Anya turned the problem over in her hands the way she’d turn a weapon, looking for the flaw.
The blade still missing.
Four warriors.
Two approach vectors.
Surprise and darkness and the sky-people’s own poor discipline.
The raid should have been a slaughter the cache burned, three or four of them killed before the rest understood they were under attack, the lesson driven home that Trikru’s land was not theirs to claim.
Instead her warriors had walked into a prepared defense.
Spears ready.
Positions chosen.
As if someone had drawn them a map.
She stood at the edge of the ridge, watching the sky-people’s camp through the gap in the trees.
Smoke rose from their fires.
Voices carried on the wind too loud, too careless, the noise of children who’d never learned that the forest listens.
They should have been dead by now.
“They were lucky,” Okar had said when he’d returned, blood on his hands and nothing else to show for it.
Anya did not believe in luck.
She believed in patterns.
“The northern approach,” she said.
Okar shifted beside her, close enough that she could smell the woodsmoke still caught in his furs.
“You said they saw you before you moved.”
“They were waiting.
Three of them, positioned on the high ground, spears angled to cut the gap.
We pulled back.”
“And the cache?”
“Gone before we reached it.
They’d moved it two days prior, or hidden it.
The guard we killed was watching an empty creek bed.”
Anya said nothing.
Turned her gaze back to the camp.
The sky-people were rebuilding something near the largest structure, the metal shell they’d fallen in.
A girl with yellow hair was shouting orders.
A boy with dark skin was lashing poles together.
They moved like a people who thought they had time.
“They have a scout,” Okar said.
“Someone we haven’t seen.
Watching the wood, reading our movements.
We find the scout, we blind them.”
“No.”
Okar looked at her.
“A scout I would have found,” Anya said.
“I’ve walked every approach to that camp.
There is no position that gives a clear line to both the cache and the northern ridge without breaking cover.
No tracks, no bent branches, no sign anyone is ranging past their perimeter.”
“Then how”
“I don’t know.”
She hated the answer.
Hated more that it was true.
The sky-people had fallen nine days ago a burning star that had split the sky and sent half the clans into a panic, certain the mountain’s gods had returned.
Anya had watched them stumble out of their metal shell, soft and loud and dying within the first hour.
Nothing in her had stirred but contempt.
Invaders.
Weak ones.
Then they had stopped dying.
Not all of them.
She’d counted the ones who’d fallen to the forest, to the river, to their own carelessness.
But fewer than there should have been.
They learned faster than children should.
Avoided predators they had no way of knowing hunted these woods.
Pulled back from the ridgeline the day before the acid fog rolled through.
And now this.
Someone was keeping them alive.
“We take the camp,” Okar said.
“Burn it.
Kill enough of them that the rest flee or die on their own.”
“The Commander wants them contained, not slaughtered.
She’ll decide their fate when she’s seen what they are.”
“What they are is a threat.”
“Yes.” Anya turned from the ridge.
Started back toward the warband’s position, deeper in the wood where the sky-people’s noise wouldn’t reach.
“Which is why we will remove it.
Carefully.”
Okar followed.
“You have a plan.”
“I have a question.” She ducked under a low branch, stepped over a root without looking, her feet reading the ground the way her mother had taught her before she’d seen her sixth winter.
“If they have a scout, why does the scout never leave the camp?”
Okar said nothing.
“Every defense they’ve mounted, every movement that’s kept them a step ahead it comes from inside their perimeter.
As if one of them sees the whole wood without walking it.” She stopped.
Turned.
“You’ve fought the mountain’s people.
The ones who take our warriors and return nothing.
Do they have power we don’t?”
“The mountain has walls and weapons.
They don’t need power.”
“The sky-people fell from above the sky, Okar.
We don’t know what they have.”
His hand moved to his blade.
A tell she’d seen a hundred times.
Fear he wouldn’t name.
“Find me the one who sees,” Anya said.
“Not the leaders.
Not the loud ones.
The quiet one.
The one who stands in the back and watches.”
“That could be any of them.”
“No.
It’s one.
And when you find him, I want to know everything.
Where he goes.
Who he speaks to.
When he’s weakest.” She turned back toward camp, the sky-people’s fires a smudge of light through the canopy.
“We’ll cut the head.
The body will fall after.”
Okar left.
Anya stayed.
Lincoln found her an hour later, stepping into the clearing without a sound.
He’d always moved like the forest had taught him personally.
“You’re planning another raid,” he said.
“I’m planning a war.”
“They’re children.”
“They’re invaders.
The distinction doesn’t matter.”
Lincoln crouched beside her, gaze on the camp below.
His face was unreadable, but Anya had known him long enough to see the shape of the argument he was weighing.
“They don’t know our borders,” he said finally.
“They don’t know what they’ve walked into.
If we”
“If we show mercy, they take it as weakness.
“I know what we’ve done to people who didn’t deserve it.”
The mountain.
He didn’t say it.
He didn’t have to.
Anya exhaled.
Looked at him.
“You want me to wait.”
“I want you to see them before you kill them.”
“I have.”
“You’ve seen an enemy.
I’m asking you to see people.”
She didn’t answer.
Lincoln rose, started back toward the trees, then stopped.
“There’s something falling,” he said.
“From the sky.
Another pod, smaller than the first.
It’ll land near their camp before dawn.”
Anya stood.
“You’re certain.”
“I saw the burn.
It’s coming down fast.”
She turned the information over, slotting it into the map she’d been building since the first star fell.
The sky-people had sent one hundred.
Now they were sending more.
Supplies, maybe.
Reinforcements.
Or something else.
“We wait,” she said.
Lincoln looked at her.
“Let it land.
Let them show us what it is.
Then we move.”
He left without argument.
Anya stayed on the ridge until full dark, watching the camp’s fires burn down to coals, the sky-people’s voices fading to nothing as they slept.
Then she saw it.
A streak of light, falling hard and fast across the northern sky, burning bright enough that for three seconds the whole forest was daylight.
It curved east, trailing fire, and disappeared beyond the trees.
Anya marked the direction.
Calculated the distance.
Smiled.
The sky-people would go to it.
They’d have to.
Which meant they’d range past their perimeter, into ground she knew and they didn’t.
And the quiet one the one who saw would either go with them, or stay behind.
Either way, she’d have her answer.
She turned back toward the warband’s camp.
Her hand found the hilt of her blade, the weight of it settling her the way it always did before a hunt.
The war had just gotten smaller.
One throat.
One cut.
The rest would follow.
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