The camp came into full view before anyone in it noticed Vhar and Nyra approaching.
The camp itself was smaller than Tavik’s, a dozen tents and one long shelter built low against the wind, arranged around a pen that had clearly been built to hold more animals than currently stood inside it. Smoke rose from a single fire rather than several, and no one tended the herd grazing at the camp’s far edge, though under ordinary circumstances that ground would have wanted watching. The animals still penned stood bunched tight in the corner farthest from the broken wall, ears flat, refusing to graze the open ground closest to the gap.
Three people stood at what should have been the pen’s north wall, rebuilding a section of it from timber that hadn’t finished drying. A fourth kept watch with a boar spear held wrong, both hands too far forward on the shaft for anyone who’d trained with it. Nobody had posted a lookout on the approach Vhar and Nyra had actually used, which meant whatever had come through here before hadn’t come from that direction, or hadn’t needed to be watched for.
"Hold there," the spear-holder called, voice cracking on the second word. "State your band or state your business."
"Neither," Nyra said, keeping her hands visible and her pace unhurried. "We’re carrying word from Tavik Coldscent’s guide-cord. You’ll know the mark if you’ve heard the name."
The spear didn’t lower, but the watcher’s eyes went to Nyra’s coat where the cord’s token sat visible against the fabric. A woman came around the pen’s damaged corner at that, older, gray at the temples, one forearm wrapped in cloth that had been white before it wasn’t.
"I know the name," she said. "I don’t know either of you standing under it."
"Vhar Blackvein. Nyra Severin." Vhar didn’t move closer than the distance already let him speak plainly. "We’re tracking something that came through Tavik’s contracted ground two nights ago. The trail led here."
The spear-holder finally let the point drop, though his hands stayed close enough to raise it again without thinking. One of the two at the pen wall set down the timber she’d been fitting and came a few steps closer, close enough to hear without joining the conversation outright. Nobody in the camp had the loose, unhurried movement of people who’d stopped expecting trouble. Every one of them still walked like the ground under their boots might ask something of them again before the day was done.
Something in the woman’s face changed at that, not surprise, closer to a held breath finally let go. "Riona Ashwake. This is my family’s ground, such as it still is." She looked past them both, toward the gap in the pen wall three people were still fitting timber into. "You didn’t need to track anything to find us. We’d have sent word to the guide-cord ourselves inside the week."
"What happened," Nyra asked.
Riona’s hand pressed briefly against her wrapped forearm before she answered. "Two nights past. Something came through the north wall without using the gate, took four animals clean out of the pen, and left my sister’s boy with a shoulder that won’t hold weight for a season, if it ever does again." She said it flat, the way people said things they’d already cried about in private and weren’t going to do again in front of strangers. "He’s alive. That’s the whole of the good news I have to offer you."
She led them past a lean-to at the camp’s edge before either of them asked to see it, as if showing them plainly mattered more than being asked. A boy no older than fourteen sat propped against a rolled blanket, his right arm bound tight against his chest, sweat still standing on his forehead despite the morning cold. He looked up at the strangers without fear, only the particular exhaustion of someone who’d already used up whatever fear he had two nights ago and hadn’t found more since.
"Dessin," Riona said, "tell them what you told me. Exactly what you told me, not what you think happened after."
"It came in low, through the wall before I even had the gate bar in my hand." The boy’s voice held steady even though his good hand hadn’t stopped gripping the blanket’s edge. "I didn’t see the whole shape of it. Just enough of it to know pushing back would’ve cost more than the arm did."
"You made the right call," Vhar said.
"Doesn’t feel like it from down here."
Riona rested her uninjured hand against Dessin’s hair. "It will when the arm stops hurting every time you breathe," she said. He looked away, but he leaned into her hand before she took it back.
"It will, eventually. Wrong calls from that close usually don’t leave anyone able to complain about the feeling." Vhar held the boy’s eyes a moment longer, then let Riona lead them on, and didn’t look back at the lean-to again.
Vhar crossed to the damaged wall while Riona kept walking ahead of them.
TIK! TIK!
Loose splinters fell from the gouges when he brushed the timber. The break wasn’t a collapse from weight or age. Four parallel gouges ran through timber thick enough to stop a boar’s charge, spaced exactly as wide as the marks Nyra had measured against a tree an hour’s walk from here.
"Same width," he said, more to Nyra than to Riona.
Nyra crouched beside him, tracing the gouge depth without touching the raw wood. "Same everything. This is the same animal, and it didn’t slow down going through a wall built to stop something with real weight behind it."
She watched them work without asking what they were confirming. "You already knew what did this."
"We knew it was out here," Vhar said. "We didn’t know it had already reached anyone."
"It’s reached us twice now, if you count what happened before this." Riona led them past the pen toward a scraped patch of ground near the tree line, where something had clearly been dragged. "The first time was eleven nights ago. One goat, mostly eaten where it fell. This time, four animals gone, and only this much of any of them left behind."
She stopped at the drag site and said nothing further, letting them see it for themselves.
Vhar crouched at the remains. What was left had been fed on, but not finished, not in the way a hungry animal finished a kill before moving to the next one. Whole sections remained untouched, left where they’d fallen rather than dragged off or buried. He’d seen animals kill more than they could eat before, when prey was easy and appetite wasn’t the only thing driving the kill. He’d never seen it done this precisely, four times over eleven nights, the same amount left behind each time within what looked like a hand’s width of variance.
"It’s not hunting to eat," he said. "Or not only that."
Nyra counted the days on her fingers. "The first kill was eleven days ago. The second was two nights ago." She looked at Riona. "Did it come last night too?"
"Two nights, yes."
"That’s not the same interval as the first kill to this one. It’s shortening." Nyra looked up at Vhar. "The animal is taking more meat than it eats, and the gaps between kills are shrinking. It is feeding more mouths or a body that is growing fast. Storing food does not explain the shrinking gaps."
Riona’s hand went still against her wrapped forearm. "Feeding what."
Neither of them had an answer that didn’t require evidence they didn’t yet have, and Vhar wasn’t going to hand a grieving band a guess dressed up as certainty.
"We don’t know yet," he said. "But we’re not leaving until we do."
She studied him a moment longer, then nodded once, the same measured weighing a herd-lead gives an unfamiliar hand before trusting it near frightened animals. "You’ll want to see where the ground breaks toward the ridge. That’s the direction it always comes from, and the direction it always goes back to."
"How far a walk," Nyra asked.
"Half a day, if the weather holds. Less if you don’t mind the loose scree on the lower slope." Riona’s eyes moved once toward the north wall, still short two hands of the timber it needed. "I can spare someone to guide you partway, but not past where our own contract ground ends. None of my people have gone further than that and come back with anything worth repeating."
Vhar pointed toward the lower slope. "Show us where your guide stops. We need to see that boundary before we enter the scree."
"It exists." Riona’s voice didn’t soften the answer. "Whether you’ll be standing in the middle of something that already knows you’re coming is a different question, and not one I can answer for you."
Vhar weighed that the same way he weighed any ground he hadn’t walked yet: not as a reason to turn back, only as a fact that changed how carefully the next few hours needed to go. Whatever kept this route, kept it well enough to leave four bodies unfinished and a boy’s arm broken without ever once being seen clearly by anyone still alive to describe it.
"We leave now," Vhar said. "Bring enough water for the climb and a night outside."
Riona was already moving toward the stores before he finished the sentence, the first thing she’d done since they arrived that looked like relief rather than endurance. She turned toward the ridge a few minutes later, two waterskins slung over one shoulder, and didn’t wait to see whether they’d follow before she started walking.