THE WINGED HUNTER
F.T. McKinstry
Copyright © 2017 F.T. McKinstry
Kindle Edition
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the author.
First edition published 2012 as Crowharrow by Double Dragon Publishing Second edition 2017
Cover Art by F.T. McKinstry
Table of Contents
Map
Prologue
The Trouble with Tansy
The Hall of Muin
The Raven of Eusiron
Maiden’s Hand
The Immortal Hunter
Eaglin’s Shadow
The Scary Garden
In the Blood
Caelfar’s Daughters
The Voidstone
Outside the Walls
The Albatross
Tea by the River
The Rites of Hawthorn
Hunted
Mother’s Blood
Freil’s Deception
Falistrom
The Apparition
The Sioros’ Curse
Destroyer’s Smile
Releasing the Serpent
The Heart of a Wizard
Epilogue
Glossary
Thank You
About the Author
Other Titles by F.T. McKinstry
Connect with F.T. McKinstry
Prologue
Late summer hung over Loralin Forest with a fading sigh. Aradia moved with her younger sister Ana through the mountain wood, her heart skipping a beat as the air closed its eyes and withdrew like a bird hiding its head beneath a wing.
“Here they are!” Ana said, grasping her skirt as she knelt beside a tumble of mossy boulders in the shadow of a hemlock tree. She set aside her basket and leaned over, her slender fingers caressing a patch of dark green leaves.
Wind swelled from the north. It passed through the forest like the breath of a wolf catching a scent, mingled with the whispers of a nearby stream, and then passed away, leaving the trees too still.
“...never seen periwinkle so fine,” Ana continued. “And blooming, too!” She pulled a short, curved knife from her basket and began to mutter an incantation.
Aradia sighed. The Mother’s own, periwinkle surrounded its votaries with a powerful cloak of love and protection. But it was a dangerous herb, a channel for lust and death, a scythe that reaped payment for the sweetest passions. Since her man left her, Ana had taken to tinkering with things like that. Foolish girl.
“Periwinkle blooms in spring,” Aradia grumbled.
Ana turned around with a smile. “I think it’s a sign.”
“Hurry up. Evening’s coming on.”
Ana rose slowly, a clump of shiny evergreen cuttings dangling from her hand. “Why are you acting so? You’ve been off all day.” She glanced skyward. “We’ve hours yet.”
When the wind rose again, Aradia flared her nostrils and caught her breath.
He came from the trees in a ghostly storm of male force that sent every creature within his pale blue gaze shrieking for shelter. He landed in the shallows on the river’s edge, a flawless man in the height of strength and desire, his ivory skin covered in silken wisps of moss green and his black hair flowing. The late afternoon sun glistened on his raven wings, high as two men standing.
Crowharrow.
Aradia screamed like a wildcat to break her sister from the clutches of the immortal’s thrall. As the crowharrow vanished, Ana’s face bled frost on the steps of the Otherworld. She didn’t waste energy screaming; she dropped her periwinkle and ran. But nothing escaped the oldest predator of these mountains, his flesh burning with the breath of gods. The women in their grandfather’s bloodline belonged to him, and today he had set his sights on Ana. Her flight didn’t last long.
Aradia spoke a word that drew her down into the roots, stones, and silently flowing springs. With tiny claws, she burrowed out of sight. The crowharrow’s footfalls shook the earth around her. With a voice of grating stones, he spoke something in a language lost to the world.
Just then, Aradia’s attention settled on a strange object: a stone in the shape of a fang driven beneath the fertile decay of the forest floor. It emanated a sensation of darkness known only to a woman in the hollow of her womb. She spoke another word. As a snake, she stretched open her mouth, came down with a graceful jerk and grabbed the stone. In pulsing, rhythmic waves, she swallowed it.
Her sensitive skin rippled with a bellow, as if the forest itself had roared. She nosed down into the ground as the crowharrow plunged his fist into the soil and began tearing it up with his claws.
