The Winged Hunter

by F. T. McKinstry

  Not that Lorth was in any position to judge a man’s innocence. Far from it. But he was, for all his black deeds, a member of the Aenlisarfon. Eaglin wondered if his father had sent the hunter just to keep him honest. Too late for that! He had ventured so deeply into his shadows that any small part of his tale would release the whole bat colony.

  Dusk stretched across the realm like a long-fingered hand as the wizards rode towards Loralin Forest. It was cold, and a half-quarter moon hung low amid slow-moving clouds. Towering before them lay the eaves of the forest, a dark, undulating maw of hardwoods, spruce, and pine beneath the gray and white crags of the mountains beyond.

  The wizards slowed their pace to a walk. Eaglin’s stomach growled. “Let’s stop for the night,” he suggested. Lorth nodded.

  They entered the forest in a rustle of stomping hooves, tossing manes and tails, and creaking leather. They continued into the colder shadows until they reached a hardwood glade with a stream. Clover carpeted the ground. Beneath the darkening sky, the water flowed cold and gray.

  Eaglin dismounted, holding onto Sefae’s saddle as he swayed on his feet. His legs and back ached and he felt ravaged by lust. He led his horse to the water. Lorth followed him, and then they both knelt and drank their fill. Eaglin splashed water onto his face to cool the heat.

  The hunter rose and went to Freya, removed her saddle and dropped it in the grass near the stream. He did the same for Sefae, and then wandered off like a lost soul into the trees. Eaglin rose and helped him to gather wood. After a short time, they had a fire blazing.

  Lorth approached with a pack, sat and pulled forth some jerked venison, a strip of which he handed to Eaglin. As they ate, the hunter eyed him.

  “What’s bothering you?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Eaglin replied with his mouth full. “I’m hungry.”

  Lorth tossed the food pack at his side. “There’s fruit and cheese in there. Some of that nut bread you hate.”

  “Not that kind of hungry. Lust hungry. I’m mad with it.”

  “Has it been that long?”

  Eaglin cast him a glance as he felt around in the pack. He pulled out a handful of dried apple rings. “This is more than that. I can’t transmute it. It’s not natural—I don’t know where it’s coming from.”

  “Any images?”

  “Women—no, a woman. I never quite see her. She is perfect and strange, something I can’t quite comprehend.”

  Lorth flashed a smile. “Aren’t they all. Are you the one with her?”

  An odd question. “How would it not be so?”

  “You could be seeing someone else’s experience. Bleeding through.”

  Eaglin lowered his food, swallowed and studied the water as he considered that. It would explain the unexpected nature of the visions, but it didn’t explain why he was so deeply connected to it. “If that is so, there must be a reason why I am seeing it.”

  “True,” Lorth agreed. He handed Eaglin a leather flask from which he took a long drink of wine. It was made of mison flowers, which grew in the mountains of Ostarin in spring. It coursed down his throat with a sunlit glimmer.

  With a deep breath, Eaglin gazed beyond the fire into the shadows of the forest. His desire ached beyond tolerance. He cleared his throat and said, “I’ll return shortly.” He got to his feet.

  “Would you like me to join you?”

  The ache in Eaglin’s loins flooded into his face, warming it. “It’s been a long time since I lay with a man.”

  “It might be nicer than the ground.” The hunter got up and retrieved a couple of blankets. As he returned, the glitter in his eyes caused Eaglin’s heart to pound.

  Later, they lay together in the silence of the forest, cooled by the wind tugging at the fire. Eaglin’s heartbeat thumped in his thighs, his groin, his solar plexus, and the hunter’s teeth marks on his shoulder. His body still ached in places from when the sioros had blasted him, and in new places he had gained while trying to adjust his riding posture to accommodate broken ribs.

  Lorth snored softly, and Eaglin drifted on the threshold of sleep. Finally, he felt relaxed...since when? Returning from Muin? He tried to remember when the pulsing had begun. He reached up and touched the voidstone, which he had tied up with a leather strip and hung around his neck. Blood pulsed in his fingertips around the stone.

  Pulsing. It had not ceased. He dropped the voidstone and rolled over.

