They worked. There was no glamor in it, no song, nothing like the tales of glorious hunts sung in halls. It was effort and balance and heat and the steady, wet resistance of flesh. Maxwell showed them the first long incision—from throat down the chest, angling around the belly so they wouldn’t pierce the gut. The knife moved with certainty, following seams of muscle and memory both.

  “Always think of layers,” he said, voice even as his hands worked. “Hide; fat; muscle; the casing around the organs. Each has its use if you keep it whole. Each becomes trouble if you don’t.”

  The hide came away slower than Toby expected. It didn’t peel so much as yield, inch by inch, as they cut the connecting tissue loose. Zak grunted and sweated, leaning his weight back as they rolled the skin away from the exposed red and white beneath.

  “This is going to make a tent twice the size of ours,” Zak panted.

  “Or blankets that don’t rot in the first rain,” Maxwell said. “Or straps. Or patches. Or a dozen other things if you don’t stab holes where they shouldn’t be.”

  Reece did his best not to look up from his part. Once the belly was opened, Maxwell guided his hands, showing where to reach in and cut cleanly around thick tubes and membranes. The smell changed again—heavier, more intimate, the sour note of offal fighting with the sweetness of fresh meat.

  “Liver,” Maxwell said, pointing with his chin. “That’s good eating if you don’t overcook it. Heart too. Cut along the vessels, not through them. There. Good.”

  They set aside organs in the shade of the tent on a square of scraped hide, the blood pooling in a small, contained mess rather than everywhere. Reece’s face had gone a bit gray, but his hands were steady. Toby approved silently. Killing was one thing; learning to live with what came after was another.

  The sun slid lower. The fang of stone threw a long, slanting shade over their work, cooling the worst of the heat. Maxwell directed them like a quiet, unsmiling foreman. Sides were split and jointed, great slabs of meat cut free from bone. The front quarters took all three of them to shift. The hindquarters were worse.

  “Hoof,” Maxwell said. “Always remember where it is. You break a toe, you’re no good for marching or for getting away. We’re too far to carry anyone who goes lame.”

  They cut the carcass down to something that looked less like an animal and more like a butcher’s ledger. Ribs piled here; haunch, there; a heap of bones stripped mostly clean. The hide, once fully freed, took all four of them to haul a few paces into a spread. Toby’s shoulders burned with the effort. His hands were slick with fat and blood, his forearms spattered, his shirt ruined. He realized he’d smelled this before, after the slaughter in Brindle Hollow. The memory tugged at something hollow under his ribs, but he shoved it aside and kept moving. The work demanded it.

  “Fire,” Maxwell said at last, wiping his knife clean on a scrap of hide and resheathing it. “Reece, your pot. Zak, wood.”

  Zak looked around at the empty plains. “Ser… there’s no wood.”

  Maxwell nodded toward the small heap they’d gathered earlier—the pale, dried chips from the wallow, stacked beside a bundled armful of reed-grass. “There. That’ll burn hotter than half the timber you’ve ever used. Add more reeds. Keep it tight.”

  Zak wrinkled his nose. “Brilliant. Cooking with droppings.”

  But he went at the reed-grass with something like relief—finally a task that didn’t involve cutting into anything that once had eyes—but the dried chips with considerably less. He came back with armfuls of stalk and the pale, crumbly fuel Maxwell had gathered, muttering that if anyone told him later he didn’t know how to build a fire, he’d feed them to one.

  Maxwell turned to Toby. “Help me with a rack.”

  “A rack?” Toby asked.

  “You thought we’d eat all this tonight?” Maxwell gave him a look that sat somewhere between amused and offended. “We dry what we can’t cook. Smoked meat lasts. Fresh does not.”

  Toby nodded and automatically glanced toward the edges of the camp, half expecting—out of habit—to spot some fallen branches or driftwood they could use. Of course, there was nothing. No trees, no driftwood, not even the stunted, gray scrub he’d seen nearer the marsh. Just grass and earth and sky.

  “These will do,” he said. “Bones dry quicker than wood out here, and they don’t snap if you set them right. We’ll lash the long ones together for a frame, use the hide strips for cord, and run reed bundles across for the meat.”

  Toby blinked. “We’re… making the rack out of the bison?”

