They were marched through the forest without ceremony.
Vincent's wrists were bound in front of him with braided cord that smelled faintly of smoke and resin. Julia's hands were tied too, though the hunters had left just enough slack for her to keep walking. Spears stayed close at their backs. One bow remained trained on them whenever the path widened.
Efficient.
Professional.
No one wasted words on threats.
That made the threat clearer.
Vincent kept his feet moving through mud, roots, and wet leaves, though the river had taken more out of him than he was willing to admit. His side still burned where the red predator's claws had opened him. Cold clung to his wet clothes. The gauntlet under the torn glove sat dark against his skin, quiet for now, but not absent.
The older hunter who had first spoken to them walked ahead without looking back.
He did not need to.
The others moved around his silence like men used to obeying it.
Julia kept pace beside Vincent, her face pale from cold and effort, but her eyes were sharp. She had not spoken since the riverbank. Good. Questions were expensive when every answer might become leverage.
The forest changed gradually.
Subtle signs first.
A length of cord stretched high between two trees where no branch should have held it.
Carved marks on bark—small and almost invisible under moss.
A pit disguised beneath leaves off the main path.
Then the smell of smoke reached them.
Low, controlled, and hidden under damp wood.
Camp.
The trees opened.
Dayakan.
The camp sat in a shallow hollow beneath the canopy, hard to see until one stood nearly inside it. Low tents of hide and dark cloth formed a loose ring around three central fires kept deliberately small so their smoke rose thin and broke under the branches above. Racks of drying meat stood near one side. Bone charms hung from braided lines. Weapons leaned everywhere—spears, bows, hooked knives, hatchets—never piled, always placed where hands could reach them first.
People looked up as the hunters returned.
No shouting.
No startled movement.
Only attention.
Men and women turned from skinning racks, sharpening stones, cooking pots, and watch posts at the edge of camp. Children did not run forward. They had already been taught better.
Vincent noticed that immediately.
A people under pressure.
A camp that could move if needed.
Not a village.
A wound that had learned to walk.
The moment the hunters pushed Vincent and Julia into the open, the whole camp saw the bindings, the blood, and the gauntlet.
The gauntlet mattered most.
Eyes moved to it.
Stayed there.
The older hunter stopped beside the nearest fire and finally looked back.
"Down," he said.
Vincent knelt because refusing would have been theatre with no audience worth impressing.
Julia knelt half a breath later beside him, chin still lifted despite the rope around her wrists and the mud on her clothes.
People gathered.
A broad-shouldered woman in dark furs stepped forward first. Mid-thirties, perhaps. Strong through the back and waist, one side of her jaw marked by an old scar that had not made her less severe. Her hair was tied high and practical. No ornaments beyond a carved tooth at her throat.
Authority sat on her without announcement.
When she looked at Vincent, he understood at once: this woman decided who was fed, who was trusted, and who was left for the forest.
Taliah, he thought before anyone said it.
She did not speak immediately. Her gaze moved over the blood at his side, the river-wet state of both captives, and then fixed on his left hand.
The hunter beside them said something short in his own tongue.
Taliah answered without taking her eyes off the gauntlet.
Another figure stepped out from behind the second fire.
Older.
Thinner.
Wrapped in layered cloth and bone-strung charms rather than armor. His hair was mostly gray, his face carved by weather and years, and his eyes had the stillness of a man who had seen enough fear that other people's no longer amused him.
When he stopped in front of Vincent, the camp quieted further.
He crouched slowly.
The old man's gaze did not linger on Vincent's face.
It went straight to the gauntlet.
His hand hovered over the torn glove.
Vincent tensed slightly.
The old man noticed.
Said nothing.
Then two fingers touched the outermost scale.
The reaction was immediate.
The gem at the wrist pulsed once—hard, cold, and ugly.
Several people in the camp inhaled sharply.
The old man's hand jerked back as if he had touched ice buried inside a wound.
He stared for one long beat.
Then said, in rough common speech, "It is feeding."
The word settled into the camp like poison dropped in water.
Vincent's eyes sharpened.
So they understood enough of taint to name appetite when they saw it.
Taliah's expression hardened. "On what?"
The old man did not answer right away.
Instead, he looked at the blood in Vincent's torn shirt. At the black-blue lines beneath the cut glove. At the way the scales had spread farther up the forearm than common metal could explain.
Finally he said, "Not him alone."
That landed worse.
A murmur moved around the circle.
Suspicion sharpened by familiarity.
