52. Meat, ready tomorrow

Chapter 52: Meat ready tomorrow

Eto found Mikaela in the corridor outside Finn's room a little after sunrise, the light still grey and thin through the high windows, and he stopped in front of her long enough to say the only thing he'd come to say.

"Back," he said, tapping two fingers against his own chest, then pointing toward the door, then out, a rough shorthand she'd learned to read well enough by now. "I go. Back."

Mikaela studied him a moment, taking in the tension still sitting in his shoulders, the way his jaw hadn't fully unclenched since the crypt. "Okay," she said, simple, not pushing. "Go."

He was gone before she'd finished the word.

The gate guards barely looked twice at him anymore, not after the last few days, and he passed through the black stone archway without slowing, without looking back at the walls climbing up behind him, and once the road gave way to open ground he stopped walking entirely and just ran.

It wasn't the kind of running with a destination. It was the other kind, the kind that had nothing to do with getting anywhere and everything to do with getting away, legs eating up the ground in long tearing strides until the city was a smear behind him, until the black walls shrank to something small enough to hold between two fingers if he'd bothered to look, which he didn't.

Within minutes there was nothing behind him worth looking at anyway.

The forest came up fast, dense and green and smelling of things that had nothing to do with stone or smoke or the particular stink of too many people crammed too close together, and Eto tore into it without breaking stride, weaving between trunks with the same animal ease he'd had back in Little Edelmere, back before any of this, back before crypts and cities and creatures wearing old women's faces.

He ran in circles for a while. Actual circles, looping through the same stretch of trees over and over, not because he was lost but because it felt good, because his body wanted movement more than direction, and somewhere in the third or fourth loop he threw his head back and roared, loud, wordless, something between a laugh and a scream that startled birds out of the canopy in a scattering burst.

It felt like the first real breath he'd taken in days.

The city had gotten into his chest somehow, tight and small and pressing, walls and roofs and too many eyes, too many smells that weren't his to sort through, and out here none of that existed. Out here there was just dirt under his feet and wind against his face and the low hum of a forest that didn't care what he was or where he'd come from.

He spent the whole day like that. Running. Climbing. Dropping flat in a patch of sun just to feel it on his skin before hauling himself up and running again. Somewhere in the afternoon he stopped being a man wearing an animal's instincts and just became the animal for a while, and it was the best he'd felt since before the crypt.

As the light started slanting gold through the trees, his stomach reminded him what else the day was for.

He caught the reindeer's scent first, faint and clean on the breeze, and followed it to a small clearing where the animal stood grazing, unbothered, ears twitching at some sound too distant to matter. Eto crouched low in the brush and watched it a moment, weighing the hunger in his gut against the shape of the thing in front of him.

This reproduction came from the author's posting place without permission; the version they publish there supports their work.

Not that. Not today.

He let it go, backing off quiet enough that it never even lifted its head, and kept moving until a different scent caught him, heavier, muskier, and a few minutes later he found the source. Cattle. A small herd of them grazing along the treeline where forest gave way to open pasture, big dumb placid shapes with dark hides and wide horns.

Something in him perked up at that. He hadn't had milk, real milk, since before the world had decided to drop him somewhere new, and the memory of it hit sudden and sharp enough to make the decision for him.

He picked the biggest bull in the herd. Naturally.

It was massive, easily the size of two men stacked shoulder to shoulder, muscle rolling thick under a dark hide, horns wide enough to gut a man clean through if he got careless, and the second Eto stepped out of the treeline it knew, some animal instinct kicking in immediately, head lowering, nostrils flaring, one hoof scraping a warning line in the dirt.

He didn't reach for the lightning. Didn't call on the speed that had carried him through wolves twice its size back at the cave. He wanted this one honest. Hands. Horn daggers. Muscle against muscle.

The bull charged first.

It came fast for something that size, ground shaking under it, and Eto met it head on instead of dodging, catching one horn in each hand as the impact nearly tore his arms from their sockets, boots plowing furrows in the dirt as he was driven backward a full ten feet before he managed to dig in and hold.

It bucked, twisted, tried to gore him sideways, and he held on through all of it, muscles screaming, broken arm shrieking with every jolt, until he got his footing back under him and turned the fight into something closer to a wrestling match than a hunt. They went down together once, rolling through dirt and grass, the bull's weight nearly crushing the breath out of him before he wrenched free and got a knee driven into its ribs hard enough to hear something crack.

It bellowed, furious, wild, and came at him again, and this time he met it with the daggers, driving one into the thick muscle of its neck while his other hand wrapped around a horn to hold the angle steady. The bull screamed, a sound that carried across the whole clearing, thrashing hard enough to nearly throw him clear, but he held on, teeth gritted, blood, his own and the animal's both, running warm down his arm.

It took longer than the wolves had. Longer than the reindeer that first started all this. By the time the bull finally went still under him, both of them were bleeding, both of them exhausted, and Eto sat back in the trampled grass beside it, chest heaving, a grin pulling at his mouth that had nothing civilized left in it at all.

Alive. God, he felt alive.

Dragging it back to the city took the better part of an hour, the bull's weight nearly dead nothing against the strength that reindeer trait had given him, though the guards at the gate clearly hadn't expected to see a man hauling a few tons of dead bull behind him like it was a sack of grain.

They shouted at him. He didn't understand a word of it. He shouted back, mostly just repeating "eat" in Keth and pointing at the carcass, which did nothing, so it dissolved into a long stretch of hand signs and increasingly frustrated pantomime until someone finally understood enough to wave over a cart, gesturing hard, no dragging things through the streets, apparently, and Eto let them load it without much complaint.

The butcher's shop smelled like blood and sawdust and old smoke, and the butcher himself, a heavyset man with forearms like tree trunks, went through the same routine, no Keth, more hand signs, more demonstrations, Eto pointing at the fur, thick and dark from a winter not long gone, and the butcher nodding slow like he was working out the terms of a very strange negotiation in real time.

Somehow they landed on it. Fur for the skinning. Meat ready tomorrow.

Satisfied, sore in a dozen places, and smelling like a slaughterhouse, Eto made his way back to the barracks infirmary as the last light was fading out of the sky.

He hadn't been sitting more than a few minutes, Nora still in her chair, Finn still unmoving, Mikaela dozing lightly against the wall, when the door opened and Freya stepped through, Alaric a step behind her.

They hadn't been seen since the morning before, since the City Lord's summons had pulled them both out the door, and something in the way they moved now, tight, careful, worn thin around the edges, said whatever had happened in that meeting hadn't been simple.

Mikaela was on her feet before either of them said a word.

"Well," she said. "What happened."

Freya's eyes found Eto's across the room, and for a moment she didn't answer at all.