The lake was a bowl of glittering blue, reflecting the summer sky. The mountainside sloped above the water, vast and silent, while a cool wind blew down over its sunlit flanks to stir the high treetops. On the stony lakeshore, Ataen felt the breeze ruffle through his hair. He walked with his musket tucked under one arm as he followed Ulzan between the creaking trees.

To the north and west, the Great Range filled half the world. The peaks were brilliant under the afternoon sun, towering grey and jagged against the cloudless horizon. The highest of them were still capped with gleaming snow, defying the summer.

The woods were old here, old and deep and grand, like a great green cloak over the mountain’s shoulder. The trees crowded close around the edges of the lake. Pines and crown firs overlapped their needled branches to filter the sunlight into a shifting dapple. Silver birches stood rank on rank like the lockstepping soldiers of the far east. On the opposite shore, a grove of redwoods rose massive and regal into the windswept sky, seeming near as tall as the mountains themselves.

Even in the forest shade, Ataen sweated under his tunic. They had been on the move, all uphill with little rest, since leaving the valley at dawn. Half a day’s hike from the bright banners and cookfires of the clan, from the faces he knew so well. From Eonaa’s warm bed, her kiss, her smile. He missed her already.

Ulzan tramped along in the lead. He was eighteen, of a height with Ataen, but broader-built, his arms and neck thick with muscle. He knew this ground better than Ataen did. His steps were surer, quick and impatient. He held his longknife in one hand, to cut away the brush where it grew too dense ahead of them.

When Ataen stopped to pull up a loosened boot, Ulzan glanced back at him sharply. “Stop dawdling. We should have made camp by now. We need to be up before dawn to shoot.”

“We could camp here,” Ataen replied. He gestured at the lake. “It’s got everything we need. The elk will come down here to drink.”

“No. It’s the first place another clan would look. Our smoke would draw them like flies. Why make it easy for them?”

“Summer’s only just begun. There’s nobody else up this far.”

Ulzan gave him a hard look. “Wager your life on it?”

Ataen muttered a curse under his breath and shifted his pack on his shoulders. It wasn’t a great burden – a bedroll and blanket tied in straps, some looped rope for snares, a watergourd, powder and shot for his musket. His longknife swung in its leather scabbard against his thigh. The only luxury he’d brought was his mother’s bronze kettle and a wrap of green tea-leaves. Eonaa had seen him off with no keepsake, just an anxious kiss and a whispered command to come home safe. He’d promised her that he would.

It was his first true ranging into these mountains. He had hunted with the men of the clan for years, learning to track elk and roe deer in the wooded foothills. He’d claimed his first antlers at eleven. But until this summer, his seventeenth, he had been a child still. Now he was blooded, a man before the law. He owed a duty to the clan. To scout for it, to clear its path, and to kill for it.

They circled the lake, picking their way among fallen trees and steep-walled gullies worn by ten thousand years of rain and meltwater. Wildflowers grew in vibrant sprays close to the shore. A family of blackwing cranes strutted through the shallows, jabbing for fish in the shimmering water. Ataen longed to swim. Maybe, if the clan stayed in the valley long enough, he would bring Eonaa up here. She would love the calm.

Beyond the lake, they moved on to higher ground. They clambered over a jumbled sweep of loose stones and felled saplings, the sign of a recent rockslide, which left Ataen watching the mountainside above with nervous eyes. Ulzan maintained a rapid pace, slashing at the bushes and trailing branches in his path as if they had personally wronged him. Ataen’s legs ached as he fought to keep up. His pack felt heavier by the minute.

He followed Ulzan along a precarious ridge that curled around the side of the mountain. At one point, it rose abruptly above the treeline and gave them a magnificent view of the surrounding peaks. Through a dip between two mountains, Ataen could see all the way out to the east, where the Great Range gave way to the endless grass-green sea of the steppe.

Inddan, the leader of the hunt, had sent them up here to look for more than elk. They were to report back any signs that other clans had been this way. At this time of year, the People hunted and foraged across a thousand miles of the Great Range. Out on the steppe that spring, they had encountered a dozen different clans. Bigger, fiercer clans with banners boasting their kills, bristling with new guns bought from the trading cities of the east.

On the steppe, the clans met and bartered as friends. But up in the mountains, the hunter’s law prevailed. The man who could not defend his kill went home hungry. The man who could not defend himself went home not at all.