  Maxwell stood, already cutting a length of hide into workable strips. “Waste nothing the wild gives you. If you can’t find wood, you build with what breathes.”

  They chose a spot a little downwind, where the smoke would drift away from the tent and not choke them in their sleep. They drove two thicker lengths into the ground as uprights, braced them with stones, then laid crosspieces over top, tying them with rope and thin lengths of stripped hide where necessary. It wasn’t pretty, but it stood.

  “Always think ahead,” Maxwell said as they worked. “Every rope you cut down to a shorter length is one you don’t have when a horse goes lame or a man does. Every scrap you throw away now is one you wish you had when a boot sole splits. The wild doesn’t care if you’re comfortable. It cares if you’re clever enough to stay.”

  Reece had the pot going by then, the little cook-fire a low, steady thing coaxed from flint and dry grass. The first things into it were the offal—liver sliced, heart cut into strips, kidneys cleaned. He wrinkled his nose as he seasoned them with what little salt they had, but said, “My father would say this is the part that makes you strong, if you can get past your tongue.”

  Zak peered into the pot and made a face. “My tongue will never forgive me.”

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  “It forgave frogs,” Toby said.

  “That was heroism,” Zak replied. “This is punishment.”

  The smell that rose a short while later, when the meat hit the heat, was enough to make Toby’s stomach growl despite the day’s labor. Rich, coppery, heavy. Not the kind of thing you’d want every night, but after weeks of dried meat and thin porridge, it felt like luxury.

  While the stew thickened, they cut thin strips from the better parts of the haunch and back. Maxwell showed them how to trim away the worst of the fat, leaving just enough to keep the meat flexible as it dried, not enough to turn rancid too quickly. They threaded the strips over the rack’s crossbars until it looked like some strange curtain of flesh, hanging in neat rows.

  “What about the fat?” Toby asked, scraping a thick, pale lump from beneath the hide.

  “That,” Maxwell said, “is winter waiting. We boil it down, skim it, let it harden into cakes. You mix it with meat or grain, it keeps you on your feet when the world’s trying to knock you off them. You rub it into leather and it shrugs off rain. You burn it in a pinch when oil runs out.”

  “You can burn it?” Zak asked, eyeing the clump in Toby’s hand as if reconsidering his relationship with food.

  “Anything that feeds you can usually burn you if you’re foolish enough,” Maxwell said. “Get the pot. Once the offal’s out, we’ll use the same boil. No waste.”

  Reece ladled chunks of cooked liver and heart into wooden bowls, the broth thick and dark. They ate standing, too tired to bother with ceremony, blowing on steaming bites, wincing and grinning and swearing when the taste surprised them.

  “Saints,” Zak said around a mouthful, eyes wide. “That’s… that’s actually good.”

  Reece sniffed. “Of course it is. I made it.”

  “You cut it out of a corpse,” Zak replied. “I’m not sure ‘made’ covers it.”

  Toby let the warmth spread through him, easing the knots in his stomach and working its way up into his shoulders and neck. Every bite tasted like work made solid. He thought, not for the first time, that there was a strange peace in this—in knowing exactly where his next meal had come from and exactly what he’d done to earn it.

  They boiled the fat next, the pot turning from dark brown to a cloudy, opaque sheen as the chunks rendered down. The smell was heavy, a little foul, but Maxwell assured them it would settle once cooled. He showed them how to skim the clear layer from the top with a ladle, pouring it into a shallow hollow he’d dug in the shade and lined with a scrap of hide.

  “When it hardens,” he said, “you cut it into chunks. Wrap it well. It’ll soften if it gets too hot, but it won’t vanish on you like oil. Don’t let it sit in the sun unless you want every fly south of Highmarsh paying us court.”

  “What about the other bones?” Toby asked, wiping his knife and glancing at the pile—ribs, the broad flat of a pelvis, a scatter of smaller lengths, and the heavy curve of the skull.

  Maxwell’s gaze went there too, and Toby saw the familiar glint—the same one he got when he looked at a battlefield and saw routes instead of ruins. “Marrow from the long ones,” he said. “That’s food and fuel both. We crack them and roast or scoop it out. The smaller ones?” He picked one up, turning it in his hand. “Pins. Hooks. You sharpen them, harden them in the coals, and they’re good for hanging what you don’t want on the ground. Or for fishing, if we find water that isn’t half mud and cow.”

