She didn't speak until the voices behind them had faded entirely. Until the last traces of home had vanished and all that remained was new, uncharted land.

  "Kraken, you are a fool. You've walked us both into this because of Isolde."

  He kept moving.

  "Don't," she said. "I saw her yesterday. I saw your face." Her dress caught on something and she freed it without breaking stride. "You packed a bag and you walked yourself through that rope."

  "There were other reasons."

  "I know there were other reasons."

  He stopped. She stopped behind him.

  "You came on your own," he said.

  "I did." Something underneath the anger, quieter than it. "Because you were going to walk into those trees alone with whatever you packed and do something irreversible, and I was not going to let that happen." A beat. "That is not the same as this being reasonable."

  He turned. She was closer than he'd registered, and her face had the particular quality it got when she'd been managing something and had arrived at the point where it was either said or it wasn't.

  "I wanted something that was mine to have done," he said. "I've listened to every Tairseach come back for years. Filed it all away, the terrain, the paths, the sky. I wanted to see it for myself, not just carry their account of it. And there is nothing waiting for me below to go back to." He held her gaze. "And now Isolde. What's left?"

  She looked at him for a moment.

  "Am I nothing to come back to? You'd throw all of it away over a girl who couldn't hold your interest a full season?"

  "It wasn't only her. But she was the last reason I stopped finding."

  Some of the tension in her face shifted into something that wasn't yet forgiveness but was adjacent to it.

  "You could have said that," she said. "From the beginning."

  "I know."

  She looked at the trail and then back at him, and something moved across her face that he didn't quite catch. Then she stepped forward and put her arms around him.

  He was still for one beat, the way he sometimes was when something surprised him, and then he held on. They stood there with the trail ahead of them and the forest around them and the sound of their own breathing.

  "I'm glad you came," he said.

  She didn't answer. She didn't need to.

  After a while he stepped back. She straightened her dress. Kraken looked at the trail.

  "They've a day on us. We should move."

  ~

  The forest kept offering him things he had no way to read.

  He had seventeen years of stone in his hands: the way limestone told you its weakness in the grain, the sound a hollow made underfoot, what a crack's direction said about the water that had made it. He had never thought of this as knowledge until it was useless. Here the ground was soft where he expected resistance and the trees gave no indication of what they were doing, and sound moved between trunks in ways that made distance unreliable. He watched Tawny, three steps ahead, and she moved through the same undergrowth without fighting it, finding the forest's openings the way water finds them, without apparent intention. He watched and tried to learn the principle without asking.

  The trail was readable, at least. Eleven pairs of boots had come through here before dawn; the grass still held their passing.

  Then, perhaps half an hour in, they smelled it.

  Something masking the ordinary scent of the trees, mineral and foul. He left the trail and found it thirty metres in: a large animal, stockier than any surface dog the hunters had described, lying in a clear space between three trunks. It hadn't been eaten. He knew what feeding looked like, the logic of it, where something would go first, and this was not feeding. The head had been crushed and lay in fragments on the ground around the body. Something had done this without hunger, and that was a different category of problem than anything with hunger in it.

  He stood there for a moment.

  Fifteen metres further, the bark had been stripped from a wide trunk at exactly the height of his shoulder. The exposed wood was pale and raw at the edges, the earth beneath it churned deep and wide, impressions in the soil too large and too spread to be any creature he could name. Something had stood here and moved its weight. What had contacted the wood had done so at his shoulder.

  He looked from the bark to the direction of the carcass. The line between them was straight.

  Tawny had come up beside him. She looked at the marks without speaking.

  They went on faster. At some point his hand had found the handle of the masonry knife at his belt, and he left it there.

  ~

  They heard him perhaps an hour later, not an animal sound, something deliberate. The sound of a person managing pain they had decided to manage quietly. Kraken held up a hand. Tawny stopped. Thirty metres off the trail, behind a trunk that had fallen and brought another down with it.

  The man was wedged between the fallen trunk and the ground, back against the wood, right hand pressed hard to his left side where the kit had gone dark and wet. His other arm sat at an angle arms were not meant to sit at. He had the stillness of someone who had been somewhere else recently and was not fully back. He looked at them coming through the trees, the festival dress, the pack too small for a fortnight, Kraken's complete absence of anything Tairseach, and his expression settled somewhere between relief and the recognition that things had not improved as much as they might have.

  "Unauthorised," he said.

  Kraken crouched beside him. "What happened."

  He was quiet for a moment, sorting what he knew from what he was guessing. "Something came from behind. Something large, something I should have heard and didn't. When I came back I was on the ground in the wrong part of the forest. Arm went down with me." He said it the way a man says something he has already processed and found unsatisfying. "I walked until I couldn't, then I sat."

