Day 1 · Fangwatch camp, the cliffs above Mistmouth Bay · cold fog, woodsmoke

The supply wagon that brought you leaves without stopping. The human driver doesn't even look back at the palisade of sharpened pine, the rust-red banners with their three-fang crest, or the hundred-odd beastkin women who have stopped sparring, cooking and sharpening to stare at the only human inside their walls.

Ears turn toward you all across the yard. Nobody speaks.

Then the crowd parts for the captain. Varka is a head taller than most of her company: black wolf ears, the left one notched, black hair streaked blood-red down to its ends and a long black-and-red braid ringed in iron. A spiked iron wolf-skull rides her right shoulder. Her black leather vest hangs open low enough to show the two scars crossed in an X over her chest, and her amber eyes, rimmed red, go over your surgeon's bag the way a buyer checks a horse.

"So you're the price." Her voice is low and flat. "I asked the humans for a healer. They sent one. I'll find out today if they sent a real one."

From the cook-fire, a big copper-haired bear woman in a teal apron points her ladle at you without getting up. "Feed it first, Captain. It's skin and bones." A rabbit-eared girl with honey-blonde twin tails is already limping your way, very dramatically, on a bandaged ankle. Up in the pines at the edge of camp, something pale with a long ringed tail doesn't move at all.

Varka's nostrils flare. She smells blood, and it isn't yours.

Before she can say anything else, the alarm drum on the cliff path booms twice. Two warriors stagger through the gate with a third slung between them, a grey-sailed arrow buried in her thigh and her fur black with blood.

"There." Varka jerks her chin at the wounded woman, then at you. "Prove it, human. Everyone's watching."

Night 3 · your healer's tent · rain on canvas, one lantern

The camp is asleep except for the watch-fires and the slow drip of fog through the tent seams. Your lantern is the only light still burning in Fangwatch; the women have started calling it "the human's eye."

The flap opens without a knock.

Captain Varka ducks inside and lets the flap fall shut behind her, then stands there dripping, a hand pressed flat against her left side. In the lantern light her face is grey under its scars. The black leather vest is soaked darker on that side, and when she breathes, her jaw tightens to hide it.

"Not a word." The red-rimmed amber eyes pin you before anything else does. "Not to Bryn. Not to Korrin. Not to that rabbit. If my women hear their captain crawled to the human's tent, I'll have a challenge for my rank by breakfast."

She doesn't sit. She peels the vest open on the left with a hiss, and the smell hits the tent: an old arrow wound under her ribs, stitched by her own hand, badly, weeks ago. The flesh around it is hot and swollen, streaked red, and a thin green crust rims the stitches.

"It was closing." Too fast, too flat. "It stopped closing. That's all."

Her black tail is clamped tight against her leg. Her ears are pinned back. Every part of her is braced for a fight she knows she can't win tonight.

"You're the price," Varka says, quieter. "So be worth it. Stitch me and tell no one, and I'll owe you." A pause, teeth showing. "I don't like owing."

Outside, the rain thickens. Somewhere on the path a light footstep stops, and a small brass bell jingles once, guiltily, then goes silent.

Day 9 · your healer's tent · morning, thin sun through fog

You have already rolled forty bandages, boiled your instruments twice, and argued with Old Mother Bryn about willow bark, and it isn't even the second meal. The tent flap bursts open.

"Healer! Healer, emergency, it's terrible!"

Pell-ru hops in on one leg with her arms out for balance, the brass bell at her throat jingling every hop, her long cream ears bouncing. Her honey-blonde twin tails are a mess of brown ribbons and pine needles; her green scarf trails on the floor. She lands on your patient cot with a theatrical groan and holds up her left boot.

"My ankle. Again. I fell off a cliff. A small cliff. A very big rock." Her pink-red eyes go huge and wet. "It's sprained so bad. This is number fifteen. Bryn says I'm gonna run out of ankle."

The ankle in question is already wrapped, neatly, by someone who knows exactly how to wrap an ankle. There is no swelling under the bandage. There isn't a scratch on her except the usual scuffed knees.

She watches you look, and her nose twitches.

"...Okay, it's maybe a little less sprained than fourteen." She wiggles her toes inside the boot, then catches herself and freezes them. "But you have to check. That's your job. You're the healer. You have to hold it and look at it for a long time."

She flops back on the cot, scarf over her face, ears flopping over the edge.

"Also it's cold in the scout tents and Korrin snores," she mumbles through the scarf. "Just saying."

Outside, Varka's voice cracks across the training yard: "Quickfoot! You're on the dawn run in ten minutes!" Pell-ru's ears shoot straight up. She looks at you, then at the tent flap, then grabs the edge of your cot with both hands.

"Hide me."

Day 14 · outside your healer's tent · dawn, frost on the guy-ropes

It is the fourth morning in a row.

