"Someone new?"
Neo's voice had changed.
The easy lightness that usually clung to it had thinned into something harder, sharper, more deliberate. The question did not come out loud, but it carried weight in the quiet between the trees.
"What do you mean?"
Icariel turned his head slightly to look at him.
His black eyes were calm.
Too calm.
"There are two possibilities," he said.
The wind moved faintly through the forest, stirring powder from high branches. It drifted between them in pale threads and vanished against the snow.
"The first is that Meron made a mistake."
He let the words hang for a moment.
"It happens. During feasts. When people drink too much. Marks get carved wrong."
His gaze dropped briefly to the trail beneath them, to the clean edges of the prints ahead.
"But not him."
Flat. Certain.
"That's Geon's habit. Not Meron's."
Neo's expression tightened.
A little.
"Meron doesn't drink," Icariel continued. "And when it comes to his work, he doesn't make mistakes."
The silence that followed felt colder than the air.
"That possibility doesn't exist."
Neo nodded slowly.
"…Fine."
His hand slid off the axe handle and then back onto it again, an unconscious movement.
"And the second?"
Icariel's voice lowered.
"The second is the problem."
A breath left him, white in the dimness beneath the trees.
"Someone changed the mark."
The words settled heavily between them. Neo's green eyes narrowed at once.
"Someone who knows our system."
"Yes."
"Someone who understands what those marks mean."
Icariel gave the faintest nod.
"And that means one of two things."
His gaze sharpened as he said it.
"Either they're from the village."
A pause.
"Or they're not."
The forest seemed to draw closer.
Not physically. In feeling.
The trunks stood too still. The branches held their burdens of snow without complaint. No bird darted between them. No small animal disturbed the undergrowth. Even the cold felt as if it had paused to listen.
"We haven't had visitors," Icariel said slowly, "for as long as I can remember."
His tone remained controlled. That was the only reason it did not sound like fear.
"But if it is someone new…"
A faint tension tightened low in his chest.
"…why change it?"
Neo frowned.
"To mess with us?"
Icariel shook his head once.
"There's no point."
No hesitation.
"No gain. No reason."
He inhaled through his nose, slow and cold.
"And the timing is wrong."
His thoughts began fitting themselves together again, each piece locking into the next with the kind of clarity he hated—because clarity rarely meant comfort.
"Meron woke before us," he said. "Earlier than us."
Neo remained silent.
"I wake with the sun," Icariel continued. "Every day."
The words came quieter now.
"If someone moved before me, they would have had to leave before Meron."
He let that settle.
"And if they left before Meron…"
Neo's face changed slightly as he followed the line of thought to its end.
"…Then they couldn't have changed the mark," he said.
"Because he couldn't have made it yet."
"Yes."
Silence.
Neo stared at him. Then let out a short breath through his nose, half disbelief and half frustration.
"You're making sense."
A beat.
"And none at all."
A dry exhale left Icariel.
"That's because none of this should make sense."
Neo rubbed a hand over the back of his neck, eyes drifting toward the path behind them as if he might somehow will the altered mark into something more ordinary.
"What if they waited?"
Icariel looked at him.
"For Meron to pass, to mark the tree," Neo said. "Then changed it after."
A pause.
"That's possible."
He did not reject it. But he did not accept it either.
His eyes swept the forest floor again. Snow. Roots. Exposed patches of dark earth beneath leaning trunks. Low brush wearing frost like glass.
Still nothing.
"No second set of tracks," he murmured.
His jaw tightened.
"No disturbance."
He looked harder. There. Then there.
Then farther right, where the trees stood denser and old fallen branches lay under thin blankets of white.
Nothing.
"And I don't miss things like that."
Neo followed his gaze across the ground, then gave a quiet nod.
"…No."
He knew that too.
That was the problem. The problem was not only that the forest had begun to feel wrong. It was that the wrongness had been placed with enough care to leave almost nothing behind.
After a moment, Neo exhaled again.
"Don't you think we might be overthinking this?"
Icariel did not answer immediately.
"What if Meron really did mess it up?" Neo said. "Come on. Even if we'd gone right, it wouldn't have been that bad."
A faint grin tugged at one corner of his mouth. Habit. Reflex. A weak attempt to make the air feel less tight.
"With or without traps."
His grip shifted on the axe.
"Harder, maybe. Not fatal."
Icariel glanced at him.
And for one passing second, he agreed. They could handle most things.
Neo with that axe. Him with the bow.
Working together, they were better than almost anyone in the village apart from the chief himself. Faster. Cleaner. More efficient. They knew how to move around each other without getting in the way. When one forced prey to break left, the other already understood.
Together, they were enough.
Against ordinary danger.
But ordinary danger was not what had spoken through the voice the weight of a true threat to life was.
That was the distinction Icariel never ignored.
"…You're right," he said quietly.
Neo blinked, not expecting agreement to come that easily.
"But that isn't the point."
Icariel's gaze hardened.
"My instincts told me not to go right."
He left the deeper truth buried beneath the sentence, where Neo could tolerate it without naming it.
"And you know how many times that's saved us."
Neo's expression shifted. The brief trace of humor vanished completely.
