SN Chapter 32

The forest was beginning to darken toward evening, and Rosaline walked back into it without ceremony. Nestor, who badly wanted to follow, asked: "If I wouldn't be in the way, might I come with you?"

"You'd be in the way," Rosaline said.

He returned to the boar with the deflated posture of a man delivered an objective truth he had no grounds to dispute.

She emerged from the forest some time later with a large deer across her shoulders. The hunting-trained guide, overcome with feeling he couldn't organize into words, settled for both thumbs extended.

Several people attempted to speak with her, but she was occupied in examining the deer she'd brought—thoroughly, methodically—and then she released a quiet, small breath of relief. No one standing nearby understood why.

She returned to the forest several more times. Rabbits. A brace of birds. Several wild mountain hens. Combined with the handful of other successful hunters in the delegation, the total was sufficient for every person in camp to eat well past satisfaction. The hunt wrapped up in fine form.

Rikardis was satisfied with the results—meal quality genuinely luxurious for a field camp. A good night, the kind that put something back into people who had been slowly depleting.

The female knights had gathered in small groups to grill the meat. Rosaline was among them. The men had, for the most part, stripped their kills and applied fire. The women had produced, from somewhere of uncertain origin, a heated stone slab, salt, pepper, and what appeared to be actual herbs. They were cooking with the focused attention of the delegation's professional kitchen staff. Rikardis privately concluded that whatever had ended up on his plate was likely no better than what the women were making for themselves.

The first piece off the stone went to Rosaline.

The smell was remarkable—roasted garlic and something fragrant, herbal, sharpening the cool night air. She stared at the piece without blinking, swallowing with a rhythmic gulp, gulp that she couldn't suppress. On her usually impassive face, intense joy had settled without pretense or qualification. Most people were slicing polite portions with their daggers; Rosaline grabbed the entire slab and tore into it with a savage chomp. The juices spread across her tongue in one clean rush. She ate with total, undivided commitment.

The female knights broke into laughter—three full tones warmer than anything they produced during operational hours.

Rosaline closed her eyes and worked through the meat with absolute focus. The warmth from the people around her settled over the scene without anyone naming it. Something about the color in her cheeks produced an almost optical impression—you would have sworn she was blushing with happiness.

"How does it taste, Dame Rosaline?"

"Very," she said. "Very delicious."

"I'm glad. I marinated it twenty minutes ago with lime and rosemary. For the cooking, I used herb butter mixed with lemon balm and garlic powder—"

Rosaline nodded with the expression of someone receiving significant new information. Rikardis felt the same, privately.

'They marinated it. Out here.'

"I see," Rosaline said. "So that's why it tastes like this." She considered the piece still in her hand. "Remarkable, Dame."

Something clicked into alignment between them—some shared register of appreciation whose precise nature was unclear from the outside—and the women's laughter rang out again.

In the same moment, Rikardis registered that he had been staring. At the women's fire. At Rosaline specifically. He had been doing this for some time.

'This is—I'm not fifteen going through puberty—'

He made a short, dismissive sound with his tongue and turned his full attention back to the plate in front of him.

He ate. He surveyed the camp in a measured circuit. Not far from where he sat, Diez was nominally conducting his own meal—eating it with the mechanical distraction of someone who hadn't quite committed to the activity—while staring fixedly at something. The direction of that gaze was familiar.

The women's fire.

Rikardis almost smiled. Another adolescent, it turned out.

He found he couldn't quite manage it.

Diez's eyes had not left Rosaline.

His eyebrow shifted. Something sat in his mouth like a canker sore—specific, involuntary, precisely where he kept finding it.

The festive evening wound down. Camp quieted. People filed into tents to settle the accumulated debt of the journey's exhaustion. Many were asleep before their heads finished moving toward their bedrolls. A few rotations kept watch through the still hours.

Rosaline took up position in a tall tree near Rikardis's tent. The senior knight currently stationed at the tent hadn't noticed her.

She leaned her head against a thick branch and dozed. She hadn't required much sleep before—it had become a more recent necessity, roughly once a week now, unavoidable. Even then, only the lightest kind: the kind from which any small sound or faint killing intent could summon her back instantly. Even so—closing her eyes released something. Unwound something small.

Tah-tah-tah.

While the body rested, her sharpened senses registered tiny footsteps ascending the tree. Something feather-light traveling up through the wood. An almost imperceptible vibration. Rosaline's eyes opened.

"......"

A squirrel. Also the deer she'd freed. A small, strange creature that showed no particular interest in fleeing her proximity.

The squirrel bounced across the branch and climbed onto her knee, bringing them to roughly eye level. It worked its nose and made sounds.

Chk-chk. Chkk—

It appeared to be saying something. Rosaline frowned.

"I haven't eaten a squirrel."

So I can't understand squirrel. The unspoken second half. The small animal before her grasped the gap. It gave her a sharp look that communicated what an inconvenience you are, and stepped off her knee.

