He came in on a lean horse with a lean face, wearing the plain, expensive leathers of a professional and the specific, unbothered patience of a man who hunts other men for a living.
He wore no Guild badge. That was the first thing Vera noticed, and it was worse than a badge, not better. "Guild hunters answer to the Guild," she murmured, watching him through the Lodge window as he stabled his horse with unhurried competence. "Church hunters answer to the Church. A man with no badge answers only to whoever's holding the purse." She let the shutter fall. "And right now the fattest purse in the kingdom has your name on it. Or the name Cassia gave you."
He took a room at the Lodge and settled in like a patient tick. He bought rounds for the hunters. He was pleasant — that was the unnerving part — easy and warm and quick to laugh. And underneath the warmth he salted the ground with questions, so smoothly you'd hardly notice you were being harvested. Any newcomers this season? Four of them, perhaps — some young ones, a big lad, a girl who scribbles? Any strange kills out in the deep woods lately? Anything folk couldn't quite explain? Any... unusual weather in the woods — a chill, a wrongness, a feeling of being watched?
Osla, bless her fire-scarred heart, gave him precisely nothing. "The Wildmarch is made of strangers and strange kills, friend," she said, flat as a slate. "That's the entire product. You want somewhere nothing unexplained happens, try the flatlands. Try the church."
But Thornwatch was small, and four people can't hide behind four walls forever, and the man had all the time his purse could buy.
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Vera's plan was simple and awful in equal measure: act normal. Take a contract. Be gone from the Lodge, deep in the woods and doing honest work, while the man asked his questions of people who didn't have answers — and give him nothing to look at.
[Contract: Track and cull the pack raiding the eastern goat-runs.]Reward: 6 silver.]Note: shadow-wolves. They hunt after dark. They hunt clever.]
Shadow-wolves. Of course. On the one night I most needed to do absolutely nothing that resembled a Demon King, the only contract on the board was for creatures made of the exact same darkness I bled from my own hands.
We tracked the pack east as the light failed, away from the outpost, my Beast Sense stretched out ahead of us like a hand feeling through a dark room. Six of them — six bright, cold, moving presences, low and clever, threading through the black trees. Real hunters, these. The kind that circle wide and come at you from behind.
"Quiet," Vera breathed as we moved. "No Mantle. Not tonight, not with that man a mile behind us at the Lodge. If someone with training feels a spike of demon-aura roll out of these woods, he doesn't even need to see our faces. He just needs to know the King of Ash is real, and here, and the whole game is over."
I nodded. No Mantle. Fight like a person. I could do that. I'd gotten good at that.
Then the shadow-wolves stopped circling the goat-runs.
As one, all six of them turned — away from the fat, easy goats — and faced me. Drawn. Recognizing, in their pack-blood, the thing that stood above them. Kneeling-adjacent.
And far back through the black trees, at the very ragged edge of my sense, something cold and dim and human held itself very, very still.