“One. Two. Three!” I counted aloud as I shoved a bale of hay off the top of the pile in the barn. It hit the ground with a heavy, hollow thud. It didn’t roll towards the smaller pile like I’d hoped it would but it wasn’t that heavy or hard to carry it over there. “That should do it!”

I brushed my hands off on my skirts and brushed some wayward hair from my face. The sun had risen the morning after my declaration with a grand anticlimax. Father hadn’t said a word about my foray into the forest or made any further comment about the time I’d spent with Aust the day before. He’d left me a long list of morning chores to complete and a promise that he’d be back a little past midday meal. Then he’d set out to finish hashing out a payment deal for the piglets with Fields. There’d been an unspoken expectation of more chores to follow once Father returned.

However, I’d worked through enough early spring seasons to take a guess at what those tasks actually were.

And I’d done them along with all my other listed chores.

I’d watered, fed, mucked, shucked, plucked, and tried to get as many things as I could think of done.

Well, maybe I’d half arsed a few things but not too terribly. Nothing that Father hadn’t already come to expect of me. And it was pretty clear that none of the pigs were going to die in the handful of time they spent unattended to while Father was still out.

I stepped out of the barn and shut the barn doors behind me. They were looking rough after the winter. We’d need to do repairs on them eventually but that was a fall job after all the barley had been harvested and the winter crop planted. Today, I could put that in the back of my mind though. My mind was firmly on the Edirk Forest and on the path that I’d picked out for myself.

Not Father. Not the others in town. Not the gods. Me. I wanted this.

Now I just had to prove that I had what it take!

I let that thought carry me directly towards the forest. With a little bit of luck, maybe there was a possibility of catching up with Aust before midday!

Luck already seemed to be on my side because I found the trail from Erickson’s quickly enough. A good thing too. Another night and morning of wear and tear obliterated the tracks I’d worked so hard to find the day before. All that remained were small little mounds and divots that vaguely resembled the shape they’d been in the day before. I found the clearing mostly by memory as well. Again, a much quicker trek that only took a fraction of the time. Not even a half hour or so after I’d started, I came across the monstrous slashes on the trees.

Aust was no where nearby. He’d probably had a much earlier start than I and was further up. The question now remained, where had the beast gone after devouring the boar and leaving the clearing? I found Dílis’s hoofprints easily enough along with mine and Aust’s. However, the beast’s tracks seemed to vanish completely outside of the clearing.

I tried to ignore the weight that dropped into my stomach. Aust had been so impressed with my ability to make it this far. Now, I couldn’t figure out which way to go next.

I tried working my way out from the center of the clearing to it’s fringes in a spiral pattern, just to see if I could find any tracks that I might have missed. There were none. Well not none. Several tracks were either degraded to far to be useful or walked over by other animals that had crossed through the clearing.

Once more, I glanced up at the gashes on the tree. Still they took my breath away at the sheer size of them. What could possibly make cuts that big? I curled my fingers into claws, imitating whatever had made the marks, and dragged my hand down the tree. At the bottom of the carve, I looked to the next set of slashes. Tentatively, I wandered to the edge of the clearing. Part of me hoped that there would be more slash marks further into the forest.

However, as I peered into the expanse of trees, there was none that I could see. I wrinkled my nose. What I did see, though, were the massive hoof prints that undoubtedly belonged to Dílis. Aust had been on the way back to Woodhearst when he’d found me. If I couldn’t find a trail for the creature left by the creature then maybe the next best thing would be to follow the one trail that I could find. Aust’s.

It felt a bit like cheating. Aust had probably never used another ranger’s tracks to find his way when he was starting out. It was the only lead I had though so I set off at a brisk walk. “It’s only until I find a trail the beast made,” I told myself.

I pressed through the dense branches and further down the trail that Aust and Dílis had cut. However, very rarely did I actually see anything that remotely resembled Aust’s boot prints. Thorns and twigs caught my shirt as I walked and more than once I had to pull them out of the brambles. It was worth it though. Definitely worth it. On another three trees ahead of me were claw marks that matched the ones in the clearing. “Finally,” I mumbled. “Now we’re getting somewhere!”

The thorns stretched across any open ground now. They grew up one side of the trees and then back down the other with thorns reaching above my head. Climbing up the tree trunks likes snakes, as though attempting to choke the tree… if there had been any breath to squeeze out to begin with. In the middle of the path those same thorns were wrapped around the remains of what must have once been a proud tree. Now it had been snapped completely in twain and completely overtaken by the invading brambles.

And I had found myself right in the very center of it. Dílis’s hoof prints had disappeared. When? I wasn’t exactly sure about that. However, the slash marks gave me a pretty clear indication of which way the creature had gone. Right through the thick tangle of brambles.

I sighed and said, “Finding Aust and the beast will be worth it.”

Then I stepped headlong into the thorns. They didn’t seem that thick further on.

Thorns continued to snag and pull on my skirt and boot laces the farther I went. The first time a barb scraped my shin I winced but ignored it to carry on.