"The third—"
"The fish. The rabbit. Now adeer." I gesture at the enormous dead animal currently taking up my entire workspace. "You have a pattern, Kes. You show up with something you 'found' and it's always got suspicious teeth marks on it and I always cook it anyway because I'm weak."
"You're not weak, you're practical."
"I'm enabling you." I lean closer, lower my voice. "And you don't know where this has been. Anything could be festering on it. Something could'vepeedon it."
Kestria stares at me. "Peed."
"Yes."
"On the deer."
"You don't know. That's the point. It was just lying in the forest, Kestria. The forest where things pee."
"Mel."
"I almost went with yellow dye yesterday after the whole Nugget situation. But I realized it would just look like something peed all over me. The forest does things to fabric. Imagine what it does to meat."
"This is not the same as your dye situation."
"It's the same principle."
She's losing the fight. I can tell. Her mouth is doing the thing.
"Fine," she says. "I hunted it myself. Just for you. Withmy bare hands."
"Don't lie to me."
"You wanted me to say it."
I start prepping it out of habit—checking the hide, looking for damage, figuring out what I'm working with. And I stop.
Teeth marks. Deep ones, puncturing through the hide at the throat. Too wide for a fox. Too clean for a bear—bears maul, they don't grip. These are long canines, set wide apart, driven in hard and precise.
Wolf teeth.
"Kestria."
"Hmm?"
"These are wolf bites."
"Are they?"
"On the deer you found."
"Maybe a wolf found it first. Left it behind. Waste not."
"A wolf killed a deer and then abandoned it."
"Wolves are wasteful. Everyone knows this."
"Nobody knows this. That's not a thing."
"Mel." Kestria wipes her hands on her trousers, leaving dark smears. "Do you want the deer or not?"
I want the deer. Winter's coming, and smoked meat keeps. My stores are low—I made a mental list yesterday, actually wrote it down for once, now where did I put it? Kitchen table? No, by the herbs. Maybe.
