The Hunter's Rede

by F. T. McKinstry

Lorth emerged from the shadows of the forest and checked Freya on the edge of the Roar Pass Road. The mid-morning sun shone in brief intervals through heavy clouds moving swiftly across the sky. A low band of gray snow hung in the west.

  He urged Freya into the unmarked snow of the narrow way. Only wind and birds disturbed the silence. Lorth preferred to avoid the road, but he had too far to travel to spend time picking his way through the dense, snowy woods between here and Icaros’s house. His watch-web had been silent all morning as he threaded through the forest, but his body trembled with energy, like a spooky horse that could be set off by the slightest sound or movement. He wanted to tear up the road and kill everything in his path until the black moon devoured him.

  All things exist in structure, Eaglin had said. I’ll change it by removing some of the lines. As a Web, you must fill in the gaps with the Old One’s eye, because only she knows where they are. If you do this improperly, I’ll have opened an interdimensional portal that I can’t close.

  The hunter held three words in his mind that were not words.

  The first, Eaglin had said, will open it.

  Lorth couldn’t guess what this would set into motion. Eaglin couldn’t do anything that would appear out of the ordinary, like fog, storms or anything else the enemy could perceive as a diversion. Certainly nothing creepy or strange. The Faerins would be waiting for that, and would act accordingly. It would have to be subtle.

  How could opening an interdimensional portal be subtle?

  Damned wizard! Like high mountain weather, sweeping, implacable, unpredictable and not to be disregarded, the Raven moved through time and space like a natural force with the powers of the earth at his call. If Lorth had questioned Eaglin’s reasons for feeling uncomfortable in the world before now, he no longer did.

  The Raven had pulled forth a stir in the air, an unreasonable spirit with some intention Lorth couldn’t perceive but for a chill in the warmth, a whisper in the silence, a touch in solitude. Eaglin had unleashed the spirit, and Lorth didn’t know where it would go or what it would do. When you find Freil, you will know him as this, the wizard had said. The second word will keep him under your control.

  A strange scent hovered in the air that didn’t belong there. Mugwort? A stagnant tidal pool? As always, the hunter noticed details around him, but something had changed; he moved in another realm, a shadow realm, one in which he knew different things. Now and then, he heard a frog croak. Leaves fluttered like Eaglin’s soft voice, speaking words that were not words.

  The third word will close it, the Raven had said, his eyes as dark as his mother’s pool.

  For hours the hunter rode, feeling every place in his body that hadn’t fully healed from the thrashing Eaglin had given him. He wondered by what command or realization the Raven had come offering no apology but to trust him.

  Had he not been told the Maelgwn blocked passage on the Roar Pass, Lorth would know it now. He saw no scouts, men-at-arms or hunters, nothing but an occasional corpse: a lone, heavy-set Faerin wearing a double elm leaf, a small company of Faerin warriors equipped with hunting gear and two Eusiron scouts who had either not been told to avoid the road, or had foolishly taken their chances. They had all been killed with slings, bows and blades. One had a snapped neck. All the horses’ tracks went north. Evidently, the Maelgwn had taken the beasts, no doubt to use as currency on supply runs. As far as Lorth knew, the Maelgwn didn’t ride.

  The empty way snaked through the landscape like a path in a dream, white, still, and silent. Lorth gathered only faint impressions on his watch-webs. Why he hadn’t been attacked, he couldn’t guess. In time, his mind began to blend with fleeting images in the woods on either side of the road: dark shapes moving, tracking or shadowing him. Like animals, they didn’t set off his webs. As dusk drew near, he had stopped paying attention.

  The fiery orb of the sun hung just over the mountains as he heard running water—a strange sound, in mid-winter. He moved off the road, dismounted and put on his snowshoes. Stiff and sore, he hefted his legs with a wide, heavy stride through the trees. He found a small waterfall with the ice hacked from it. The pool beneath had been cleared of snow and axed through, revealing a small, black-brown opening where the stream rushed beneath.