As a pheasant, Aradia exploded from the brush and flapped into the air. The crowharrow came after her like a midwinter gale.
She bounded into the forest as a ruddy gold streak, a hind fleeing the predator at her heels. You can become anything, her grandmother had once said. Alter the words to change the essence. She ran to the river, stumbling to her elegant knees as rough knives raked over her back with breathless precision. She fell into the water and spoke a different kind of word.
Remember the elements. Each has its way. Honor it.
She flowed downstream, first as a fish, then a frog, a tendril of bright green algae, and then as the water itself, cool and swirling along the pebbly course. Water was the only element she had learned to become, but she favored it above all else. She flowed over grasses, drooping branches, fallen trees, and boulders. She flowed until time stopped and the crowharrow faded to dreams. Finally, she recognized the slats of a millwheel striking the water’s surface.
With a gasp, Aradia awoke face down on the shore of the stream by her cottage. Her back howled with pain where the crowharrow had torn into it. For a moment, she couldn’t move. Drenched and stricken with grief and cold, she doubled over as water closed a fist around her gut and flooded from her mouth, gagging her. On the other side of the cottage, goats bleated softly.
She had vomited up the stone. She grabbed it and shoved it into her pocket, then crept on all fours through the deepening twilight to her cottage door. Once inside, she managed to build a fire. Tears streamed down her face. First, get warm. Clean the wounds on her back. Make tea. Stay alive.
She started as something thumped on the floor above her. After a moment, a scruffy orange cat with gold-green eyes trotted down the narrow stairs. “Nasturtium!” the witch breathed, holding a hand to her breast. Trembling with relief, she fed the cat from a pot of stew she had left covered on a shelf that morning. She made tea and got some dry clothes. Then she pulled down a jar of rosemary salve and a second jar she hadn’t touched since the day her grandmother had pressed it into her hand and said, Never, ever use this unless you’re able to relinquish all expectation.
Aradia returned to the fire and set down her things. She drew off her dress and hung it up to dry, shuddering as she saw the long, ragged gashes in the back. She fumbled around in the pockets and retrieved the stone. As she put it on the hearth, its blackish green, polished surface absorbed the firelight.
The cat drew near and rubbed its face against her thigh, then dropped onto the hearth and started to clean. Aradia sat down and reached around as best she could to smear the healing cream on her naked back. She gasped as the cold salve touched her wounds. When she had finished, she dressed and pulled a wool blanket around her body.
Her hand shook as she reached for the second jar. She opened it, plucked forth a clump of tangled, pale red roots, and set the jar aside. A strange, pungent smell assaulted her nose. She tossed the roots onto the fire, took the fang-shaped stone in bot
h hands, rocked back and forth, and spoke a word unlike any other word she knew, a word few mortals knew. She had learned it from the water.
“Menscefaros.”
She sat with her eyes closed until the air around her changed. It felt like the heart of the stone, the fertile, aching emptiness of incipient creation. The room whirled around her, pulling down and inward, gripping her in vertigo. Her ears roared and stars rushed by in a sparkling array that rose and fell on a warm spring tide.
Aradia opened her eyes. The center of the hearth had gone dark; a shadow hovered in the flames. From the hollow spoke an inhuman voice as ancient as blood and time. It was so gentle, full of love and at the same time so vast and utterly dark, Aradia’s tears returned.
What do you wish of me? the Old One said.
Somehow, Aradia understood her. “Maern,” she said, using the wizard’s word for “mother.” “I need your help. My life is forfeit and for this I don’t ask. It is my fate. But Tansel is only a child and now lives alone in the forest. I ask that you protect her.”
Cold wind pushed up the streambed and whispered in the chimney top.
I shall grant your request, came the Old One’s eerie, beautiful voice from the fire; but for this, I require two things.
Aradia waited, sick with fear as the fire whispered and the wind blew. After a pause, the Old One’s voice came forth again:
First, you must give the voidstone to the girl when she comes to you.
