The spear had gone in through the open mouth and out the back of the neck, yet the shadow wolf still would not fall.
It crashed sideways into the leaves, legs kicking, the silver point jutting a hand’s length out behind its skull.
Any natural thing would have been dead before it landed.
This one lay twisted for the space of two breaths — then its front claws bit into the earth, and it began to pull itself up.
Raven watched it drag itself forward along the shaft, gullet grinding up the wood an inch at a time, closing the distance to her with the spear still run clean through its head.
The wet scrape of timber against teeth carried across the clearing.
It made no sound of pain at all.
Its black eyes stayed fixed on her in a way that sent a shudder running through her spine.
She should have moved.
Her body refused.
She stayed crouched in the mud with the slate shard locked in her fist, and behind her, footsteps dimly came through the leaf litter.
She tried to turn toward them, but her ribs seized and her ankle sent white sparks up her leg, so all she managed was a half-twist that put the newcomer at the edge of her sight.
An old woman walked past her into the moonlight.
Gray hair, pulled back in a braid tight enough to shine.
A dark travelling cloak, its hem stiff with old mud, and boots caked to the ankle in fresh.
Leather guards covered her forearms, scored across with claw marks that had been stitched and re-stitched, and a short silver blade rode at her waist.
She didn’t run at the wolf and she didn’t circle it.
She walked a straight line to where the spear pinned it.
The wolf hauled itself another inch along the shaft toward Raven.
The woman put one boot on its chest, gripped the spear two-handed, and tore it free.
Black fluid came with it, hissing where it spattered the leaves.
Before the creature could get its legs under itself she reversed the point and drove it up through the soft place beneath its jaw, leaning her whole weight down through her arms.
The convulsion nearly lifted her off the ground.
She rode it, boot planted, until the body under her went slack — and Raven, staring, saw the thing’s shadow keep twitching against the moonlit leaves for one full heartbeat after the flesh had stopped.
Then the shadow lay down too.
Movement snapped her eyes right.
The smaller wolf was already coming.
It had ignored the woman entirely, skirting the kill in a low, crooked-jawed rush, black vapor streaming between its teeth — and it was coming for her.
Raven threw herself backward.
Her palm and elbow took the ground, she shoved with her good leg, and her ankle folded the instant she asked anything of it, dropping her flat.
The wolf’s front paws hit the mud where she’d been.
Its head swung down, jaws opening, close enough that the rot of its breath touched her face.
She swung the slate at its ruined eye.
The blow missed.
The shard raked across its crooked jaw instead — krrk, stone grating over bone — and the impact knocked its head aside for one second.
The second was enough.
Wood whistled, then the spear shaft cracked across the creature’s ribs and swept it bodily away from her, rolling it twice through the leaves before it found its feet.
Raven lay propped on one elbow, gasping, the slate still in her fist.
The edge had gone through fur and hide and the wolf hadn’t even bled properly — a thin seam of black, already closing.
The wolf and the old woman faced each other in the open ground.
This one was smarter than the big one.
It didn’t charge.
It moved sideways around her in a slow arc, weight low, and every few steps it darted its head at her — testing, the same feint it had baited Raven with.
The woman turned with it and gave it nothing.
When it snapped at the spear shaft she let the point dip away, then brought it back level.
When it broke wide, angling around her flank toward Raven, she cut the corner with two short steps and stood in its path again, blade of the spear held low, and waited.
She fought like she walked.
No flourish, no wasted reach.
She let the creature commit to each rush before she moved, and then moved only as far as she needed to, and the wolf’s teeth kept closing on the air where she’d already stopped being.
Raven dragged herself backward toward the treeline, inch by inch, and that was when she saw it — the woman stepped over a patch of leaf-covered ground without looking down.
A flat, ordinary patch, no different from any other, except that the woman’s boot had lifted to clear it.
Raven’s eyes went where the boot had been.
Moonlight caught a hair-thin line above the leaves.
Wire — silver wire, strung a hand’s width off the ground between two stakes she never would have found by searching.
Now that she knew what she was looking at, she found the rest: a second line farther out, and small bells hung in the low branches of three saplings, dulled with soot so they wouldn’t catch the light, threads running down from them into the leaf litter.
The clearing was rigged.
All of it, rigged before Raven ever fell into it.
