The Hunt

by Frost Kay

  “If I was fully healed and hadn’t spent three weeks on bedrest with no exercise and was wearing my own clothes, you wouldn’t be making such a joke.”

  “Then I sincerely hope I get to see that Tempest again. She was far more sociable, too, as I recall,” Pyre said, scratching his chin as if in deep thought. “So wide-eyed and innocent. You didn’t look too bad in that skirt, either, though I must confess I rather liked it when you tore it off, to—”

  “You insufferable rake,” Tempest growled, knowing her cheeks must be red as warmth crept into her face. What is your problem, Tempest? You’ve heard much worse growing up with boys. “I’d appreciate it if you’d keep your lascivious comments to yourself.”

  Pyre merely laughed. “That isn’t the first time I’ve heard such a curse, and it won’t be the last. It’s good to see you in higher spirits though, Temp. Being in the cottage for so long clearly didn’t agree with you.”

  “Nobody likes to be held somewhere against their will,” she said, very quietly, though Pyre’s fox ears pricked up at her words.

  “I know.” His expression blanked. “I didn’t want it to be this way, but as I said yesterday, you hadn’t given me any reasons to trust you. I couldn’t let you out.”

  “So why are you letting me out now?” What was this whole little walk about? She certainly hadn’t behaved very well so it wasn’t a reward. Another way to try to gain her trust?

  Pyre pointed directly in front of them, down a winding path through the forest. “I’ve come to the conclusion that you are the type of person who needs to see something, rather than be told it. Which is by no means a bad thing; taking anything someone says at face-value can be incredibly stupid and dangerous.”

  Tempest raised an eyebrow. “So if I’d believed you from the beginning you’d have thought me stupid?”

  “You and I both know that was never going to happen.”

  “True.”

  The two of them fell into an easy silence as Pyre led Tempest through the trees with a precision that meant he could probably navigate the area blindfolded. Tempest did her best to take note of every little thing around her: the soft ground beneath her from all the recent rainfall, which would make her more likely to slip if she took a wrong step; the warm south-easterly breeze, which Tempest would have to make sure she stayed upwind of to ensure Pyre could not smell her after she escaped; the dull roar of the nearby river and the sounds of thrushes, woodpigeons, and larks, which told Tempest she was not too far from the outskirts of the forest. All of these sensory inputs were vital for her to understand, if she was going to get away from a fox shifter at some point.

  She cocked her head and listened hard as a faint sound caught her attention and put her on edge: the sound of someone approaching on light, nimble feet. Tempest loosened the wooden spike from the waistband of her trousers. Not for the first time, she wished she could have worn her bow and quiver of arrows. There wasn’t a single member of the Hounds who could best her aim. One true-flying arrow was all Tempest would have needed to take down an enemy. But she didn’t have her bow, or her arrows, so it was pointless to wish she had them. No, all Tempest had was a wooden spike and a will to fight to the end.

  She got into a fighting stance before she could stop herself, her fingers clenching around her wooden spike, and then—

  A small boy with the beautiful, elongated ears of a fawn and the warmest brown eyes Tempest had ever seen came bounding toward them and jumped into Pyre’s arms with a glee only seen in children.

  “Fox!” the boy cried, delighted, as Pyre ruffled his braided hair and tossed him up onto his shoulders as if he weighed nothing at all. “You have not played with me for days and weeks and months and—”

  “It has been three weeks, young one,” he laughed, startling Tempest right out of her fight-or-flight mode. It wasn’t the amused-at-someone-else’s-expense laugh he usually used, nor was it arrogant or humorless. No, his laugh was full of genuine, unrelenting joy and affection, the likes of which Tempest had rarely experienced for another in her life. Except for Maxim and her mum.

  Her heart twanged in her chest. Winter’s bite, she missed her uncle. He would know what to do with the cocky kitsune.

  Tempest stared at the little fawn shifter, and, with the memory of her mother fresh in her head, she quickly tucked away her makeshift weapon. She smiled at the precious little boy as he babbled on about a new boat he’d carved. It had been a long time since she’d seen someone so carefree. Full of love. Not suspicious of everyone and everything.

  Innocent, in a way Tempest had not been since her mother was killed.

  What if the sides aren’t human or shifter? What if they are corruption against innocent?

  Briggs’s question had haunted her for days. And, looking at the boy, she already knew her answer even if it meant standing against her king.

  Traitor.

  Tempest

  Tempest followed Pyre and the boy into a clearing earmarked by two tall, carved, wooden wolves. She coolly eyed the statues and turned her attention to the pair of shifters ahead of her. The little fawn boy still sat upon Pyre’s shoulders, singing a nonsensical song as he played with the kitsune’s ears. Pyre did not seem to mind at all, which surprised Tempest to no end.

  Was the child his? From her interactions with him, she’d have pegged him as someone who avoided the wee beasties. But then Tempest paused. What did she really know about Pyre? They were strangers playing a dangerous game. All she knew was what she had witnessed herself, which wasn’t much at all.

