They left East Cliff City with the dawn traffic, three hooded travellers among thousands, and nobody looked at them twice.
An hour west of the city, where the roads thinned and the canyons deepened, Gregor drew the mist out of themselves and the water dragon poured back into being, scales of running water catching the morning light. Bee climbed to their usual place at the neck. Raider took the head.
He looked back once. East Cliff City stood on the rim of the world with the golden sea burning behind it, and he fixed the sight in his memory next to the vow it had given him.
Then he turned west and didn't look back again.
"So," said Gregor, once the city was an hour behind them. "Hunting."
"Hunting," agreed Raider.
"Then your lessons start now, because the first rule of hunting beasts is knowing which beasts will be hunting you." Gregor gestured lazily, and the dragon began to descend toward the broken lands south of the road. "Bee. Recite."
Bee straightened up with the joy of a student who has finally been asked the one thing they studied.
"All beasts under the sky are divided into three grades!" they declared, holding up fingers. "Wild beasts, savage beasts, and monstrous beasts. They don't cultivate — their power is born in them, and it grows as they age. So each grade divides again into low, mid, high and top level, by age and strength. As far as anyone knows, it's the same in every corner of the world."
"Anchors," prompted Gregor.
"The weakest low level wild beast can already tear apart most cultivators of the common stages," recited Bee. "A low level savage beast matches a high level wild one. A top level savage beast is stronger than most River Realm experts. And a low level monstrous beast..." Bee paused for effect, clearly savouring it, "...matches the Sea Realm. Which means a monstrous beast that has lived long enough could eat the whole Clan."
"Hm. Adequate," said Gregor, in the tone of a teacher hiding their satisfaction. "The East Canyons hold wild beasts beyond counting, savage beasts enough that every traveller has a story, and monstrous beasts rarely enough that most stories are lies. What we hunt today is the first kind. If we meet the second, I hunt, you watch. If we meet the third, we are already flying the other way."
Raider listened, and understood the arithmetic of his own childhood a little better. The clanspeople had hunted for meat and materials his whole life — casually, the way one gathers firewood. Only now did he understand what it meant that creatures able to slaughter most of a city's population were, to the Clan, groceries.
'No wonder they never feared discovery by ordinary people,' he thought. 'Only by each other.'
...
They found the first horde in the late morning.
The dragon crested a ridge and there they were, spread across a dry basin below: forty, maybe fifty rust-coloured shapes, six-legged, lean as famine, drowsing flat against the stone exactly the way they had lain in ambush by the waterhole days ago. Pack hunters. The same kind that had brought down the winged goat while Raider watched.
"Redhide striders," said Gregor. "Low level wild beasts, but clever, and wicked in numbers. Their hide turns most common blades, which makes it valuable. Their bones are dense and take enchantment well, which makes them more valuable still."
"They're sleeping," said Raider.
"They're pretending," corrected Bee cheerfully. "It's what they do. Watch the shadows at the basin's edge."
Raider watched, and slowly picked them out: another dozen striders, flattened into invisibility along the rim, placed exactly where fleeing prey would run. Even asleep, the pack held an ambush shape.
Something in him — twelve years of being the fleeing prey, perhaps — went cold and clear all at once.
"How is it done?" he asked. "Properly. Without waste."
"Fast," said Gregor, and their voice had shifted into the register Raider was beginning to think of as the real Gregor, the one from before the Settlement. "A beast is not an enemy. It is not punished, it is not taught a lesson, it is not made to understand. You end it the way weather ends things — completely, and owing nothing."
The dragon slid down the air toward the basin.
The pack woke as one animal. Fifty narrow heads snapped up; the ambush ring surged; and Raider, standing on the head of a diving water dragon with the wind screaming past his hood, raised the radius and swung.
He had meant it to be like the Settlement — a wave, a push, something to scatter and stun. But he had made the wind an extension of a decision this time, not of a panic, and the difference taught him something about his own power that no amount of asking his Master could have.
A blade of moving air the width of the basin passed through the horde, and the horde fell down.
There was no second wave. There was nothing to have a second wave for. Fifty redhide striders lay in the dust in two clean rows, parted like combed hair, and the only sound was sand settling.
