The something turned out to be a bull moose the size of a garden shed, which regarded us with vast bovine contempt, decided we weren't worth the effort, and crashed off into the fen — so we reached Thornwatch by nightfall with the full complement of our limbs, which around here apparently counted as a triumph.
It wasn't a town. Calling it a town would've been generous to the point of fraud. It was a fort of raw logs and a huddle of cabins ringed by a palisade, and the palisade was scarred top to bottom with gouges — claw-marks, bite-marks, one long scorched streak I decided not to ask about. The whole place sat in a clearing the wilds pressed against on every side, patient as water against a dam. Everyone I saw carried a weapon the way other people carry a coin purse: without thinking, and never far from hand.
The heart of it was a long hall of blackened timber — the Hunters' Lodge — and the woman who ran the Lodge was named Osla.
Osla was maybe sixty, built like a stump that had survived several fires, grey-haired, with one milky blind eye and one good one that swept over us and, I swear, itemized us and priced our organs in about a second and a half. She took in the four of us — road-filthy, half-starved, a giant hugging a bread sack, a girl in an oversized robe scribbling in a notebook — and delivered her verdict flat.
"Too clean for the deep woods," she said. "Too dirty for the city. Runaways."
"Hunters," Vera corrected, smooth as oiled leather. "Looking for honest work. No names required."
Osla's good eye crinkled at the corner. Out here, apparently, no names required wasn't a red flag. It was practically a résumé.
"Rank?"
"E."
"Board's on the wall." She jerked her chin at a slab of timber shingled with contract slips. "Frontier rules, so listen once. You keep what you kill, less the Lodge's cut. You don't come back from a contract, that's your affair and nobody's business — we don't send searchers into the deep wilds, we don't have the bodies to spare. And nobody here asks where you're from." She shoved a dented tin of stew across the counter at me without being asked. "Eat. You'll die tired if you start a Wildmarch contract on an empty belly, and I hate the paperwork on a dead newcomer."
[Location discovered: Thornwatch (Frontier Outpost).][Local Guild presence: minimal. Bounty propagation: negligible.][Contracts available: Hunting · Gathering · Culling.]
Vera read that middle line over my shoulder, and I watched the tension she'd carried since Ashlow — since the ravine, since Cassia's white horse wheeling north — go out of her shoulders in one long, silent breath.
"Negligible," she murmured. "We're off the map. For a little while, we are genuinely off the map."
We took the smallest, dullest contract on the whole board that first night: cull a warren of burrow-hounds that had been tunneling under the goat-pens and dragging off kids — the four-legged kind. Rank E. Barely two lines of description. The single most boring quest I could imagine.
I could have wept with gratitude for it.
Because for the first time since a magic circle stole my microwave and handed me a doomsday title, I had something rare and precious in my hands: a plan that involved living quietly, killing small things for small money, and not being anybody's apocalypse for a while.
It lasted, generously, about a day and a half.