knowing where something will be before it knows it itself."
"Nobody taught me that."
"Nobody had the chance to." Toma glanced at him, something almost gentle in it despite his usual flatness. "You’ll get chances now."
They field-dressed the kill efficiently, Corin explaining each step in a low, patient voice, showing Cassian exactly where to cut and why, which parts the village would use and which would be left for the forest to take back. It wasn’t the kind of thing Azhur had ever bothered teaching him. Azhur’s lessons had always ended the moment something stopped moving. Nobody had ever shown Cassian what came after.
"You waste less this way," Corin said, working with quick, sure hands. "Waste less, hunt less. Hunt less, the forest stays healthier longer. It’s not complicated once someone actually shows you."
"Nobody ever did," Cassian admitted.
"Well." Corin glanced up at him, something almost kind in his usually unreadable face. "Somebody’s showing you now."
Cassian found himself paying closer attention than he had to almost anything since the fire, grateful for something to focus on that wasn’t grief or revenge or the ache that lived permanently behind his ribs now. It felt, briefly, like something close to normal.
They were nearly back to the main trail, the deer slung between Corin and Petra on a hastily rigged frame, when Toma stopped walking.
"Wait."
Everyone froze. Toma crouched near a patch of softer ground beside the trail, mist still clinging low around his knees, and went very still.
"What is it?" Cassian asked, already knowing before the words finished leaving his mouth.
Toma didn’t answer right away. He reached out and pressed two fingers lightly against the edge of a deep, wide print sunk into the damp earth, far too large for any deer, far too strange in shape for any boar or bear Cassian had ever heard described. The edges of it were still sharp, uneroded by the morning’s light rain, which meant whatever made it had passed through recently. Very recently.
Petra’s face had gone carefully blank in the way people’s faces go when they’re working hard not to show fear in front of someone younger. "That’s not from yesterday."
"No," Toma agreed quietly. "That’s from this morning."
Corin crouched beside him, studying the print in silence for a long moment before speaking. "Same shape the boy described at the council. No claws that I can see. Whatever’s making these isn’t walking like anything I’ve hunted before." He looked up at the surrounding trees, at the mist still hanging heavy and undisturbed, and something in his easy confidence from earlier had quietly drained away. "And it’s closer to the village than the last sighting was."
Nobody said anything for a moment. The forest around them had gone strangely, thoroughly silent, the same wrong kind of quiet Cassian remembered from the north woods on the day everything in his old life had started falling apart.
"We should get the deer back," Toma said finally, voice low and even despite everything. "And tell my father exactly where this was."
Cassian stared down at the print a moment longer, at the size of it, at how carefully undisturbed the moss around it remained despite something clearly heavy enough to sink an inch deep into wet ground.
Whatever it was, it hadn’t been hiding from them by luck.
It had chosen exactly how close to let itself be seen.