The Hunter's Rede

by F. T. McKinstry

  A short time later, after exploring the saddlebags and rearranging the tack to remove signs of Faerin ownership, Lorth mounted and emerged from the alley wearing the Osprey’s sky-blue cloak with the hood down. The darkness of Maern still moved around him as he rode in a brisk, purposeful trot, shielding his face against the cold rain pelting him from the north. He rode out onto the wide road, a blur in the night fog.

  On his way, he met with two Faerin blockades. They let him pass.

  The rain had stopped when he finally reached the Hallowolf. The bridge spanned a gorge that howled with the eerie tongue of incessant wind. In the depths, on the rocks and crags, grew trees with twisted trunks and tough, gnarled roots. Precarious steps plunged down to the dwellings of hardy fishermen, birdkeepers and boatwrights. The river below was swift and treacherous, even in the calmer places that lapped into the caves of the lower city.

  The dirty blur of torchlight glowed in the mist. The bridge, a substantial stone arch with ornate carvings of birds, animals and fishes along the parapets, was wide enough for a wagon and several mounted men to ride side by side. The gate stood on the city end, and crouched like a big, armed guard on an outcropping that jutted out over the gorge. Archers lined the heights.

  Another cordon, mounted and heavily armed, blocked the way. A group of people huddled there at sword point, the usual rabble that walked the streets of Os late at night, but no one passed the line. A tall Faerin with a green-trimmed cloak walked slowly among them, yanking their hoods away, lifting their chins and moving a torch near to see. One man lay in a heap on the ground, unmoving.

  Lorth breathed deeply to gather his strength. The open bites from the Keeper’s blade ached in his flesh. He had folded the cloak in such a way as to hide the wizard’s blood on the front left edge, but it wouldn’t bear close examination. As the soldiers turned their faces in his direction, he briefly hoped they were not familiar with Aenspeak.

  Someone shouted as he rode forward. The tall Faerin turned. On his helmet and breast, he wore the elm tree of a captain. Two soldiers joined him. The townsfolk stared up with hollow, pleading gazes that caused Lorth to envision spilling a great deal of blood here. But the Faerins outnumbered him, and he wouldn’t risk giving them more information about his capabilities than he had already exposed.

  He rode forward and spoke something of which he didn’t know the meaning in the context in which he used it. To the right of the bridge, something snapped from a chain and crashed into the rocky depths of the gorge. Several men barked exclamations of surprise. One of them laughed.

  To the captain Lorth said, in a serviceable eastern accent, “I’ve been called by the Eye. Business in Alil.”

  This captain had more sense than the others whom Lorth had passed. He held up his torch, making the hunter intensely conscious of his dress, his condition and the blood on his hands. “Seen some trouble?” His gaze traveled down.

  With a warlord smile Lorth replied, “The blade of a Raptor finds trouble.” No thanks to you lot, he added to himself.

  The captain pursed his lips and nodded, then looked behind him. “Man coming through!” He stepped back, and his men followed. Lorth passed them without further attention and rode beneath the gate. The tone of his horse’s hooves striking the stones changed as he went out onto the bridge.

  Half way across, in the whirling scream of wind and water, the mare grew agitated. He soothed her with his body, keeping an even, unthreatened pace until he reached the other side. Then he drove her into a dangerous gait along the muddy, rocky way.

  He glanced over his shoulder at the gate. The Faerin guards stood there as if nothing had happened. But it had, and all the wrong people in Os now knew about it.

  Chapter 4

  Shade of Wings: The owl flies near.

  Lorth’s night senses came alive as he rode, drawing on impressions normally under the surface of sight. What little relief he had gained by escaping Os swiftly fell to hunger and fatigue, an uncanny, crushing fatigue that drained his heart and thinned the veils of his conscious mind. Only his concentration on finding his way on the road kept his mind off the cold. He had layered his gray cloak over the wizard’s to stay warm.

  The curvy image of the wolf-faced Destroyer hovered on the edges of his thoughts like a dream he couldn’t quite remember and didn’t want to.

