Hana Dusk counted her coin on a stump and came up three silver short of a meal. Her crossbow lay across her knees, bolts clean, string waxed, nothing to shoot. Across the valley stood the keep she wanted. It had four walls, a dry roof, and a price she could not pay. Every month the owner waited, and every month her purse stayed thin. A hunting lodge of her own, bought with bounty coin. First she needed a bounty worth the name. The village board held three jobs. A fox in a henhouse. A rat nest under a mill. A missing goat. None paid enough to feed her, let alone buy stone and timber. She was turning to leave when the hoofbeats came. No rider. Just a horse, walking out of the treeline alone. It was pale from mane to hoof, lean and quiet. Where its eyes should have been, the skin ran smooth and empty. It stopped at a drooping willow with grey leaves and stood there, head low, as if it knew the spot. Hana had tracked many beasts. She had never seen one wear a cut girth strap still buckled to its back. Someone had ridden this horse. Somebody who was now on foot, or dead. A man from the mill crept up beside her. "That's the cave horse," he whispered. "Comes from the deep tunnels under the ridge. They say it only surfaces when something down there drives it out." He would not step closer. Hana stepped closer. She ran her hand along the girth strap. The leather was sliced clean, not chewed. A blade had done this, or a claw sharp as one. Dried blood crusted the horse's flank, too dark to be the animal's own. She followed the horse's prints back to the treeline. They led to the mouth of a cave in the ridge. Near the entrance grew a cluster of shelf mushrooms, their layered caps marked with rot. Something large had crushed half of them flat on its way out. The tracks beside them were not human and not horse. A warden posted a notice on the board that same hour. A surveyor and his guards had gone into the ridge caves eight days back. None had returned. The merchant guild would pay forty gold for proof of their fate, and fifty more for the head of whatever killed them. Ninety gold. Enough for the keep, and more. Hana read the notice twice. Then she looked at the blind horse, the sliced strap, the crushed mushrooms, the black mouth of the cave. The horse had come up because something down there was still hungry. She pressed her thumb to the warden's ledger and took the job. She loaded six silver-tipped bolts and checked her lantern oil. By dusk she stood at the cave mouth, listening to the dark breathe back.