The hunting began in autumn.
His father announced it the way he announced most things, without announcement. He simply appeared one morning before sunrise with two bows, a quiver, a short hunting blade in a leather sheath, and the expression of a man going somewhere with a purpose and an intention to bring company.
Mikhael dressed and followed.
The forest that bordered the village's eastern edge was not a dramatic forest. It did not have the quality of ancient darkness or mythological depth. It was simply old trees and undergrowth and the accumulated quiet of a space where human activity was infrequent enough for the resident animals to have developed only a moderate wariness toward it. Birds moved through the upper branches. Somewhere distant, water ran over something.
His father moved through it in a way that changed the quality of his father entirely.
Inside the village, in the house, on the practice ground, his father was composed and warm and present. In the forest he became something quieter than all of those things. Something that had been there before the warmth and had not gone away when the warmth arrived, simply been placed alongside it. He moved without sound. Not the careful deliberate soundlessness of someone trying to be quiet, but the natural silence of someone for whom moving without announcement was simply how movement worked.
Mikhael followed and matched his pace and his silence and felt something in his own body respond to the environment with an alertness that was different from the alertness of the practice ground. More animal. Less architectural.
They did not speak for the first hour.
His father stopped twice, crouching to examine ground, touching the edge of a broken stem, reading the forest the way he read people, through the evidence of what had moved through it recently and what direction it had been moving in and what that suggested about where it currently was.
Mikhael watched and learned.
The bow lesson came next, in a clearing where the light was sufficient. His father's instruction here was different in quality from the sword instruction. More spare. Fewer words. The bow was a different discipline, one where the internal work mattered more and the external form was primarily a vehicle for that internal work.
"The bow does not lie either," his father said, adjusting Mikhael's draw elbow, "but it lies differently than the sword. The sword tells you immediately when you have done something wrong. The arrow tells you after. Which means the correction has to happen before the release, in the moment of stillness before the shot, which is the moment most people use least well."
"Because the moment of stillness feels like waiting," Mikhael said.
"Because the moment of stillness is everything," his father said. "The shot is just the conclusion."
Mikhael drew, found the stillness, and released.
The arrow went where he had intended it to go, which was a knot on a tree trunk twenty metres away. It hit two finger-widths to the left of centre.
His father looked at the knot. Then at Mikhael. Then at the knot again.
"Adjust your anchor point," he said, after a pause that lasted slightly longer than the previous ones had.
The first kill was a deer, encountered in the late afternoon of their third hunting trip.
It was a young one, at the edge of the tree line, head down in the low grass, ears moving in the independent way deer ears move, each processing its own section of the surrounding soundscape. It had not heard them. Or had heard them and assessed them as insufficiently alarming. Either way it was there, and still, and presenting the kind of opportunity that hunting trips often do not produce and that hunters learn not to expect and therefore not to hesitate over when they arrive.
His father looked at Mikhael and indicated with a slight movement of his head that the shot was his.
Mikhael drew.
He found the stillness his father had described. Not manufactured stillness, not the performed calm of someone trying to demonstrate composure, but the actual thing, the moment before action where everything that is going to happen has already been decided and all that remains is for the body to follow the decision. He felt it as he had come to feel it, a settling, like sediment in water that has stopped being disturbed.
He released.
The deer fell quickly. His father had positioned them for a clean shot and it had been a clean shot, as humane as such things can be, which is a standard worth caring about.
Mikhael walked to it and stood beside it.
He had killed before. In a previous life he had ended things with a scale and regularity that would have made this moment seem absurdly small. He had ended darkness that threatened entire populations and had not felt the specific quality of what he felt now.
The deer was simply there. It had been alive and was not alive and the distance between those two states was very short and very permanent. There was no darkness in it that had needed ending. There was no balance it had been threatening. It was simply an animal that had been in a place where it had been seen, and now it was not moving.
He stood beside it for a moment with the respect that the moment deserved.
His father stood beside him without speaking.
Then they did what came next, which was practical and necessary and which his father taught him with the same careful attention he gave to everything, because the practical and necessary parts of a thing matter as much as the meaningful ones and the mistake is in treating them as separate.
Walking home in the evening, the deer carried between them on a pole, Mikhael thought about what was different.
In his previous life, power had always been directed outward. Against things. The world had furnished him with opposition and he had moved against it and the moving had given his life its shape. The cultivation he had done in these first years of this life was quieter than that, turned inward, the patient moulding of a foundation rather than the construction of a weapon.
But today was different from both of those things.
Today had been about reading. About patience not as discipline but as attention. About the moment of stillness before the shot that his father said was everything. About walking through a forest and allowing the forest to speak its own language and understanding enough of that language to move inside it without erasing it.
He had been powerful in his previous life in ways this world could not measure.
He had not known how to do this.
"Father," he said.
His father looked at him from the other end of the pole.
"In the stories," Mikhael said, "about great warriors. They are always described by what they defeated. The darkness they ended. The battles they won. The things they stood against."
"Yes," his father said.
"But no one describes the forest," Mikhael said. "No one describes the moment of stillness before the shot. The grip. The footwork on wet ground."
His father walked for a while without responding.
"The stories people tell about strength," he said eventually, "are the stories that can be told in the language that people already have. Victory is a word everyone knows. The moment of stillness before the shot does not have a word." He shifted his grip on the pole. "That does not mean it is less real. It means it is harder to share."
Mikhael thought about the name carved into the bark of the World Tree in his previous life. The only proof that he had existed. A single word.
He had been described by what he had defeated too.
He had never had a word for the rest of it.
They walked home through the evening with the deer between them and the village lights appearing ahead through the trees and his mother waiting inside with dinner and the fire and the uncomplicated warmth of a place that was simply home, and for the first time since he had been born into this life, Mikhael did not feel the quiet undertow of something missing.
He felt, without reaching for it or examining it or trying to understand its mechanism, simply present.