They’d seen nobody, as yet. No footprints or cut paths, no standing smoke drifting over the face of the mountain. Perhaps, sweet fate, they were the season’s first hunters.

A few miles north of the lake, they found a small clearing in the pines, bounded on one side by a fallen tree-trunk thickly cloaked in moss. The sunlight painted a rough circle of brightness on the leafstrewn black earth. In the canopy above, a woodpecker’s busy hammering greeted their arrival.

“Here,” Ulzan said flatly. His tone brooked no disagreement. Ataen had none, anyway. It was as good a spot as any to make camp.

They shucked off their packs and unfurled their bedrolls, neither boy saying a word to the other. The woodpecker’s drilling echoed around them, broken by intervals of silence in which the thin warble of songbirds could be heard.

While Ataen scraped out a firepit in the middle of the clearing, Ulzan propped his musket up against a tree to load it. He measured powder from his horn into the barrel, then wadded in the shot with a copper ramrod. His face was expressionless, but there was a hard set to his jaw, as if a scowl was trying to break through.

“I thought we were waiting for the morning,” Ataen said.

“Loading it for wolves,” Ulzan grunted. He primed the flashpan and clicked the hammer shut over it. He laid the charged musket on his bedroll with an almost fatherly carefulness. “I’ll keep watch tonight.”

“Brave of you.”

Ulzan’s calm vanished. He looked up with a sneer of undisguised loathing. “Shut up, worm. I wouldn’t trust you to keep the wolves off us.”

“I would. I’m a better shot.” Ataen couldn’t resist the jibe. All he got in reply was a bitter snort.

He knew Ulzan wanted Eonaa. He’d seen the way the older boy stared at her, his forced flippancy when he talked to her. The razor-edged resentment in his eyes when Ataen walked hand-in-hand with her.

They’d never been friends. Ulzan was always the bully of the clan, the brawler and mudslinger, and he’d picked on Ataen as ruthlessly as he had any of the other boys. Eonaa hadn’t gotten between them. She had just turned Ulzan’s contempt for Ataen into real, bone-deep hate.

And Inddan sent us here together. Perhaps the leader of the hunt thought it would force them to put their differences aside. Their foolish quarrel would melt away before the harsh majesty of the mountain. The rigours of the hunt would teach them brotherhood, and they would return to the valley true companions. Is the old man really that blind?

Ataen fished the tea-leaves out of his pack and began to set up his kettle beside the firepit. There were plenty of fallen branches around, summer-dry and perfect for firewood. He had gathered an armful together when Ulzan rose from where he’d been sharpening his knife and stomped over to glare at him.

“Don’t waste time with that. We need to take a look upslope. There were elk up there last summer. If we find their tracks now, it’ll make tomorrow easier going.”

“Now? It’s not long till sundown.”

“Now. And bring the snares. Might as well lay them out before dark.”

“We’ve got some dried meat left. The snares can wait for morning.”

“No,” Ulzan snapped. “They can’t. Come now, or I’ll drag you up in ropes.” He shoved hard past Ataen, knocking the dry branches out of his arms.

No different than when we were children, Ataen thought.

*

The slope steepened above the clearing. The forest was broken up by high stacks and chutes of stone where the rock of the mountain showed through the dry soil. The undergrowth was wild and thick. In places, Ulzan had to hack them a path with his longknife.

Ataen’s muscles already burned after the hike up from the valley. This fresh ascent had them protesting anew. His heart thumped against his ribs like a mustang’s hoofbeats. Sweat streamed down his back beneath his tunic. He paused to catch his breath, leaning against a crooked birch.

“Keep up,” Ulzan barked.

Ataen squinted up at the tree-shrouded sun. “Why do we need to be all the way up here?”

“Do you not have ears, worm?” Ulzan didn’t even look back, slashing ferns and mountain sedge out of his way. His knife-strikes echoed whiplike down the slope. “I told you, I want to see if the elk have been through here again. Or wolves. We need to know how the land lies before we hunt.”

“Time enough for that tomorrow,” Ataen complained. “You can’t even see the land for the trees.”

“Shut up and walk. You’ve slowed me down too much as it is. Inddan ought’ve sent me up alone.”

And I’d have thanked him for it. Ataen held his tongue and trudged along in Ulzan’s wake.

Ulzan brought them to a stretch of level ground, where the trees stood more widely-spaced among a wild garden of ferns. It was a welcome relief for Ataen’s aching legs. The air was colder up here, and thinner, though not exhaustingly so. Blue slivers of late afternoon sky could be seen above through the weave of rustling branches.

