He drew the knife from the leather sheath at his waist, then stopped, staring up at the moon. He sat that way, unmoving, for several minutes, the knife in his hand a familiar weight. Had anyone been there to see him, kneeling there amid that snow-covered landscape, they might have been forgiven for thinking him some statue, a left-over, forgotten remnant from a time long past., and in so many ways, they would have been right. But there was no one there to see.
He was alone. Alone as he had been for many years. As he had been, it sometimes seemed, for his entire life.
He brought the knife to his throat. He didn’t think about doing it, never made the conscious decision, but he did it just the same, and as the weight of the handle was familiar to his fingers, so too was the touch of the blade’s flat, cold edge against his skin. He remained that way for the space of several breaths, thinking. It was a game he played with himself sometimes. And now, like always, he did not know how it would go, was unsure until finally his breath plumed out in a great white fog, and the blade drifted away from his throat seemingly of its own accord.
He was not left frightened at how close he had come, and his hands did not shake at that understanding. They had, once, but that had been long ago, and even the memory of that fear was buried under a thousand such days as this. A thousand such games.
He was preparing to bring the blade to the elk’s throat, to cut away the membrane there so that he might begin to clean it, when a rustle of movement off to his right somewhere in the trees caught his attention. Any normal beast would have been frightened away by the smell of blood thick in the air, and few from the village would have traveled so far from its borders in the day, even less in the night.
Both of these were true things, but they were not the reason why he spun, the reason why the blade was out of his hand, hurtling through the air before he had even drawn another breath. He knew the knife well, its heft and weight, for he had carried it for years, just as he had long ago memorized every tree of these woods, so long had he stalked beneath them.
Both of these were true things, but they were not the reason why the blade flew so straight, why it found its mark unerringly, as if, from the moment it left his hand, there had been no other possibility. The shadowed figure let out a muffled grunt then collapsed to the ground in a heap. The man, known as Cutter to those of the village, rose from his crouch and stalked toward it.
The man had fallen on his back, and the bow—and the arrow he’d been stringing to it—lay in the snow beside him. The man writhed for a moment, but he did not do so for long, for the knife’s path had been true, and in seconds, the corpse stared up at him with vacant, but somehow accusing eyes.
Dead then, and that was no wonder, for the truth—the one he had spent the last fifteen years of his life trying to forget—was that the man the villagers knew as Cutter was good at killing. It was the only thing he was good at.
He knelt down before the corpse and retrieved his knife, cleaning it on the dead man’s jerkin with several practiced strokes before returning it to its sheath. He leaned forward, meaning to examine the man’s clothes—knowing all too well what he would find—but caught a glimpse of an orange speck of light down in the valley beneath the hill on which he crouched. There for only an instant, then gone.
He told himself it had been no more than a figment of his imagination, for if ever there was a place made for such imaginings, it was the cold, dark, lonesome hilltop. He told himself that. But he did not believe it. He told himself that perhaps that orange flash had been no more than a firefly going past, flickering in the shadows. But that, too, he did not believe.
He rose to his feet once more, turning to stare down into the wooded valley from his vantage point on the hill. At first, there was nothing, only the dark and the stillness. Nothing but the cold and the softly falling snow and the white-coated trees, their shadowed limbs thrust out as if they would claw and rend any who drew too close. There was nothing else, nothing at all.
Until there was.
Another orange flicker, then another. Far away, the sight of it nearly occluded by the shape of the great wooden sentinels in the valley beneath him, but there just the same, and no denying it. He knew what it was, realized that he had known it from the first, no matter how much he may have wished otherwise. Fire. And what’s more—torches.
There were all manner of beasts in the world, each with their own dangers—so his mother had taught him on her knee, many years ago, and his life had taught him no different. But out of all those beasts, none, save one, carried torches, and that one was, perhaps, the most dangerous of all. Men. Men walking in the dead of night, and though they were too far to even guess at numbers, their forms, if forms he saw, no more than shadows among the trees, the light of the torches—several now—were not comforting. Lights that grew in number with each moment that he watched, blooming in the darkness as
