Artemis knelt in the moonlit clearing and counted the dead. Six of her sacred deer in three nights. The beast had torn through the ferns and thrown logs aside like kindling, leaving her no cover in the woods she had hunted since she was a girl. A granite stone at the clearing's edge bore fresh claw gouges and streaks of dried blood. She pressed her palm to the marks. The claws had cut stone as easily as hide. Her white hind waited behind her, gold antlers catching the moonlight. The hind had pulled her crescent chariot to the edge of the trees and stood now with her muzzle low, breathing the scent of her slaughtered kin. Artemis rested a hand on the hind's neck. "One more try," she said. "Then we change the hunt." She had built the blind two nights ago, before she understood what she was tracking. A pit dug deep, stakes sharpened at the bottom, a lattice of branches and fern laid over the mouth. She had baited it with a fresh kill and climbed into the oak above it with a full quiver. Simple. The kind of trap that had never failed her. The beast came at moonrise. It was larger than she had guessed, low-shouldered, its hide the color of wet iron. It walked over the lattice without breaking a stick. It smelled the pit. It smelled her. Artemis loosed three arrows into its flank before it turned. The shafts skipped off its hide like stones off a pond and buried themselves in the dirt. The beast snapped the oak trunk with one shoulder and she fell hard among the ferns. She scrambled up with an empty bow and no arrows left in reach. It charged. The hind broke from the tree line at a full run. She struck the beast's ribs with her gold antlers and drove it sideways into the pit's lattice. Branches cracked. The beast half-fell, caught itself on the lip, and clawed free, but the moment bought Artemis her feet. She ran for the chariot. The hind wheeled and followed, blood on her flank where a claw had opened her. Artemis lashed the reins and the chariot lifted from the clearing. Below, the beast paced the ruined pit and watched them climb. She looked at the arrows still sunk in the dirt beside her broken trap. Bronze would not do. Ordinary craft would not do. She turned the chariot toward the peak of Olympus and the one forge that could give her a shaft the beast could not shrug off. Her hind ran on, bleeding, and did not slow.