They had seen something like this before, or close enough for the resemblance to matter.
Julia broke her silence then.
"It saved his life."
Every eye that had not already judged her now did.
Taliah's gaze moved to her.
"Did it?" she asked.
Julia held it. "Yes."
The old man stood.
"He says nothing," he said of Vincent.
Vincent met his eyes. "I am speaking now."
The old man's expression did not change.
"Then speak usefully."
Good, Vincent thought. No ceremony here either.
He looked around the camp once before answering.
No visible corruption on the people.
No tainted wounds at first glance.
But the perimeter was layered with warning charms and the drying racks sat farther from the ground than necessary.
This camp feared contamination.
The older man had recognized feeding.
And the hunters had reacted to the opposite riverbank before taking them.
They knew the forest's sickness personally.
Enough pieces.
"This gauntlet absorbs tainted essence," Vincent said.
Silence.
He continued, "It responds to corrupted creatures. It stabilized me when those creatures should have killed me."
Taliah's eyes narrowed. "And what does it want in return?"
A better question than most nobles would have asked.
Vincent answered honestly because lies of this size broke at bad times.
"More."
That got a harsher murmur than anything else.
A young woman near the edge of the circle stepped forward before the camp could settle again.
Slim. Quick-boned. Bow across her back, knife already at her hip. Her eyes were bright with anger before she had even spoken.
"You brought that here?" she snapped. "Into our camp?"
She was young enough to move before caution. Old enough that no one had yet punished the habit out of her.
Serya, Vincent guessed.
The broad-shouldered hunter from the riverbank—Ragan, if the shape of the hierarchy meant anything—caught her wrist before she moved closer.
She shook him off immediately.
Taliah did not stop her.
Interesting.
Let the young voice say what the older ones did not wish to waste words on.
Serya pointed at Vincent's left hand as if accusing a snake of choosing bad company.
"That thing is a mouth," she said. "You can see it. It eats."
Julia's bound hands tightened.
Vincent held still.
Serya's gaze cut to Julia. "And you dragged it here anyway."
"We didn't ask to be dragged anywhere," Julia said coldly.
Good.
Bad timing.
But good spine.
Several hunters stiffened.
Taliah lifted one hand.
The camp settled again.
The older man—Shaman, almost certainly—looked once toward the forest beyond camp, not at any specific tree, but into the direction from which Vincent and Julia had come.
Then he said quietly, "The river carried them. The red hunter drove them."
At once, that mattered to the camp more than the insult-trading.
Ragan spoke for the first time since the riverbank.
"I saw its trail on the far side."
A tighter silence followed that.
The red predator had a reputation here.
Good to know. Worse to experience.
Taliah folded her arms. "So the forest pushes trouble into my fire now."
Vincent answered before anyone else could place the full blame conveniently.
"The thing in the forest was hunting us."
Serya laughed once. Harsh and short. "As if that makes this better."
"No," Vincent said. "It makes it precise."
That slowed her for half a beat.
Taliah turned her gaze fully to him for the first time.
Her eyes were the sort that did not care whether a man had once been rich, holy, or useful elsewhere.
"What followed you?" she asked.
Vincent thought of the red hide, the wounded eye, the clean way it had chosen angles instead of panic.
"A predator," he said. "Fast. Intelligent. Already injured when we reached the river. It knows how to watch before it commits."
Ragan's mouth tightened. "Rotfang."
So that was the name.
Taliah looked at the Shaman.
He said only one word.
"Yes."
That was enough.
The circle around the fires shifted subtly.
A few hunters checked spear points. One woman at the drying racks moved the meat inward. Two boys old enough to carry messages but not hunt disappeared toward the back tents.
This camp did not wait passively for danger to arrive.
It made room for it.
The Shaman lowered himself onto a flat stone near the fire and gestured.
One hunter stepped behind Vincent and tore the ruined glove fully away from the gauntlet.
The camp saw the thing clearly now.
Black-blue scales fused to living flesh.
The gem dark at the wrist.
The faint spread of cold lines up the forearm.
No one confused it for armor.
Good.
Better that way.
The Shaman studied it in silence long enough to make Julia's breathing sharpen.
Then he said, almost to himself, "Not worn."
Vincent answered, "No."
"Attached."
"Yes."
"Fed recently."
"Yes."
The old man's gaze lifted to Vincent's face.
"And hungry again."
Vincent said nothing.
He did not need to.
The gem pulsed once as if answering for him.
