Keira Thornwood knelt over the fresh tracks and knew her bow was wrong. The prints were as wide as her spread hands, pressed deep into the mud. The beast no hunter had ever caught alive had passed here at dawn. She wanted to bring it back breathing. But her hunting bow was built to kill, and a dead beast would prove nothing. She had lived in these woods since she was a child, cast out with her family and taught to feed them with a silent step and a steady aim. Every meal on their table came from an arrow. Now that same skill was useless. You could not tame a thing you had already killed. A soft weight pressed against her shin. Her silver fox kit had followed her again, its luminous coat catching the gray light. It sniffed the giant track and pinned its ears back. "I know," Keira whispered. "He's bigger than both of us." She drew an arrow, then stopped. She pictured the beast falling, still and cold, and her stomach turned. That was not what she wanted. She wanted to walk it out of these woods alive, to do the one thing every hunter before her had failed to do. The bow could not give her that. So she put it down. Keira spent the rest of the day gathering what the bow could not offer. She stripped long vines from the trees and tested each one against her weight. The strong ones she kept. She sat with the kit beside her and braided them tight, over and under, until the strands held like rope. She shaped the end into a wide loop and pulled it hard. It did not fray. She had made a snare that could hold a beast without drawing a drop of blood. But a rope was not enough. A trapped beast would fight, and fighting animals tore themselves open. She had seen it before. If the loop cut into its leg, or if the creature already carried a wound, she would need to close it. So she searched the undergrowth for the plants her mother had shown her. She pulled bunches of the bitter healing herbs and wrapped them with strips of cloth from her own pack. By dusk she stood with new tools in her hands. The vine loop hung coiled at her hip. The bundle of herbs rode in her pack. Her bow leaned against a trunk behind her, left where it fell. The fox kit yipped once and darted a few steps down the trail. Then it looked back, waiting. Keira followed the deep tracks into the dark. She was no longer a girl who came to the forest to kill. She had traded her only proven weapon for a rope and a promise, and now she had to prove the trade was not a mistake.