  “How’s that, ay?” he said softly, stepping out of the way so that Freya could drink. He turned and unfastened a clasp on a saddlebag. Then he paused, reaching instead for his blade as Freya lifted her head with a snort and stepped away from the water.

  No chance to fear.

  They melted from the surrounding woods, men in dark fur tunics with black and green leather ornaments woven into intricate knotted patterns, thick skin leggings bound with embroidered straps and the same snowshoes Lorth had seen on the ridge. They held bows and knives at the ready. Lorth sheathed his blade, pulled back his hood, soothed Freya with one hand and held up the other as if to placate a pack of wolves. Their dark eyes glittered in the fading light.

  The tallest of the Maelgwn band stepped forward. Lorth stood there, his senses awash in the eldritch impressions of twilight and his mood not unlike that of the men who surrounded him. Had he not respected the clan, let alone what he had seen on the ridge—men, women and children, not warriors—he might have attempted to slip this net. But he knew better. He had never seen a Maelgwn fight, but Efar had once told him they possessed the strength and agility of mountain cats, and could navigate this terrain nearly as well. Lorth realized this to be the reason they hadn’t tripped his webs. They were as close to the land as the wildlife.

  The tall Maelgwn said something in his own tongue. Lorth lowered his hand and shook his head, not understanding. The leader looked over his shoulder and spoke a word, and another approached, a youth, just into manhood. The two spoke for a moment, and then the youth looked up at Lorth as if he had just been shoved into the cage of a monster.

  “Dark warrior surrounds you,” he said in an accent so thick Lorth had to strain to understand. Dark warrior? Again, he shook his head.

  “Eusiron,” they said in unison, joined in by several others.

  “Where do you ride?” the youth asked him.

  “I ride to save a child from the elm-tree warlords,” Lorth replied. The pitch shadow of the Old One crossed his heart. “I am the Destroyer.”

  The young Maelgwn’s throat jumped with a gulp. The leader spoke to him. Tearing his gaze from Lorth, the boy swiftly relayed the message.

  For a moment, no one moved. Lorth became conscious of his weapons, his intention and the amount of time he had to find Freil.

  Remember the Shade of Blood, Eusiron had told him.

  All at once, as if by some invisible communication, the Maelgwn bowed their heads. The leader said something Lorth didn’t understand. Then, as quickly as they had come, the clan withdrew and vanished into the twilit woods.

  Chapter 14

  Shade of One: I am the Destroyer.

  Without a moon, night consumed the forest. Disoriented and uncomfortable, Lorth searched his mind for the things Icaros had taught him, things he’d known all his life, but they no longer felt familiar. He spoke a word in Aenspeak that gave him a sense of solid objects in the dark so he could avoid them.

  As he guided Freya along, Lorth no longer perceived the Maelgwn in the forest on either side of the road. But the foreboding he had felt before discovering the Maelgwn dead on the ridge returned like something bobbing up to the surface of the water after a flood.

  The formless words Eaglin had given him had changed his connection to the surroundings, giving him new eyes in the night. A presence whispered in his mind, just beneath the threshold of his awareness. Not forbidding, not evil; it felt more like the unreasonable spirit Eaglin had unleashed, the essence of Freil in some dimension that couldn’t possibly exist.

  He thought of Leaf, Icaros, and his mother. He thought of Leda and a tear on her cheek. His loins tightened as he envisioned her leaning over his cock and tonguing him into oblivion. He knew three words that were
not words.

  Lorth had no clear sense of time as he left the road and entered the woods. Clouds shrouded the stars, wind blew in restless gusts, and the air smelled of rain. His nerves ached from focusing in the dark. He stopped at a frozen stream, and axed it clear to care for Freya and fill his water skin. He wished he had brought whisky.

  A short time later, he rode out. For hours he rode, his heart numb but for dreamlike images of his childhood at Icaros’s house: pulling a potato with wonder from the ground, clipping a rose bloom and yanking his hand away with a start as a thorn pricked his finger, repairing the fence, feeding the geese, chopping wood, spitting out a chokecherry, reading a book about basil and sage, and lying next to Icaros at night on the warm summer grass, reciting the names of the stars in the constellations.

