Maxwell, who’d stayed near the top of the soft slope to keep an eye on camp, stiffened. His head turned toward the fang.

  The hum grew.

  It wasn’t the heavy, rolling thunder of bison hooves this time. It was higher, thinner. A buzzing that set the hairs on Toby’s arms on edge.

  Maxwell’s voice cut across the plains. “Up. Now.”

  Toby was on his feet before he realized he’d moved.

  What is it? Before he could shout it back, Maxwell answered his thoughts.

  “Hornets,” Maxwell said. He was already untying Piper, hands moving with the same efficient speed he used for battle. “A whole swarm.”

  The three younger knights looked at each other, concern and confusion written over their faces. Maxwell was among them in moments.

  “From where?” Zak asked.

  “Probably a hole,” Maxwell said. “They’ve smelled the carcass we left.” He jerked his chin toward the open, sun-washed ground beyond the creek. “Bring the horses. We give them space.”

  They scrambled. Toby grabbed Oak’s reins, leading him up and over the lip of the shallow bank. Reece coaxed Daisy away from the water; Zak yanked on Flint’s lead until the gray gelding decided that, whatever was happening, it wasn’t worth arguing about.

  As they crested the slight rise, Toby saw them. The air above the remains of the bison had turned to gold and black.

  A seething cloud of insects boiled over the torn earth and exposed flesh—thousands of them, each no bigger than his little finger, bodies banded yellow and dark, wings a blur. They poured over the gut pile and the scraps around it, a living smoke that shifted and thickened and pulsed with a mindless, hungry purpose.

  “Saints,” Zak breathed. “That many?”

  “Hungry summer,” Maxwell said. “We left them enough to sing about.” He nudged Piper away from the worst of the buzz, then further still. “Into the sun. They like shade. We’ll go where they’re less likely to follow.”

  Toby followed, keeping Oak close. The heat felt worse out there, away from the stone’s shadow, but the air was at least clear. A few stray hornets wandered their way, circling once or twice on the wind before deciding there were richer pickings at the carcass and veering off.

  “Are we safe here?” Reece asked, glancing back.

  “Should be,” Maxwell said. “As long as you don’t go waving your arms like a windmill and tempting them.”

  Zak folded his arms pointedly. “I’ll be still as a saint.”

  “Saints move more than you do,” Maxwell said. “We’ll give them time to work. They’ll leave less for the larger scavengers. Less stink for us when we go back.”

  They stood or sat where they could—on tufts of dry grass, on the bare-packed earth where some ancient pool had once dried away. The sun beat down, relentless. Sweat soon traced new paths on dust-smudged faces. The hum at the carcass rose and fell like a strange kind of tide.

  “Didn’t think insects could sound… angry,” Reece said quietly.

  “They guard what they find,” Maxwell replied. “Same as we do. Only their armor’s hunger and numbers. You don’t scare a swarm by drawing steel.”

  “How many stings would it take to…” Zak trailed off, uncomfortable with the shape of the question.

  “Enough,” Maxwell said. “In plate or mail, you can’t swat them properly. They go for the gaps—neck, wrists, inside the helm. You panic, you breathe wrong, you fall, they keep coming.” He picked a piece of dried fat from under a fingernail and flicked it away. “You fear wolves and swords. You’d do better to fear anything that comes in hundreds and doesn’t care if you’re brave.”

  Toby watched the cloud eat. From this distance, the details blurred, but he could imagine it well enough—mandibles tearing, tongues lapping at any scrap of moisture, legs crawling over legs. The bison, which had seemed so impossibly vast and solid when it fell, now looked less like a beast and more like a table laid for the small and merciless.

  “How long will they take?” he asked.

  “As long as there’s something sweet left,” Maxwell said. “An hour. Two. Lucky—I already stored the first lot of smoked meat.” Maxwell glanced toward the rack where they were drying another batch of meat. It too was now covered in yellow and black. “The rest belongs to them, to beetles, to birds, to whatever else gets there in time. The wild hates waste. It just has a different way of tidying than we do.”

  Zak made a face. “That’s one way of putting it.”

  They waited. The buzz slowly thinned. The cloud drew tighter to the ground, more focused, then began to fray at the edges as insects, sated or carrying food, drifted away toward whatever hidden holes they called home. A few small dark shapes circled above—birds of some kind, gliding on the heat, waiting their turn.

  When Maxwell finally said, “Come on,” the sun had shifted enough to throw new angles of light across the plain. The worst of the noise had faded to a background hiss.

  They approached cautiously. Even at a distance, the smell had changed—less fresh blood, more iron and rot and exposed gut. Flies had joined after the hornets in earnest, a second layer of motion that thickened the air.

  The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  What remained of the bison made Toby’s stomach tighten.

  Most of the soft parts nearest the surface were gone. Strands of flesh had been chewed away to ragged fringes. The entrails abandoned in the grass had collapsed in on themselves, its surface alive with crawling things, yellow and black and shining green. The hide that still lay attached to the lower side of the carcass was pocked where insects had gone for the last traces of fat.

  Bones showed through in places—white and slick where teeth and mandibles had cleaned them, still smeared with drying red in others. One horn lay half-buried in trampled grass where something had tugged at it for leverage.

  Reece swallowed hard. “They did that in an hour?”

  “Just the start,” Maxwell said. “By tomorrow, there’ll be less. Give it a week and you’ll have weathered bone and a memory. Give it a season and even that will be gone. That’s how the world makes room for the next thing.”

  Zak rubbed at his forearm as if he could feel phantom stings. “And if we’d been standing in the way?”

