Chapter 60

Chapter 60
Olivia's POV

The third morning of the hunt broke gray.

The canvas of the tent had held the night's cold the way a soaked stone holds it, clutching a chill that went to the bone. When I woke, my fingers were stiff and my temper had already sunk to the bottom. Our camp sat in a fold of ground in the southern reach of the Silver Wolf Woods, screened tight by a few stands of young pine and a rock shelf that broke the wind. Unless someone came looking with their life on it, no one would ever find us.

That was the only thing I asked of a campsite.

Because we had not come here to hunt in the first place.

Megan came back not long after first light. Her hood was still up, and she carried the smell of moss and cold water, breathing like she had run the whole night through. She crouched at the tent flap and did not speak at once, only waited, as she should, for me to give the word.

"The cliff on the east side came down."

She paused, and her voice dropped a little.

"They're all alive. All four of them, alive. Just some scrapes."

I had a stick of charcoal in my hand.

In that instant I didn't even hear myself move; I only heard the crisp snap of the charcoal breaking against the leather. The tip splintered, and black ash smeared across half my hand.

"Alive."

I turned the word over on my tongue. My voice came out strangely light, so light it felt foreign even to me.

"A whole face of rock comes down, four girls, and not one of them dead."

Megan pressed her head lower still.

"She pushed them into a hollow at the base of the cliff. Before the stone came down."

I threw the broken charcoal into the dirt by the fire and sat where I was, listening to that scalding thing in my chest slam against my ribs, one beat after another, until they ached.

I had spent a whole night of men's labor, one set of iron wedges, one climb no one ever saw — all of it just to make a path collapse itself in front of her.

And she hadn't so much as scraped a foot.

Why?

Why was it like this every single time — every thing I pushed out, the moment it landed on her it turned into her credit, turned into that line on everyone's lips, that the Crimson Fang girl really was something.

I pulled the collar of my outer robe tight and forced myself to let the breath out of me, bit by bit.

Mother taught me that things done in anger leave gaps. And I could not afford to leave a gap.

The cliff had only ever been a test.

I had told myself that before I sent anyone up, and now I repeated it in my head. Because a thing you never counted on succeeding for certain is always easier to accept when it fails. A rockslide costs little; beyond one night's climb and a few men's strength, it spent nothing. If it worked, it worked; if it didn't, it had at least bought me information.

How fast she moved. How far ahead she looked. Whether she panicked in a crisis.

She had not panicked.

Good.

Knowing that alone was worth what little it had cost.

I spread the map out again and pinned the leather's corners under four river stones. I had drawn this map with my own hand, the charcoal lines laid over scraped hide, and every stretch of road Megan had run in three days was poured into it.

Here was the cliff line that had already come down.

Here was their first night's camp.

The second night's camp.

A time was scratched beside each little black square. And here — this long arrow curving out to the northeast — marked where they would go today.

If they kept following the same route they had these three days.

"They're still heading northeast today?"

"Broke camp in the same order," Megan said. "The Nighthowl girl walks second. Your sister walks point out front."

Your sister.

I didn't correct her, only felt my jaw tighten at some point without my noticing.

Two months ago, Abigail couldn't even climb the stair to the west gallery of the keep. She had to stop halfway, bracing on the wall to catch her breath. I saw her once from the landing, that face pale as milk with the froth skimmed off. And I thought then that Mother needn't finish with her own hands the thing she'd begun — winter would finish it for her.

But that girl was gone now.

The one walking point at the head of the northeast timber right now killed a mutant boar the first afternoon; when she walked out from under that collapsed cliff, her hair was full of dust and her spine was still straight.

And I sat here, a piece of leather across my knees.

The cliff had only been a beginning. The thing that would truly end her wasn't on this leather; it was inside my clothes. That little vial sat in the inner pocket of my clothes, wrapped twice in oiled cloth. No longer than my thumb, and heavier than it had any right to be.

Ghost-trail.

That was what Mother called it.