  He thought of Freil, his bright smile flashing in the morning light as he materialized from nowhere, set down Lorth’s breakfast tray and pinched off a chunk of ham to give to Scrat.

  The hunter didn’t know what had made him think everything would be all right. Love only amplified the sorrows of time.

  I am not innocent.

  When his senses told him he neared Icaros’s realm, he found a sheltered place and dismounted. Before they had parted, Eaglin spoke to Freya in the wizards’ tongue and instructed her to return to Eusiron once Lorth left her. By way of comfort, the wizard had said: The spell will revolve around you. The things you perceive will drop into another dimension, but everything else will remain in place. She will be safer away from you.

  Lorth found no comfort in this; it only increased his unease.

  “All right lass,” he said softly, as he removed his things from the saddle. “Much as I hate leaving you, you’d best listen to that fool wizard and go home.” He placed a hand on her head between her eyes and cloaked her in a fortress of obscurity. Then he stroked her once more and turned with a heavy heart into the deeper woods. He didn’t look back as he heard her move away in the direction from which they had come.

  For an hour or more, he moved on snowshoes through the tangled dark. High winds tore the tops of the trees, and it rained lightly. Several times, he thought he recognized some feature of the landscape, but he passed that off to his state of mind. Only Eaglin’s enchanted wood surrounded him now.

  Lorth had lost all track of time when he finally perceived the perimeter of the Faerin guard: one man, breathing, facing northeast. The stormy night had hidden Lorth’s presence so far, but now he would have to time his movement with its rhythms. He settled into the sounds of creaking boughs and whispering pines. Raindrops tapped on the sodden snow.

  He knelt, stilled his mind and focused on the watcher. A Faerin Net. Lorth had learned about this in Tarth, years ago, from a commander who had fought Faerin for many years in the struggle for the port of Sceil. The men would be positioned around the camp in a pattern that would be known only to them, and that wouldn’t be obvious or easily calculated, as would something geometric. They would be close enough together that he wouldn’t be able to slip between them easily, and not at all once he got closer in. They would use code words to change watch, a different word for each man, to avoid anyone infiltrating the pattern.

  Eaglin was very specific about one thing: Lorth was not to open the portal until he had Freil in his sight. What had he said? You will see his identity, focused from Void. I have no control over what form it will take. You have to get an eye on him before you open the portal, because he’ll have no other references.

  Whatever that meant, to get close enough to see Freil, Lorth would have to negotiate the net without a single mishap.

  So the hunter waited. He needed more information before attempting to penetrate this. He wouldn’t have to wait long: the men in a Faerin Net didn’t tend to sit in one place. It moved like a clock mechanism, alert and fresh with every turn.

  The energy of the watcher changed as something moved in the forest nearby. Lorth waited, as still as a cat by a birdbath, until the next guard came. They made no greeting, only a word: “Saloptis.” The first man rose and moved into the forest. The hunter followed him, synchronizing his steps over the uneven terrain.

  Saloptis. A star in the constellation of Aesfoth, after which the ruling seat of Faerin was named. Lorth calculated the distance and rough direction of the changing guard to see where he went, a maneuver he would have to repeat several times to figure out the pattern of their positions. He grew still as the next man met up with his replacement. This time, he said, “Coreon.” Another star in Aesfoth. They were running through them.

  To verify this, the hunter shadowed the next man, and the next. He paid very close attention, thinking he had better figure this out soon before someone spotted him, as he had moved deeper into the net and no longer had the safety of the woods on one side. Faint torchlight glowed in the distance.

  Just then, a realization startled him. He knew this landscape; even in the dark, he had begun to recognize things: the shape of a rise, a certain boulder by a certain tree. Concentrating on the net, he had failed to notice Eaglin’s enchantment no longer cloaked these woods.

  What happened to it?

  No time to ponder it. The pattern they used to position themselves appeared similar to a symbol on the coat of arms for the house of Forloc. Lorth had recently seen the emblem nailed to a beam in the training yard, as if to remind the warriors of what they were up against. Not completely sure of this, he decided to take a chance. It did made sense, that they would use something like that.

