I watch her crouch near the cliff roots, cutting something with a small blade. Practiced, at least. She knows the plant she's after.
It doesn't excuse the lack of sense.
I'm about to move on — she's not my concern, and the tracks I'm following are pulling northeast — when the lower forest goes quiet.
Not gradually. All at once.
My hand finds the bow before the thought fully forms. I'm already scanning the treeline below when I see the vegetation shudder — not from wind, there's no wind — and the particular way the vegetation flattens before something heavy moves through it.
Grevhault.
The word surfaces from older memory: a classification used by Mournhold's previous hunters for the worst category of wildspont predators, the ones that have been soaking in fault-line energy long enough that the original animal underneath is more suggestion than fact. I haven't seen one this close to the ridge in years. The sheersizeof this one is unnerving to some — it fills the space between the trees with its shoulders and still moves, lurching and fast in a way those proportions have no right to allow.
It hits her before she clears ten yards.
The crack of impact reaches me half a second after I see it happen. She goes into the cliff face shoulder-first, and I watch her spin and come up with her knife — abelt knife, against that — and my hand is already at the quiver.
Something tightens in my sternum that I don't pay attention to.
She runs. She's pretty fast for her little body and smart enough to cut for difficult terrain, making herself hard to track visually, but the grevhault isn't tracking visually. I can see that from above. The head swings on that slow arc, locating her through something that isn't sight, and it corners her precisely against the ravine. She's out of room.
Something in my chest tightens—sharp, immediate, and entirely without utility. But, I disregard it, and my hand is already moving. Not concern. More like a want for the creature to be dead before it finishes the motion.
I nock the first arrow.
The angle is complicated. She's directly below and the grevhault is between us and I have approximately four seconds before it closes the remaining distance. I calculate the shot the way I've calculated a thousand shots — wind correction, drop, the precise point at which the arrow's path intersects with the skull rather than glancing off the thing's corrupted bone structure — and then I stop calculating and loose.
Three arrows. Each one three-quarters of a breath apart. Not because I need three. Because one sends a message, and three sends a different one.
The grevhault drops, and I'm already moving down the ridge.
She hasn't fallen. I expected that — her leg buckled when she caught herself and the shoulder damage is bad, I could tell that from above — but she's upright. Barely. Holding the belt knife and watching the dead creature with some quality of focus that comes from someone who isn't done fighting yet, just temporarily out of something to fight.
Then she looks up and finds me.
I watch her take me in. The armor, the bow, the ears. Watch her realization happen behind her eyes. She opens her mouth.
What comes out isn't a plea. It isn't even coherent, exactly — something brief and incomplete, words assembled by a body running on the last of its reserves — but theintentof it isn't supplication. She's talking, not begging. There's a distinction, and something about it stops me two paces away.
I look at her properly. Shoulder incorrectly angled. The leg taking too much weight. A palm that has bled down to her elbow. And she is looking at me dead in the eyes, steady in a way that has no business existing right now.
"You're not going to ask," I say. It isn't a question.
She doesn't answer. Her knees crumble, and I cross the remaining distance and catch her before she reaches the ground,one arm under her back and the other beneath her knees. There isn't a sound from her when I move the injured shoulder. The unconscious ones never do — the body's mercy, redistributing sensation when there's too much of it.
She's lighter than I expect though.
I stand there for a moment with her satchel still swinging against my hip where it's fallen, and I don't move. She smells of crushed herbs and rain-soaked earth and the copper-salt of blood. Very human. Very alive, though not by much.
I glance at the satchel. Feverroot, freshly cut and wrapped in damp cloth. She had gone into that forest for someone else.
"Vuldren," I call, without looking back. "There is feverroot in her bag. Take enough to Duskmire before morning. Find the sick child."
"And the rest?"
"Stays with her."
I start walking toward Mournhold.
