By the fourth day, the grove had settled into something close to routine.
Wren's crates filled steadily, stacked two deep against the cart's rails by midday and three by dusk. Corbin's checks on the cart's straps stopped catching anything worth fixing. Silas ran out of new questions for Hannah, more or less, and started needling Fenn instead, who took it with a lot less grace than Dez ever had.
Even Dez and Fenn had stopped flinching at every snapped twig somewhere around day two, easing into the kind of loose alertness that came from four straight days of nothing happening.
Henry still walked the perimeter every evening before the light went. Nobody had asked him to. Nobody needed to.
That evening he took it wider than usual, following the tree line further around the northern ridge than he'd bothered with before. The ground climbed unevenly under a scatter of loose scree, dead needles slick with an early frost.
He found the goat maybe sixty yards out.
Or what was left of it. Half of it, really, the rest scattered wide enough that he had to widen his own reading of the ground just to piece together what had happened here.
The blood had gone dark and tacky at the edges, but the center of the kill still cut sharp through the cold pine smell, fresh enough that whatever did this hadn't bothered dragging its meal anywhere quieter to finish.
The tracks weren't wolf. Gouged too deep into half-frozen dirt for anything that light, and too wide a stride for something that should still be alive this far inside a stretch the army bothered keeping clear.
Henry paced off the distance between two clean prints and came away with something wider than his own shoulders. Nothing that size had any business grazing this close to ground the army swept every season.
He crouched, careful not to disturb anything, and studied the spacing between claw marks pressed into a stripped patch of bark.
His jaw tightened.
This wasn't supposed to be here.
He found Hannah before dark fully set in, water skin still in hand from refilling it at the stream.
"You're going to want to see this."
She followed without a single question, which was one more thing he'd come to rely on about her.
At the kill site, she crouched exactly where he had, running her fingers along the same claw marks without needing him to point them out.
"Not wolf."
"Bear?" Hannah asked.
"Wrong stride. Bears drag their back paws when they walk off a kill. This didn't drag anything. It lifted and moved." Henry nodded toward a set of prints trailing off into denser brush, evenly spaced, no scuff between them. "Whatever did this ate here and kept going. Recently. Blood's still tacky."
Hannah looked up at the treeline, the same reflexive read they'd both been running on this hollow since the first day. "How recently?"
"Hours. Not days."
The silence after that stretched a beat too long to be comfortable.
"We tell them?" Hannah asked, meaning the alchemists.
"Not everyone." Henry straightened, eyes still tracking the treeline out of habit. "Dez and Fenn need to know. Wren doesn't need to lose a night's sleep over one goat, not yet."
"And if it comes back for more than a goat?"
"Then we'll already know what we're looking at instead of finding out the hard way."
It wasn't much of a plan.
A single carcass wasn't proof of anything beyond one bad afternoon for one goat, and until he had more to go on than that, caution cost a lot less than certainty would. It was the only plan that didn't cost them a week's harvest over what might still turn out to be nothing.
They found Dez checking the picket line, Fenn a few feet off sharpening a knife that didn't especially need it.
Henry kept it short: a kill, tracks that didn't match anything the army should've left in this stretch, recent enough to still be warm at the edges.
Dez's easy humor dropped out of his face somewhere in the middle of the sentence.
"How recent."
"Fresh enough that we're doubling the watch tonight," Henry said, it like a decision already made, because it was. "You and Fenn split first shift with me. Hannah takes second with whoever's left standing."
Fenn's knife stopped moving against the whetstone. His jaw worked for a second before he found actual words. "We signed on for Bronze work. Culled ground."
"Nobody's asking you for more than that," Dez said, quieter than his usual register. "Just keep your eyes open tonight."
Fenn nodded, though it didn't look like it settled much. "And the alchemists?"
"Don't know yet." Henry glanced toward the fire, where Wren was laughing at something Corbin had said, easy and unguarded in a way it hadn't been the first night out. "For now, they get to keep believing this is exactly as boring as we told them it'd be."
Dez didn't look thrilled about that answer. He didn't argue with it either.
Henry took first watch, same as every night, but he kept his eyes on the treeline the whole shift instead of splitting his attention with the fire the way he usually did.
The cold had deepened since sundown, sharp enough that his breath hung visible with every exhale.
Behind him, a log settled in the fire and threw a scatter of sparks upward, and he didn't let himself flinch at it.
Rated isn't the same as guaranteed. Sir Black's words, verbatim, from a room that already felt like it belonged to someone else's week.
Out past the reach of the firelight, something shifted low in the brush and went still again before he could place exactly where.
He never saw what it was.
Whatever moved out there stayed gone, and eventually so did the fire, burning down to embers while Henry kept watching the dark past where the light reached.