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“Rabbits been this way,” Ulzan grunted, pointing to the undergrowth. “I knew it was good ground.”

Ataen peered through the ferns and leaf-litter between the trees, looking for pellets and tufts of fur. “Over here, too.”

“Well, get the bloody snares down, then. Before it gets dark. I want something worth eating at daybreak.”

“I’ll let the rabbits know,” Ataen replied.

He unspooled lengths of fine rope from his pack and snapped some fallen branches into passable snare-posts. He set seven snares, one after the other, while Ulzan scoured the forest floor for elk tracks. At the base of a tall crown fir, to his delight, he found what could only be the entrance to a warren. He knelt and laid an eighth snare just outside the hole, as quietly as he could, so as not to startle the rabbits out of their burrows.

He wove back through the trees, checking his work, satisfying himself that the posts were sturdy and the loops were sound. Good enough for a brush rabbit or a squirrel, or even a hare. “They’re set,” he announced, as he tightened the knots of the last snare. He heard Ulzan’s boots crunch among the fallen leaves not far behind him. “Looks like a warren down here. It’ll be good hunting.”

“Aye, it will.” There was something in Ulzan’s tone that sounded wrong. Too light, too cheerful. Ataen rose off his haunches and turned, frowning.

Ulzan had his longknife in his hand, held low with the tip of the blade nearly scraping the ground. He began to approach, swinging the knife lazily back and forth through the air.

There was no misunderstanding here. No questions formed on Ataen’s lips. He realised at once what the older boy meant to do. Why he’d led him up here, away from the campsite, without their muskets. Fear ran through him, chill as a glacial melt. He reached down and drew his own knife from its scabbard.

“A wolf took you,” Ulzan smiled as he stalked towards Ataen. It was an awful smile, bright with hatred. “A big old greymane, with scars all over its muzzle. It leapt on you from a crag. I shot at it and missed. You never stood a chance.”

“Get back,” Ataen warned him. His fingers sweated around the grip of his knife. His eyes darted around in mounting terror, seeking any angle of escape between the pines. Steep, rocky, treacherous ground uphill. Dense brush to either side downhill. Ulzan blocked the only clear path.

“Or maybe a rockslide got you on the south slope. Or you slipped in the rapids, and I couldn’t swim to you in time, poor Ataen. I’ll think of something to tell Eonaa. She’ll weep for you.” Ulzan continued his slow advance. “Until my cock’s in her. Then she’ll cheer right up.”

“Is that what this is about?” But of course, Ataen already knew it was. “She’ll never want you, Ulzan. She’ll bite your cock clean off.”

“Will she? Maybe I should bring her yours, then.” Ulzan sprang at Ataen, his longknife whistling in a fast upward slash from the right.

Ataen wasn’t quite fast enough. He felt the blade bite into his thigh as he dodged aside, only just keeping his balance. Warm blood ran down inside the leg of his britches.

“I thought I might slit your throat in the night,” Ulzan said. He drove Ataen back with another fast cut. “No sport in that, though. This way is much more fun.”

Ataen could tell the cut to his thigh was deep. It already hurt to put his weight on it, and the pain worsened by the second. “Inddan will have you killed for this,” he said through clenched teeth. “If you stop now, I’ll tell him it was an accident. Nobody needs to know.”

“Nobody will know. People die in these mountains all the time. Remember Osati and Kentuan, two summers back? Nobody ever found them. Wolves must have gotten them, or another clan. Just like the wolves got you.”

“You’re mad.”

“You’re dead.” Ulzan swung again, but this time it was a feint. Ataen dodged the wrong way, and the tip of the blade scored across his chest. Bright, fresh pain. He gasped, staggering back, and Ulzan laughed. “I’ll bleed you out, worm. Piece by piece.”

Ataen slashed wide with his knife, trying to get inside Ulzan’s guard. It was a clumsy attempt, and he knew at once it would fail. The older boy dodged back smoothly, still smiling his dreadful smile.

“Not much of a fighter, are you?” Ulzan taunted. “Eonaa picked a weakling.”

“Over you,” Ataen reminded him, trying to ignore the blood dribbling down his chest. There was so much of it. His leg throbbed terribly.

“She’ll learn to like me. I’ll give her your scalp as a courting-gift.” Ulzan swiped at him again, and this time Ataen managed to evade it, though the blade came so close he heard it sing in the air in front of his nose.

