You rise before the market wakes and let the new na settle like a weight in your mouth. Yorren—fur trader, trapper, a man of pelt and ledger—moves easier through Oakhaven’s gates than Yohan ever did. The jack of plates rubs soft at your ribs, the bronze finial gleams dull and honest on the spear, and the tusk dagger sleeps in the roll at your pack’s base. The staff is sheathed and kept private; the slate lies hidden beneath layers of rchant cloth. You wear the disguise like a second skin and step into the city with the practiced calm of a man who knows how to be invisible.
Your kinsn et you at the east gate: three hard-faced hunters from the Rex clan, cloaked and simply ard. No banners, no talk of old claims—just the quiet arrangent of traps, snares, and the small bartered tools of a pelt-trader. You trade a curt nod with Heyshem’s riders over the slate’s silent blessing; they will watch the roads while you hunt in the bordering woods. Theron has one last look, sorrow and respect in his scholar’s eyes; Elara’s instructions are pressed into your hand like a talisman—ask for signs of iron smoke, avoid obvious quarrels with n who bear rchant marks, and bring any suspicious keeps to the Hall in secret.
The work is ordinary and sacred both. You wander the fringe where town becos wild, laying snares where trails cross, checking deadfalls beneath hemlocks, and pressing your ear to the earth for the faint, wrong rhythms that mark sothing touched by the blight. You take on the manner of a trapper—gruff calls at market, an eye for hides, an exchange for tanner’s coin—so that your nightly returns with skins will not raise the magistrate’s brow. You learn the tanners’ routes and the hours they accept pelts; you plan your comings to match their routines. In daylight you are a rchant bargaining for salt and pitch; co dusk you are the hunter again, blood on your hands buried beneath the leather of civility.
Tracking the blighted is never neat. Spoor is often ruined by rain, or muddied by stray livestock, or masked by the very comrce you pretend to respect. Still, the signs co: a line of clotted prints that fade to a sar where an animal collapsed and then, impossibly, nothing; tufts of hair singed at the tips; the tallic tang on warped leaves that makes your teeth ache. Once, you find a small copse where the birds will not enter—no chirp, no darting wings—only silence and a circle of crushed grass as if sothing large pressed down to listen. You do not approach carelessly. You leave crude markers for your kinsn and map the place by mory.
At tis violence finds you. One night a trader’s guard catches you lifting a pelt—only a test, a show of skill to keep the tanner’s trust—and the man lunges with a short blade. Steel ets bone and leather in a cramped alley; your jack of plates shudders as tal takes the blow ant for your ribs. The guard falls, surprised, and you bind him fast, wipe the blood from your hands on a scrap of fur, and toss the man where he will be found at dawn by the Wardens—an explanation of a night scuffle and a drunken watchman. You do not relish such encounters, but the city teaches you to win them and leave no tracing of motive.
You trade pelts at the tanner’s by day and whisper of prices and breed to avert suspicion; at night you wander farther into the wilds. Kinsn track with you in a loose cordon—silent steps, eyes like knives. Together you find the carcass of an altered boar, the flesh clumped and blackened as if soone had salted it with iron; the air around it tastes of copper. You take samples in oilcloth and mark the circle with horns so that Elara’s people can retrieve evidence without exposing the Hall to needless inquiry. Where beasts have been changed, you leave small offerings—salt and barley—and a warding rune scratched shallow where the staff’s thorn would etch it, hidden in a rockpile for only your clan to read.
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Sotis the hunt brings fragnts of human intent: a rchant’s crate half-open, nails pulled to hide a secret seam; a waxed seal with the coiling knot pressed faintly in soft wax; a burned scrap of paper with a star scrawl. Each piece tightens the circle, carving nas into a ledger you keep folded in oilcloth. You send copies by the slate when you can—slow pulses of runes that fly like birds between kin—but most intelligence you carry in your head, where it cannot be seized.
By keeping to trade and trap you gain trust in small ways. Tanner hands nod to Yorren; they do not ask about where your pelts co from beyond the claim of “northern runs.” At Three Pines your sister tends a false ledger for the Hall, recording paynts and moving coins where they should not be noticed. Heyshem’s riders report back with minor spoils—two ships noted with suspicious manifests at the eastern quay; a caravan seen moving iron bowls under tarps. Each report is a thread you braid into a larger net.
Yet the deeper mystery gnaws at you. The sigil keeps surfacing in different hands but always with the sa arrogance—the crowned boar and star arrayed as if to own what they touch. The rites you’ve seen in the labors of their cellars—iron bowls, scorched glyphs, ash that tastes of old promises—are not re superstition. They are work, precise and cold. Soone is funding it with the steadiness of trade. The blight is a product, packaged and moved through ordinary channels until it becos ordinary ruin.
At night, by the fire with kinsn, you strip the day down to facts and plans. Your brothers speak of scouts sent to the plains and the ports; riders will watch for the boar-marked seals; the Desert Rats sweep southern caravans; the Seafarers will check manifests and crews. Theron sends questions in tidy script—chemical signs to test, symptoms to correlate—and Elara promises lab space and secrecy to analyze the samples you have stowed away.
You live two lives now: Yorren who haggles and Yohan who hunts. The mask feels heavy, but it buys movent and ti. Each pelt taken to the tanner, each broken night watch, is a step toward unraveling the organization that turns hunger into a sigil. You know the danger: the scions of old houses keep long mories and sharper grudges. You have made peace with being patient and unseen; when the right mont cos, you will not be a trapper at all but the blade that catches a scion unawares.
Until then you walk the woods, laying snares for both beasts and secrets, trading pelts by daylight and mapping a conspiracy by moonlight. The mask keeps you safe where the na would draw fire—yet every ti you change skins, the old story tightens like a string waiting to be plucked.
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