One Girl, A Pack Of Beasts novel · Chapter 13 of 32

Chapter 13: Rejects

"Ten days," I said.

Kell pushed himself off the cave wall.

He swayed, and I caught his elbow, and he let me.

"Then we go down in the morning," he said.

"You can barely stand."

"I can stand. I just can't stand quickly."

Tobiah was still in the cave mouth, red to the ears, looking anywhere but at us.

"There's more on the notice," he said.

"Tell me."

"Four to a team, no fewer. The guild won't send three up after a boar that's been burned and half-blinded and is angry about it."

Kell laughed once, without any fun in it.

"Nobody in Saltmarket will hunt beside the cold blood."

"Then we find somebody Saltmarket doesn't want either," I said.

We came into town at noon the next day, Kell on Tobiah's mother's sled for the last mile.

The notice was nailed to the Hall door.

Ridge wolves lounged on the steps under it.

"Team Gray Knife's got three," one of them called. "A ghost, a bird and a corpse."

I pulled my hood down over my face and walked through them.

Inside, the guild master didn't look up from his ledger.

"Four names by the horn, Gray Knife. Or your fee goes in the strongbox. And every hunter in town is already teamed."

A dry voice spoke from the fire.

"Not everyone."

An old man sat on the bench closest to the flames, where he'd sat every time I'd ever come into the Hall.

He had one arm. The left sleeve of his coat was pinned up to the shoulder.

"Old Frost took that arm forty winters ago," he said. "I'm still on the roll. Put me down."

The guild master sighed. "You can't climb, old man."

"The notice says four names. It doesn't say four legs." He looked at me. "I'll hold your camp at the valley mouth, and I'll tell you things about that pig nobody else alive knows."

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