  “You’d be on the ground, praying your friends were smarter than you,” Maxwell said. His tone stayed matter-of-fact. “Or you’d be a cautionary tale about men who stand too close to what isn’t theirs.”

  He let that hang for a moment, then tugged his attention back to the practical.

  “Keep wide,” he said. “Don’t swing your arms. We’ve already taken what we need. The rest belongs to them now. Respect that, and they’ll forget you exist.” He glanced at the three younger knights. “Forget that, and the last thing you see will be a sky full of yellow.”

  Toby looked once more at the stripped-down carcass, at the clean patches of bone and the frenzy of small life still working at what remained. The bison had fed them. Now it was feeding everything else.

  Waste nothing, Maxwell had said. Out here, that wasn’t advice. It was law.

  Toby flexed his sore hands, feeling again the ghost of the stone’s grip and the ache of his own failed and almost-made climbs. The world, he was starting to realize, had its own way of deciding who deserved to stay on its surface and who got turned back into fuel. When he compared this to Brindle Hollow, where his life had all been growing enough food to live, this was an entirely different skill set.

  Tomorrow, he promised himself, he’d reach higher. If the wild was watching, he meant to give it something worth remembering.

  The last of the hornets drifted off as the sky changed. One moment, the plains were all hard blue and white glare. The next, gray rolled in from the west as if someone had dragged a curtain across the sun. Low-bellied clouds knotted themselves together above the fang, thick and fast, swallowing the horizon.

  Toby glanced up, squinting. “That wasn’t there a moment ago,” he said.

  Maxwell followed his gaze. “Storm line,” he said. “Big one.”

  The air cooled in that strange, breathless way that meant the heat hadn’t gone so much as hidden. The wind picked up, sharp and restless, tugging at cloaks and snapping loose strands of hair against cheeks. Out beyond the camp, the stripped carcass and scattered bones of the bison gleamed faintly, fat and exposed bone catching what light was left.

  The first drop hit Toby’s nose, heavy and cold. It left a clean track through the dust. The second landed on his hand. The third and the fourth came together. By the time they reached the tent, the sky was falling. Toby had known rain all his life. Brindle Hollow lived and died by it. He’d seen storms flatten wheat and flood fields, had watched muddy water race through shallow ditches like it was eager to be a river.

  This rain proved to him yet again that the world changes with location. It poured down like a giant bucket was tipped over. Each drop landed with force, drumming against the canvas, the stone, the packed earth, turning dust to mud in breaths. The sound swallowed everything until the world shrank to water on cloth and the dull, steady roar of it pounding the plains.

  No wonder the little creeks cut their beds so deep, he thought, listening to the distant rush where their trickle had been. With this kind of hammering, the land barely had a chance to remember being dry.

  They’d staked the tent higher up the slight rise beside the fang, more out of habit than expectation. Maxwell had beaten it into them: Never sleep where water once lived. Now, as rivulets formed and ran in sudden, determined lines through the grass, Toby felt a brief, quiet gratitude for that stubbornness.

  Water poured off the canvas in thick ropes, splashing into shallow channels they hadn’t even seen when they’d pitched it. Inside, the world was dim and cramped and blessedly dry—for the moment.

  They sat cross-legged or hunched where they could, knees knocking, shoulders brushing. The tent smelled of damp cloth, old sweat, leather, and a hint of smoke clinging to their clothes. Every so often, a gust of wind would slam into the side and make the whole thing shudder, the ropes creaking in protest. Between gusts, the rain sounded almost like applause.

  “Nature’s decided we needed humbling,” Zak said over the noise. “First hornets, now this. I feel harassed.”

  Maxwell, who’d wedged himself near the entrance where he could lift the flap if he had to, snorted. He passed around strips of smoked meat from a waxed cloth bundle, the rich, salty smell cutting through damp canvas. “The wild doesn’t harass you,” he said. “It reminds you you’re small.”

  Zak took a strip anyway. “Well it’s doing an excellent job.”

  Reece tore his piece in half and tossed one end to Toby. “It’s your fault,” he told Zak, raising his voice over a particularly heavy drum of rain. “You’re the one who said you wanted something interesting to happen.”

  “I said ‘anything but more climbing,’” Zak protested. “This is not what I meant.”

  “You still asked,” Reece said. “The saints must’ve heard you. This is what you get.”

  Toby chewed, listening to the water pound the earth just beyond the thin layer of canvas. “You both asked,” he said. “You spent half the morning complaining the plains were boring.”

  Zak aimed a wounded look at him. “I asked for a tavern, not a washing.”

  “Words don’t vanish just because you forget them,” Maxwell said. He spoke calmly, as if they were in the yard discussing footwork instead of in a tent being hammered by the sky. “If the saints had their way, every word would carry weight.”

  Zak squinted at the roof as if he could see through it. “I’ve seen a saint with weight,” he said. “He nearly broke the altar when he knelt.”

  Reece snorted. “Priests don’t count.”

  “Tell that to the altar,” Zak said.

  The tent shook again. A trickle of water found a seam and dripped once onto Toby’s sleeve before Maxwell reached up with a calloused thumb and pressed the canvas from behind, reshaping the flow so it ran off instead of through.

  They chewed in companionable misery for a few moments—the kind of shared discomfort that didn’t need words. Outside, the world was all motion. Inside, four men and their gear sat in a little island of forced stillness.

  Toby glanced at Zak’s hands. The older lad had pulled something from his belt pouch—a small cloth roll, tied off with a strip of leather. With nowhere else to look but at each other, the movement was obvious.

  “What’s that?” Toby asked.