Winterskin (Book One of Wrath & Winter)

They Come at Night: Part Three

I'm doing everything wrong today.

Snow has turned to rain by the time I finally meet the outer farms surrounding our mountain town. I don't complete the trek alone. A gaggle of others wielding everything from pitchforks to wicker baskets trudge from all parts of Montbereau toward the sour patches of unbroken soil festering on the outskirts of town. Pre-lit torches surround the perimeter, sticking up like fractured bones. Warding the beasts of the blackened forest beyond away.

Though fire is never enough.

"Maeva!"

Leaning his old body into one of the many rows of dry, jagged, trenches; Magni placed his gnarled claws against...something. His hoarse voice was a sentence for them. Like the caw of a black crow or the spiraling wings of a vulture hanging low overhead.

His eyes are a lot like moss, drooping low. Desperate for a tough ashwood to latch onto. Unfortunately for Magni's eyes, his face wasn't as strong as it once was and they drooped severely. I still remember how the right one had gone blind. It hadn't been his fault.

Three others hung around Magni, blocking my view of whatever print he had found. Furs ruffled by ice-dry wind, I could almost smell their fear. Their confusion.

"What is it?" I let my ax fall from my shoulder.

The three others turned, one with his hands squarely on his hips.

"Come," Magni coughed, his fingers fanning.

I slipped through and crouched down into the trench. Magni removed his hand from the print as the chiming rhythm of picks and spades began chucking themselves at the cold, packed, earth. The farmers knew our jobs. Knew that, whatever we found we would kill. And if we couldn't the torches would keep away until a swift wind blew the fires out.

Direwolves are common. Hungry as us, they'll steal anything from cabbage to babes. I've seen paw prints bigger than my hands stomped into these trenches. I've seen the clawed variety, the three-pronged prints of tricelings, the small creatures shamed by their stone-breathing cousins.

But never something like this.

"Human?" I breathed. A man's foot print parted the dirt. "Is there a trail?"

Magni shook his head, "Just the one."

Odd. Confusing. Terrifying enough to make the hairs on my nape stand on end.

A look passed between us, Magni shuttering his eyes while my eyelids lowered. Humans patrolling the forest was an unheard of thing due to the icy-cold. True, a mad man could go dashing through the turf but there were two things off about this single print in the frozen ground; one, not even the commander's boot could make a dent in the packed ground and two, even if it could there would be a second foot print not farther than an arm's distance away. And there was none.

Just the one.

This was beyond us. Magni knew. When wood-cutters like us weren't cutting wood we were patrolling the perimeter of the farms in lieu of the Guard, who patrolled farther out into the black forest beyond. I didn't want the commander, Hagen, and their men stomping all over the farms—the one place where I felt powerful, where I didn't need to prove that I was worthy of a real ax and shield—but this couldn't be ignored.

Unless...

Magni clapped me on the shoulder, "Keep watch, Maeva...," he about-faced, directed the other three men with a flick of his arm and went jogging off toward Montbereau. The guardhouse in his sights.