He moved before the light decided itself.
Not a start to a day—more like the day finding him already in motion, a figure slipping along a sloped seam between cedar and rock. Yesterday's deer lived warm in his belly and heavy in his satchel; the rest lived somewhere out on the ridge in other bellies or not at all. He didn't look back toward that place. The forest's ledger preferred you didn't count out loud.
The ground forced attention. Frost slicked the shaded edges, needles gave underfoot and then bit back with hidden twigs, stone offered surety until lichen turned it to glass. He let the terrain dictate the manner of his steps: soft on duff, angled on stone, low where the wind could cut color from his face and carry it away. The spear rode in his left hand, point trailing low; the sword lay across his back, familiar weight against his shoulder blades. He'd kept the spear from yesterday—he would be a fool not to—but he refused to let the sword fall to the rank of ornament.
A shallow bench of rock offered a strip of level ground wide enough to work. He took it without ceremony. The blade came free—leather whisper, steel breath—and the air changed timbre. He set his feet shoulder-width, turned his hips, and began the zoning he knew too well to call by name: north cut, step, east slash, pivot, south sweep, recover, west thrust.
No reach without root, his father said from some cold corner of memory. No cut without a place to stand.
He tested that—let his weight settle not just onto the rock, but into it. The shock of each landing softened; the ground answered him back like a muscle that belonged to both of them. His front foot slid into a shallow dish of stone as if it had been carved for him. The thrust that followed did more than move forward; it arrived.
He slowed. He sped. He cut the air until his forearms throbbed. He tried the same pattern with the spear, hand high on the shaft, then low, tip sweeping in arcs that would clear a throat or hamstring a runner. The spear worked in circles; the sword in lines. He began to braid them—circle to line, line to circle—until the distinction blurred and his body learned something it wouldn't later have to remember.
When the wind changed, he felt it first as a pressure on the back of his neck. He turned with it, crouching without thought, head canted, breath sitting quiet in his throat. The scent rode thin at this distance but stubborn: musk, old leaf-mold turned under fresh, the sharp animal fact of it. Boar.
His body made a decision and told him afterward. He slid the sword home, shifted the spear to both hands, and left the bench of stone for a rib of slope that would hold his weight without broadcasting it. He took the long line, the way the wolves did—never directly at the scent, but with the wind skimming his cheek so it carried news to him and not of him.
The first sign was not sign at all, but absence: ferns truncated where they should have feathered longer, the earth churned and packed wet with a shine to it. Then the scraped bark of an alder, fresh sap beading like tears. Then, at last, the hollow under an oak, dug to raw earth where a body had folded itself in the dark and steamed.
He did not step into the hollow. He circled it, slow as a question. A low grunt reached him—felt as much as heard—followed by the wet rip of roots from soil. He edged to a vantage between two saplings, kneeling in the shadow they made.
The boar stood broadside, head down, shoulders like living stone. Its hide carried a map of old fights: pale scars that ran under the bristle and crossed to vanish in the shoulder meat. The tusks curved white from a mouth black with soil. It chewed the earth itself like meat.
He counted the rhythm of its feeding. One, rip. Two, toss. Three, head high for a breath long enough to scent the world.
He considered the throw. The spear would bite, yes, but boar were a bad argument: you could be right and still bleed out for it. His father's voice, practical as a blade on stone: Don't give a charge a road. The slope, then. If it came, make it deal with ground and gravity both.
A twig snapped under his knee.
He hadn't moved. The sound came from farther right.
He let his eyes drift without fixing. In the narrow seam of view between alder leaves, a pale shape paused. Not noise. Presence. Wolf—one of the mottled pair he'd seen on other ridges, or a different animal wearing the same distant patience. It stood long enough for him to lower his gaze a fraction—not submission but a small act of sharing—and then turned its head toward the hollow, ears forward, a statue carved from attention.
The boy's mouth went dry. He did not ask for help. He did not need it. But the fact of that other hunter set a line in him, a place the moment could fit.
He shifted his feet to a stance that would let him break left if the boar came straight. He set the spear high, angle pre-chosen for the gap behind the foreleg. Air cooled in his nostrils. His heartbeat slowed into usefulness.
One, rip.
Two, toss.
Three.
He rose and threw.
The spear flew flat, a clean thread through wind. The point bit high at the shoulder, drove deep, and struck bone with a sound like an oath.
