The next day dawned fair, the sky above the lake harebell blue, the water clear as glass, each of the islands of Vineland sitting neat and still upon its own reflection. Wren, exhausted by her adventures in the night, slept late, but outside her window, Anchorage was waking up. Woodsmoke rose from the chimneys of the city’s thirty inhabited houses, and fishermen called out good morning to each other as they made their way down the stairways to the mooring beach.

On the north side of the lake rose a brindled mountain, far higher than the Dead Hills to the south. Its lower slopes were green with scrub and stands of pine and steep meadows where wildflowers grew, and in one of these meadows a group of deer was grazing. There were many deer in the woods on the green shore, and a few had even swum across to set up home upon the wilder islands. People had spent a lot of time debating how they had come here: whether they had survived since the fall of the old American Empire, or come down from the frozen country to the north, or made their way here from some larger pocket of green much farther west. But all Hester Natsworthy cared about, as she drew back her bowstring in the shelter of the trees downwind, was how much meat was on them.

The bow made a quick, soft sound. The deer leaped into the air and came down running, bounding uphill into the shelter of the scrub—all except the largest doe, who fell dead with Hester’s arrow in her heart and her thin legs kicking and kicking. Hester walked up the hill and pulled the arrow free, cleaning the point on a handful of dry grass before she replaced it in the quiver on her back. The blood was very bright in the sunlight. She dipped her finger in the wound and smeared some on her forehead, muttering her prayer to the Goddess of the Hunt so that the doe’s ghost would not come bothering her. Then she heaved the carcass onto her shoulder and started back down the hill to her boat.