The squirrel's fur began to darken. Then it came apart—dissolving outward, spreading and expanding—until it had grown to the size of a person. The dark, liquid-looking mass churned with magical energy at its center.

She'd suspected it from the moment the creature understood her words: this kin had also consumed a human at some point. A human form assembled itself gradually. The woman who emerged was young and lovely, with brown hair falling loosely around her shoulders. She was wearing nothing, which meant her full, voluptuous curves were entirely visible.

Rosaline glanced at Rikardis's tent below. The senior knight was at a distance. No one close enough, or sharp-eared enough, to overhear a conversation.

The brown-haired woman opened and closed her fist, working through the startup of an unfamiliar body. Awkward movements. She checked her voice—ah, ah—confirmed it was functional, and looked at Rosaline with calm, soft eyes.

"Human bodies really are something. The muscles are pathetic."

"You speak well."

Rosaline remembered her own early days—clumsy mimicry of overheard words, the vast distance between that and where she stood now. The woman before her was already more fluent than her current self.

The woman noticed the admiration in Rosaline's eyes and smiled.

"I lived as a human once. I stayed with an elderly woman whose mind was going. She thought I was her granddaughter."

She'd pretended to be mute at first, the woman explained—waited until she could speak, watched and absorbed until her mouth was ready.

There was a method like that. Rosaline was impressed.

"Still, living as a human has far too many inconveniences. Living as an animal is easier and better by far. So this is rather interesting." The woman tilted her head, studying her. "You're living among humans? It doesn't bother you? We naturally pull away from them—that's simply how we are. Or does it differ between individuals?"

We naturally pull away from humans.

Rosaline turned this over. It was true that when she'd lived in the deep forest of Vista, she'd avoided humans—despite feeling no particular fear of the far stronger creatures there. Humans had produced some nameless, primitive unease. She'd been slowly forgetting that part of herself since becoming Rosaline. Was it the taboo?

The thought fell out of her mouth before she'd decided to say it.

"Is it because of the taboo?"

The woman's eyes flew wide. "Taboo?" Her voice rose. Rosaline raised one finger to her lips. Keep your voice down. The woman slapped the finger aside.

"You ate a living human. Didn't you."

"Yes."

The woman hit her arm. Thwack—sharp and flat, unhurried. It didn't hurt particularly.

"Have you completely lost your mind? I know plenty of our kind who live without thinking, but you—even you—isn't that a bit much? Are your instincts so thoroughly broken that you could override them? How catastrophic is your situation, actually?"

Rosaline became somewhat sulky. She'd had her reasons. The woman looked at her aggrieved expression and hit her arm again. Even her mother, Edelweiss, had never scolded her like this.

"You can't escape that form now, you little fool! You have to die in that body!"

"Mm."

The woman stared. "Mm," she said. "Just sitting there going 'mm.' Did you already know?"

Instinct was engraved before anyone explained it—the way an animal avoided a poisonous mushroom without being told: that thing is dangerous, don't eat it, I don't know what happens but don't. Memory transmitted through blood. The taboo was that kind of knowing, passed down through their kind:

Do not absorb living things.

She had learned the taboo's true meaning recently.

She had been living in Rosaline's body for more than two months. Human food was delicious, but it only became the nutrients sustaining this body—it fed the form. When the time had come to return to her true state—she'd gone out quietly at night, prepared animal remains, and tried to release the transformation.

The magic had simply circulated inside her shell, calm and unchanged.

No transformation came. The shock of it had been like lightning.

She could not transform.

She had panicked, and then, eventually, arrived at something like acceptance: she now had genuine life. A beginning and an end. Subject to the world's natural laws of circulation, as living things were—rather than standing outside them as she had before. Rosaline's memories had begun to arrive in fragments: the consumed woman's life force merging with her essence, surfacing as vivid dreams. She processed them as they came and filed what she could.

I am mortal now. I will die as this body dies.

The woman had been watching her face while she thought. Seemed to have read enough from it. Something in her expression shifted from furious into something more complicated.

"I saw it happen to one of our kind once," she said. "One who accidentally consumed a living rabbit—it was inside the body of a dead snake, so they had no way of knowing. They got stuck in rabbit form after that. Couldn't come back out. Hunters caught them eventually."

A pause.

"I'm going to follow you."

"...Follow me?"

"I can't watch a kin who broke the taboo get caught by humans as some helpless creature." Her voice had settled into something resolved. "I'll watch over the end of it."

A strange kind of care. Rosaline regarded her for a moment. Then accepted it.

"What form will you take? You can't travel with the group like that."

The woman considered. "Squirrel is too small. Deer is too conspicuous. Bear would just get killed." She paused. "Snake is too alarming. Horse needs a rider." They turned the problem over in silence.

"Eagle," Rosaline said.

"Eagle," the woman agreed. She'd once consumed a king eagle, she mentioned—one that had fought many beasts in its time, before being chased down and killed by a great horned owl.