  "How old are you."

  "Seventeen."

  He closed his eyes. Opened them. "Right. Are you going to stand there."

  His name was Uurad Fayne. He told them what to cut and how to bind it, and Kraken did exactly what he was told. Bark stripped for splinting, fabric from the pack torn into lengths, the whole thing improvised and none of it clean. Tawny worked the binding with the precision of someone who had done this before and knew the difference between a knot that held and one that merely looked like it. She pulled it tight without asking permission. Uurad's jaw set and his eyes closed briefly and then he was looking at the skyline again, his breathing level, directing them without fuss and spending each word like a man who had counted what he had left.

  If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

  "You'll reach the main party before dark if you move," he said, while they worked. "Tidgar leads them. He'll be angry."

  "How angry."

  "The kind that turns practical in two minutes. It's the only kind worth being." He breathed through the tightening. "Above the seal it's Tidgar's authority. What happens in Alebrath is Alebrath's concern."

  "Luck's made itself scarce for you today," Kraken said.

  Something moved in Uurad's face. "It has." He looked at the cut branches. "We'll need a drag."

  He watched Kraken while they built it. "You're going to the camp."

  "Yes," Kraken said.

  From the other side Tawny said, in the tone of someone closing a question: "We're going to the camp."

  Uurad received this without comment. He lay back, and they lifted him, and started moving.

  After a while Uurad spoke: "Kilbracken. That's your name."

  Kraken glanced back.

  "I knew your mother." The flatness of a man spending everything on the essentials. "She came to a clan assembly when I was perhaps twenty. She argued with my father over water rights in the Tarmouth passage, and she was correct, of which she was entirely aware, and she did not make it comfortable for him." Something faint under the words. "I thought she was the most formidable person in the room."

  The trail bent and they followed it. Kraken said nothing for a moment.

  "She died when I was ten."

  "I know. I heard." A pause. "I'm sorry for it."

  They walked. The light had been changing all day, not the Braoch's level and faithful green, but something with angle to it, something that moved and was different every hour. He noted it the way he noted everything out here: filed, held, nothing yet to put it alongside.

  "Your father," Kraken said.

  "Bors Fayne." A breath. "Third clan chief. Still alive and still occupying the seat, which means I have been next in line since before you were born and will likely remain so until I'm too old to want it." Something dry in his voice that was not quite bitterness. "He has strong opinions about water rights and most other things. He is wrong about a fair number of them."

  ~

  The clearing opened perhaps an hour later, a break in the trees, grass long and pale, a shallow stream crossing pale stones. They had been moving long enough that stopping required no explanation. Kraken set down the drag. Uurad made no complaint, which told its own story.

  At the clearing's edge: a cairn. A stack of stones on a flat outcrop, weathered to the same grey as everything around but the arrangement still deliberate. At the top, one stone sat lighter than the rest. Pale against the lichen. Its underside still dark with moisture. Someone had placed it recently.

  "Previous party," Uurad said.

  Tawny had slowed. "How many times has someone come through here?"

  "Every Waking for as long as there's been a Waking," Uurad said. "These hills are ours. We come back to them." A pause. "This trail runs close to the base of the ice mountains to the north. Tidgar uses it when he has to. Old habit."

  She looked at the cairn. "Did they make it back. Whoever left that."

  "Usually. Not always."

  She was quiet, then turned to the stream. They filled the skin and sat. The water was cold enough to matter.

  Then Tawny went still.

  At the stream's edge, almost within reach of her boot, sat a small brown animal, ears long, sides moving, completely absorbed in something at the water's margin with no indication it knew they were there. Around and between its feet, three smaller ones moved with the effortful coordination of things that hadn't yet worked out what their legs were for. One of them found the toe of Tawny's boot, examined it with the gravity of a creature conducting serious research, and began attempting to climb her ankle.

  She looked at Kraken with her eyes wide and her mouth forming words that made no sound, one hand raised slightly as though she might do something and had not yet decided what.

  It reached her shin and stopped there, sides working fast with its small breathing, looking out at the clearing from its new height with an air of complete satisfaction. The mother didn't look up. The other two were busy with the water.

  Tawny looked down at it. Then she looked at Kraken.

  "Don't move," he said, unnecessarily.

  She shot him a look that said she was aware of that.

  "I'm dying," said Uurad, from the drag, in a tone of complete equanimity, "and you've stopped moving."

  "There's an animal on her leg," Kraken said.

  A pause.