  The Wolf River Road ran from the Hallowolf Bridge to Eusiron in the north. Only a Northman would call it a road. Narrow, rocky and rent by scree slopes and wooded ravines, it didn’t offer easy passage, especially at night. Lorth blended with the dark to guide Freya over the terrain. For some reason, she trusted him.

  As Leaf had trusted him.

  Lying filth.

  He had no clear idea how long he rode, an hour, maybe four. Something—his wounds, his use of energy shields, the cold, perhaps the sadness in his heart—had weakened him beyond explanation. Only the wind, rain, fog and the steps of the mare held him together.

  Once, travelers in these parts could find welcome in the cottages and farms surrounding the river. The hunter had never taken shelter in this way, being more accustomed to and trustful of the wilds. Now and again, light flickered through the trees, from a dwelling or a village. Like a wounded animal fearing fire, he resisted. Taking shelter from strangers would mean lying to them, endangering them, or both. It would also give his new enemies time to catch up with him.

  I am alone.

  Fire. Water, earth. Mothct. A pale hand drew him down and covered him, singing him into green shadows, wind moving over the wings of a crow. The trees on either side of the road reached into his face and heart with cold, thin fingers. Freya paused with agitation. As he pressed his thighs into her, she skittered back, fighting the bit.

  Lorth summoned the last of his strength to calm the horse as a low, silvery shade fled across his path and vanished over the drop on the western side of the road. It moved so swiftly he couldn’t see or sense its nature. Shivering gripped his body. He didn’t have the strength to conjure any more spells and he couldn’t make a decision.

  Freya abruptly turned and entered the forest to the east. Lorth held on and pressed his cheek into her damp mane as she pounded through the brush. When she finally stopped, Lorth’s head spun from the depths of his gut. He slipped into trance.

  A silvery, naked girl stepped out of a bloody pool. She smiled. “I need a killin’ done.”

  Lorth leaned over in a sickening whirl of gray and white, clinging to the horse as the sensation of a shivering willow tree dragged his body over sodden ground. Mothct. He could no longer focus on reality. Ferns, frogs, fire and rain. The spider bite on his neck throbbed with prickling fire, glowing black.

  The night gathered into a woman, cloaked in black, half-turned away. Light grew in her womb. It hurt his eyes. A rich, flourishing garden clothed her body in splendorous yellow, lavender, pale green and red; her earth-brown flesh gave it life. He longed to see her face but he couldn’t utter the words. Warm wind carrying the scent of honeysuckle caressed him as she stirred with reptilian grace, and then turned as slowly as a constellation on the night sky. A wolf’s eyes gazed out from the void of a hollow cowl.

  “Moridrun fore sarumn!” Lorth finally managed. Only the forest surrounded him.

  Freya sidestepped with a jolt, causing him to slide from the saddle. He struck the earth, and kept sinking, down, down into the pulsing dark of a mother’s arms.

  ~ * ~

  Lorth awoke with a start as something big and warm moved beside him, rising in a pounding rush. The mare stood and lowered her velvet nose to his face. “Freya,” he breathed, reaching up. “My warm, strong girl. I think you saved my life.”

  He rolled over, his body aching, his wounds throbbing with pain. His stomach was a hollow maw and he badly needed to piss. He smelled animal droppings, damp hay and soot, as if the mare had dropped him in the remains of a barn.

  Lorth got up, swaying on his feet with vertigo. He stumbled away from the stone foundation to the edge
of the forest. As he relieved himself, he drew a deep breath of the brisk mountain air. It smelled of rotting leaves. Autumn’s splendor had risen to color and fallen to the wind; most of the trees were bare except for poplars and beeches. The trees swayed and clacked restlessly against a cerulean sky.

  He found Freya nudging through a rain-drenched pile of hay. He rooted through the Faerin saddlebag and found a strip of jerked venison. Chewing slowly, he noticed signs of destruction in the tangle of the wood.

  As he wandered over the site, Lorth discovered he had spent the night in a homestead that had burned not a week past. Mounted men had come through and thoroughly looted the place. Near the cottage, the raven-picked remains of a boy sprawled over the broken edge of the foundation. Two more bodies, a man and a woman, lay in a bony heap amid the charred rubble filling the cellar. Tied to a broken spear driven into the earth was a half-burned, wave-shaped pennon in shades of green and gray, embroidered with the standard for the Os City Guard.

