He left the last fence at graylight, when frost still wrote its thin handwriting along the rails and the village slept with the shamelessness of the tired. The road took his foot the way a tailor takes a measure: professionally, without praise. He walked north first, because north had been tugging at him for days like a needle through tight cloth, and because Old Jaren's words had set themselves inside him like a compass that did not know how to lie.
The ground changed politely at first—fields thinning, hedges forgetting their manners, the track giving up its sensible stones and trotting out into grass. The pines began to lean together in long gossiping rows, all of them craned a little to the right as if trying to overhear something the wind said elsewhere. By midmorning he had the taste of iron on his tongue, not from blood but from cold and the promise of stone.
He traveled the way men do who have learned to be quiet without resenting silence. When a kestrel flung its shadow across the path he stepped aside to give it right of way. When the wind lowered itself through the trees to ask questions, he answered by setting his pace to the roots' patience. He drank when he remembered, not when thirst made a case, and he ate while walking—bread and onion cut with the knife whose edge sang truth along his thumb hair.
By noon he found the river—no grand thing, just a strong-boned animal of water shouldering between banks glazed with rime. It sounded like teeth: not a roar, but the steady work of chewing cold into smaller pieces. Jaren had said when the river sounded like teeth he'd gone too far, so he turned east until his shadow, thin as a knife, tried to walk ahead of him. The light leaned; he followed. The land opened itself differently every half mile, like a book that couldn't decide which story it wanted.
Tracks began to pattern the thaw where sun touched frost. He saw the neat two-fingered press of deer, the wild scribble of hare, the long drag where a boar had insisted the world move aside for its belly. He crouched at a patch of churned mud and laid a palm to the place where something heavier had passed: a broad, round impression like a dinner plate, claw marks deep as the first joint of his finger. Hill-bear. The claw grooves cut into the cold earth like notes in a ledger, a reminder that the land collected debts.
There were signs enough that a man in love with fear could have fed himself on them, but he did not go that way. He went attentive, which is not the same as afraid. When he crossed a glade, he crossed its edge, not its center. When he stepped on deadfall, he set his foot near the branch, not the spongy rot. When he needed to stop, he stopped behind something that would rather take a sprinting blow than share it—boulder, stump, the thick hip of a root.
The first beast he saw was no threat, only a reminder that size was not the same as anger. A hornback elk stepped out from a line of burned birches, its shoulder as high as the eaves of the Taverner's. Its rack was a ship broken into antler, hung with lichen and last season's bracken. Frost smoked from its nose. It watched him with slow regard, head tilted to weigh whether he was a branch it could ignore. He lowered his eyes a fraction—not submission, not challenge, just sense—and held himself like a rock that had chosen legs for a day. The elk chewed a mouthful of brown grass, found nothing to offend it, and moved on. The ground remembered after it in bruises.
He crossed the river where it braided shallow over stones. He'd wrapped his boots with strips of waxed linen, but cold has long fingers and it found his toes anyway. On the far bank he built a palm-small fire in a scooped-out place behind a fallen log, the smoke scant and secretive. He warmed his socks against a chip of flame, ate half the last of the bread with caution the way a man eats a map, and let his boots drink another whisper of tallow. When he broke his fire he pinched every coal dark and swept the ash with a branch until the ground looked as if it had always been indifferent.
Afternoon raised a wind that slid under his coat the way a thief slips a hand under a latch. He cut willow switches at a stream and bound them into a rough hoop that made his pack sit on his shoulders more like a hand, less like a punishment. He trimmed his walking stick with the new awl's stubborn point until it matched his stride and learned to catch the world's small lies before they took his ankle—buried hollows, treacherous moss, the slick the frost left when it forgot its edges.
He kept to the open when the trees began to hold a smell he didn't like—old musk, fresh blood, matted fur warmed by anger. Iron-fur wolves travel in argument and agreement both; you hear them when you are meant to and you never hear all of them. The first sign today was not a paw mark but a silence: birds stopped telling each other jokes. He detoured along a little shelf of rock where even a soft-footed thing would show itself if it tried to follow. After a time the forest raised its chatter again, carelessly, the way it forgives danger after danger is satisfied.
Toward evening, the ridge ahead changed shape. It gathered its stones into molars and grinned at him: jaw-line cliffs with roots for tendons. Jaren had said when the ridge looked like a jaw and the river sounded like teeth, he had gone too far; he had already turned east when he met the river, but seeing the jaw reminded him how easily a man could be swallowed just by not minding his own directions. He kept the ridge at his left shoulder and walked until his shadow wanted to speak first again.
Shelter wanted making before dark learned its bad habits. He climbed into a notch between two boulders where wind had learned to argue with itself and tire out. He clipped spruce boughs and wove them into a lean shelter that made a low green tunnel against the stone. He lined it with dead needles and set a bed that would be less cold than the ground and more honest than promises. He lit a thumb-high fire at the notch's mouth and fed it shavings of fatwood coaxed with breath until flame remembered itself. He ate the last of the bread and onion. The onion's sharpness made his eyes decide to water and he let them, because there are tears you pay and tears you invest.
