Chapter 2: The Stranger
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The seasons turned.
I learned to walk.
Then run.
Then climb.
My body grew, but slowly.
I was small for my age.
The other children my height were two years younger.
They didn't know what to make of me.
I didn't care what they made of me.
I had other things to do.
---
Jian was four years old when he started training in earnest.
He woke before dawn each morning, while the settlement was still dark and the guards were fighting sleep on the watch posts.
He ran the perimeter of the valley—a mile loop that left grown men winded.
He ran it twice.
He climbed the rock face behind the settlement, the one the older boys used to prove their courage.
He fell more times than he could count.
Each fall taught him something.
How to grip.
How to balance.
How to read the stone.
He threw stones at a dead tree until his arm went numb.
Then he switched arms and threw with the other.
The soldier in him knew this body was a weapon.
Weapons needed forging.
---
The hunters left at dawn.
I watched them from the edge of the settlement.
Seven men.
Spears of ash wood, points of flint.
Good enough for deer.
Not good enough for what was coming.
Stands Tall led them.
He was the war chief, though there hadn't been a war in his lifetime.
Big man.
Broad shoulders.
A scar across his jaw from a bear that almost killed him when he was young.
He saw me watching.
"Boy," he said.
"You're always there. Always watching."
I said nothing.
He grunted.
"Come. You can carry the water."
I followed.
---
It was the first time Jian had been allowed to join the hunters.
He was four years old.
Too young to hunt.
Too young to do anything but watch and carry.
But Stands Tall was curious about the strange child who never cried, who spoke like a grown man, who watched everything with eyes that seemed older than his face.
The hunt was for deer.
The men spread out through the forest, making noise, hoping to drive the animals toward the river where the best hunters waited with spears.
Jian watched from a ridge above.
He saw everything.
The wind was wrong.
It was coming from the east, carrying their scent directly into the forest.
The deer would smell them long before they got close.
He said nothing.
The deer bolted.
The men went home empty-handed.
---
We walked back in silence.
Stands Tall was angry.
I could see it in the way he gripped his spear.
The other men were quiet.
At the settlement, the women asked what happened.
Stands Tall shrugged.
"The deer were not there."
I sat by the fire.
I said nothing.
But I was thinking.
---
He started going to Gathers Roots after that.
The old healer had been watching him since he saved Tall Oak's life.
She saw something in him.
Something she didn't understand.
But she was old enough to know that understanding was not the same as useful.
She put him to work.
Sorting dried leaves.
Grinding roots.
Mixing pastes.
Watching her work.
He learned what she knew.
And he learned what she didn't know.
---
"This one," Gathers Roots said, holding up a handful of dried leaves.
"For pain. Chew it. The pain goes away."
Willow bark.
I knew it from my first life.
It worked.
Not as well as what I had in the other world, but it worked.
"This one," she said, holding up another.
"For wounds. Stop the bleeding."
Yarrow.
I knew it too.
Good for cuts.
Not good for deep wounds.
Not good for what killed my mother's mate.
"What about honey?" I asked.
She looked at me.
"Honey?"
"For wounds. To stop the rot."
She stared at me for a long moment.
"Where did you learn that?"
I shrugged.
"I saw it. In my head."
She didn't ask more.
But she started using honey.
---
The valley had a name.
The people called it the Cradle—a long stretch of flat land between two ridges, with a river running through it and forest on both sides.
Good hunting.
Good water.
Easy to defend if you knew how.
They didn't know how.
The watch posts were placed wrong.
They had sightlines to the valley floor but not to the approaches.
A raiding party could come down from the north ridge and be inside the settlement before anyone saw them.
Jian noticed this when he was four years old.
He waited until the men were sitting around the fire, drinking fermented grain, laughing about the hunt that failed.
He walked up to Stands Tall.
"The watch posts," he said.
"They're wrong."
Stands Tall looked at him.
The other men went quiet.
"What?"
"The north ridge. You can't see it from the posts. Someone could come down there and be inside before you knew."
One of the hunters laughed.
"What does a child know about watch posts?"
Stands Tall held up his hand.
He looked at Jian.
"Show me."
Jian led him to the north edge of the settlement.
He pointed up at the ridge.
Dark against the evening sky.
"From the posts," he said, "you can see the valley. But you can't see that ridge. Anyone coming down would be on you before you saw them."
Stands Tall was quiet for a long time.
The next day, they moved the watch posts.
---
The men started looking at me different after that.
Not all of them.
Some still saw a child.
Some saw something else.
Stone Hand was one of them.
He was twelve.
The best young hunter in the settlement.
Tall for his age.
Strong.
Fast.
He had been the one everyone talked about before I started opening my mouth.
Now they talked about me.
He didn't like that.