Yes, he knew.
A fall of rock on a slope that had looked stable until Icariel abruptly changed routes. A starving wolf that should have circled wide but hadn't.
A stretch of frozen stream where the ice had sounded normal and still given way two steps after they left it behind.
Neo sighed.
"You always find a way to ruin my mornings."
A ghost of a smile touched Icariel's mouth.
"I should return the favor to your father somehow."
A beat.
"And who better than his son?"
"Bastard," Neo muttered.
But there was no heat in it.
Only familiarity.
Then he asked, more seriously, "So what do we do?"
Icariel did not need to think.
"First, we find Meron."
His voice steadied further as he spoke, each word settling into place.
"We keep going straight."
A pause.
"Then we decide."
His eyes darkened slightly.
"And we hurry."
Neo frowned. "Why?"
"Arelia and Grin."
That was enough to make Neo go still.
"They'll follow us later," Icariel said. "To help carry the hunt back."
A beat.
"I don't want them taking the wrong path."
Neo's face hardened immediately.
"…Right."
He nodded once.
"Then move."
They ran.
Snow burst beneath their boots in sharp, uneven sprays as they pushed deeper into the forest. The air cut against their throats with each breath. Branches crowded closer overhead, breaking the pale daylight into thin slivers and patches of murky silver. The silence changed as they moved—less open now, more enclosed, the kind of silence that did not simply exist but pressed from all sides.
Their footfalls pounded against packed ground hidden under snow.
The trail narrowed.
Trees thickened.
The smell of the forest deepened too, wet sap under frost, rotting bark, old water locked beneath ice.
Signs of hunting ground began to appear in fragments. A low branch cut cleanly with a knife weeks ago. Bits of old cord tied almost invisibly near the roots of a pine. A bent patch of reeds where something had been dragged through before recent snowfall erased the full shape of it.
Then they saw him.
A figure stood ahead between the trunks, partly obscured by hanging branches heavy with white.
Bent slightly forward.
Working.
Meron.
Ropes had been stretched between several trees in a low, nearly invisible line, half-buried beneath snow, placed with the kind of quiet precision that turned a harmless path into broken legs and torn flesh for anything too careless to notice. Nearby, another line ran waist-high through brush, meant to catch and jerk prey sideways into sharpened stakes hidden under a drift.
Clean.
Efficient.
Ugly in the way useful things often were.
Icariel slowed first.
Neo matched him almost immediately.
They stopped just before crossing the nearest line.
"Meron!"
Neo's voice broke across the trees.
The man straightened.
Tall. Broad through the shoulders. Black hair tied back loosely. His face was narrow and sharp, the kind of face that always seemed mildly dissatisfied even when it wasn't. His eyes were darker than Neo's and far less expressive—blades kept sheathed, as Icariel had once thought, but never dull.
He turned toward them.
"Oh?"
His voice carried faint amusement.
"You two are early."
His gaze shifted to Neo.
"Couldn't sleep?"
Neo snorted, still breathing harder than he wanted to admit.
Icariel stepped forward to stand beside him.
"I'd say the same to you," he said. "But I assumed your back forced you out of bed."
Neo made a strangled sound that was almost a laugh.
Meron raised one eyebrow.
"My spine suffers," he said dryly, "because I make hunting easier for idiots."
He looked between them again.
"And yet, here you are."
A pause.
His gaze sharpened.
"Why those troubled faces tho what's wrong?"
Neo explained.
The changed mark. The direction. The second slash ahead. The possibility of someone altering the trail after Meron had passed. He spoke quickly, but not sloppily, and Meron listened without interrupting once. No questions. No visible alarm. Only a stillness growing in him with every sentence.
At last:
"…I see."
A quiet breath left him.
"I went left," he said simply. "Marked two."
His eyes flicked toward the way they had come.
"There's bear activity here. With the snow worsening, we need fur more than boar meat."
Another pause.
"There was no reason to send anyone right."
Silence followed.
Heavy.
Real.
Neo stared at him.
"Then it's true," he muttered.
Meron's expression did not visibly worsen. But something in the set of his mouth tightened.
"That is a problem."
The understatement was so dry it almost felt absurd.
"Yeah," Icariel said quietly.
Meron turned at once, already moving.
"We go back."
No hesitation.
"No reason to stay out here blind."
He began stripping one of the more visible lines from between the trees as he spoke, fast, precise hands gathering rope in practiced loops.
"And we tell the chief."
His pace quickened.
"Arelia and Grin might follow the wrong mark if we waste time."
Icariel nodded.
Neo did the same.
Together, they turned and then a scream tore through the forest.
It came from deeper among the trees, sharp enough to split the silence open from root to branch. Human. Unmistakably human. Not a startled cry, not anger, not pain alone.
Something worse.
It echoed between the trunks in ragged fragments and then seemed to remain there, hanging in the frozen air long after the actual sound had ended.
Icariel froze.
His heart slammed once against his ribs hard, violent, sudden enough to hurt.
That was not an animal.
Not a boar brought down in a trap.
Not fox or wolf or bear.
A person.
And whatever had ripped that scream out of them had done more than hurt them.
It had terrified them.