  He drifted down a river of blood, a pulsing, swelling river, warm as the ache of a woman in need. Sound echoed in the carvings in a tree, its boughs singing in the wind, the voice of the mountains, of the Dark Tongue. He knelt slowly, wings outstretched, head bowed as she shimmered from the air. Her long black hair rolled in silken waves over her shoulders and back, every ivory muscle rippling with the supple grace of horses and cats, strength in softness. She uttered a breathtaking sigh as she drifted into his arms. He could not see her face; he could not see her body in full; only fragments, flashes and dreams as he lowered her down beneath him with a soft, raspy yowl.

  Maiden’s hand... She was the first woman, the only woman, the one all women knew. She was as pure as the first breath, soft as flowers and fresh cream as she yielded to him, her cry blowing through the tree in the swirling language of the lair as he broke through her maidenhead and into the eternal warmth and safety of a mother’s womb.

  Mother’s blood... It stained his thighs like honey as he moved on her; she enclosed him in her arms, wrapped her legs around his hips and soothed the fire. He pulsed into her, their bodies tangled in the rhythm of tides and wheeling stars. She was all cycles, all changes, all movements in the shapes of waves, circles, wells, and caves protecting the wounded.

  Destroyer’s smile... He rose up to the towering heights of need, the brightest light in the heavens. He spiraled up, and up, a sun beaming into the boundless hollow. She opened her eyes, dark and empty, chilling. Her soft body melted into the bed, the boughs and the mountains. Her voice dismantled the living like a whirlpool, pulling down. His cry shook the land as he released his seed inside of her, to die, to sleep.

  And then she was gone. Everything, nonexistent.

  “Menscefaros!”

  Eaglin awoke with a cry. Lorth held his side with one hand and his face with the other, as if he had been trying to awake him. He smelled of pine, sweat and horses. Eaglin’s breath caught as he clutched the hunter’s shoulders and emptied his seed against his thigh.

  “Och!” Lorth said, looking down. “Again?” He pulled up a nearby clump of ferns and wiped the pearly fluid away.

  Eaglin sagged against him. “What in the name of Maern...” Without thinking, he reached up and grasped the voidstone at his neck, and pulled so hard that the leather snapped and came loose in his hand.

  The pulsing ebbed.

  Eaglin opened his hand and stared at the stone. His heart beat wildly at the base of his throat. He withdrew from Lorth and sat up, then tossed the stone to the ground. It skittered in the dirt at the fire’s edge.

  The pulsing stopped.

  “Hah!” Eaglin barked in astonishment. “I may have just discovered something.”

  Lorth stared in question. “You think the voidstone is tormenting you?”

  “That has to be it. I was fine, before.”

  The hunter reached for the stone. He turned it to the light as he studied it. “Does Caelfar know you took this?”

  “No.”

  “Can I have your sword after he kills you?”

  Eaglin ignored that. “No wonder the winged hunters prize their stones so. The sioros told me the Old One gave it to him. She must use it to materialize.”

  Lorth whistled through his teeth. “Then we can surely bargain with it.”

  “Na. I tried.” The wind took the confession into the trees as Lorth reached up and tied the voidstone around his neck. “What are you doing?”

  “I want to see what it does,” the hunter replied with a wicked grin. It faded quickly. “What do you mean, yo
u tried?”

  Eaglin gestured to the stone on his neck. “See, it’s already distracting you.”

  Lorth pulled on his clothes, then got up and grabbed an armful of wood. With an assassin’s inscrutable calm, he built up the fire. Then he returned to Eaglin’s side and casually draped his arms over his knees. “What are you hiding?” He leveled his eerie gold-green gaze as if to assess wounded prey he knew had no chance of getting away from him.

  Eaglin put his head in his hands and thought about bats. “Maern is testing me.”

  “I don’t believe she does that. Neither do you.”

  “I’m no longer sure. Ever since the day we went to the Eyrie Waeltower, I’ve had a shadow on my heart. A dark place in my mind I can’t see through. The sioros is using it to force me to give him Tansel.”

  Shocked silence; then: “What?”