  Was this another ploy to gain her confidence? If so, she’d pretend to let it work. Keep your wits about you. You have to have a clear head. Don’t let pretending slip into real feeling. She had to see what Pyre wished her to see and not let any previous judgments cloud her.

  “Tempest?”

  Pyre was watching her with serious amber eyes. Tempest ducked her head quickly to avoid showing him any of the thoughts that might have slipped onto her face. She scurried forward to catch up with him, making sure to limp as she did so.

  “What’s wrong with the lady? She looks pitiful,” the fawn shifter asked from up high.

  Pyre made a tutting noise. “Now, now, Aspen. That was a rude question. My lady was injured, you see. She’s still recovering. She might not wish to talk about it.”

  Aspen looked horrified. His face grew ashen, and his lovely doe eyes became impossibly wide. “I—I’m sorry, my lady!” he stammered, close to tears.

  Tempest shot a glare at Pyre as he wiggled his brows, amused at the mess he’d now left Tempest to clean up.

  She’d wipe that grin from his face.

  Tempest closed the gap between them in order to reach up and tickle Aspen beneath his chin until he giggled.

  “Do not listen to the silly fox,” she said with a mischievous smile. “You can ask me anything you want, little one. Do you want to know how I got injured?”

  Pyre’s amusement slid from his face, and something truly scary rippled across it. “Tempest,” he said softly. A warning.

  She ignored him when Aspen’s face brightened with the kind of excitement only children have at the idea of a gruesome story.

  “Yes, please!” he exclaimed happily, pulling on Pyre’s ears with such force that the man winced.

  Tempest smiled sharply and leaned against the kitsune’s arm to take Aspen’s small hand in her own. She ignored how the fox stiffened, and she hid her amusement at his discomfort over her having so boldly entered into his personal space and deliberately kept her eyes on the fawn. The ass now knew how it felt.

  She grinned at the fawn. “I fought a lion.”

  “A lion?!” the boy gasped. “Not a lion shifter or—”

  “No, an honest-to-goodness lion.” She kept her gaze pinned to the boy as Pyre’s attention intensified on the side of her face.

  “Was he scary?”

  “Oh, very.”

  “Was he strong?”

  “He almost ripped my arm of
f with one swipe of his paw!” Tempest swatted Pyre’s arm as she spoke to emphasize her point; he watched her do so with an unreadable expression.

  Aspen looked frightened, as if he were the one now facing the lion. “How did you escape?”

  Tempest smiled sadly. “I killed him. I didn’t want to, but I had to. I wish it could have turned out different.”

  “Did you hear that, Fox?!” Aspen cried, bending over to look at Pyre’s face upside-down. “She killed a lion!” He looked back at Tempest. “What kind of shifter are you? You must be so strong to—”

  “She’s not a shifter,” Pyre said, just as Tempest took a step or two back from him in response to the question. “She’s not one of our people.”

  Her smile fell a little, but she managed to keep it in place. A little shifter could never have imagined an ordinary human could best a lion. Before she’d managed it, Tempest had never imagined it to be possible, either. But it still stung, because it reminded Tempest of what she’d been taught back in Dotae.

  Talagans think they’re better than us. Stronger and smarter and faster. The only thing we beat them in is numbers.

  Well, they were wrong.

  Tempest could not blame Aspen for his question. He was but a child, after all, and children believed what they were told by adults. But it was Pyre’s abrupt reply that really got under her skin. He claimed she was the one that was brainwashed and prejudiced, but couldn’t he see he was just the same?

  Aspen was still staring at her in awe. “Are you a goddess?” he asked, without a hint of sarcasm. “You have hair like the skies.”

  Pyre’s lips twitched, and Tempest held up a finger.

  “Don’t you dare,” she warned.

  The kitsune bust out in laugher, flinging his head back so abruptly that the boy slipped from his shoulders.

  Tempest lurched forward to catch him just in time, the little one clinging to her with wide eyes.

  “A-a goddess?” Pyre sniggered, almost inconsolable in his mirth.

  Tempest clutched a bewildered Aspen to her chest protectively, as if he could somehow deflect Pyre’s scathing disbelief. She stroked her hand along one of the boy’s ears and smiled.

  “If you think I am a goddess, maybe I am one. Your fox is a jester, after all,” she needled to get a reaction out of the kitsune. “So why can’t I be a goddess?”

  Upon hearing the word ‘jester’ Pyre immediately flinched, and his laughter stopped. He plucked the fawn shifter from Tempest’s arms and placed him on the grass.

  “Why don’t you run ahead, Aspen?” he said, patting the boy’s back as he did so. “Your mother will be looking for you. I wish to show your goddess around the village.”

  Aspen looked crestfallen. “I thought I could show her around…”

  “But then you couldn’t ask your mum for some of that wonderful bread she bakes to give to her, could you?” Pyre reasoned. “You always help your mum bake the morning batch, don’t you?”

  The fawn brightened immediately. He nodded, then grinned at Tempest. “I won’t be long, I swear I won’t! Don’t leave without the bread!” And then he was off, bounding away with the speed and grace of a deer.