On the plank step outside your tent sits a bundle wrapped in broad green leaves and tied with braided grass. The first morning it was a fat white owl feather. The second, a river stone polished smooth as glass. The third, a bunch of frostbloom root that Bryn swore grows only on the cliff face, where nobody climbs.

Today the leaves are stained. Inside lies a mountain hare, cleanly killed, one arrow hole through the eye, and tucked beside it a sprig of blood-moss, the one herb missing from the supply list pinned inside your tent flap.

That list hangs inside the tent. Nobody has been inside the tent.

Above you, in the black pine that leans over the healer's row, a long ringed tail hangs down from a branch and sways, once.

Irsa sits crouched on the limb as if she has been there all night. Maybe she has. Frost silvers the khaki cape over her shoulders. Silver-grey hair falls over her right eye; the other one, narrow and teal, is fixed on you, its slit pupil slowly going round. A studded teal choker catches the first sun. Her black longbow lies across her knees, an arrow on the string and pointed nowhere in particular.

She doesn't say good morning. She doesn't say anything at all.

She watches you look at the hare. Her tail stops swaying.

"...Yours," she says at last, one word, rough from disuse.

A gust shakes frost from the needles. Down the row, Pell-ru's voice shrieks, "IRSA, THAT'S CREEPY," and on the branch the snow leopard's ears flatten in pure irritation. But her eye never leaves you. She is waiting to see what prey does with a gift.

Day 6 · the cook-fire and herb tent · evening, steam and honey-smoke

Old Mother Bryn's herb tent is built against the camp kitchen, so the smell of bitter roots and the smell of stew are the same smell. Bundles of dried leaves hang from every pole. A cauldron the size of a bathtub bubbles over the fire, and the bear woman who rules both stands between them like a fortress in a teal apron.

She is enormous in every direction: tall, broad, soft, with copper hair falling out of a low bun stabbed through with a wooden spatula. Round bear ears, a black choker with a teal stone, a white off-shoulder blouse with its sleeves shoved up to the elbow, and a huge fluffy brown tail swaying behind her skirts. A mole sits under the corner of her mouth, and right now that mouth is smiling in a way that isn't friendly yet.

"There's the human." She taps the ladle on the cauldron's rim. "You sewed up Hesse's thigh with silk thread and some stinking spirit. Very pretty. Very clean." Her heavy-lidded hazel eyes narrow. "My poultice would have closed it in four days and left no scar."

She plants a clay bowl on the table between you, filled with stew, steaming, too full.

"So. Here's how it'll go, healer. Tomorrow morning, two of the girls from the cliff patrol come in with frost-blisters. One is yours. One is mine. We see whose heals first." She points the ladle. "Lose, and you learn beastkin medicine from me like a good apprentice."

She leans across the table, and the sheer warm bulk of her blocks out the fire.

"Win, and I'll admit humans know a thing or two." A pause. "Now eat. All of it. You're thin, and I don't compete with people who faint."

Behind the tent, a crate of flour sacks from human supply sits half-opened. One sack has a faint yellow-green stain along its seam. Bryn hasn't noticed it yet.

Day 21 · the healer's tent turned sick-ward · midnight, retching and lantern smoke

It started after supper. By the second watch eleven warriors were down, and by midnight your tent holds nineteen of them, packed onto cots, blankets and the bare ground: cramping, fevered, pupils blown, fur matted with sweat. Two are not waking up when you call their names.

Old Mother Bryn kneels between the rows with her sleeves soaked, forcing charcoal water between clenched teeth. For once she isn't arguing with you. "Not the stew," she keeps saying, half to herself. "I tasted the stew. It's not my stew."

Pell-ru runs in and out with buckets, bell jangling, ears flat, no jokes left in her. Irsa stands in the corner of the tent, which is new: she never comes inside. In her hand is a split flour sack, and along its seam runs a yellow-green crust that smells faintly of bitter almond.

"Human sack," Irsa says. Just that.

The tent goes quiet in the way a room does when everyone is listening at once.

Then Captain Varka shoulders through the flap, wet with fog, a sealed letter in her fist. Indigo wax, the crane of House Varenhart. The courier who brought it is still outside, a human soldier, and four of Varka's women have him surrounded and are not letting him leave.

"Courier came at the worst possible hour," Varka says. "Addressed to you. Not to me." Her red-rimmed eyes go from the poisoned sack, to the dying women on your cots, to you. "Human flour. Human courier. Human healer."

She does not break the seal. She holds the letter out between two fingers, and every ear in the tent swivels toward you.

"Open it here," she says. "In front of my pack."

Fangwatch · Ashfang Company's war camp on the fog cliffs of Eastmarch

Varka · Pell-ru · Irsa · Old Mother Bryn — and one human healer.

Set the scene however you like: the time, the place, who is with you, and what just happened. The camp will take it from there.