  “After he blasted me the first time, he captured me in his lair. He claimed that my shadow allowed him not only to do that, but also to mark me above the grid. Said he would destroy me in every timeline if I didn’t appease him.”

  The hunter made a sound in his throat. “What was your answer?”

  “I refused. I would have died there, and in every life, to protect Tansel. My father forbade it.” Lorth lifted his brow. “The only reason I agreed to the sioros’ demand is because I plan to find another way around this before I get there. I was hoping the voidstone would help, but—”

  “He wants Tansel.”

  “Aye. I even threatened to hide it in Eyrie where he’d never find it. He didn’t budge.”

  Lorth ran his fingers through his hair and gazed into the fire. “A shadow on your heart powerful enough to give a sioros dominion over you must have a source. Something unhealed.”

  Eaglin breathed a dry laugh. “You’ve spent too much time with my mother.” He picked up a stick and thrust it into the fire, causing sparks to spiral into the sky. “It has a source, all right. Years ago, when I entered the priesthood of Maern, I learned the Rites of Hawthorn, to bring a maiden over the threshold of innocence.” Eaglin’s heart thumped evenly as his memory clutched him. “I only did it once. It was after you entered apprenticeship to Raven. I’d been a priest of Maern for many years by then, so I wasn’t ignorant of what to do or how to do it. But I didn’t understand the power of the Rites, what I would see in myself.”

  Lorth leaned over and rustled something from their gear, then handed Eaglin the wine flask. He drank deeply. Lorth said, “You are powerful, Eaglin. It wouldn’t be easy for anyone to bear the kind of light you must, being who you are.”

  You did not understand that you cast the shadow of a god.

  “I didn’t understand anything, then,” Eaglin said, returning the flask. “It all seemed so simple. I knew the Old One could be terrible. What I didn’t understand is how dark she is when she takes form in a man.” He rubbed his face and took a deep breath. “I went with a maiden into the cave where the Rites are performed, in the forest north of Eusiron. She was so honored to be initiated by me, the son of the Aenmos, that she trembled in my arms. But when I spoke the words to bring the Destroyer into my body to take her...”

  Lorth nodded as if this were obvious to him. “It frightened her.”

  “Frightened—she screamed, called to Maern for protection and fled from the cave. I went after her, but she got away from me. I searched all that night and the next day, to no avail. I finally returned to the palace through Eusiron’s Haunt. My mother was waiting for me at the gate holding part of the girl’s ceremonial dress. They found her broken in the Wolf River. She must have either fallen into the gorge—or thrown herself into it—we never knew.”

  After a long silence, the hunter said, “I’ve seen women die as the indirect result of my occupation. I used to see it as an unfortunate but necessary side effect of war. Your mother taught me that I have a choice. Either a man uses his power to destroy, or he uses it to protect. The power is the same.”

  Eaglin gazed down at his hands. “The Rites of Hawthorn is an act of protection, by the hand of the Destroyer. It brings a woman through Void to know the Old One in herself. It was my charge to initiate her, but I didn’t fully know the Destroyer in my own heart. So I lost her.”

  “Your maiden chose that,” the hunter pointed out. “One does not enter the Old One’s domain and then define the terms of initiation. Only she knows.”

  “You didn’t see her face. She wasn’t thinking about choices.”

  “Had the Destroyer not already claimed her, she wouldn’t have been yours to initiate.” The hunter took a drink from the flask. “What did your mother say when you returned?”

  “Oh, she knew what had happened. Told me I cast the shadow of a god. Caring nothing for that, I left Eusiron that night and returned to Eyrie. I didn’t return to Ostarin for a long time. I took only male lovers or women who were experienced. I never performed the Rites again.”

  Lorth nodded. “So let me guess. You see letting the sioros have Tansel as the same thing. Losing a maiden to the Destroyer.”

  “Aye. I would have died to avoid it. But my father forbade me. Seems he’s treating Tansel as a necessary sacrifice, something I was unable to accept during the Rites.”

  Lorth cocked his head in doubt. “I’m not getting that.”

