Keandra is staring at me.
Good. She is alive enough to stare.
“Back!” I shout at her.
She moves this time. Not far, but enough. Enough for Oshara to catch her arm and drag her properly into the women’s knot where she should have been from the start.
The remaining pack begins to break under the pressure now that more warriors have closed the line. One predator takes a spear through the ribs. Another vanishes into the tall grass only to die three bounds later with an arrow in its side. The last two circle too far out, snarling, then bolt when I and my warriors advance.
No one chases beyond reason. That is how men die.
The basin goes suddenly loud in the aftermath. Women breathing hard. One child crying from somewhere farther back, where he had no business being near the gathering patch. A guard swearing through blood where his forearm has been raked open. Another woman kneeling beside someone whose ankle turned badly in the scramble. The stream still running through it all, bright and indifferent over the stones.
I hear none of it clearly. I am already crossing to Keandra.
Oshara has one grip on her arm, but releases it the second I reach them. Smart. The older woman says nothing. Her face is grim, her own knife bloodied. She does not waste time telling me what I can already see.
Keandra is upright. Breathing too fast. Not bleeding, not that I can scent immediately.
I grab her first by the shoulders, hard enough to make sure she is real, then check lower with brutal efficiency. Arms. Sides. Throat. Legs. Looking for blood. Bite. Tear. Any sign that one of the beasts touched her before I got there.
She flinches under the force of the check.
Good. Flinching means alive.
“Are you hurt?”
The words come out rough, barely controlled.
Her eyes are huge. “No.”
I check again anyway. No blood. No torn flesh. No bite scent. Only fear. Hers. The pack’s. Mine.
Rage comes next. At the fact that she had been within one leap of those things. At myself for letting her out of my sight for one hour of gathering because the horde cannot live if it wraps every female in walls, and yet all I want at this exact moment is walls, guards, and a camp where nothing with teeth can breathe in her direction.
My thumb finds the edge of her jaw before I realize what I am doing.
She is trembling. Not dramatically. Deep. Hard. The kind of trembling that starts after the body understands it survived.
I lower my hand from her face and turn to the nearest warriors. “Sweep the perimeter. Two lengths out. Then back. No stragglers left breathing near this ground.”
They move at once.
I turn back to Oshara. “Take the women to camp.”
Oshara’s gaze flicks over me, over Keandra, over the dead predators in the grass. “The baskets—”
“Leave them.”
That is enough. No one argues with my tone now. The women begin gathering the injured, the children, the tools that matter more than roots. One or two try to retrieve baskets anyway until Oshara snaps something in Tigris that sends them moving faster.
Keandra still has not stopped shaking.
I take the short gathering blade from her hand. Her fingers resist for one heartbeat before releasing. They had locked around the handle hard enough to whiten the knuckles. She looks down at the blade as if surprised to find it still there.
“You should have stayed in the line,” I say.
The words come out harsher than I intended.
