It took half an hour of hard hauling to bring Tern up in the canvas sling, followed by the groaning bounty hunter and finally Kiv himself. By the time Kiv’s boots cleared the northern rim, the first grey pre-dawn chill was thinning the mist and the white antler beetles were already unlocking their horns, streaming back into the cliff crevices like pale water draining through a sieve.
They bound the hunter’s hands in front of his belt with a spare tail-end of Chaska’s cord—tight enough that he could not reach a buckle, but loose enough around his heavily bandaged right wrist that his swollen fingers stayed pink and warm. Half a mile up the northern gorge, where the trail widened into a windless draw, they found an abandoned dry-stone shepherd shelter roofed with overlapping slate slabs.
Inside, Chaska shuttered the narrow window-slit with her cloak and lit a small tallow dip in an iron pan.
Ysabet sat on a flat hearth-stone with Pip between her knees. She had lifted the original field mouse’s box out of her pack first and set it near the warm tallow pan, where the mouse poked its nose out of the dry moss to nibble a bruised oat kernel. Then she boiled a little water in their tin kettle, tore a clean linen shift-hem into small squares, and began dabbing the hundreds of tiny beetle punctures across Pip’s neck-folds and flanks with her left hand.
