Toby’s head snapped up. Maxwell sat where he’d fallen, one knee bent, the other leg stretched out in front. His cloak had twisted under him; his left arm hung at a wrong angle, elbow tight to his side, forearm held protectively with his right hand. His face was paler than Toby liked, mouth compressed against some pain he wouldn’t name.

  “I’m all right,” Maxwell said as they hurried over. “Mostly. Arm’s broken.”

  “Ser—” Reece began.

  Maxwell cut him off with a small jerk of his chin. “I’ve had worse,” he said. “We’ll set it, splint it, and I’ll complain until it heals crooked.” He glanced toward the distant fang. “Bones left over from the bison will do. Good and long. Piper and I have bounced harder.”

  Piper stood a little way off, sides heaving, sweat streaked with mud, but upright. At his master’s name, he snorted and shook his head, as if in agreement or protest. Toby and Reece got on either side of Maxwell, careful of the damaged arm.

  “Easy,” Maxwell said as they lifted. “I can walk. I’m hurt, not glass.”

  “Humor us,” Toby said, feeling his own hands shake now that the danger had shifted from lightning to aftermath.

  Between the three of them they managed to get Maxwell back to Piper, then up into the saddle. The old knight’s face tightened as they jostled the arm, but he made no sound beyond a hissed breath.

  “Strap that beast,” he said once he was settled. “No sense wasting it.”

  The elk’s body still smoked faintly at the wounds. Up close, the smell of singed fur and ozone was stronger, almost metallic. The antlers—what was left of them—still hummed with leftover charge. Zak stepped toward the severed tine Toby’s elven blade had taken off, hand reaching down.

  “We should— ahhh!”

  He jerked back, shaking his fingers, eyes wide. “Saints’ teeth!”

  “Don’t grab it bare-handed,” Maxwell said sharply. “Get cloth around it first unless you like cooking yourself. The charge will fade, but not for a while.”

  Zak sucked on his fingertips, glaring at the antler as if it had insulted his mother. “You could have mentioned that sooner.”

  “I was busy being struck by lightning,” Maxwell said. “Wrap it. Storm horns will sell for a lot if we get it back to Highmarsh. No point leaving coin in the mud.”

  Between grumbles, Zak found a spare bit of cloak-lining and used it to lift the broken antler section, wrapping it snug before lashing it to his saddle. Reece and Toby worked the elk’s carcass into a rough drag—ropes around the hind legs, looped to Oak, Daisy, and Flint so the weight was shared.

  “Lucky it was only a young one,” Maxwell said as he watched them work, voice gone thoughtful. “A full-grown storm elk would’ve put us in the afterlife before we got our blades out.”

  Zak swung himself back onto Flint with more caution than usual. “Speaking as someone whose hair just tried to take flight,” he said, “I’m inclined to agree.”

  Toby wiped a smear of blood—his, or the elk’s, he wasn’t sure—from his cheek with the back of his wrist. The air still tasted faintly of metal, but the crackle had faded to something that felt almost like ordinary weather. He glanced once more at the dead bull, at the arrow in its chest, the deep cut on its neck, the shattered line where the elven blade had bitten through antler and bone. Then he clicked his tongue, and Oak leaned into the weight of the drag. Behind them, the steaming plains began to swallow the signs of battle as they turned back toward the fang, their camp.

  The fang came back into view like a promise and a threat. By the time they reached camp, Maxwell’s jaw was a hard line, sweat and rain streaking the dirt on his face. Reece was off Daisy almost before she’d stopped moving.

  “Ser,” he said quietly.

  “I know how,” Maxwell grunted, but he let them help. Toby steadied Piper’s bridle while Reece took the old knight’s good arm and guided him to the ground. The bad one he kept tight against his ribs.

  “Bone first,” Maxwell said through his teeth, nodding toward the bison remains. “Long, straight. Two if you can find them. And strips—hide or cloth, I don’t care.”

  Reece went at once. Toby and Zak turned to the elk. Up close, it looked big. The fur along its ribs was dark with blood and storm-scorch; the wound in its neck still seeped sluggishly. The smell was raw and metallic, with a faint bitter tang of something that might have been leftover lightning.

  “Right,” Zak said, drawing his knife with a flourish that didn’t quite cover the way his hands still shook. “Let’s carve the angry weather out of dinner.”

  They rolled the bull onto its side with effort—even dead, it seemed to resist being moved. Toby set his blade to the hide, cutting a long line from hind leg toward the belly. The knife bit, then jumped in his grip as a snap of blue kissed the metal. Toby swore under his breath and shook out his hand.

  “Still has some teeth,” he muttered.

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  “Careful,” Maxwell called from where he sat against a pack, cradling his arm. Reece knelt beside him with two long, cleaned bison bones and a pile of torn cloth. “Last thing I need is one of you sticking yourself instead of the meat.”

  Zak snorted. “I’m more worried about biting my tongue off if it zaps me while I’m eating it.”

  Maxwell’s mouth curved, just a fraction. “Once it’s cooked, it won’t,” he said. “Heat chases out the worst of the storm. You’ll just get the flavor.”

  “Lucky me,” Zak said. “Roast thunder.”

  They worked. Now and then, as they cut through certain muscles or knotted lines along the spine, a soft crackle jumped from knife to fingers. It wasn’t like the bolts on the field, more like the sting when he’d touched a charged bit of wool in winter, but it kept them respectful.

