Cassian was carrying water back from the well when he saw the same small girl from weeks ago standing near her mother’s doorway, a wooden toy shaped roughly like a boar clutched tight against her chest.
She saw him too. Her whole body went stiff, the way it always did, and she backed a half-step closer to the doorway without taking her eyes off him.
"Wren," her mother said quietly, appearing behind her, one hand settling protectively on the girl’s shoulder. "Inside."
"I wasn’t doing anything," Cassian said, keeping his voice even, keeping the water pail lowered so it looked less like anything that could threaten anyone.
"I know." The woman’s tone stayed polite on the surface, the way it always did, but something underneath it never quite softened. "It’s easier this way. For her."
"Because of the fire."
"Because of everything about you," she said, not unkindly, simply honest in a way that landed harder than cruelty would have. "You’re not from here. You didn’t earn anything here yet. Some of us aren’t ready to pretend that doesn’t matter just because Doran brought you home."
Cassian said nothing. There wasn’t much to say to that which wouldn’t sound like arguing for a place he genuinely wasn’t sure he’d earned yet either.
The woman guided Wren inside without another word, and the door shut a little more firmly than it needed to.
Cassian stood there a moment, the water pail heavy in his hand, something old and familiar settling back into his chest. He’d felt this before, in smaller doses, from smaller reactions. It never stopped landing exactly the same way.
He kept walking.
Cassian stood there a moment longer than the exchange strictly required, something loosening in his chest that he hadn’t realized was still tight. It wasn’t trust yet. Not really. But it was closer than he’d expected to get, this soon.
He was still thinking about it that evening when Toma found him near the storehouses, two thick cloaks slung over one arm.
"You’re on watch tonight," Toma said, tossing him one. "Eastern fence. My father wants doubled pairs after what happened to Dalin."
"You’re with me?"
"Lucky you."
They walked the fence line together as the sun dropped behind the ridge, torches already lit at intervals along the perimeter, throwing long orange shapes across the dirt. The forest beyond looked different at night, the way it always did, closer somehow, as if the trees had shifted forward an inch the moment nobody was looking directly at them.
"Anything happen on watch before?" Cassian asked.
"Boring, mostly. That’s the point." Toma checked the knot on his cloak. "Boring means nothing’s found a reason to come closer yet."
"And if something does?"
"Then you shout loud enough that the whole valley hears you, and you don’t try to be a hero about it." Toma glanced sideways at him. "I mean that. Especially you."
"Why especially me?"
"Because you fought a Mystical alone at eleven and you’ve been walking around ever since like that’s just something you do now." Toma’s tone stayed light, but something underneath it wasn’t joking at all. "This isn’t that. Whatever made those bootprints, if that’s even what they turn out to be, isn’t something you charge at because charging worked once before."
Cassian didn’t have a ready answer for that, so he let it sit.
They walked for the better part of an hour, trading quiet, unimportant conversation, the kind that filled space without needing to mean anything. Then Toma stopped near a bend in the fence line, crouching suddenly, one hand raised for quiet.
"What is it?" Cassian whispered.
Toma didn’t answer right away. He was staring at a patch of churned dirt just outside the fence line, half-hidden in shadow between two support posts. Cassian crouched beside him and understood immediately why he’d gone quiet.
Footprints. Not paws. Not claws. Boots, clearly, the tread pattern unfamiliar, deeper on the heel than anything Cassian had ever seen a village hunter wear.
"That’s not one of ours," Toma said quietly.
"Could it be a trader? Someone lost?"
"Nobody gets lost this close to us by accident. Not without finding the fence first and turning around." Toma’s jaw tightened as he studied the prints further, tracing their direction with his eyes. They came from deeper in the forest, circled once near the fence line, and turned back the way they’d come, never actually crossing in. "Whoever this was, they were looking. Not walking."
Cassian’s stomach went tight and cold. He crouched lower, and that was when he saw it, half-buried in the churned dirt near the last print: a small scrap of dark cloth, torn free from something larger, caught on a low branch and left behind.
He picked it up carefully. A faint mark had been stitched into the fabric, small, deliberate, the thread darker than the cloth around it.
He didn’t recognize the shape of it. But something about the careful precision of the stitching made the back of his neck prickle anyway, the same instinctive unease he’d felt once before, staring at a symbol on someone else’s collar in a burning village he’d never fully stopped thinking about.
"Toma."
"I see it." Toma’s voice had gone flat and careful. "We report this. Now."
They were halfway back toward the storehouses to raise the alarm when Yara intercepted them near the square, moving with more urgency than Cassian had ever seen from her.
"One of the other watchmen already sent word," she said, before either of them could explain. "Show me."
Cassian handed her the scrap of cloth. She studied it a long moment under the nearest torchlight, her expression carefully unreadable, though something behind her eyes had gone very still.
"This isn’t from any trader I know," she said finally. "And it isn’t from anything that walks on four legs, whatever’s been emptying our hunting trails." She folded the scrap carefully and tucked it into her sleeve. "I’ll take this to Doran myself. In the meantime, the two of you stay on this stretch of fence. Extra eyes, until the watch changes."
"Do you know what it means?" Cassian asked.
Yara was quiet long enough that he thought she might not answer at all. "I have a guess," she said. "I hope I’m wrong."
She settled onto an overturned log near the fence post instead of leaving immediately, waving off Toma’s offer to walk her back. "I’m old, not fragile. Sit. Both of you. If we’re keeping watch together, we might as well not do it in silence."
Cassian sat, still turning the strange mark over in his mind. "You said something before. About your grandmother’s time. Something that came through the forest the same patient way."
Yara’s eyes moved to the tree line, distant and unreadable in the dark. "I did say that."
"What was it?"
She was quiet a long moment, the torchlight flickering across the deep lines of ink along her forearms. "It wasn’t a beast at all, in the end," she said slowly. "That’s what took the longest to understand. Everyone spent an entire season hunting the wrong kind of enemy, because a beast was easier to imagine than what was actually out there."
Cassian felt something cold settle low in his stomach, the scrap of dark cloth still burning at the edge of his thoughts even though Yara had already taken it from his hands.
"What was actually out there?" Toma asked quietly.
Yara opened her mouth to answer, and in that exact moment, far off across the valley, a bell began to ring, fast and uneven, nothing at all like the slow, ceremonial toll Cassian remembered from Selection mornings back home.
Every watchman along the fence went rigid at once.
Yara was on her feet before the second toll finished ringing out. "That’s not a beast alarm."
Cassian’s whole body had already gone cold, some old, familiar instinct recognizing the sound of alarm before his mind had finished catching up to it.
"Then what is it?" he asked, already knowing, somehow, that he wouldn’t like the answer.
Yara didn’t get the chance to say. She was already running toward the square, and Cassian and Toma were right behind her, the old story left unfinished in the dark.