  Faerin work, this.

  Near the barn foundation, Lorth found a shovel with the handle mostly burned off. On the edge of the settlement lay a garden, barren after a harvest. Noticing green beneath the fallen leaves, he pulled out some carrots and turnips, tossed them aside and began to dig. The sun had risen into the trees as he stepped away from three mounds of loamy earth. He bowed his head and formed his hand into the sign of a wizard: a down-turned fist that he turned upwards, opening his fingers to the light. “Silin en Maern tali,” he said in the wizards’ tongue, blessing the graves with the power of the Old One.

  He stepped back, breathed deeply and gazed over the remains of the guardsman’s home. Freya had found a trough filled with rainwater; Lorth washed the vegetables there, broke a carrot in half and gave it to the horse. He moved around the barn, gathered what food he could for her, and stuffed it into a sack. Then he removed the Keeper’s cloak from beneath his own and stashed it out of sight.

  He mounted and thundered into the woods with fresh urgency.

  ~ * ~

  Three days passed, running with the winds rising from the Ostarin Mountains and bearing down upon the forests, swaying restlessly. Snow cloaked the higher elevations, forming a white line against the lower hills of gray and evergreen. The days grew shorter; though the sun shone warm and bright, it set early in the evening with a cold, brief song that painted the high woods and crags in shades of russet gold.

  Lorth rode against the wind, long days and into night, stopping only to rest and care for Freya. His last night in Os had left his body weak, and every time he slept, he dreamed of the wolf-faced Destroyer. He had begun to sense that his fight with the Osprey, perhaps his unintentional shift into the spirit of Maern, had weakened him. He had used the powers of wizards for years and not been knocked down like this.

  He rode north in a persistent, thumping pace along the rugged way. Frost, fallen trees and boulders covered the ground, and occasionally a gully burbling with water, deadwood, brush or ice tested the mettle of his horse. The Wolf roared in the gorge that plunged on the western side of the road. The river sparkled like a silver ribbon through the tops of the barren trees.

  Unhindered by bad weather, Keepers or Faerins, Lorth figured one more day to Icaros’s house. Clear skies had given way to clouds that hung like a scythe over the western hills. The late afternoon sun beamed beneath the front and lit the trees with apricot and ghostly white.

  The hunter had fled the road several times beneath the sharp, eerie prickling of his watch-webs. When threatened, he rode into the trees and hid himself and the mare with fog and images of thorns until the Faerins passed, small parties of four or six riding hard and yet warily, their gazes searching the forests and the gorge below.

  As to what they searched for, Lorth didn’t have to speculate. While he hadn’t been here when Roarin was assassinated, he had fled from capture at the gates, eluded and then wounded a Keeper of the Eye, and left a Hunter’s Sanctuary in grisly shambles. Given that and the things Leaf had told him, he guessed they now blamed him for the wizard’s murder. He had certainly given them enough that they wouldn’t bother to investigate the particulars.

  Again, his mind turned to the Tarthian lord and the Osprey asking questions in the Sea Serpent. That wouldn’t improve his situation. According to the warden, they were hunting for anyone using Tarthian royal coin. Had the Eagle at the gate seen through the spell Lorth had cast over his purse? No wonder the Destroyer in his dream by the burned homestead two nights ago wore Tarthian royal colors! That couldn’t possibly be coincidental. Not in a vision.

  Last night, he had tried to find Icaros with his mind, through an art called mindspeak, which wizards used to communicate telepathically. In his youth, it had taken Lorth a long time to be able to enter Icaros’s mind without breaking trance in fright at the vastness of it. Once he had learned how, he had been able, under very specific circumstances, to merge and talk to the wizard mentally. So he had thought to merge with Icaros again and tell him he was coming and to warn him of trouble.

  He couldn’t get through. He saw only the blank, silent wall of the wizard’s will when he was not open to impressions beyond his own private universe.

  Tonight, he would try again.