  They peeled the hide back in heavy, wet sheets, steam rising where the sun struck. The elk’s flesh was a darker red than the bison’s had been, the muscles cleaner, tighter. Toby focused on the work—on joints, on clean cuts, on nothing that looked like lightning.

  By the time they’d freed the hide, Reece had Maxwell’s arm bound. Two bison bones ran along either side of the forearm, held snug with strips of cloth and a few thin leather thongs. The hand sat at that halfway angle Maxwell had insisted on, fingers curled but not tight.

  “Good enough,” the old knight said when Reece tied the last knot. “I’ve had worse from actual surgeons.”

  “You’re not moving it,” Reece said. “At all.”

  “I’ll move it when it needs moving,” Maxwell said. Which, in his language, meant he’d move everything except the bone he’d admitted was broken.

  Toby and Zak dragged the elk hide over to the fang and dropped it beside the stretched bison skin. The older hide still glistened, rain-soaked and half-treated. The new one slapped down wet and heavy, slightly larger than half the bison’s, but completed with less than half the skill.

  Maxwell eyed them both. “I’ll teach one of you the rest of the tanning when we’re not racing rot,” he said. “For now, meat first. If hornets smell this from a mile off, we don’t want to be their table again.”

  Zak grimaced. “Agreed. I prefer my food not trying to eat me back.”

  Starting a fire took longer than Toby liked. Even with the sun baking down, everything felt damp to the core. The few remaining kindling they’d stored beside the fang was soaked and sulky about catching. Zak coaxed it with more curses than breath, flint and steel striking until his fingers were blackened. At last, a spark took. Smoke rolled up in thick, reluctant curls before any flame decided to join it.

  “It’s more smoke than fire,” Zak coughed, waving a hand in front of his face.

  “Smoke’s fine,” Maxwell said. “We’re drying, not roasting a feast for the King.”

  They rigged the old rack first—the one they’d used for the bison—tightening lines that had loosened in the storm. Thin long strips of elk meat went up in neat rows, hanging like dark flags from the crossed poles, smoke curling around them.

  “Second rack,” Maxwell said, nodding toward the pile of elk bones Toby had set aside. “We need more space if we don’t want half of that wasting.”

  Toby wiped his knife on the grass and set to work. The elk’s longer leg bones made good uprights; shorter ribs served as cross pieces when lashed together with strips of hide and spare leather. It felt wrong, using bone for anything but burial or broth, but out here everything had to do more than two jobs. By the time he was done, a second, bone-framed rack squatted over the thinnest fingers of smoke, hung with more sliced meat. It looked like something that could’ve wandered out of a campfire story—a little grotesque, a little clever.

  “Good,” Maxwell said. “Ugly works just as well as pretty. Better, usually. Pretty makes men careless.”

  The haunches they kept for immediate eating. Zak and Reece stripped off all the meat from one hind-leg into their cooking pot, added water, and their remaining salt and let it boil into a stew. The other, balanced half on the pot, half bone contraption sticking into the ground, placed over the fire, searing the meat. Fat dripped and hissed in the coals, the smell of it making Toby’s stomach complain out loud.

  “Careful,” Maxwell warned when Zak leaned too close. “That leg still might kiss you back if there’s a charge tucked in there.”

  Zak eyed the roasting elk suspiciously. “If it zaps me while I’m feeding it to myself,” he said, “I’m haunting this place.”

  “Get in line,” Reece said. “You’re not the only one the fang’s tried to kill.”

  “Saints,” Zak said. “Imagine that. A haunted rock and ghosts that complain about cramped tents.”

  “Better than quiet ghosts,” Maxwell said. “Quiet means you never know where they are.”

  The sun slid lower while they worked, leaving fleeting colors across the sky with more determination than heat. They turned, basted with what little fat they could scrape, checked the racks, shifted lines to keep the best of the smoke. The air filled with the smells of drying hide and cooking meat.

  By the time full dark came, they’d eaten until their bellies ached. Not feast-full, there was too much caution in Maxwell’s eyes for that, but enough that the constant hollow of the last few days finally quieted. They took longer watches that night so Maxwell could get proper rest. Their bellies were warm and their limbs heavy. The storm elk hung on the racks in long, dark curtains, the last of the day’s sun and the first of the night’s chill working with the smoke to keep rot at bay.

  Morning came clearer. No rain. No sign of hornets. A thin veil of cloud and the steady drip of the last of the water from the fang’s edges. The smoke from their small fire rose in a straight, pale column. Toby stood with a strip of half-dried meat in his hand and looked up. The fang towered over them, white and impossible, its surface clean from the storm and the days of staring. The stone face showed them the same indifference it always had.

  Beside him, Reece chewed quietly, eyes on the same height. Zak rolled his shoulders, making a show of groaning like an old man, but his gaze kept drifting back to the impossible wall. Maxwell watched them all, his broken arm bound tight to his chest, good hand wrapped around his cup.

  “Well?” Maxwell said.

  Toby swallowed his mouthful, feeling it sit solid in his stomach. The storm elk’s strength, the storm’s memory, the hunger that had been fear and was now something steadier—all of it settled together. He wiped his fingers on his tunic and stepped forward.

  “Hands only,” he said, echoing Maxwell’s earlier words.

  Reece huffed a breath that might almost have been a laugh. Zak groaned, but he moved up beside them, flexing his scraped palms. The three younger knights squared themselves to the stone.

  Training, Toby thought, was back on the table.