"You think you're clever," he said one day.
I was sitting by the river, shaping a stick into something like a spear.
He stood over me with his arms crossed.
I said nothing.
"You're just a child. A strange child who talks too much."
I looked at him.
"I haven't said anything to you."
"You don't need to. They talk about you. They say you see things. That you know things."
He crouched down.
His face was close to mine.
"I don't care what you know. I'm going to be the best hunter in this valley. Not you."
He walked away.
I watched him go.
I wasn't trying to be the best hunter.
I was trying to keep them alive.
---
Crane was the only child his age who wasn't afraid of him.
She was the daughter of a woman taken from another tribe years ago.
Her father was dead.
Her mother kept to herself.
Crane grew up on the edge of things, watching, waiting, never quite belonging.
She understood Jian in ways the others didn't.
They met by the river one afternoon.
Jian was throwing stones at a tree.
She sat on a rock and watched.
"You're good at that," she said.
He didn't answer.
He threw another stone.
It hit the mark.
"Why do you practice so much?"
"To get better."
"Better at what?"
He looked at her.
She was small for her age, like him.
Dark hair.
Dark eyes.
A scar on her arm from a burn when she was little.
"Better at throwing," he said.
She picked up a stone.
Threw it.
Missed by a wide margin.
"Show me," she said.
He did.
---
Crane became his first friend.
The only one who didn't look at him like he was strange.
She looked at him like he was just a boy who knew how to throw stones.
He taught her things.
How to hold a stone.
How to aim.
How to breathe before the throw.
She taught him how to laugh.
---
The months passed.
I turned five.
Then six.
Then seven.
I grew.
Slowly, but I grew.
My body started catching up to what my mind wanted it to do.
I could run without falling.
I could climb without slipping.
I could throw a stone hard enough to kill a rabbit.
I kept going to Gathers Roots.
I learned her craft.
And I taught her, without her knowing, what I knew from another life.
She started boiling water before cleaning wounds.
She started using honey on infections.
She started chewing willow bark for pain.
She never asked where I learned these things.
But I saw her watching me sometimes.
The same way I watched everything else.
---
The raiders came again when I was seven.
Not a full attack.
Just a small party.
Five men, maybe six.
They came down from the north ridge—the same approach I had pointed out to Stands Tall.
But the watch posts were moved now.
The guards saw them coming.
Stands Tall led the hunters out to meet them.
I watched from the edge of the settlement.
My mother held my shoulder.
She didn't try to stop me from watching.
She knew better.
The fight was short.
Three of the raiders ran when they saw the hunters were ready.
Two stood their ground.
One of them was young.
Sixteen, maybe.
His spear was shaking in his hands.
Stands Tall killed him.
I watched him fall.
I had killed men before.
In another life.
In another world.
I knew what it looked like.
What it sounded like.
What it felt like after.
Stands Tall stood over the body.
His chest was heaving.
His hands were red.
He looked up.
Saw me watching.
His face was hard.
"You see," he said.
Not a question.
I nodded.
"Remember it," he said.
"This is what comes for us."
He walked away.
I stayed.
I looked at the body.
The blood soaking into the ground.
The eyes open, staring at nothing.
I had killed men like him.
In the other world.
In places I didn't talk about.
I had told myself it was duty.
That I was protecting people.
I wasn't sure anymore what I was protecting.
But I knew one thing.
Iron Tooth would come.
Not with five men.
With fifty.
A hundred.
And when he came, this valley would burn.
---
That night, Jian sat by the river alone.
Crane found him there.
She sat beside him without a word.
They watched the water for a long time.
"You're scared," she said finally.
"Yes."
"Of the raiders?"
He shook his head.
"Of what I'm going to have to do."
She didn't understand.
She was eight years old.
She had never killed anything bigger than a fish.
But she stayed beside him until the moon was high.
---
I started training the other children after that.
Not the hunters.
They wouldn't listen to a child.
But the children—the ones who would be hunters one day.
I taught them to throw.
To run.
To be quiet in the forest.
Stone Hand watched from a distance.
He said nothing.
But I saw him watching.
One day, he came to the river where I was teaching Crane to track.
"You're teaching them," he said.
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because they need to know."
He stood there for a moment.
Then he picked up a stone.
Threw it.
Hit the mark.
"Show me the rest," he said.
I did.
---
Jian was eight years old when he became the teacher of the children.
He taught them what he knew.
How to move without sound.
How to read tracks in the mud.
How to use the wind.
How to throw a stone so it hit where you wanted it to hit.
He did not teach them how to kill.
That would come later.
He hoped it would not come at all.
---
The days passed.
The seasons turned.
I grew.
And in the mountains to the north, Iron Tooth was watching too.
---
End of Chapter 2