He tried for an upward cut, aiming for Ulzan’s chest. The blade made contact, but it was a poor angle and it couldn’t get through the tough leather of Ulzan’s tunic. Ulzan slashed at him in vicious reply.

Ataen brought up his knife just in time to block it. The blades clanged and scraped together. The force of the clash nearly knocked the knife from Ataen’s fingers. Then Ulzan’s fist came in from the side like a swung hammer, and smashed into his skull.

Ataen stumbled back, the forest spinning around him. Pain thundered behind his eyes. His longknife was gone, dropped and lost among the ferns. He felt rather than saw Ulzan’s blade slicing towards him, and dropped to his knees out of its path, a heartbeat before it would have hacked his head in two.

“No,” he heard himself say feebly. “Ulzan, no-”

“Yes,” Ulzan snarled. “Yes, worm.” He stood over Ataen and raised the longknife over his head.

With every shred of animal strength left in him, Ataen threw himself shoulder-first into Ulzan’s midriff. The older boy cursed and staggered, his killing strike turning into a long shallow cut across Ataen’s back. Ulzan lost his footing and went down heavily in the brush.

Ataen might have tried to pin Ulzan down, to wrestle the knife away from him. But he was bleeding, dazed, gasping for breath. His vision swam sickeningly as he rose to his feet. He knew that a struggle would only end one way. Ulzan was already fumbling his way back up, coughing, the bloodied longknife in his hand and wild hatred in his eyes.

A single thought came into Ataen’s mind. It was startling in its clarity, banishing everything else. The musket.

He turned away from Ulzan and began, as best he could, to run.

*

It was perhaps a half-mile back down to the clearing, but to Ataen it felt like crossing the entire Great Range from north to south. He had to bite his tongue to keep from crying out as he made his cut leg carry him down the bumping slope. Without a longknife, he had to force his way through the brush by hand, scratching his palms and forearms bloody on thorns and jagged twigs. His heart and lungs screamed with the effort of keeping him upright, keeping him moving. It took all the vigilance he had to avoid the roots and protruding stones that threatened to trip him at every step. If he fell now, it would be the end.

He could hear footfalls storming through the woods behind him, faint but growing louder and louder. The rough ground slowed Ulzan, too, though not nearly enough. Ataen was leaving a perfect hunter’s trail of blood in his wake; there was simply no helping it.

He staggered through the rustling ring of pines into the clearing. The campsite was as they’d left it, deeper in shadow now as the sun sank to the east. A longtailed squirrel that had been nosing around the firepit scurried away in alarm as he limped out of the undergrowth. Panting and groaning with the pain of every movement, he stared around the clearing in desperation.

The two muskets glinted in the light filtering down through the canopy. His own lay empty beside the firepit. There was no time to charge it. But Ulzan’s was primed for the night watch, still resting on the bedroll, waiting for its master to return.

Ataen stooped to pick it up. It was heavier than his musket, the black walnut stock bound with iron loops and carved all along its length with a pattern of curling vines. He turned it over in his thorn-slashed hands, feeling its weight, judging its balance. He raised the hammer to see the black pinch of powder in the flashpan. Wolf-shot in the barrel. Aimed true, wolf-shot would kill a man.

Ulzan was stronger, a better tracker, more skilled with a longknife. The whole clan knew it well. But Ataen was a better shot.

“Where are you, little Ataen?” Ulzan’s voice echoed through the trees. “Hiding? You’re bleeding all over the place. The wolves will get your scent soon enough. Do you think you’ll outrun them in the dark? Come out, and I’ll make it quick. Better than being eaten alive.”

Ataen’s panicked gaze fell upon the fallen tree-trunk that bordered the clearing. It was big enough to conceal him, if he crouched low. He already knew he couldn’t run any further, and his hands were blood-slick and shaking. An ambush was his only chance of getting a clean shot. He hobbled to the trunk and mantled himself over it, gasping and groaning. He laid himself almost flat on a bed of pine needles and dry leaf-litter, peeking through a splintered gap in the rotting wood.

Ulzan burst into the clearing, still wearing his wolfish grin. He spun his longknife jauntily in his hand, like he did when he was showing off for the girls around the solstice bonfire. Ataen’s blood dripped from the blade.

“You’re here, aren’t you?” Ulzan addressed the empty air. “Snivelling behind a tree, or down on your belly in the dirt. Fitting place for a worm. Come on out, maybe you can beat me. A real man would try.” He began to walk in an unhurried circle, making a show of looking behind each tree.

