His eyes were human.
Not the blank yellow of a predator's hunger. Brown, warm, rimmed with the kind of tiredness Mara recognized from looking glasses and from the faces of women who had buried too much. They found her across the fence. They found the shape of the baby against her breast. They did not look away.
Mara's body moved before her mind finished naming fear. She shifted Elias to her left arm, gripped the pitchfork with both hands, and pointed the tines at the creature's chest.
"Stay back!"
Her voice cracked on the second word. The wind took it and threw it thinly across the pasture. Somewhere a crow answered, indifferent.
The beast stopped at the fence. He did not vault it. He did not smash it. He rested one massive hand on the woven wood, claws careful, as if the fence were a living thing that might bruise. When he spoke, his voice was deep and roughened by disuse, but the words were the village tongue—Briarholt's own vowels, softened by something older.
"I won't hurt you."
Mara's laugh was a broken thing. "You won't—look at you. Look at what you are."
"I know what I am," he said. Not angry. Not wounded into rage. Simply knowing, the way a man knows a scar. "I still won't hurt you."
Elias woke fully then. He did not cry. He turned his face toward the sound, toward the horns and the fur and the wrongness of the silhouette against the overcast sky. Mara felt his small body tense, then settle. She held him tighter.
"Please," she said, and hated herself for pleading, and pled anyway. "He's only a baby."
"I know."