Sometime around the third hour, wooden wheels.
Orin's hand moved once and everyone went sharp without a sound. They listened until the noise had enough shape to read: two carriages, four horses, a small group of people who had been tense for too long and were moving like it.
Leo stepped to the trail edge, visible enough not to startle them. He talked to the lead driver briefly. The others couldn't hear it.
When he came back his voice was very low. "Horses have been spooked since yesterday. Kept trying to pull off-route. The east fork — their usual path disappeared on them. Driver says they've felt watched the whole night." A pause. "He was shaking when he said it."
Orin looked at the second carriage. A young woman was holding back the curtain with one hand, staring out at the dark with the expression of someone trying to see what she already knows is there.
"Send them north," Orin said. "That route is clear."
Leo went back, spoke again, and the convoy moved. Wheels on stone, fading around the bend.
Silence came back.
Too much of it, too fast — like the forest had been holding its breath and was now exhaling.
It had barely been a minute before the scream.
No signal. They just moved, spreading as they ran, spreading into the positions they always spread into, no need to think about it.
Beyond the bend, the first carriage was in a ditch. Horses everywhere — one already free and gone. People scattered in the panic, one still down.
And standing beside the tilted carriage, hands resting on the broken wood, not growling, not moving — just standing there and looking at what it had made happen.
The calm was the worst thing about it. Not the size. The calm.
"Piscessa," Orin said.
The shot came a half-second later. Silver hit the halfwolf's arm and it made a sound — short, low, controlled, more like an acknowledgment than a response to pain. Blood dripped into the mud. It didn't move.
Then it lifted its head and started reading the air. Wind direction. Weight of footsteps. The heat and location of everything around it. Methodical, like it was doing math.
"It knew we were here before the shot," Leo said quietly.
"Yeah," Orin said.
The halfwolf took one step back. Then another. Then the mist had it and it was gone without making any sound a body that size should make.
Not running. Repositioning.
"Don't spread out," Orin said. "It wants gaps."
Piscessa came down from her branch quickly, rifle already up. "I've got the right flank."
"I don't like it when they don't react to getting shot," Geminio said, not quiet enough but not loud enough to matter. "It's unnatural."
"It's a Veilborn," Geminia said flatly. "Pain is just information to them."
They moved slower, tighter. Orin crouched and put two fingers to the ground. The earth was broken in a way that was recent.
"It's here," he said. "Close. And it knows we know."
Then the branch snapped.
Wrong direction. Behind them.
Piscessa had no time — it was already there, one hand closed around her throat from behind, lifting her slightly, walking her forward. Not squeezing to kill. Controlling. She fought and it didn't shift.
"Get it off—"
The twins were already moving. Geminio buried his blade in the halfwolf's shoulder from the right — the sound of it was ugly. Geminia hit the already-wounded thigh from the left, driving deep. Blood hit the ground.
The halfwolf staggered. Didn't let go.
Orin hit the hand — not to sever, just to cut the tendons enough to weaken the grip for a second, one second — and Piscessa used that second, folded, drove her elbow back, kicked out, and landed wrong but caught herself.
"Push it back — together—"
What came next was not a clean fight.
Karven Forest was tight and dark and muddy and the roots made every step a negotiation. There was no formation that held for more than a few seconds. There was only staying near enough to cover each other and trusting that cover was being given.
Leo drove at the halfwolf with his shield, not trying to hurt it, just trying to move it — force it out of the root-maze and into somewhere they had room. The halfwolf absorbed the hit on its already-torn shoulder, dug in, tried to push back. Leo had eighty pounds on most men and he put them all into his feet and didn't move.
Geminio attacked from angles that didn't make sense until they worked — under the arm, between the ribs, already rolling away before the claws came back. The halfwolf swiped at where he'd been and got air.
Geminia kept it from focusing. Her blade had the longer reach and she claimed space with it, wide sweeping arcs, making herself too large to dismiss. When the halfwolf turned toward Orin she was already at the thigh again, driving the same wound deeper, and it turned back.
