Page 62 of Moonless

“We told nobody.”

“Rauk. Two boys come limping home with mud in their ears and a sack of fish missing. They knew.”

It gets a chuckle out of me, and I look down at the fish in my hand.

“Yes. They probably knew.”

I thought we’d got away with that.

Jouni kept stopping to pick grit out of his knee, and I’d stop too and lean on him until he shoved me off. We took so long getting home that we were hungry again.

I shift the sack to my other hand for no reason.

Kestria walks beside me with her face tipped toward mine. Her lips part, and I wait for her to ask where he is now. I don’t know what I’ll tell her.

She looks down at the path instead. Good.

We keep walking. Where the path narrows she drops in behind me, close enough that I can hear the arrows knocking against the bow, and I hold a branch back for her and let it go once she’s through.

By the time we reach the bare stone, the sun’s low. Kestria stops where the upper path curves around the rock. She’s only eyeing a patch of plants beside it, and then she follows me to the entrance.

I move the slab and stand it against the wall, and I leave it there. There’s fish to hang yet. That’s the reason. A few days ago I shut it behind me to fetch an armful of pine.

She carries the bow through the bends and lays it beside her pallet while I open the sack at the hearth.

I tip the fish out onto the big flat stone and slit the first belly with a claw, scraping the guts into a bowl, and Kestria sits down across from me, rubbing her fingertips.

The tail of linen’s still hanging loose above her collar, and that shoulder’s been holding a bow up all day.

Hitto.

I keep my hands on the fish.

She’s looking at the belly I’ve just opened. “Mel would have words about that.”

I check the cut. “It’s open.”

“I can see that. So could half the mountain.”

I take the next fish and go shallower. Not because she said. She leans in to watch.

Her first catch comes out last, and the arrow hole sits just behind the gills, clean through, first fish she’s ever shot. I take off its head and set it on a small flat stone beside my knee, clear of the bowl with the guts.

Two of the fish are for the fire. The rest I split and cut into strips, and Kestria comes as far as the mouth with me when I carry them out and stretches her legs while I hang them on the rack under the overhang.

The fish are hung. That was my reason for leaving the slab open, and now I haven’t got one. I come back in past it, leave it standing against the wall, and rake out coals for supper.

Kestria’s moved to the nearer hearthstone. She’s still rubbing the string marks on her fingers when I thread the first fish onto a wooden spit and set it over the heat.

Her hands go still. “Farther back.”

I move the spit away from the nearest flame.

“Farther than that.” She points at the edge of the hearth.

I leave it where it is. “It has to cook.”

“All the way through would be nice.”