The woman hadn’t stumbled across a girl in trouble tonight — she had baited this ground and had been hunting these creatures..
The woman gave ground.
She did it well — a stagger cut into the retreat, the spear point drooping as though her arms had finally remembered their age — and she did it in one direction only, opening a clean lane along her left.
The wolf took it.
It broke around her in a burst of speed, committed, one bound, two— Its foreleg hit the wire.
The line sang taut, and the silver bit.
Corrupted flesh hissed where the wire wrapped it, thin smoke curling up out of the fur, and the creature went down thrashing, tearing the stake half out of the ground.
The reek of it rolled across the clearing, burnt and sweet and wrong.
Then it stopped thrashing, and Raven’s skin crawled, because it didn’t turn on the woman closing in behind it.
It looked at her.
Both black eyes, fixed across the clearing on Raven, and with its gaze locked on her the wolf began to pull against the wire.
The silver sank deeper.
Smoke poured off the wound.
It leaned its whole weight into the cutting line, sawing its own leg open by will, and made no sound the entire time.
Raven’s stomach turned over.
Every beast she’d ever seen caught in the estate’s traps had fought the trap.
This one was spending its leg like a coin, because the leg was between it and her.
The woman’s advance checked, a half-step.
Her eyes never left the wolf, but her chin came around a degree, following the line of the creature’s stare over her own shoulder to the girl bleeding in the mud, and for a moment the spear held still in her hands.
Her grip shifted on the shaft, as she leveled it.
The wolf tore free.
Something stayed behind in the wire — a strip of black-veined flesh, smoking on the silver — and the wolf came on without it, three-legged and fast, jaws wide, vapor streaming, straight at Raven.
She got the slate up.
There was time for nothing else.
The old woman stepped into its path.
She dropped under the leap, braced, and drove the short silver blade upward into the soft of its jaw as its momentum carried it onto her — and the two of them came down together, woman and dying beast, crashing into the mud close enough that its skull struck the ground beside Raven’s boot.
Black saliva flecked her skirt and hissed there, eating pinholes through the cloth.
The clearing went quiet.
Raven lay where she was and breathed.
Her arm burned where the claws had opened it, three lines of heat from shoulder to elbow, and blood was working its way down to her wrist.
The ankle had swollen against the leather of her boot.
Her palms stung, her ribs ached with each breath, her throat ached inside where Celeste’s grip had crushed it — and beneath all of it, behind her sternum, the torn place where two bonds used to live burned on, steady, answering to no healer and no prayer.
She reached past it once, out of habit, down toward the deep water.
Still nothing.
The old woman rolled the carcass off herself and stood.
Mud streaked her cloak from shoulder to hem, but she stood up with vigor, and went about the clearing without so much as a glance at Raven.
She freed her blade from the small wolf’s jaw and wiped it twice against its fur.
She worked her spear loose.
At each corpse she paused — prodded the eye with the spear point, watched the shadow beneath it, waited, moved on.
Raven watched her do it, and her fingers tightened around the slate until the edge printed itself into her torn palm.
Rescued.
Maybe.
Or a lone armed stranger in a black forest had just run out of wolves to kill, and the only witness left was a girl who couldn’t stand.
Nobody hunted these things alone at night for kindness.
Whatever this woman was, Raven wanted to be on her feet before she found out.
She set her good foot under herself and pushed.
The ankle took a quarter of her weight and buckled, and the mud caught her on knee and elbow.
She clenched her teeth over the sound that wanted out.
Then she dragged herself back instead, one arm’s length, until her shoulders met the root-ball of a fallen tree and there was solid wood behind her.
The woman pulled her blade from the second corpse and turned around.
She looked at Raven the way she’d looked at the traps and the treeline — a survey, quick and flat.
A servant girl in a torn uniform, muddy, bleeding from the arm, one leg useless and both hands wrapped around a piece of broken slate.
She took one step closer.
Raven raised her head to keep the woman in sight.
Her hair, soaked through and heavy, slid off her face and fell back past her shoulder, and the moonlight came down on her clearly for the first time.
The old woman stopped walking.
Her hand slackened around the spear, and the point dropped, and dug into the mud unnoticed.
Her mouth opened.
Her throat worked without producing anything.
She swayed forward half a step, and when her voice finally came out, it came out cracked.
“Laura?”