Piscessa couldn't kill from this range, too many bodies in the way, but she kept redirecting — a shot at the left side pushed it right, a shot at the right pushed it left, she was the walls of a channel and it couldn't see far enough to account for it.
Orin moved through all of it. He didn't have a word for what he did in a fight — he'd never tried to find one. He was just where he needed to be, and then somewhere else, and it worked because he didn't think about it.
The halfwolf was good. Strong, smart, nowhere near panicking. It kicked Geminia so hard she hit a tree and slid down it, and came straight back up without fully stopping. It caught one of Orin's cuts on its damaged arm without flinching. It threw Piscessa when she came in too close — one controlled shove, not a strike — and she hit mud and was up before most people would have finished falling.
Leo watched it. That was the thing about Leo in a fight — he watched. He had been watching this one for close to ten minutes, cataloguing it, noticing the pattern: whenever it was pressured, it went up. Roots, rocks, high ground. It always wanted to be above.
When the halfwolf jumped for the large root at the trail's edge, Leo was already sideways. He didn't try to grab it. He just put his body in the one place where the halfwolf's momentum, transferred through the air, had nowhere useful to go. The redirect into the tree trunk was almost incidental.
The halfwolf's balance broke. For the first time in the fight, it was scrambling.
"Now," Orin said.
They didn't need more than that. Leo on the right with the shield, pinning. Geminio from behind, finding the gap he'd been looking for all fight. Geminia at the thigh, one more time. Piscessa putting a round into the neck from six feet away. Orin coming in from the front.
One cut.
The halfwolf went down.
Karven Forest went quiet and gradually, carefully, started to sound like itself again. Wind in the upper branches. Something small moving through the undergrowth. Water.
"Finally," Geminio said, bent over with his hands on his knees.
They stood in the mud, each of them holding their damages privately. Piscessa turned her wrist to check the cut there — long, not deep. Geminia pressed her side carefully with her fingers, breathing in — bruised, not broken, same verdict as last time and the time before that. Leo was rotating his shield arm slowly, working out the cramp.
Geminio looked around. "Where's my second blade."
"Tree, about twenty meters back," Geminia said.
"I'll get it."
"I'll get it. You're bleeding on your boot."
"It's a small amount of bleeding."
"Go sit down."
Orin sheathed his sword and looked back at the trail home. "We move. Stay tight until we're clear of the forest."
They walked. Behind them, Karven Forest closed back around the space they'd been standing in as if they had never been there.
The walk back was quiet in the way it always was after — not uncomfortable, just the quiet of people who had run out of words for now. Every few hundred meters someone checked behind them. Habit. It ran deeper than tiredness.
Geminio and Geminia walked with their shoulders touching on the narrow trail. Geminia was pressing her side occasionally; Geminio was pretending not to notice, because it wouldn't help to mention it.
The trees thinned. The mist retreated. The sky opened up grey and uncertain above them, the first pale light already sitting at the horizon like it hadn't decided yet.
The headquarters entrance was there between the rocks.
Orin lifted the iron hatch. They went down one by one, heads ducked, into the smell of metal and damp that they had stopped noticing years ago. The lamp they'd left burning was down to almost nothing, just a glow.
"I'm hungry," Geminio said, dropping into the nearest chair.
"All of us," Geminia said, sitting more carefully.
Leo set the hunt evidence on the table, loud, and then found his chair and his wall with the focused energy of a man who has earned the right to stop moving. Piscessa leaned her rifle in its place and sat on the floor with her back against the crate and stretched out, eyes closed.
Orin stood in the middle of the room for a moment. Looked at each of them — the cuts, the mud, the tiredness. Still here. All of them.
He sat down and started cleaning his sword.
The lamp guttered low. Water dripped through the tunnel into the floor drain, slow and even, same as always.
They rested. The night was done.