  "I can see that."

  "We don't have a word for it."

  A pause. "That," Uurad said, "is a rabbit. And its young." Another pause. "I have been lying here bleeding. I am glad something is being attended to."

  The animal descended eventually, at its own pace, and rejoined the others, and all four moved off into the grass with the unhurried certainty of things that have nothing to run from. Tawny watched them go. When she turned back there was something in her face that the morning hadn't put there.

  "The small one seemed to think you'd make a good mother," Kraken said.

  She looked at him.

  "It made its position fairly clear."

  She turned away, and he saw her trying not to smile and not entirely succeeding.

  They lifted the drag and went on.

  ~

  Firelight between the trunks first, warm orange where everything had been grey and green. Then woodsmoke. Then the smell of something roasting over open flame that had nothing underground in its composition.

  They came through the trees.

  It was smaller than he'd imagined. He had built it up across years of listening. The camp the Tairseach made, the thing they returned from. The reality was four tents staked into the ground at practical angles, a fire pit ringed with flat stones, kit laid out with the logic of people who had learned to find things in the dark. Two men crouching over equipment, one tending the fire, one at the clearing's far edge who looked up at Uurad on the drag and came to his feet without hurrying. Nobody spoke. These were people in the middle of their work, and their work didn't stop because something had arrived.

  Then Tidgar came around the fire.

  He was past fifty, and he moved with the economy of someone who had stopped wasting effort some time ago. His eyes went to Uurad first and stayed there, the side, the arm, the drag, and what moved across his face was not performed.

  "Uurad."

  "Here," Uurad said. "These two found me. Give them that."

  Tidgar crouched beside the drag and looked at the wound with the attention of a man doing an accounting. "Who bound it."

  "The girl."

  He examined it. Stood. He looked at Kraken, then at Tawny, and at whatever he found in Tawny's face something registered that he did not name. "Ciarán." The man at the kit was already moving. "Take him."

  As they lifted the drag, Tidgar's voice followed Uurad across the camp: "What happened."

  "Went to piss," Uurad said. "Something put me down from behind. Big. I came to in the wrong part of the forest." A pause as they carried him. "Walked in circles. Sat down."

  "How long."

  "Long enough."

  Tidgar watched them go, then turned back to Kraken and Tawny. He studied them in the way of a man who is not deciding whether to be angry, that part is settled, but deciding what use to make of it.

  "You're Lorcan's daughter," he said to Tawny.

  "Yes."

  "He'll know of this before rumour does. I'll see to that." He looked at Kraken. "And you."

  "Kraken. Mason's aide."

  Tidgar looked at him for a moment, then moved on. "You both stay where I can see you. You don't move past whatever perimeter I set without telling me first. You go back when we go back." He looked between them. "Go sit somewhere and don't get in anyone's way. I'll deal with you when I've seen to Uurad."

  He turned back to the fire.

  They sat at the clearing's edge, backs against the wood, the ground cold and damp through their clothes in a way that stone never was. Across the camp the others moved with the efficiency of people who have a system and are using it. Uurad was being seen to behind canvas. The fire was being managed, a proper wood fire, which still smelled wrong to him in a way he couldn't account for. Not bad, just foreign. Nothing like the wood of the great trees or spare peat, nothing like anything familiar. Nobody paid Kraken or Tawny any particular attention, and nobody offered them anything, and that was how it was going to be.

  Above the treeline, the last of the colour was going out of the sky. The blue deepened and the first stars came through in the places where it was thinnest, not all at once but gradually, the way a truth arrives when it has been present for a long time. They were countless and still and entirely indifferent to anything happening below them, and something about that indifference was not as unwelcoming as it might have been.

  "They don't move," Tawny said, beside him.

  He looked at her.

  "The lights. All day everything up here has moved, the light, the shadows, the wind. I thought those would too."

  He looked back up. "They don't," he agreed.

  It wasn't much of an exchange. It was enough.

  Then Tidgar was standing over them, looking down with the expression of a man who has resolved one problem and found two more behind it.

  "You'll take the first watch with Torsten," he said to Kraken. "Tawny, you're on Uurad's tent. He'll need water and someone to tell him to lie still, and I'm not putting the clan chief's daughter in danger." He looked between them. "You'll stay with us for this fortnight. Until then, you can make yourselves of use."

  He walked away.

  Kraken and Tawny looked at each other.

  "Right," she said.

  He stood. Above the treeline the stars burned, countless and patient. He had never seen them before tonight, not like this. He suspected he would never be able to explain that to anyone who had.

  He went to find Torsten, and to find out what watching meant.