Chapter 68: CHANGES
He woke before the boy.
The fire had gone to ash. The cold came up off the burned ground into the camp before first grey. His chest had not caught on it.
A year ago a night on burn ground would have had him sitting up at second bell with his hand against the bench leg waiting for the coughing to stop. Tonight it had not. He had slept through the night. His body had let him.
The senior’s hawk was on a low branch beside the senior’s bedroll.
The senior was already up at the edge of camp where the ground sloped down to the old burn. Hands in his pockets. Reading the ground, not looking at it.
He did not turn at Aiden coming up.
"There’s a patch of quiet on the upper slope. Wasn’t there last night."
Aiden looked.
The silence had moved. Not in the young trees anymore. It sat on the lower slope of the upper line, at the edge the senior had told them not to cross. A different patch of it. Slightly larger. Not moving.
Forty paces yesterday. Tonight it sat where the upper slope begins.
"Same thing?"
"Different position. Same thing." The senior did not move his hands. "I am sending you and the apprentice back down the lower trail at first bell. The same trail. The directive stands. You will not go past the lower trail. You will not engage. You will log what’s changed."
"And the body."
"The body is not on the trail anymore. You will read where it went. That is all the directive asks for."
He looked at Aiden once, brief.
"There are two things on this ground."
"Sir."
"I read this ground for twenty-two years before they gave me rotations. The second one was not here yesterday. The second one came in overnight. The boy’s master had me log something like this once before, in another place. So the boy knows what to look for. You know what I told you to look for. Between you, I get the whole picture."
He turned.
"Move."
The boy was up. He had the small cat at heel and a thin notebook in his coat pocket. He had not eaten. He looked at Aiden. The look a boy gave the man he had been sent out with.
They went down to the lower trail.
The light had changed.
Not the day. The cloud over the old burn had come down in the night. The trees that had been thin and crowded yesterday were thin and crowded still, under a low grey ceiling.
The cloud held the light at one flat angle. Things on the floor read sharper than they had in yesterday’s midday sun. He could see the pale wood where a forager’s blade had cut bark away.
He could see yesterday’s break in the low branch at chest height. A second strip of bark had come off it since. Something had passed through the same gap twice.
He noted it.
The boy at his shoulder said, very quietly, "My master sent me out here twice. The second time he said to log a thing the first day’s logs hadn’t named."
"And did you."
"I logged it. I did not name it. He told me he would not name it either. He said if a name goes in a book his hand can reach, the book stops being a record and becomes evidence against someone."
He went on.
They walked to the working den, the one with the fresh bedding.
The den was empty. Not the empty of a den-maker gone out hunting. The empty of a thing that had taken what it needed and would not be back.
He stood in the mouth of it and looked before he touched anything. The way the depot had taught him to stand at a stripped lamp. Hands off until the eyes were done, because hands wrote over evidence and eyes only borrowed it.
Old dung at the threshold. One animal’s. Prey bones in the corner gone grey and light. A den kept clean by something raised to keep dens. Then the keeping had stopped.
The bedding had been disturbed. Something small had been in it after the den-maker left. A thin dark streak lay along one corner.
Aiden crouched. He did not touch it.
Hair. Different hair. Fine where the den-maker’s was coarse. Black where the den-maker’s was red-brown. Three inches at the longest.
The Hearthcat had come up to his elbow. The small flat ear was forward. The eyes were on the dark streak. The small body was putting out more heat than the cold morning explained.
The boy did not write yet.
They went on past the den.
The body had been moved.
The drag marks started where the body had been and ran thirty paces upslope to a mass of exposed roots where a burned tree had fallen.
The marks were too narrow for something that size to have made. Something smaller had taken the body apart and moved the pieces. They cut a clean, narrow line through the burn floor.
The pieces were at the roots. He could see one of them from where he stood. A hind leg, opened, the meat stripped off one side, and the bone left. Something had eaten in a hurry and not finished.
He did not approach it.
The boy did not approach it either.
"Two predators," the boy said. "The den belongs to the big one. The drag was made by something smaller. The smaller one is what my master had me log the second time I came out here."
"How much smaller."
"Half the size. Maybe less. But there are six or eight of them together." The boy looked at the roots. "That’s why they could move a kill that big. Not one animal. A group."
"The big one walked off."
"It walked off because the watcher came."
He said the watcher and stopped there. He had learned that from his master, and he was twelve.
He wrote in his notebook. Two lines. He did not show Aiden the lines.
Aiden looked at the upper slope where the silence had moved overnight. He looked at the lower trail where the drag marks ran to the roots.
The big one made the kill. The watcher came and the big one left it. Then six or eight smaller ones dragged what was left thirty paces to the roots and ate part of it.
Animals that haul food back to one place have young waiting there.
He noted it.
He did not write it. He did not say it.
They walked back to the camp.
The senior was at his table with his hawk on the perch. He took Aiden’s report through the boy first. The boy gave him two lines from his notebook, flat and short. The senior wrote them down.
He took Aiden’s report second.
"South flank reports. The body has been moved. Drag marks from the lower trail to a root mass thirty paces upslope. Piece of the body at the roots. Den empty. Bedding has a hair on it that is not the den-maker’s. Fine, black, three inches."
The senior wrote it down.
He did not write second predator.
He looked at Aiden once, the same brief look.
"You read the black hair for what it was."
"Sir."
"You did not write it."
"You wrote what the apprentice gave you. I gave you the same thing the apprentice did."
The senior’s mouth did not change, nor did his pen.
"Keep doing that. Camp moves east tomorrow. You and the apprentice go with it. The trail you walked the last two days does not get walked again on this rotation. I have a separate rotation for it."
"Yes sir."
He went to set his bedroll.
The cry came at last light.
It came off the upper slope where the silence had been yesterday morning. It was not the watcher. Whatever stood in those silences did not make sound. This did.
This one had a voice. The voice was long, and the cry went high at the end. The wind took it across the camp and over the rise toward the road.
The camp lamps burned low against the grey.
The small Hearthcat stood up.
It did not move from Aiden’s boot.
Miasma’s spines came off her shoulder rest. The single rise. The one she did when a thing she was the answer for entered the room. The spines went down again a half-second later. Whatever it was had moved off.
Nyx’s pale eyes were on the upslope.
The eyes did not move off it.
The cry came again.
The second time it was farther east, and it was thinner, and it was closer to a thing crying for something it was not getting.
Aiden sat against the same tree as the night before.
Two days left of the rotation. Five days before the second press.
The thing that cried was not the thing that had watched him out.
The second one was not silent.