Chapter 57

Chapter 57
Abigail's POV

In the first half of the day, we took down three of the common marked beasts. The first, Finn scented first. We circled to the downwind side, Dara drove it out of the brush from the front, Elodie pinned its hind leg with an arrow, and I slipped in along its flank and sent a clean edge between its ribs. The second and third went much the same. I no longer flinched, no longer froze. I simply moved, judged, struck, and then ended them with the fewest motions.

Finn and Dara stopped treating me like the soft one who'd been handed to them to look after. Before long, Dara even started calling me "Captain."

As the sun leaned to the west, I led them south, deep into a narrow ravine. Cold water rushed between the rocks, its sound pressing the surrounding silence deeper.

"What's in here?" Finn asked in a low voice, having noticed the change in my steps.

"An iron-mane," I said. "A kind of mutated boar. Its hide is hard enough to break common steel, and its core is worth as much as a dozen ordinary kills. In my last life—"

The instant the words left me, I stopped and corrected myself in time.

"I heard the old hunters of Crimson Fang speak of this ravine. Every time they mentioned it, they spoke of it like a dangerous place no one dared set foot in."

"So do we dare?" Dara arched a brow.

I glanced at them and tightened my grip on the short blade at my hip.

"The four of us together—we dare."

Tracking that iron-mane took a full three hours. It was cunning in a way no boar should be, moving and stopping, circling back onto its own old trail several times, as though it had long since sensed someone following behind. We kept to the downwind side the whole way, our steps pressed light, even our breathing deliberately slowed.

It was only after the sun had sunk fully below the tree line that the heavy, rust-scented musk finally came to a stop in the ravine ahead.

It had stopped to drink.

I raised a hand to halt the others and, sheltered behind the rocks, looked ahead. The ravine narrowed the deeper it ran, the walls closing in on both sides until only a passage as narrow as a throat remained.

That was the place I wanted.

If we met it head-on in the open, all four of its legs could bring their strength to bear, and once it charged, none of the four of us could hold it. But if I lured it into that stone gap, its huge body would be hemmed in by the walls, unable to turn. By then, its strength would only become a burden.

I lowered my voice and quickly ran through the plan.

"Dara, you and Finn take the front." I looked at them. "Don't actually meet it head-on. Just goad it at the mouth of the passage, make it think it can ram straight through you, and draw it in."

Dara grinned. "Getting on people's nerves is my specialty."

Finn said nothing, only unslung the short axe from her back. Her knuckles were white where they gripped it, but she gave me a nod all the same.

"Elodie, take that high rock on the side," I went on. "Its eyes are the only soft place. No matter how thick the hide, it can't shield those. Loose as many arrows as you can, as true as you can."

"I've never once missed a living thing's eye in my whole life," she said, already unslinging her longbow and climbing up along the jutting stones of the wall.

Last, I drew the short blade from my hip and pressed my palm to the hilt. The familiar coolness came to me, steadying my heart a little.

"I'll circle around behind it," I said. "Before we move, no one rushes in. Once it goes into a frenzy, go for the spots I told you."

The others spread out quickly.

Dara and Finn were the first to show themselves from the front. By the water, the iron-mane snapped its head up, its iron-gray mane bristling all at once like a dense thicket of needles. A low, muffled growl rolled from its throat, its front hooves pawing hard at the ground, sending gravel flying in every direction.

Dara deliberately came forward with a feinting swing of her axe, then nimbly retreated the instant before it lunged. The beast was duly enraged, lowering its head into a charge. Dara and Finn slipped aside to left and right, just barely, then kept it dangling neither near nor far, drawing it step by step deeper into the passage.

The moment it rammed into the stone gap, the walls on both sides caught its swollen bulk exactly. Its enormous strength was suddenly left with no room, and the more it struggled, the clumsier its movements grew.

And in that same instant, Elodie's arrow left the string.

The first grazed the corner of its eye, drawing a streak of blood. The second followed close behind, driving straight into its left eye.

The iron-mane let out a shriek that hardly sounded like a beast, thrashing its head wildly, blood running down its iron-gray mane. In the narrow passage, its tail swept across like an iron whip. As I circled along the wall toward its back, I was, after all, half a beat too slow, and the tail struck my left arm hard.

In the instant the agony burst open, my vision went black, and the short blade nearly slipped from my grip.

But I didn't stop.

I fixed my eyes on the base of its neck. In the gap of its violent thrashing, two thick scaled plates parted for a moment, laying bare a thin line of dark red flesh beneath.

That was it.

I held my breath, and in the instant it reared its head up once more, I threw my whole self forward. The short blade, together with all my strength, drove into that seam, all the way to the hilt.

The iron-mane's struggling stalled abruptly.

The next moment, its huge body crashed down, and the very ground beneath my feet seemed to shudder with it. I stood over it, soaked through with sweat, the place on my left arm where the tail had struck throbbing wave after wave. But beneath the pain, a scalding warmth slowly rose in my chest. It was a feeling I had never truly possessed in either of my two lives.

This was something I had won by myself. Not a prophecy, not a lie pieced together from a dead woman's memories, but a strength that truly, solidly belonged to me.

At dusk, we made camp in a hollow ringed by pines. While Finn and Dara built the fire and Elodie dressed the kill, I walked a circuit around the edge of the camp. And it was then that the small triumph of the day suddenly hardened into something colder.

In the brush at the tree line, there were footprints.

Very fresh, and roughly smoothed over by someone, as though to hide their tracks. The tread the soles left behind I knew—it was the mark cut into Crimson Fang hunting boots. Then, from the upwind side of the camp, I caught a thread of scent, so faint it was almost nothing, like the dry, sweet trace of some crushed herb, and before I could make it out clearly, it had already dispersed.

I said nothing.

I turned back toward the firelight, keeping an easy look on my face.

Someone was tracking our route, noting where we went and how we moved. And looking at the team Olivia had brought into these woods, I no longer doubted who it was. I would wait, wait for my dear sister to show me with her own hands exactly what she had come here to do.