The Thomas family does not buy such things at market. It comes up through the channels my uncles never speak of at the table. In all twelve territories there are likely not three such vials to be found.

The liquid in it was clear near to nothingness, and to my nose it had no smell at all.

But painted onto a wolf, worked into skin and cloth, it would make the beasts of a territory read that wolf as one of their own kind trespassing on their ground.

Prey, the beasts usually stalk one at a time, and losing it, they lose interest. But an intruder is another matter. They come in numbers, pouring out of every den within reach, and they do not stop easily.

In the end, when the guard picks through what's left, they will only smell beast on a dead girl's clothing. And they will write it down the plainest way there is: she fought something, that something spat on her, bloodied her in the struggle, left its scent on her; she carried that scent into the northeast beast ground, and so the pack there tore her apart.

An accident in a hunt.

And an accident like that kills two or three every year as it is.

No one investigates the weather, and no one investigates a wolf who went too deep.

The order of it was clear in my head.

First step, Megan follows them and confirms the line of march and the hour they rest. That step, now, was done.

Second step, the water.

On that northeast line there is only one stream worth stopping at. The water runs shallow over gravel, and above the ford lie a few still pools. A party three days into the woods will drink there, and will wash their wounds there too. Because for four hours in either direction there is no other water.

A few drops in the upper pools is all it takes.

It will mix into the water they cup in their hands, seep into the cloth they wring out and press to their wounds, and hide in the seams of their boots.

Third step is patience.

My patience runs far deeper than my sister thinks.

That stuff needs two hours to work fully out of the skin and cloth. Two hours counted from the ford is exactly enough to send them over the ridge and into the very center of the northeast dens.

Nicholas's men patrol those woods; then let them patrol.

Let them come at a dead run with their spears and their horns. Overwhelming numbers have never known any rescue party. Even if the guard truly can drag something still breathing out of that ground, it will not be a girl who can still walk into the Awakening on her own two legs.

This part, I did not say aloud.

Not even to Megan.

Because some things need not be said. Said aloud, they would only make me look like I was defending myself.

But I have nothing to defend.

She has already taken everything. One thing after another, and not one of them a thing I could lay my hand on and point to and say, this was stolen.

I am the one Mother took by the chin and told, in that voice she never puts on for any outsider:

All of this will be yours.

The keep.

The name.

The marriage that puts a woman in the hall where kings argue.

And every time I reach for it, my sister's shadow is already lying across it, one step ahead.

And if she awakens, it all ends.

Then the rest of my life will be spent being introduced as the other one.

So no.

This time, absolutely not.

Megan came back once more just before noon. Her steps were more dragging than before, wet mud on the soles of her boots.

"They took the northeast line," she said. "Reached the ford mid-morning, just like you said."

I lifted my eyes.

"And then?"

She hesitated.

In that instant, the skin on my arms tightened first.

"She didn't let them drink the moment they got there," Megan said. "She went upstream alone, maybe a hundred paces. Walked both banks, looked at the pools, took her time about it. Only then did she come back and wave them in."

There is nothing to see in a gravel pool.

Three drops spread through that much running water leaves less of a trace than a fish passing through.

"She's cautious," I said. "She's always cautious. But cautious and knowing are not the same thing."

By afternoon we had shifted north and settled on a low rise.

From there the whole valley lay within sight. The distance was judged just right — near enough to hear a horn, far enough that no one would come asking what we were really doing.

I sent Bree and Talia to the edge of the beast ground to bring down a few small marked beasts they could handle. Two or three was enough, enough to put our name on the tally boards and enough to make us look like a team that had truly come to compete.

When the light slanted through the pine boughs and drew out into a dull yellow, Megan finally came up the slope.

Her face was cut into patches of light and dark by the tree shadows, her breathing pressed low.

"They've crossed the ridge," she said. "They're inside the dens by now. Still heading northeast."

I looked out toward those rolling rows of treetops in the distance, toward that dark green fold of wild country, and the smile rose to my cheeks.