  “There is another perspective. I only got out of the sioros’ lair by telling him Caelfar knew what he wanted and would see Tansel deflowered before letting him have it.” Lorth coughed on a sip of wine. “I also realized something when talking to Aradia. She’s convinced Tansel will die to the sioros. I thought her ‘death’ might be symbolic, as in an initiation.”

  Lorth turned to him with a stare. “As in the Rites of Hawthorn.”

  “Aye. That.”

  “There’s a big problem with that, Eaglin.”

  “More than one,” Eaglin agreed. “Foremost, Tansel would never agree to it. She fled when she saw me.”

  “Why?”

  “Evidently, she saw what the other girl had.”

  “Na, don’t assume that. She did the same thing the first time she saw me.”

  Eaglin laughed. “You’re a worse wolf.”

  Lorth leaned forward. “The difference, my friend, is that I’m comfortable with that.” He placed another piece of wood on the fire. “Caelfar is your biggest problem. He’s not going to let anyone near her—especially a wizard—and I’d wager he knows damned well how long a shadow you cast.” He released a troubled breath. “But this may not get to that. No matter what you promised the sioros, he can’t take Tansel unless she yields to him. He wouldn’t need to seduce her, otherwise.”

  “Aradia thinks Tansel is marked. That’s why she asked the Old One for protection in the first place. She thinks the sioros has claim to every woman in her bloodline.”

  Lorth’s eyes widened. “I think Caelfar would’ve mentioned that.”

  “I wonder. Caelfar didn’t summon me for nothing. I’m getting the impression there’s much about this he doesn’t know—or want to know.”

  After a pause, Lorth said, “That sioros’ attraction to these women is strange. He’s taken two of them already, and is after a third.”

  “Four, if you count Aradia. I believe she might be marked also.”

  “Is this possible?”

  Eaglin considered the hunter’s observation. It was indeed a notable coincidence that so many women in the same place—the same bloodline—had been marked by a sioros. That was rare.

  Unheard of, actually.

  “It is possible,” Eaglin supposed. “After losing his voidstone, the sioros could simply want Tansel’s maidenhead before he kills her. It would explain why my father forbade me to die protecting her. If she is marked, there’d be no point.”

  “That would make her death literal and not symbolic,” Lorth said with an assassin’s matter-of-fact composure.

  It was true. Death seemed the most likely outcome; whatever Tansel chose, the sioros would destroy her. But despite the opinions of ev
eryone involved—wizards, witches, gods, immortals—Eaglin couldn’t ignore his heart’s darker sense. He had learned that much in service to the Old One.

  Outside the Walls

  Morning bled gently from the dark as Tansel stood amid the white roses on the northeastern corner of the scary garden. She had slept here last night, and stood awake since pre-dawn, breathing the sweet fragrance of roses as she waited for the light to reveal the tall jagged rock where she had last seen the crowharrow.

  Empty. She questioned if he ever had been there, even once. She might have dreamed it. This was a wizard’s hall, after all. Anything could happen.

  She lowered herself to the ground, catching her dress on thorns. The dress had been her mother’s, lavender, soft and thin, with a lace-up bodice. Mushroom sat nearby, cleaning himself. Tansel reached out and petted him, glad for his company.

  She studied the empty crag. She not only imagined the crowharrow perched there, but also the black-haired Raven. He’s hunting you, her aunt had said. Tansel now wondered to whom the crone referred.

  Her great-grandfather had come after her when she fled from the Waeltower, as if he had known why. But he didn’t know why. Tansel hadn’t told him about the dreams. She was not accustomed to having to tell anyone anything, let alone a man. Certainly not a wizard.

  He had tried to comfort her, of course. The Raven of Eusiron is the most powerful wizard in this land, he explained. He’s a master shapeshifter. He has freed your aunt, to protect her. He did what I no longer could. At my request.

  This was not comforting.

  That man is a crowharrow, Tansel hadn’t said. Powerful was not always good. Powerful was never good.

  “Damned empty crag,” she muttered. She would have torn out her own heart and held it bleeding to the sky just to see something there, anything. But the crowharrow had lost interest. He didn’t care about her anymore. It was unbearable. A wild animal writhed inside of her. She wanted to scream, claw the ground, retch, cry, howl—anything to change this.