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Ash: The Last Hunt
ASH: THE LAST HUNT
Author's Edition | A Preview from Chapter One: The Trap
She came to the mountains to hunt a dragon. What she witnessed would change everything.
The dragon sign found her before noon.
It was a pine first, a big one, raked high up the trunk where no bear could reach without learning to fly. Four furrows, deep, oozing sap that had dried in long tears. Below it, caught on a whorl of dead branches, hung a tuft of sheep's wool, greasy and weathered. And past the pine, scored across a slab of bare limestone, ran a drag mark, something heavy hauled over stone, something that had scraped the rock white. Mara crouched over it and read it the way her father had taught her to read everything: slowly, twice, once for what it was and once for what it meant. It was a sheep carcass, dragged. It had been dragged up. Whatever carried it had wanted the high country, and it had not cared who saw.
She checked the wind out of habit, west and a little north, and pulled the map from her oilskin wrap.
It was a hand copy of her father's old chart of the northern valleys, inked in two hands. His, small and cramped and certain, marked the ranges where dragons had laired thirty years gone, with notes in the margins about thermals and den sites and which villages paid bounties and which ones hung hunters who made trouble. Hers, larger and less certain, updated what the last three seasons had changed. In the upper valley, under the gray peak the map called the Carrow, she had inked a small circle. A stock killer, the notices in Toll's End said. An adult male, red as old bronze, gone bold. Eleven sheep, a herder, and a trapper who had gone up with iron and come down in pieces. The valley guilds had posted a warrant. Mara was not guild, and the warrant was not hers to take, and she had come north anyway. She had tracked, and she could shoot, and she could fight, and her father's voice lived in the back of her skull with its favorite warning: three skills is not four, girl, and the fourth is the one that kills you. She knew what the fourth was. She had never stood beside a living dragon. She had come north to fix that, and if a dragon died on the Carrow and she was standing there when it happened, someone in a guild hall would have to learn to say her name.
She crossed the shale slope below the ridge an hour later and nearly left the fourth skill bleeding out on the stones.
The shale went without warning, a whole skin of it sliding under her boots, and there was no time for flint-and-steel solutions. Mara gathered and shoved, a pulse of force driven down through her soles into the hill, her father's battlefield trick, meant to stagger a charging man, used here to argue with a mountain. The slide stopped. She stood trembling on the incline with her heart kicking and her hands gone pins and needles, and she waited until the tremor passed before she finished the crossing one careful step at a time. The magic cost. That was the first thing and the last thing her father had taught her about it. Everything cost.
She found the hunting party's sign on the far side of the ridge, and it was good sign, the kind that told her more than the men who left it probably meant to.
Boot prints, eight or nine men, heavy, the heels of men who set loads down and lifted them often. Iron drag marks where chain had been hauled and then, farther on, where it hadn't, which meant they had rigged a sledge for the steep ground and packed the iron past the bad stretch. A fiber of cord caught on a thornbush, waxed and resin-treated, the expensive kind, made to resist heat. And under everything, faint on the moving air, a flat bitter smell, crushed mineral and something herbal gone wrong. Scent-masking oil. Mara had read of it. Hunters who could afford it bathed their gear and their bodies in the stuff so that a dragon's nose, which was better than a dog's, read them as bare rock and weather. She stood there a while and put it together, and she was honest enough later to admit that she put most of it together right. A professional crew, guild grade, well supplied, working under the valley warrant. They had scouted the Carrow male and picked their ground, and the ground they had picked was the pinch, the narrow draw below the eastern cliff where the thermals came down off the peak at dusk. Half a day ahead of her. Sensible men doing sensible work. She assumed sensible men did sensible things, all the way down the line, and it did not occur to her until much later that she had assumed the one thing she had no evidence for at all.
She followed them anyway. If they killed the Carrow dragon, she wanted to see it done by men who knew how. If they died, she wanted to see that too, because her father had always said you learned more from other men's funerals than your own.
The call stopped her before she reached the cliff.
It rolled down out of the high valley and through her chest and into the roots of her teeth, and it was nothing like the shriek she had imagined all those years listening to tavern songs. It was low. It was long. It had a structure to it, almost, a rise and a fall and a rise, like something calling across a great distance in the expectation of an answer. Every bird in the valley came up out of the trees at once, a black roaring cloud of them, and when they settled the whole valley was silent in a way that had a texture, the way a room is silent when everyone in it is holding still.