Night in the beastlands is not quiet; it only makes different kinds of sound. Owls stitched the dark from one side to another. The river kept its teeth busy. Far off, something with weight and confidence tested a tree and found it still true. Once a chorus began—wolves telling one another the world's locations—and once it broke off all at once, as if a hand had clapped over all their mouths. He slept when the fire went from gold to thinking, woke when it tried to forget, and fed it a stick. He slept again with the knife hilt under his palm by habit, not bravado. He was wise enough to know that steel's courage ends at the length of its blade.
He rose at the first blue and was moving at gray, because daylight buys distance at a better rate than any other coin. His breath made little ghosts, then larger ones, then none as the day learned itself. Frost made the ground honest again. He crossed a meadow webbed with hare tracks and found at its far side a trail of churned earth where a boar had instructed the world vigorously. He chose another way, not because fear held the reins but because prudence had better maps.
He walked out a long hour along the ridge's hip and came to a place where the land remembered water long after the stream forgot itself. The ground was black and springy, and sedge poked through in hair-thin blades. Bog-deer had used it and left delicate two-finger prints like calligraphy that had something to say about old hunger. He stepped where he wished the next foot to stay, testing with the stick, reading the ground's yes or no with the sensitivity men usually save for other men's faces. Twice the stick found doubt where grass pretended trust; twice he backed up, breathed, and taught his feet a new sentence.
Near midday the wind shifted and brought him a smell like old pennies and wet dog. He dropped to one knee and let the world move around him while he made himself uninteresting. Below, not fifty paces off, an iron-fur wolf shouldered out of scrub, scar-laid across its ribs like tally marks. Another ghosted behind it, and another after that. They were not hunting him; they were hunting something honest enough to leave a hopeful track. He watched them come and go without vanity. When their noise moved on, the birds filled the space with small talk again as if the silence had been an impolite guest finally shown the door.
He found a tree rubbed raw half around its girth at chest height—hill-bear, marking. Sap bled in amber beads as if the pine were wearing a broken necklace. He laid his palm against the wounded place in apology and moved on quickly, giving the tree the courtesy of not confessing its weakness to anything with teeth.
The sky wore a thin cloud like skin pulled tight over bone. In that flat light a far slope showed him lines he would have missed in shine—old slides where stone had given up pretending to be rooted, fans of talus like gray beards at the ridges' feet. He considered them with a carpenter's eye: weight, angle, what holds, what fails. Somewhere beyond those long chins of rock, he felt, the land kept the hook Jaren had promised. He did not rush the thought. Rushing is for men who think distance answers questions.
In the afternoon he crossed a cut where water ran only in spring and in stories. The gully walls were clay and stone layered like a poor man's pastry. He took a length of rope from his pack, looped it around a stubborn juniper, and lowered himself hand over hand, boot edges finding tiny truths. At the bottom the sand was stamped with prints different from any he knew—round, two-toed, splayed wide with weight. Bog-elk, maybe, or one of the pale cave-pigs that learned to root in daylight when winter got arrogant. He set his hand in the print; it swallowed his palm and told him nothing except that something large had gone the same way he was going and had not been required to ask permission.
Climbing the far side, his boot slipped once and his knee barked against stone. He lay there breathing while the ground decided whether to hold him after all. It did. He thanked it without making a temple of the thanks and moved on.
Near sundown he came to a stand of black spruce crowded so close the wind could only whisper through its needles. Between the boles the ground was brown velvet, soft and deceptive, sprung by years of shed. He slid the knife into his belt where his hand could find it by thinking. On the far edge of the stand, where the trees stepped back under a granite shoulder, he saw old claw work on the stone itself—four parallel rakes, deep as his knuckles, each groove full of lichen stubbornly pretending to be paint. He looked long, then longer, making himself memorize the height, the spacing, the direction of the strokes. If the bear owned that wall, he would be wise to leave its house finer than he found it.
He did, setting no fire, eating his last onion sliver raw, letting the cold do some of the work hunger usually does to keep a man's edges sharp. He slept with his back to rock and his feet downhill so he would wake if the world began to lift him. Once the night offered him a sound like a low laugh; he answered by closing his eyes again and not offering even a thought in return. You learn what to feed and what to starve.
Dawn showed itself first as a rumor, then as proof. He shook frost off his coat like a dog and stood into ache that felt like muscles tutoring resolve. He drank from a runnel where water made a mirror too honest for vanity. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and found the taste of iron again—not blood, still cold.
The pines ahead grew crooked as bad answers, all of them leaning the same way as if some great hand had brushed them and forgotten to set them back. He felt it then more precisely—the pull not of direction but of purpose. East tugged, so he gave east its due until his shadow liked the sound of its own feet again. The ridge on his left kept its jaw, working at the winter the way an old man works a problem with no teeth and too much time. Somewhere beyond, a slope would show him the promised hook; somewhere sooner, the land would ask him to prove he deserved to see it.
He did not speak. He did not pray. He put his foot where the ground said yes, and when the ground hesitated he moved his foot until it could agree. He was not brave. He was exact. And that exactness was the shape of his patience and his nerve, and it carried him deeper, the village a smaller line behind him, the world ahead beginning to lean.