A few people around the fire muttered curses in their own language.
Serya took one step back.
Not from Vincent.
From the hand.
Taliah watched everyone watching it.
Then she made the first true decision.
"Separate them," she said.
Julia moved instantly. "No."
Several spears tilted.
Vincent's eyes cut to hers.
Too fast. Too direct. Too dangerous a refusal in a camp like this.
Taliah's expression did not change.
She only looked at Julia and said, "Then give me a reason not to."
Julia met her gaze.
For one heartbeat Vincent thought she would answer with loyalty.
That would have been true.
It would also have been useless here.
Instead Julia said, "Because I know what it does when he collapses."
That bought real silence.
Taliah's eyes narrowed slightly. "Explain."
Julia took one breath and used it well.
"It doesn't just eat monsters," she said. "It changes him when it feeds. If you separate us and it reacts badly, you'll learn nothing except how fast a stranger dies."
Better.
Still dangerous.
But better.
The Shaman looked from Julia to Vincent, then back to the gauntlet.
He finally asked the question beneath all the others.
"When it fed, what did it leave in you?"
Vincent could have said strength.
That would have been the wrong simplification.
"Function," he said.
The old man waited.
"Breath," Vincent added. "Stability."
That interested him.
Good.
Taliah did not care about the poetry of the answer.
"Can it take taint from something living?" she asked.
There.
That was the first glimpse of the real pressure under the camp's caution.
Not fear of the unknown alone.
Need.
The Shaman's eyes sharpened too.
Julia noticed it. So did Vincent.
A taint problem inside the tribe, then.
Infected land? Wounded hunters? A place they could not cleanse? Perhaps all three.
Vincent answered carefully.
"I don't know."
That displeased Serya immediately. "So it might."
"It might," Vincent said.
"And you still brought it here."
"No," Vincent said flatly. "You brought us here."
Ragan's mouth twitched.
Serya looked like she wanted to continue the argument with a knife.
Taliah stopped that with a glance.
Then the tribe leader turned to the Shaman.
"You said it was feeding."
"Yes."
"You said not on him alone."
"Yes."
She looked at Vincent's left hand.
"Can it be used?"
The Shaman did not answer immediately.
The fires crackled softly in the pause. Somewhere beyond camp, a bird finally called once and then thought better of it.
At last he said, "Everything hungry can be used."
Taliah accepted it for what it was.
Then she looked at Vincent and Julia and gave the second decision.
"They stay until he wakes fully from whatever the river and that thing have done to him."
Serya stiffened. "Mother—"
Taliah turned her head.
Serya stopped.
The title had explained itself.
Good.
Taliah continued, "Not as guests. Not as kin. As risks under watch."
Vincent could work with that.
Julia could survive that.
Better than the riverbank.
Better than the Rotfang.
Ragan stepped forward to cut the rope between Vincent's wrists, but not before two other hunters moved into easier killing range. They freed Julia's hands next.
Neither of them rubbed the rope marks.
Wise.
Serya still looked like she disagreed with the decision on principle and would be delighted to prove it with practical consequences later.
Also useful to know.
The Shaman settled back onto the flat stone near the fire and closed his eyes for a moment as if listening to something under the noise of camp.
When he opened them again, he was looking not at Vincent—
but at the gauntlet.
And when he spoke, his voice was quiet enough that only those nearest the fire should have heard it.
Yet the words still seemed to reach farther than sound.
"If it truly drinks taint," he said, "then either it becomes our answer…"
His eyes lifted slowly to Vincent's face.
"…or it becomes the thing that finishes what the forest started."
No one in the camp said anything after that.
They didn't need to.
Vincent looked around the Dayakan firelit hollow—at the waiting spears, the hard-eyed hunters, the wary children kept back, the leader who thought in terms of survival first and kindness never, and the old man who had just named him a possible cure and a possible disaster in the same breath.
Good.
That was clearer than false welcome.
Julia shifted closer by half a step.
Small.
Intentional.
Not enough to challenge the camp.
Enough to say she was still with him in this.
Vincent did not look at her.
He looked at the fire.
At the smoke rising thin into the branches.
At the place in the tribe's silence where opportunity and danger had just become the same thing.
The gauntlet pulsed once.
Slow.
Hungry.
Listening.
And Vincent understood with tired, cold certainty that House Aldebaran was behind him now.
The dungeon had given him a method.
The forest had given him a chase.
And Dayakan—
Dayakan had just given him a reason the gauntlet might need to feed on more than monsters.