The boar shouted its pain. Not a squeal—the sound had weight—and turned so fast the spear's shaft snapped where it met hide. Blood sheeted black down its leg and steamed in strings. It didn't bolt. It came.
He had planned for this. Planning has a sense of humor.
He broke left into the slope, exactly as he'd meant to, and the ground came with him. For three heartbeats he ran with more feet than he had, Earth carrying the backswing of each step into the next. He reached for the sword's hilt, pulled, found the scabbard angle wrong, and abandoned the draw. The boar hit the space he'd left with a sound like a boulder thrown into a river, skidding, tearing moss and root and soil into a churn of green and brown.
He didn't run farther. Running would give it open ground. He turned on the slope, went low, hand open toward the bristle-thick neck as if calming a horse, the other finding the knife at his belt. The boar gathered itself to turn again, hind end sliding for purchase, head swinging to find him. Its eyes were not clever, but they were very alive.
The second charge came faster, the legs sure of the angle, the head low to plow and lift. He stepped—not back, nor fully aside, but in with the head's swing, his palm striking the thick fur just above the eye, the way his father had once slapped a charging goat to turn it into a fence. The tusk passed so close it whispered through the cloth at his thigh. He shoved hard, not to stop the mass but to misplace it. The boar's shoulder hit him, hammered his ribs, and sent his breath out in a burst that tasted like metal. He went to one knee, blade flashing in reflex and finding only hide.
He didn't get clear fast enough. The tusk rose in the arc of the turn and kissed his leg with a sharp, cold bite, then opened him a hand's width farther with a rip he felt but did not fully own until the wet warmth ran down into his boot. He made a sound he didn't know he could make—short, ugly, part anger and part animal—that surprised the boar enough to win him a hand-span of time it did not mean to give.
He spent it.
The sword came free this time, the motion built from every drill and every weight-shift he had asked from the ground all morning. He didn't ask for a perfect cut. He asked for a true one. He let the slope choose the angle. He put every tendon and breath into a line that started under his heel and ran out his shoulder, elbows soft, wrists set, and the blade came across the boar's thick neck at the tucked place between muscle and bristle.
The edge bit, skated, found purchase, bit again. Blood came hot and thick, coating his hands and the hilt in a skin slick as oil.
The boar refused to die politely. It slammed its head into his shins, lifted, threw him backward. He hit rock and air left him a second time. The sword clanged off stone, bounced away. He rolled as the boar staggered in a half circle, its legs forgetting their orders. He reached the broken spear shaft—half a weapon and all he had—and drove it into the first wound he'd made.
This time the sound from the animal had the edge of closing. It collapsed into itself, legs folding like badly made furniture. He held the shaft until the pounding in it slowed, then left it and crawled off the dying heat to where the sword lay in needles.
Silence returned in small, careful pieces. The boy tried to breathe without the iron flare in his ribs and failed twice before finding a third attempt he could keep. The cut in his thigh made its own weather. He looked at it once and looked away; the blood had already made its choices about where it would go.
He tore strips from his undershirt, cleaned them with a splash of water from his skin, and packed the wound hard, binding until his fingers quivered with the need to stop, then binding more because he understood that "enough" was often a lie. When the cloth reddened through, he added another strip. He sat back against the slope and let the world come back into a shape he could carry.
The wolves had not left.
He didn't see them. He felt the absence of certain bird sounds, the way the wind hesitated at the edges of the clearing, the pressure of eyes that were not part of fear but belonged to the same family of knowledge. He didn't look for them so much as look in such a way that if they wanted to be inside that looking, there would be room.
When he could stand without his vision tightening to a tunnel, he finished what he had begun. He opened the boar with motions that were now more muscle memory than memory, steam rising from the body in pale sheets. He cut out the meat that would carry well and left what would not. He took the heart. He set aside the liver and lungs and a generous portion of shoulder and laid them on a flat rock clean of soil. He stepped back, made the same small turn of head and weight that had felt right with the deer, and did not wait for a reply. He could not afford to. He was wet and the wet was blood.
Camp could not be far.
He chose a hollow under a fallen trunk with one end lifted by its own root ball, a roof of woven earth and wood. He set himself to the business of living through the next hours: fire first. The flint threw sparks without argument; the moss took them like a returned favor. He fed the flame with bark curls and thin twigs until it made its own case to the damp. He cut the heart into thick pieces and set them on a flat hot stone close to the coals. The smell came up sharp and clean and wrong in a way that made the mouth water anyway.