  The fifth watcher died at the hands of the hunter, who replaced him after burying him in brush a short distance away from the watch-point. When the next guard came, Lorth stirred in his Faerin cloak, received the name of another star, and then crept into the forest in the direction of the next man. He ended up trusting some old tracks he found by feeling around in the snow.

  He approached the guard, drew close and in his best Faerin accent, said, “Spiron.” He let out his breath slowly as the man lumbered off into the shadows. Good thing he had paid attention to Icaros’s lessons on the stars.

  Lorth changed his position three more times before he spotted the Faerin camp spread out into the woods around Icaros’s house. It appeared just as it had before Eaglin had originally altered it. Aside from somehow breaking the spell, they had knocked down the fence and felled trees to make space for their operations. The barn had been turned into what looked like a forge, wooden shelters and fire pits littered the area, and standards hung from the eaves of the house. They had even built a watchtower on the highest point in the woods near the house.

  No temporary set up, this. It was a base camp.

  Strangely, no light emanated from the house, and nothing moved inside. Men stood around it. One of them glanced nervously over his shoulder. Lorth studied the black locust door...the windows...the stone ravens. The place felt like a hole, something that didn’t belong, like a dream image, a hallucination.

  Lorth came to himself as he heard someone approach. Too soon—not enough time had passed for a change of guard. In the dim light of the distant fires, Lorth saw him step carefully over a fallen tree, and reach for his sword.

  I am unseen.

  “Hunter of Ostarin,” the Faerin growled.

  Lorth moved; the guard stumbled forward and fell with Leaf in his throat. “That’s not in the constellation of Aesfoth,” the hunter muttered as he dragged the man into the shadows.

  Then he heard shouts.

  He couldn’t see Freil. He didn’t have time to try—he would never see the boy again if he didn’t throw this now. He stood up, took a breath and cleared his mind. From the darkness, he spoke the first word.

  “Echalct.” It sounded like branches falling from a towering pile.

  What happened next nearly unhinged his mind. The rise he stood on became a pit. In the night, the silhouettes of trees—different trees—had leaves on them, and no snow covered the ground. He took off his snowshoes and tossed them over the edge, then scrambled out of the
hole, panting. It looked like a grave.

  The Faerin camp—and Icaros’s house—were gone. He stood in the middle of nowhere.

  Nothing subtle about this! He strapped the shoes on his back, then grasped his sword strap and looked up. The air smelled like the sea. Unable to discern which direction the camp had stood before he had spoken a word that was not a word, he scanned the stars. But the patterns didn’t reveal the winter constellations of the Ostarin Mountains. They weren’t even constellations of Ealiron.

  He picked a direction and ran. He realized that in his last move in the net, he had changed guard with the wrong man. He should have gone west, not south. A useless observation.

  His vision had changed; he could see as well as a cat in the dark, without magic. The trees here were older and broader. Soft wind stirred the leafy boughs, whispering. The forest reminded him of Eusiron’s Haunt, where things were not as they appeared, and not as he expected them to be. Between the trees stood tall stones cut into strange shapes and carved all over with intricate spiral patterns. Energy, high and pale like stars, emanated from them.

  Lorth stopped in his tracks as an eerie wail pierced the sky. The sound vibrated in his chest with the familiar ache of the unreasonable spirit. He followed the sound. On the curves and rises of the landscape grew broad-leaved bushes and thin trees with blood-red leaves. The standing stones towered everywhere. One, in the shape of a snake. Another, a bird. An egg, a phallus, a shell.

  His senses flew around like pieces of colored glass as he ran, following the harrowing cry of the creature, now mixed with shouts and stomping feet. Lorth pulled forth his bow and strung it, and snatched an arrow from his quiver. His hand shook as he nocked it. Through the trees, a Faerin stumbled about as if searching for something. The hunter ended his search and crept on, taking two more. Horses stampeded through the brush. Lorth wished for an energy cloak, but worried what would happen if he tried to use magic in this place. He had to assume the rules had changed.