Shadow could not, obviously, knock.
This was the kind of problem that became obvious only after the fact — the gap in a plan that had seemed complete until the moment of execution revealed the thing you hadn't accounted for. He had thought about Shadow's movement through the forest, about the dark spear, about the connection maintenance cost at range, about what kind of creature would be the appropriate first target. He had thought about almost everything.
He had not thought about how Shadow was going to present a dead Glimmer Rabbit to a family that would find its sudden appearance on their property alarming without some plausible explanation for how it had gotten there.
He ran through the options with the speed of someone who has a body in their possession and needs to deal with it before the morning routine brought people through the back door.
Shadow leaving the creature in the forest and going back for it later was not viable — someone might find it, an actual animal might take it, the meat would begin to turn. Shadow appearing visibly in the yard was absolutely not viable. Shadow producing the animal from apparently nowhere in full view of the family would require a level of explanation that Arthur was not yet capable of providing and not yet ready to attempt.
What Shadow could do was place it. Quietly, without being seen, in a location that would give the discovery a plausible shape.
The back step was the obvious choice, close enough to the house to suggest it had arrived intentionally rather than wandered there — and ambiguous enough that any explanation would require active effort to disprove. He arranged the Glimmer Rabbit as naturally as Shadow's approximate spatial judgment allowed. The result looked, he assessed through Shadow's eyes, like something that had been placed rather than something that had died there, but not so obviously placed that it would invite immediate suspicion.
He hoped his parents were not especially observant.
His parents were, he would discover, very observant.
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The wait was the difficult part.
His father found it on the back porch at first light.
Arthur heard the door, then the pause — the specific quality of a pause that meant something unexpected — and then his father's voice calling back into the house.
'Mira.'
His mother came through from the kitchen. A short silence.
'Where did that come from,' she said.
'Porch. Just sitting there.'
Another silence. Arthur could see them both looking at it through Shadow, the glimmer rabbit laid neatly on the porch boards the way something placed rather than fallen would be. No trap. No hunter. Nothing that explained it.
'Is it fresh?' his mother said.
His father crouched down. Arthur heard the sounds of a practical examination.
'Yes,' his father said. 'Neck's clean. No damage to the body.' A pause. 'It's good meat. Glimmer Rabbit, by the look of it — see the sheen on the coat.'
'I know what it is,' his mother said, in the tone she used when she was thinking rather than correcting. 'They don't usually come out of the forest.'
'No.'
'So something brought it.'
'Something brought it,' his father agreed.
Another pause. Longer this time, with the quality of two people standing next to a question neither of them was going to answer this morning.
'The hide,' his father said. 'That's worth real coin, if it's kept whole. Better than anything from the market traps.'
His mother was quiet for a moment.
'Don't damage the fur when you clean it,' she said. 'I'll make a stew.'
His father came back inside. His mother went back to the kitchen with a small pep in her step at the thought of a good meal. The question of where the rabbit had come from went with them, unasked, filed in the same place the family filed most things that didn't have a clean answer yet — somewhere patient, to wait.
Arthur lay in his cradle and let out a slow breath.
Shadow had done well.
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The stew was made in the large iron pot that lived on the hook over the fire.
He was not yet eating solids, which he found increasingly difficult to accept as the smell of Mira's cooking enveloped the house. Root vegetables, wild herbs from the kitchen garden, the Glimmer Rabbit broken down into its components with the efficient respect of someone who had learned to process animals cleanly and quickly. His mother cooked the way she did most things: without ceremony, without waste, with the focused competence of someone for whom feeding her children was one of the primary missions of her life and she intended to do it properly.
The family ate when Edric returned to the table after washing, and Arthur watched from his cradle.
He had been watching his family eat for eight months and he had learned to read the hunger and satisfaction communicated when people were not performing for an audience. Clara, who was dramatic about almost everything, ate with an unself-conscious enthusiasm that was its own form of honesty. Thomas, who portioned his own food with the careful equity of someone managing a limited resource, tonight did not — he ate freely, refilling his bowl.
Lyra ate two full bowls.
His father had seconds. His mother had seconds, and then — when she thought the children's attention was elsewhere — a third portion scraped from the bottom of the pot, eaten standing at the fire rather than at the table.
Arthur watched this and felt something move through him that he did not have proper words for. A satisfaction and grief and a love that had crept up on him over these past eight months, which was not an experience he had had much of in his previous life.
He had done that. He had delivered a monster he had killed in the forest and his family was able to eat for the first time in months until they were full.
He thought: I am going to do this every day.
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