He did not eat first. He cleaned the wound with water warmed in a cup of bark and hissed air through his teeth when the heat found the open line. He pulled the first bandage away, set fresh cloth, bound again. He did not examine beyond what he had to. The body is a country that doesn't like to be looked at from the inside.
When he ate, he did it with both hands and the focus of a man writing his name on a door the weather had tried all week to erase. Salt from his pouch. Smoke from the pine. Iron from the heart itself. The food hit his stomach and made a low case for a different plan for the night than bleeding. He listened.
Between mouthfuls he reached out with both hands toward the fire, fingers spread, and asked the Flame for something more than warmth. He tried the shape of the calm Matteo had taught him—attention like a still pool that heat might slide across. He found it for a breath, for two. A fur of warmth grew against the skin of his palms as if the blood there had remembered a thing it used to know. Then the pain in his leg throbbed and the pool broke. The heat left as a body leaves a room without closing the door.
"Not yet," he said, voice low. Not anger. Not disappointment. Statement.
Beyond the fire's circle the dark breathed its own way. A soft scrabble of paws through needles came and went. He kept his eyes on his hands, on the meat, on the business of staying where he was. If they wanted what he had left them, they would take it. The question was not whether he would see it, but whether they had seen him.
When the worst of the shaking passed, he brought the sword into his lap and set a stone to its edge. Slow, even strokes, the angle found and held. He honed until a hair laid along the blade would sever under its own weight. He cleaned blood from the hilt and oiled the leather with fat from the pan. He would not let the weapon learn neglect from the wilderness. The sword was a promise he had made to himself long before the forest had learned his name.
Fatigue came in waves. He rode them until the sandbar of sleep showed itself enough times that he believed it would hold. He banked the fire low, left a seam of ember like a mouth-line in a sleeping face, and drew his cloak around his shoulders, careful of the leg. He shifted to a position that would let him stand if he had to without tearing what he had just convinced to stop tearing.
A howl lifted from the ridgeline. Not near. Not far. It held a shape he had not heard from voices meant for him or against him. He could not say it said we see you, but the idea of those words fit inside it without strain. Another answered from below, and together they made a kind of bracket that held the night in place.
He did not answer. He did not reach for the practice sound his throat could make that embarrassed even the trees. He lay with his hand near the sword—not upon it, not needing that comfort the way he had in other places—and let his thoughts shorten down to the size of the next breath and the heat along his shin and the slow cool of sweat drying at the small of his back. He noted, without choosing the noting, that he had eaten and then circled his sleeping place once in a low arc before settling. He noted that he had not spoken aloud more than a handful of words since the boar had shown itself. He noted that these facts did not feel like choices so much as a body behaving in the only way that made sense.
Sleep came in pieces. Once, he woke to the sound of a stone clicking against another stone: a soft, accidental knuckle-tap from the direction of the offering rock. He kept his eyes closed. A pause, then the barest chuff of breath and the faint drag of something heavy across soil. The fire made the quiet, pleased sound of pine sap finding new ways to boil.
Dawn took the long way to the ridge. The cold had cut deeper by the time the light agreed to arrive. He blinked himself upright, checked the bandage, found it wet but not failing, and dressed it again with the last of the clean cloth. When he limped to the offering place, he found the stone licked clean, the bones scattered in a crescent and pressed into the mud by something with the habit of neatness. A print sat in the dark earth: four toes, pad wide, edges clean as if cut with a fine blade.
He did not touch it. He did not need the proof of his fingers to know what he knew.
He returned to the fire. He warmed his hands and tried once more for the heat-without-flame, not to light anything but to make a small truth inside his skin. For a moment it came—now that the night had moved a step away—and he felt his blood approve. It was not a weapon yet. It was not even a tool. It was the shape of a thing he would one day be able to hold.
"Parallel," he said to the ember seam, and the ember gave up a soft breath like agreement.
He stood, tested his leg, and set his weight carefully—heel to arch to ball to toes—until the ground told him he could go. He angled toward the ridgeline, not to chase and not to flee, feeling for the line where his steps and theirs could run side by side without either one becoming the other.
He did not know if they would let him walk there.
He moved anyway.