  He reached a fork and left the road. Once, a camp up here offered rest to travelers. Hopefully, it would be empty. He needed water. The path wound up through a meadow that thickened into a glade. Lorth rode slowly through the silent trees, noting the signs of a mounted company: scattered fire pits, animal bones, boot and hoof prints, frozen puddles, horse manure, stumps and axed tree limbs. Wolf and raven prints marked the now-frozen mud.

  He dismounted, slid his hand along the reins and stroked Freya on the cheek with the backs of his fingers. The mare lowered her head against him. He followed the sound of falling water and found a frozen pool on the edge of the forest, cupped into a hollow fed by a small waterfall. Someone had stomped on it; thin slabs of ice lay scattered on the ground around the edges of the hole. He let Freya drink, watching the muscles in her neck ripple as she swallowed, and then moved to the falls to fill his flask.

  He straightened his back and drew his cloak around him. His belly growled with hunger, and suddenly he felt not only tired, but also cold. The wind blew restlessly; rain was coming, perhaps snow. He hadn’t yet adjusted to this climate, having been so long in the south.

  Freya nibbled and ripped at a clump of grass by the edge of the pool. It was risky to stay here long, but Lorth badly needed rest, warmth and food. He fetched the reins, led the mare around the pool and up into the trees until he found a place to cross the ravine. He rode into a hemlock thicket until he could no longer hear the water, then dismounted and shuffled around for a good spot to build a fire.

  Dusk descended quietly. Thick cloud cover folded like a cloak into long strands of iron gray. Damp cold rose from the ground, and the air smelled of smoke and leaf mold. The hunter huddled over a sputtering fire, his hood drawn. Freya had fed on a carrot, a turnip, and what forage she could find in the surroundings. A stream trickled nearby, beneath the ice.

  Lorth ate the last half carrot and a piece of moldy cheese he had taken from the galley of the Slippery Elm just before his departure. He reached into his damp woodpile and put a hemlock branch on the fire. The dried needles burst into flames, then crackled and hissed along the twigs, dying quickly to a shrinking glow. “Teine,” Lorth said impatiently, in the wizards’ tongue. At once, the wood caught fire. He put more on it.

  He glanced up, hoping the rain would hold off. His woods-sense told him it was not cold enough to snow, but his body felt otherwise. Whatever it did, he would have to deal with it, as Icaros had never taught him how to work weather. Lorth suspected the old wizard could have done if he was of a mind, but he had always seemed content with whatever came.

  He rubbed his temples, breathed deeply and let his thoughts part to the deeper silence. There, where he usually found peace and balance, he found only unease, like the night, restless
and brewing a storm. Something had changed since he had unleashed the Destroyer. Icaros had once told him: The Old One is balanced. We cannot see her as she is; we see only one aspect of her nature at a time, out of context with the rest. We cannot see her in wholeness, not even the gods can. Only she knows. For this reason, you must take great care when stirring the waters of Maern, for you may not understand the consequences.

  A chill crept up the hunter’s spine. He hadn’t intentionally invoked the Old One in his fight with the Osprey. It had just happened, to rise up from some part of his being because of his condition at the time. He hadn’t even questioned it. It had a presence in his mind that belonged there, like his breath or heartbeat.

  But something eluded him. He saw the wolf-faced woman every night in dreams and even during the day at times, from the corner of his eye, disguised in the trunk of a tree or in the shape of a brush pile on the edge of the path. He had invoked her, now she shadowed him and he didn’t know how to put her back into the chasm she had come from.

  He placed another piece of wood on the fire, and watched the smoke curl in small patterns in the moss patches. He had dragged out the wizard’s cloak to use as a blanket. His feet had warmed a little, and he felt drowsy. A bit more warmth and a short rest...then he would return to the road. Night was a better time to travel.

  He crossed his arms over his knees and lowered his head. His blood moved slowly in his veins, tugging his consciousness from the outside in. The fire crackled, hissing as water escaped. Wind tugged a strand of his hair, and drew the fire’s attention. A twig snapped as the mare shifted on her feet. Her animal sigh merged with a rising breeze that stirred the forest.