The bulletin board outside the handler's hall carried twenty names above Mara Vex's, and every one of them had been crossed out in red. She stood in the wet morning light and read the notice again. A sky-drake, wild, unbroken, bounty tripled since last month. Twenty handlers had signed for it. Twenty had come back empty or not come back at all. Mara pulled the pin, took the notice down, and folded it into her coat. She had six silver left to her name and a room she owed rent on. She needed the bounty, and more than that, she needed to be the one who did what none of the others could. The only trouble was she had never seen the drake. She did not know what color it was, how big, or where in the ridges it slept. She could not hunt what she could not find. She spent the morning asking after it in the market, and everyone she asked shook their head and looked past her shoulder. At noon she found an old scale merchant sorting chips into brass trays. He glanced at the folded notice in her hand and set down a scale the size of her palm. It was blue at the edge and green through the middle, and the light moved across it like water. He said a shepherd had cut it from a fence post two ridges east, where something had landed heavy enough to snap the rail. He named the ridge. He named the shepherd. Mara paid him two of her six silver and walked out with the scale in her fist. She had a direction now, and a face to match it to, and a place on the map where the thing had touched the ground. The hunt could start.