  “And the skull?” Zak asked, eyeing the great horned head with cautious respect.

  Maxwell considered it for a moment. “Leave it,” he said finally. “Strip what’s easy. Let the rest go back to the land. You start hauling skulls and you’ll never convince folk you’re not cursed. Besides”—his mouth twitched—“I’ve no appetite for bison brains.”

  They laughed, tired but genuine. The sky had shifted toward evening now, the hard blue softened to something gentler. The fang of stone beside them glowed faintly in the slanting light, its white curve touched with gold. The meat on the rack glistened, slowly darkening at the edges as the first touch of heat and smoke did their work.

  They worked until dusk blurred the edges of things. By then, the bulk of the carcass had been transformed—meat into strips and chunks, fat into cooling cakes, bones cracked and split. The hide lay stretched, scraped as clean as they could manage with their knives, pegged at the corners with sharpened bone driven into the ground.

  “Tomorrow,” Maxwell said, nodding at it. “We work it more. Salt where we can spare it. Fold it much as we dare. For now, let the night tighten it a little.”

  Toby’s hands ached with a deep, thorough soreness that felt almost clean compared to the day’s fear. He rinsed them at the water skin, watching pink stream down into the dust, and sat back on his heels. The air had cooled enough that his sweat-damp shirt felt almost like a blessing.

  “You see?” Maxwell said quietly, dropping down beside him. “One beast, and we’ve food for days, maybe weeks; fat for cooking and leather; marrow; tools. Enough to keep four men and four horses moving through land that doesn’t care if they do.”

  Toby nodded, looking at the rack, the pot, the careful piles and bundles that had been nothing but a living thing a few hours ago. “Doesn’t feel much like hunting in the stories.”

  “That’s because stories skip the parts that make life possible,” Maxwell said. “They like the arrow flying and the beast falling. Not the hours after, with flies and knives and sore backs.”

  Zak groaned from where he lay sprawled on his bedroll, one arm flung over his eyes. “For the record,” he said, voice muffled, “if anyone ever tells a story about me, they’d better mention the sore back.”

  Reece snorted softly, adjusting one of the meat strips on the rack so it wouldn’t touch its neighbor. “I’ll engrave it on your stone myself. Also, aren’t you on first watch?”

  Zak cursed and got out of his bedroll.

  Maxwell’s eyes softened, just a fraction. “Living off the land isn’t about being noble,” he said, more to Toby than anyone else. “It’s about being honest. This is what it costs to be out here. Every meal is work. Every comfort is something you make with your own hands. You waste nothing, because out here there is nothing extra.”

  Toby let his gaze drift south, past the dwindling light, toward the horizon where the plains ran out of color and the sky began. Somewhere beyond that lay elves and battles and the reason they had left the safety of walls. Here, for the moment, there was only this—a circle of worn men under a strange stone, breathing in smoke and meat and dust.

  He thought of Brindle Hollow, of shallow graves and the sword he’d taken up because there was nothing else. He thought of fields that had taken years to coax into giving, of harvests lost to frost and blight. He thought of how easily this wild land grew its own richness, and how quickly it could swallow men who thought that meant it was merciful.

  He thought of Highmarsh’s hall after his first clash with the elves, of Kay’s voice carrying the weight of lost men, of Maxwell stepping forward when no one else dared. He remembered kneeling, not out of pride, but because someone had to go south and see what waited in the dark. He had chosen then—chosen duty over fear, chosen the road over comfort.

  “We won’t waste it,” he said quietly.

  Maxwell nodded once. “See that you don’t. The wild is watching. It may not forgive carelessness, but it has a habit of rewarding those who respect what they’re given.”

  The fire sank lower. The first stars pricked through the deepening blue above, sharp and cold and familiar in their own distant way. Reed-grass whispered beyond the camp, bending to the night wind.

  Under the fang of stone, among meat racks and cooling fat and the clean bones of their work, four men settled in for the dark—small, stubborn creatures who had earned themselves another few days in a world that owed them nothing at all.