Mara went up the last slope on her belly and looked down into the draw, and there they were.
Nine men, spread through the pinch like they had grown there. At the center squatted a torsion frame, a squat ugly engine of wood and twisted rope, cocked and ready, and beside it lay coiled a length of braided iron cable that gleamed dully in the afternoon light, and beside that, laid out in a careful row, three iron weights the size of melons, each one sprouting barbed hooks. Below the draw, staked in the open where the thermals would carry its smell up the valley, lay a slaughtered ox. The men did not talk. The men did not fidget. Mara had hunted enough to know discipline when she saw it, and her stomach tightened with something that was not fear and not excitement and was some of both.
They were waiting for a dragon, and from the feel of the valley, the dragon was already on its way.
From her belly on the rock, Mara sorted the crew the way her father had taught her to sort any group of armed strangers. Find the one the others check before they move.
It took her less than a minute. A lean man, gray threading a short brown beard, standing at the torsion frame with one hand resting on the release housing, not gripping it, just resting there, the way a man rests a hand on a dog's head. He wasn't the biggest. He wasn't the loudest. But twice Mara watched other men glance at him before they shifted position, and when he lifted two fingers a rope crew adjusted an anchor line without a word spoken. That would be the warrant holder. That would be Rafe, if the notices in Toll's End had the name right.
The big man beside him was another matter. Red faced, shoulders like a plow horse, and he could not leave the release lever alone. He touched it, took his hand away, touched it again. Nervous men touched things. Mara had seen it before. Nervous men with their hands on releases were how accidents got names.
"The wind's wrong," the big man said, low but not low enough. His voice carried up the slope the way anxious voices do. "It's going to come down the east face and it'll smell the oil off us anyway, oil or no oil."
"It'll come down the valley," the lean man said. "It always comes down the valley. Hold your water, Jory."
"You've said that for three days."
"And for three days I've been right." There was no heat in it. That, more than anything, told Mara who was in charge.
The dragon came out of the sky an hour before dusk, and Mara forgot, for a moment, everything her father had ever taught her.
It came off the high thermals with its wings spread wide, too wide, wings that belonged on something half again its size, and it rode the sinking air down the valley in long lazy circles. Even at distance she could see that its proportions were wrong, unfinished, like a hound pup's. Its feet dangled huge beneath it. Its scales were the gray of banked ash along the back, paling to cream on the belly plates, and the evening light slid along them as it turned. It was beautiful. She had not expected beautiful. She had expected a weapon with wings, something out of the songs, all menace and fire, and instead she watched this ungainly, enormous young thing swing around the valley with its whole attention fixed on the dead ox below, cautious and hungry and curious all at once, and something in her chest did a slow, strange roll.
"Hold." Rafe's voice, quiet and flat. "That's not him."
"It's a dragon." Jory's hand was on the lever.
"It's a juvenile. It's gray. The Carrow male is red as a barn roof and half again that size, with a scarred left wing, and I am not going to waste a set cast and three hundredweight of guild iron on a whelp." Rafe didn't raise his voice. He didn't have to. "We're not paid for it, it's done nothing to anyone, and a screaming juvenile will put every adult dragon in three valleys on edge for a month. Hold the cast."
"It'll spook the bait. It'll foul the draw. Then where's your red?"
"Then we come back tomorrow. Hold the cast."
The young dragon circled one more time, and then it did something Mara would think about for years afterward without ever being able to explain it. It checked the sky, all of it, a long careful sweep from horizon to horizon, the way a swimmer checks the water. Then it folded those too-wide wings and dropped toward the ox, and it landed badly, skidding, wings half out for balance, big feet tearing up the turf, and it froze there over the carcass with its head up and its nostrils working.
The wind turned. Mara felt it on the back of her neck, and she saw the exact moment the dragon felt it too, its head snapping around toward the draw, wings cracking open like sails in a squall. It launched. It was fast, faster than anything that size should have been, and for one instant, coming up off the ground with its wings spread from one side of the draw to the other, it was not a gangling young thing at all. It was huge.
Jory slammed the release.
The story continues in ASH: The Last Hunt, Author's Edition.
What happens when the hunters catch the wrong dragon?
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