Voidstone. Aradia opened her hands and stared at the black fang glistening in the firelight. A strange request. Relinquish all expectation, her grandmother had said. A powerful wizard, she would never have said a thing like that offhand, especially regarding the Old One. Aradia lowered her head, her heart pounding wildly.
“I will do as you ask, Maern.”
Next, the darkness said, you must give me her innocence.
Aradia’s chest tightened. Aside from invoking horror, this request had all the tangible substance of a breath, a thought. Clinging to her last nerve, she said, “How?”
When the time comes, you will know.
Wind tore the fire, drawing the stars and the darkness into it. The room returned to shape and the fire crackled merrily.
Aradia pulled her blanket close and lay down with the voidstone clutched against her breast. For a long time, she thought of innocence, how to capture innocence. Periwinkle knew. In the dappled light beneath the hemlock tree, Ana smiled. I think it’s a sign.
A sign of what? Aradia wondered, closing her eyes to rain.
Under a heavy cloak of grief and exhaustion, she spoke a word and curled up next to the other cat sleeping by the fire.
The Trouble with Tansy
Some things did not stay well in gardens.
Tansel knew this, being a gardener like her mother, and her mother before her. She lived deep in the verdant, shadowy hills of Loralin Forest, in a one-room cottage made of river stones. Old clay pots of herbs and flowers crowded small windows with diamond-shaped panes. She owned one small table cluttered with plant stalks, dirt, pots and jars, a mortar and pestle, a knife with a stag-horn handle and a chair with an unraveling reed mat to sit on. She slept on a pallet by the hearth. Dominating the room, a rambling pantry held seeds, dried leaves, twigs, roots and bark in baskets, old cloth bags, stone and glass phials, jars, and wooden boxes. With these Tansel made a modest living.
Tansel loved her garden with all her heart. It surrounded the cottage and spread out beneath the edges of the forest like a wild thing, singing. She grew things for eating, seasoning and healing; things that smelled pretty, attracted butterflies, birds, bees, and cats; she grew things for the shapes of their leaves, the way the sun and moon shone upon a petal or a stalk, or the way one thing grew beside another, tangling high and low in arches, tendrils and delicate patterns. Some plants loved the high, bright sun; others preferred the shadows beneath evergreen trees, or water caressing their roots. Tansel grew things she simply liked the names of. Things no one knew the names of.
Few could have said exactly what grew in Tansel’s garden. Not even she knew, from season to season. The garden had a rhythm of its own, a balance that took care of itself.
Her mother had once told her, Gardens are made of darkness and light entwined. The cottage, the garden and that mysterious piece of information were the only things she had left her young daughter of twelve summers before running away into the lands beyond Loralin like a cucumber vine on a compost heap.
Seven years later, Tansel knew what stayed in her garden and not.
One breezy, fragrant morning on the eve of the Bright Moon, something happened that reminded Tansel of another thing about womanhood her mother had warned her about.
On the western side of her garden, where she grew things from the eldritch chasms of the heart, a bush that warmed the eyes of lovers flourished. A tidy rose bush with small blooms the color of an autumn sunset, pale and pinkish peach, with dark green glossy leaves, it had a certain attitude about it, something like patience, but not entirely. Today, it glinted with drops from a passing rain.
Half of it did. The other half was missing.
Tansel walked down the garden path edged with woodruff and thyme. She lifted her dirty skirt and knelt by the rose bush, brushing her tangled red-brown hair from her face with a deep breath. A large clump of stems and blooms on one side of the bush had been cut. She touched the fresh stump with the tip of her finger as if to stanch a bleeding wound.
A blue jay fluttered from the trees, catching Tansel’s attention. It circled once around the garden and landed on the cottage roof, where it cocked its head in her direction and released a metallic squawk. Then it took to the air, flying south.
Maetor, she thought with a hard set to her jaw. A wizard’s apprentice who lived in Muin Hall a half day’s journey south, Maetor had been coming around in the form of birds and beasts for two seasons, to watch her...to seduce her. Tansel understood. Not long before her departure, and never one to leave things to chance, her mother had explained what a man and woman could do together, what could come of it, or not. But womanhood failed to endear Tansel to the idea. She had responded to Maetor’s attentions with all the warmth of the ribbon snake that lived in the rocks bordering the kitchen herbs.
