Bjorn Boneforge stood at the wooden gate to the fungal caves with empty pockets and a skinning knife at his belt. Mushrooms the size of barrels leaned over the frame, their red caps wet from the morning. Somewhere past this gate lived a creature big enough to swallow a horse. A trader had told him so, two towns back, and Bjorn had paid every coin he carried for the rumor. He meant to kill the beast and forge a weapon from its bones, because bone kept the strength of every kill a creature ever made. He had learned that at nine, standing over a dead wolf while his father watched and said nothing. He pushed the gate open and stopped. The caves yawned in three directions past the threshold, each tunnel breathing a different smell. He had no map. He did not know which throat led to the beast and which led to a slow death in the dark. His brother's silent face came back to him, framed in their doorway, watching him go without a word. Bjorn turned away from the gate. Up the slope sat a timber lodge with wide windows. Through the glass he saw shelves stacked with leather journals. A weathered woman on the porch was skinning a small horned rabbit, its antlers no longer than her thumb. She looked up when his boots hit the steps. Bjorn asked what it cost to learn where the biggest beast in the caves laid its head. She named a price. He turned out his pockets and showed her the lining. She laughed once, short, and went back to her work. Then she stopped. She looked at his arms, at the knife, at the hide cloak. "I need a runner," she said. "Scouts come back hurt. Someone has to fetch them. Do that for a season and I'll open the journals to you." Bjorn thought of the coin he did not have and the tunnels he could not read. A season was not today. A season was not tomorrow. But a season ended with a map to the thing he had crossed a country to kill. He set his hand on the porch rail and told her he would start in the morning. She handed him the antlered rabbit to gut for supper. The gate behind him stayed open, and the beast inside it kept breathing without him.