Dawn-watch, even when it is not dawn, is a set of manners.

Downwind: so your smell does not arrive like a rumor. Count: so twenty people do not become a crowd that thinks it is one quiet person. Do not crowd: because a white hart in summer is already a shout, and fear will send it across a road that acts like a wall.

Thorn drills you in a patch of shade. Stand. Soften your knees. Let a jay scold without answering. If the animal looks, you do not stare a hole in it. You become uninteresting on purpose.

Mira takes notes on mill-paper. “We could teach this. We could charge for it. We could not wreck it.”

“Rules first,” Thorn says. “Coin after. Coin without rules is just a prettier hunt.”

The light leans toward afternoon. Dusk will put the Pale One on the corridor if the corridor still exists.

You still need the village to want a gate more than a trophy. Skills in a fern do not bind a miller by themselves.