It heard them before it understood what it was hearing.
Two sets of movement coming through the Sunken Green from different directions, both with the dense layered current inside them, both moving with the kind of quiet that meant they knew how to move through a forest and were trying to. Not like the hunter from before who had moved alone and unhurried. These ones were in groups and they were paying attention to something other than beasts.
It moved up off the forest floor onto a low branch of an old tree, thick enough to sit on comfortably, high enough that the undergrowth below hid it from anything not specifically looking up.
Four from the north. Three from the east. Their currents were all dense but different from each other, some stronger some weaker, and they were spreading out as they moved, putting distance between each other, which meant they knew the others were coming and were not surprised by it.
The two groups met in the wide flat area near the oldest trees where the roots broke the ground into natural barriers and the canopy above was thick enough that almost no light reached the floor. It had passed through this area hundreds of times. Good ground for something small that knew it. Complicated ground for something large trying to move fast.
Nobody spoke.
One of the four from the north moved first.
His current pulled inward the way it always did before movement and he crossed the distance between the groups fast, his whole body carrying the current the way the lone hunter had done it, spread thin and even. The one he went toward was ready, her current already moving before he reached her, and what happened between them was nothing like watching people hunt beasts.
The beast never knew what was coming. These ones knew exactly what was coming and were already answering it before it arrived.
It watched from the branch without moving.
The others were moving too now, pairing off, the flat area filling with the sound of impact and the sharp crackle of currents meeting and pushing against each other. It read all of it through the tongue at once, seven currents moving and shifting and responding, and tried to follow each one separately and could not, too much happening too fast, so it picked one and watched only that.
The smallest one on the eastern side. His current was the weakest of the seven but he was doing something with it that the others were not, keeping it close to his body instead of extending it outward, and the one he was paired against kept pushing at something that was not quite where he expected it to be.
It watched this for a while.
Then it shifted its attention to the one who was going to lose.
It did not know yet that he was going to lose. It just noticed that one of the four from the north had made a small adjustment early in his fight, shifting his current to his right side to answer something his opponent did, and had not shifted it back when the moment passed. The current was still sitting heavier on the right side, a leftover from an answer that was already done, and his opponent had not noticed yet or had noticed and was waiting.
She was waiting.
It watched her move around him slowly, her current sitting even and patient, and watched him not notice that he had not corrected the imbalance, and watched her notice that he had not noticed.
Three exchanges later she went left.
His right side answered fast, the heavy current there moving well, but his left had nothing ready and she was not going right and he turned too late and the sound of the impact carried through the still air of the flat area and he went down hard into the roots and did not get up.
Everything stopped.
The others pulled back from each other, both sides reading the same moment, and the ones from the north looked at the one on the ground and the ones from the east looked at their own and the flat area went quiet except for breathing and the low sounds of the forest doing what it always did regardless of what happened in it.
Words went back and forth. Short and hard, nothing like the sounds travelers made on the road or the family with the small ones. It caught three words it knew and none of them helped it understand what was being said but the sound of them told enough. Nobody was finished yet. This was a stop not an end.
The ones from the north picked up the one who had gone down. Still breathing, the tongue confirmed it, warm and alive but not moving on his own. They pulled back into the undergrowth and the ones from the east watched them go and then pulled back the other way and the flat area was empty again.
It stayed on the branch for a long time after.
The imbalance had been there from the third exchange. Early enough that fixing it would have cost him almost nothing. He had not fixed it and she had waited and the whole rest of the fight had just been the consequence of that one moment playing out the way it was always going to play out once it was set.
It thought about the speck sitting at its center, small and stubborn, loosening slightly each night and snapping back. Thought about the ways it had watched the current move through seven different people today and the differences between all of them. Thought about the small one keeping his current close instead of extending it and what that meant for someone whose current was weaker than everyone else in the fight.
The light was fading by the time it came down from the branch.
It went back to the books and opened one and read until dark. Then it worked on the speck until the tiredness came and stopped and lay still in the dark with the sounds of the flat area still running through whatever it thought with, not the impacts or the voices but the moment before, the current sitting wrong on his right side and nobody saying anything about it.
One mistake.
Everything after that was just waiting.