Her mother had warned that loving a wizard was like planting tansy in the garden. One never knew where it would go, what it would do. It did not stay well. At the time, Tansel hadn’t made the connection between her mother’s unthinking comments and the absence of her father, a Keeper of the Eye whose heart belonged to the sea. They had done well enough without him.
She rose to her feet. Sunlight beamed through the trees to the east, casting dappled shadows. Tansel scanned her garden for more things cut or otherwise disturbed. She didn’t see anything. She studied the rose bush. He had cut off the half with the most blooms on it.
She might not have suspected Maetor so readily if not for his having targeted the impatient rose. Did he think she wouldn’t notice that? Or care? She would just as soon give her love to the big toad that lived in the center of the garden by the scrying pool.
She walked to the pool and knelt. In early spring, she had found a piece of tree bark that curved nearly all the way around, put a miniature thatch roof of pine twigs on top and tucked the house into the creeping phlox thickening around the pool. The toad had recently taken up residence in it. Tansel leaned down on her hands and knees and peered inside. The creature crouched there in the shadows, its dark eyes shining.
“Will you have me?” she asked, giggling.
As she stood up, she saw the tansy plant. Her smile faded abruptly.
*
Tansel shrugged on her ragged pack of roots and jars, grabbed a basket stuffed with neatly tied clumps of herbs and flowers and headed south into the forest. To the north, the jagged peaks of the Sioros Mountains basked in the morning sun.
She pulled the tansy from its roots on her way by, holding it up before her like a mother holding a naug
hty child by the scruff of the neck. She walked a mile into the woods before tossing it in the shade.
First, she would visit the village of Crowharrow, named after a legendary creature with the body of a man and the wings of a crow. The crowharrow was said to be a predator of the most malevolent kind, living far to the north and occasionally taking mortals. Tansel had never known anything like that to happen, not in her lifetime anyway.
In the village, she would sell what things she could. On another day, she would have brought her cart. Today, she had other things to do.
She planned to go to Muin.
Later that afternoon, she walked up the winding path from the village. She had sold most of her wares and filled her pack and basket with enough fresh food to last until the next trip. As usual, the villagers had greeted her with strange relief, as if they hadn’t expected her to come. Kind yet elusive, they always bought her wares and left her quickly, a startling shift that had happened after her mother left.
She sank her teeth into a small woodchuck pie and ducked into a brushy hollow, heading south. Somehow, tansy had found her again. The most invasive, prolific weed she had ever scuffled with, it stood on hard, thick stalks holding sprays of jagged leaves that towered into clusters of bright yellow, button-like flowers. Years ago, when Tansel still struggled to learn what her mother had known, the herb took over. Tansel had torn it from its crazed running roots beneath everything in her garden until it looked like the whole area had been worked by trowels, clippers, and moles.
Tansy had driven her to visit the Shapeshiftress, or so the villagers called her. The crone happened to be her aunt, though Tansel had never felt kinship with her. She still remembered the witch’s wheezing laughter as she held out a dark red phial with tiny yellow dots painted on it. Tansel hadn’t seen tansy since. Until today.
She stomped through the forest over fallen trees, burbling streams, ferns and blackberry bushes laden with soft white flowers. She would tell Maetor to stop bothering her. If he did not agree, she would tell his master, the Raven of Muin. Tansel had never seen the Raven of Muin, nor did she know much about him aside from peasant rumors. He was a Keeper of the Eye, an ancient, powerful order of wizards who ruled from a high citadel in southeastern Sourcesee. Folks said he could turn back time, talk to apple trees and change himself into a wolf or a snowstorm. Tansel hoped the stories were true enough to convince Maetor to leave her alone. She didn’t wish to find out for herself.
The Winged Hunter Page 1