The dragon pulled up and hung in the air. Bee's mouth was open. Gregor had gone very still.
Raider stared down at the basin, at the stillness he had made in a single breath, and found his hands were steady and his stomach was not.
"...They didn't suffer," he said at last, quietly, as if checking the arithmetic aloud. "It was fast."
"Faster than anything else would have been," said Gregor, watching him with an expression Raider couldn't read. "Faster than age, or hunger, or a savage beast's jaws. That is the whole kindness available to a hunter. You just gave it to fifty at once."
"It was too easy." The words came out before he could weigh them. "Killing shouldn't be easy."
"No," agreed Gregor, and there was something almost like relief in their voice. "It shouldn't. Hold on to that discomfort, Young Master. Power that stops noticing what it ends up standing on stops deserving to stand at all. Ask me one day how I learned that."
Raider looked at them, but Gregor had already turned to the work.
...
The work, it turned out, was its own education.
They landed, and Gregor produced a knife and taught hands-on what the market had taught in theory: which parts of a beast the world would pay for. Redhide, peeled whole, supple and blade-proof. Sinew for bowstrings. Fangs for tools. The dense leg bones, prized by forges and formation-carvers alike.
Raider ended the afternoon elbow-deep and thoughtful, holding a strider's long femur up to the light.
"So bones hold power even in ordinary beasts," he said.
"Bones are where a body keeps its stubbornness," said Gregor. "Ask any forge."
"Planning to fight with those too?" called Bee from atop a carcass, grinning. "You could rattle at your enemies."
"Careful," said Raider mildly. "The last skeleton I met changed my life."
Bee laughed, then stopped laughing and eyed the femur with new respect.
The true marvel came at packing time. Gregor stood over the mountain of hides, bones and meat — the yield of an entire horde, a heap taller than the dragon's head — and drew from their robes a small pouch that seemed woven of water and light, its surface moving like a pond under rain.
They opened its mouth toward the mountain, and the mountain poured in.
Raider watched a heap the size of a house slide into a bag the size of two fists, and made an entirely involuntary sound.
"A Water Pouch," said Gregor, pleased. "Upon reaching the Pond Realm, a cultivator of our Clan can weave a pouch from their own cultivation, a space folded out of the world to carry what the world can't be bothered to. Its capacity matches its maker's realm — a pond's worth, a lake's worth, a stream's worth and so on, growing as we grow."
"I just made mine this year!" said Bee, brandishing a pouch the size of a plum with enormous pride. "It fits nearly a whole strider!"
"It fits most of a whole strider," corrected Gregor, "as we discovered, memorably, from what would not fit. When we camp tonight, Young Master, I will weave one for you. A hunter should carry his own yield. Even—" they weighed the pouch of water and light in one hand, and their smile was suddenly a real one, "—especially one the realms have no name for."
Raider took the little pouch when it was finished that night, felt the impossible cool weight of a horde sitting inside a handful of woven water, and lay awake a long time doing sums again.
One horde. One afternoon. One swing.
The Clan had two hundred people who could do this daily, and a treasury filled by three centuries of it, and it had all sat hidden in a blank space on the map, guarding its fear.
'So much strength,' he thought, drowsy at last, the radius warm against his shoulder. 'Doing so little.'
They hunted twice more over the following days — another strider horde, then a colony of burrowing shell-backs whose plates Gregor prized for shields — and each time Raider's single swing did the work of a hunting party, and each time he made himself watch what the wind had done, and count it, and refuse to find it easy.
By the fourth morning, the pouch at his belt held a small fortune, and the horizon held a low familiar line of canyons.
Bee came forward and stood beside him on the dragon's head as home rose slowly out of the west.
"Nervous?" they asked.
"Yes," said Raider honestly.
"You flattened the Clan Chief and a tenth of the village last time you saw them," Bee pointed out. "What's left to be nervous about?"
"That," said Raider, "was the easy part. Wind is simple. People aren't."
...
On a watch-rock above the Barren Settlement, a bored sentry glanced east, went rigid, and looked again.
A water dragon. And on its head, unmistakable even at this distance, a small grey figure that the entire Settlement had spent days trying not to talk about.
The sentry dropped from the rock and ran.
"They're back—!"
The words went through the Settlement like wind.