Chapter 5: Seventy Cores

"Why did the hawk cross the river?" Tobiah said.

"Toby, we're hunting."

"Because the wolf was on the other side, and he owed him money."

Kell, lying flat in the snow beside me, closed his eyes.

It was our fourth day in the river woods.

We camped under a split cedar.

Our cache was a hollow in its roots, lined with moss, under a flat stone.

Every core we took went in there.

By the fourth day there were thirty-eight.

We'd taken a snow lynx, a rock badger the size of a calf, and a pair of frost jackals that had followed us for a mile, laughing.

Tobiah was good in the air.

He'd circle high as a red hawk and drop back down as a boy, feathers still in his hair.

He was not good at silence.

"What do you call a snake with no legs?" he whispered now.

"A snake," Kell said.

"Oh. Right."

Below us, the river was frozen gray from bank to bank, except for one black hole in the ice the size of a cart.

Something was breathing in it.

"Tusker," I said.

A river tusker was the worst thing in the river woods that wasn't Old Frost.

Twice the weight of an ox, a hide like boiled leather, and two yellow tusks as long as my arm.

They came up through the ice to take deer at the water's edge.

Their hearts didn't hold one core.

They held a cluster.

"Twenty, maybe," Kell murmured. "If it's old."

"It sounds old."

The breathing was deep and wet and slow.

I tied my hood tight, though there was nobody to see me but them.

It was habit.

My father had hunted in the same gray felt.

"Toby, the deer."

He grinned and shrugged off his cloak.

The hawk went up. A minute later a doe came crashing down the bank, driven by a screaming red shape at her ears.

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