Tavik had offered to send two of his own people along at first light, and Vhar had turned it down before the offer finished.
"Not because I don’t trust them," he’d said. "Because whatever left that print doesn’t know your band’s ground rules yet, and I’d rather it learn mine first."
Tavik hadn’t argued. He’d simply handed over a second waterskin and told them the guide-cord’s boundary marker was the last thing out there that owed either of them safety.
"You could still stay behind the marker," Vhar told Nyra, once Tavik had gone back to wake the rest of the camp. "House Severin already has enough to say about the last two days without adding a border you were never authorized to cross."
"House Severin will not study those prints." She checked Thronebreak’s strap as she walked toward the tree line. "You need a tracker. I am done with hearings."
The boundary marker itself was nothing more than a single iron-hooked stake driven into a cairn of stacked stone, the same pattern Tavik’s people used everywhere the contracted ground ended. Past it, the land didn’t announce the change. No fence, no cleared line, just the same scrub and broken rock continuing on as if the guide-cord’s promise of safe passage had simply run out of ground to stand on.
The tree line looked the same in daylight. Rain had passed through before dawn. It washed shallow prints away and softened the ground around the sheared trunk. The cut still showed pale wood through a hand’s width of bark.
Vhar crouched at the cut anyway, running two fingers along its edge out of habit rather than expectation.
"It came back," Nyra said. She was ten meters ahead, crouched over a patch of churned earth that hadn’t been there the evening before. "Or it never left."
He crossed to her. The new print sat half inside a puddle the rain had left, deep enough that water pooled inside the impression rather than around it. He measured it against his own boot without needing to explain why.
"Same weight as the first two."
"Same gait, too." Nyra traced the line between three marks with two fingers, not touching any of them. "A heavier animal moving carefully leaves a different pattern than a lighter one moving fast. This animal is walking at its usual pace and leaving the prints exposed."
Vhar looked past the print toward the tree line beyond it. Cold sat in the low places. "It is not trying to hide."
She followed the print direction with her eyes. "A careless animal stumbles and breaks brush. This one walks hard enough to leave every print open."
Two hundred meters farther on, a tree at the trail’s edge bore a long, pale scar scraped through its bark at the same height as the stripped branches they had logged earlier, high enough that Vhar himself would have had to reach for it.
"Same height." Nyra pressed her palm flat against the bark below the scar, not touching the wound itself. "Same height as the others. Three separate marks now, all reaching the same place on different trees."
Vhar tested the scar’s edge with two fingers. Bark had healed at the margins, so the mark was days older than the felled tree. "The old scars show its shoulder height. It has passed these trees before."
"These marks are older than a week." She crouched at the packed earth where the trail curved around a boulder. "The trail bends here even though the animal could walk straight over the rock."
He studied the curve for a long moment. A predator moving in a straight, functional hurry didn’t waste ground avoiding an obstacle that cost it nothing to cross. Something that curved around a boulder it could have walked straight over had a reason that had nothing to do with the boulder itself.
"The rock is incidental," Vhar said. "It’s following the same strip of ground it always follows. The rock just happens to sit on it."
Nyra looked up at him, her eyes narrowing the way they did when a read clicked into place half a breath before she said it aloud. "This isn’t a hunting range, then. It’s a track it has worn itself. Same width, same bend, pressed this deep by every pass."
"How long would that take."
"Longer than since the quarry." She stood, brushing wet dirt from her palm against her coat. "This animal was walking this ground before either of us crossed the guide-cord boundary. We are standing on one stretch of its track."
Vhar looked back at Tavik’s boundary marker beyond the scrub. He followed the curved trail past the boulder and into a shallow defile neither of them had walked before.
They followed the bend for another quarter hour before Nyra stopped again, this time at a low bush stripped bare on one side. Coarse gray hair, too long and too stiff to belong to anything Wildblood workers herded, had caught in the lower branches at knee height.
"Shed, not pulled." She worked a few strands free without tugging on the branch itself. "It brushed past here without breaking stride. Didn’t even notice losing it."
Vhar turned the hair between two fingers. It smelled of dust and stone. "The hair has no blood at the roots. The animal was uninjured when it passed."
"Healthy, then. Whatever’s walking this track has settled into its territory rather than limping toward the end of it." Nyra tucked the strands into a fold of cloth rather than her open palm, the same care she’d have given anything that might matter to someone else’s reading of it later. "That’s worse for whoever’s camped downwind of it than a wounded animal would be."
Vhar checked the wind before they moved on, more out of habit than any real expectation it would tell him something the ground hadn’t already. It came from the defile ahead, faint and steady, carrying nothing he could name beyond wet stone and old leaf litter. Whatever owned this track wasn’t upwind of them yet. That wouldn’t stay true forever if the trail kept bending the way it had.
They found a second old mark at the defile’s mouth: a narrow trench in the soil where something heavy had dragged one side of its body over the same turn again and again. Rain had softened its edges, but not erased it. Nyra measured the trench against the fresh prints with a length of cord from her pocket.
"The body clears the ground here," she said. "Only one side scrapes. It leans into the turn."
"A damaged limb?"
"Not if the prints stay even." She reeled the cord back around her hand. "Habit. It puts its weight here because it expects to turn here."
Vhar looked along the narrow defile. The scrub had been worn low on one side, not eaten, simply pushed aside too many times by the same broad passage. "It has used this turn long enough to shape the ground."
Nyra’s gaze moved to the gray smoke ahead. "And that camp built its fire beside a road it never knew was there."
She tucked the cord away and checked the slope above the trench. "If it comes from the ridge while we are with them, this turn funnels it straight toward the tents. No tree cover. No second way out until the wash."
"We do not arrive and tell them to sleep easier," Vhar said. "We tell them where to run."
WHIRR!
A ground bird burst from brush beside the trail. Both of them watched it clear the leaves, then kept walking. They saved words for sounds that changed the hunt.
"Where does it go from here," Vhar asked, once the brush had gone quiet again.
Nyra didn’t answer right away. She was looking past him now, at a thin gray thread rising above the tree line further down the defile, too straight and too controlled to be anything but a cookfire someone had built on purpose.
"There." She pointed with two fingers rather than her whole hand, low, like the gesture itself could carry across the distance and be noticed. "Someone’s camp. And this track runs straight at it."
He followed her eyes to the smoke, then dropped his gaze back to the curved trail beneath their boots, worn deep enough by repetition to hold standing water long after the rain that had made this morning’s print had already stopped falling. Whatever kept this ground would keep walking it whether or not anyone downwind of that fire had noticed yet.
"Tavik’s band, or the ones he said he’d warn?" Vhar asked.
"Too far south to be his. This is someone else’s fire, on ground nobody’s marked as anyone’s contract." Nyra was already moving, faster now, no longer reading each print for its own sake but counting the distance between here and the smoke instead. "Which means whoever built that fire doesn’t know what shares their ground, and we’re the only two people who do."
Vhar fell in beside her, matching her pace without matching her urgency, keeping enough attention on the trail itself to notice if the pattern changed before they reached whoever was tending that fire. The track hadn’t varied once since the boulder, not in width, not in the spacing between prints, not in the confidence of whatever kept walking it. That kind of consistency belonged to something that had never once been forced to reconsider where it was allowed to go.
"The animal’s trail leads to that camp," Vhar said. "We reach the fire before it returns."