Ataen drew in a shuddering breath. His boots, his britches, his tunic, were all soaked through with blood. Each pump of his frantic heart bled him out a little more. Everything hurt. The world narrowed and sharpened, reducing itself to pain and cold sweat, the moss-carpeted wood of the tree-trunk, the musket in his hands.

If he missed, or if the powder in the pan had spilled and the shot blew up in his face, he would never see the valley again. Ulzan would butcher him here under the mountain sky, leave his corpse to the wolves, and head home to tell of the terrible mishap that had befallen him. The clan would never know the truth. Eonaa would mourn him, and sing his deathsong with the other women. Then, when the summer was over, she would go with the rest of them east onto the steppe. Other boys would climb into her bed, while the worms and beetles picked his bones clean, and season by season, year by year, she would forget him.

Ataen fixed her sweet face in his mind. He tightened his grip on the musket and shifted himself onto one knee, preparing to rise. Dead leaves crackled underneath him.

Ulzan heard. He turned, spinning his knife. “There you are. You really make poor sport, worm. You couldn’t have run a little longer?” He marched across the campsite, stomping through the ashes of the firepit, and kicked Ataen’s kettle aside into the bushes. Five strides from the hiding-place, he slowed, his smile fading as he noticed what was missing from his bedroll. “Where’s my-”

“Here.” Ataen came up from the cover of the fallen trunk and raised Ulzan’s musket to his shoulder. He held himself as still as he could and cocked the hammer with a soft click.

Ulzan froze. His wide eyes met Ataen’s along the length of the musket barrel. The trees creaked in the wind above them.

“Wait,” Ulzan said. He began to raise his knifeless hand.

The shot sent birds scattering from the pines in a storm of frightened wingbeats.

*

As the evening drew in over the lake, Ataen trapped a red hare among the knotted roots of an aspen. He skinned and cleaned it by the shore with Ulzan’s longknife, working with care despite his hunger and the pain of his wounds. He made a fire close to the edge of the lapping water and cooked the pale meat until it was nearly charred. He ate slowly, savouring every stringy bite, watching the sunset flow down the east flank of the mountain and turn the lake to shimmering blood.

He’d left most of his things behind in the clearing. His musket and bedroll were load enough for an injured man, even for the short journey down to the lake. His hands ached and his clothes were stiff with dried blood. The cuts on his thigh and chest and back throbbed beneath the crude cloth wraps he’d bound around them. Eonaa would wash and bandage them properly. She had a talent for that sort of thing, and she always fussed over his cuts and bruises, more concerned by them than he was himself.

His belly full, he laid out his bedroll beside the embers of the fire. It was a warm enough night that he hardly needed his blanket. The moons rose, both full and brilliantly white, followed by a treasury of glittering stars. He drifted to sleep trying to count them.

In the dark before sunrise, Ataen was woken by a wolf-howl, somewhere up the mountainside behind him. Another long cry answered, and then another, further off. He sat up, fumbling for the knife, and sat in trembling vigilance for an hour or more while the sky brightened to the west, until he could see well enough to load his musket. But for all Ulzan had threatened, the wolves never came near him.

He’d left them fresh carrion to eat, after all.

He filled his watergourd and left the lake in the bright morning, using his musket as a walking-stick. His cut leg protested with every step. He bit his tongue and forced himself along, thinking of a warm bath and hot soup, thinking of Eonaa.

He found the trail he and Ulzan had followed the day before. Even downslope, it was hard going, and doubly so with a limp. He had to skirt around steep stony drops that he would once have dared to clamber down, doubling back as far as he could without losing the trail entirely.

Around noon, he spotted an elk, tall and splendidly antlered, lit by a sunbeam in a stand of silver birches. It didn’t see him. It chewed away at a drooping fern, lowering its great head to tear off the fronds, quite content in its calm green world.

“You’ll make good hunting, for somebody else,” Ataen told the distant shape. He watched it strut off into the shadows uphill.

Onwards he went, cutting through the brush where he had to, the longknife catching the sun like a bright smile. The forest was huge and quiet around him. He forded a stream in the mountain’s blue shadow, making careful steps from stone to slippery stone with his musket in one hand. Beyond, he came to a clear overlook, an angled shelf of rock jutting high over the slope. He breathed in the cool, still, pine-sweetened air.

In the valley below, where the trees gave way to a wide sweep of meadow, he saw banners.