  An uncomfortable silence followed, and Tempest became aware that Pyre was unabashedly staring at her. They had stopped right on the cusp of the village; Tempest could smell smoke and cinnamon on the air whenever the wind carried the scents over to her.

  “You like children.” Pyre stated.

  “That’s not a question.”

  “I never expected an assassin to like children.”

  Tempest forced herself to look at Pyre. The man’s sharp features seemed ever more pronounced in the morning sunlight, making him look less human than normal. It twisted her stomach in a way she could not describe and reminded her of the stark difference between them.

  A fox and a Hound.

  “I have always been surrounded by children,” she finally replied, “being an orphan and all. When I wasn’t training with the Hounds, I spent my time playing with the street urchins of Dotae.”

  “How long did you train with the Hounds?”

  “Since my mother died.”

  “That’s not exactly protocol.”

  “Neither is being a female trainee, either, yet here we are.”

  “Here we are.” A pause. “You called me a jester. Why?”

  “I didn’t call you the Jester, just a jester. You like to play tricks and games at the expense of others. The description seemed appropriate.” Tempest lifted her chin in the direction of where the fawn disappeared. “I didn’t think you would like children.”

  Pyre shrugged, then indicated for them to continue walking through the village. “We’re a very close-knit community around here. I suppose as a rebellious teenager I didn’t like kids much. Things change, though, when you’re put in a position to protect them. Each and every child becomes precious, then.”

  Tempest swallowed heavily, not sure how to respond to what Pyre had just said. It was the closest thing to a backstory he’d given her so far. I suppose I just gave him the same information about myself, though. Perhaps he felt he owed me an answer in return.

  She glanced around at the cottages they passed as they made their way through the village. Children were running everywhere, darting behind trees and hiding in wooden buckets and making so much noise Tempest could scarcely hear herself think. But she was smiling; whether in a city or a tiny, secluded village hidden in the forest, children were children.

  Then she noticed the women: they were cleaning, cooking, shopping, arguing, and corralling children back indoors. Some ways off from everyone else, two girls a little younger than Tempest were sparring each other. Something wasn’t right. She scanned the village again.

  Where are all the men?

  “Clearly a vicious, conniving bunch, right?” Pyre remarked, sidling into Tempest’s personal space just as she’d done to him earlier. When she tried to move away, he slung an easy arm over her shoulders to keep her in place. “Just relax. I didn’t take you here to bait you. I took you here to show you… what ‘here’ is. Most of the villages along the mountain range are just like this one: women, children, the elderly and the infirm outnumber men of fighting age three to one across these parts.”

  So, he was trying to get her to sympathize.

  Tempest kept her eyes on what was in front of her, searching for anything suspicious as they passed what looked to be a baker’s shop. She wondered if that was where Aspen lived. “Why is there such an imbalance?” she asked Pyre, fighting to keep her tone as neutral as possible.

  He barked out a laugh. “Why do you think, Temp? Destin’s had so many of us rounded up and killed since he took the throne. His father—and his father before him—was hardly any better. Shapeshifters are a race on the brink of being destroyed altogether. What is left of us works on the farms until we die. So why do you believe we’d kill our own people as collateral damage in our vendetta against the Crown?”

  “I—” Tempest began, but then Aspen came bounding out of the baker’s shop and crashed into her excitedly.

  “Try this, lion-killer!” he cried, holding up a small loaf of bread twisted into the shape of a tulip for Tempest to take.

  She accepted it from his hands, glancing at Pyre uncertainly before ripping it in two and handing him half of it.

  He quirked an eyebrow. “How gracious, Tempest.”

  “You have been feeding me for three weeks, after all.”

  “The entire village has been feeding you for three weeks, city girl.” Pyre chuckled. “Did you honestly believe I had the time to cook you three square meals a day for that long?”

  She sniggered. “You haven’t done any of the cooking. It’s been Nyx and Briggs.” But she hadn’t thought about where the food was coming from, if not Pyre himself.

  The little fawn boy was watching her expectantly. “Well, is it good? Is it? Is it better than city bread? Ma says—”

  “You might want to let he
r try it first, Aspen,” a woman said patiently when she reached the boy’s side. She looked to be about ten years older than Tempest, with the same ears and eyes as the fawn who was clearly her son. Her long, oak-brown hair was braided in a similar fashion to his, too. She smiled at Tempest. “You must be the lion-killer Aspen has been telling me about. I’m Rina.” Her eyes lingered on Tempest’s hair, her defining mark of being a Madrid. A Hound. “It’s not every day we meet one of your kind.”

  A shifter-killing assassin was implied. “A lion killer,” Tempest ventured, deliberately misunderstanding the woman’s meaning.

  Rina laughed softly. “Exactly right. How have you been finding the forest? Although, Briggs has been telling me you’ve been on constant bedrest, so I guess you haven’t seen much of it.”

  “Is Briggs your husband?” Tempest asked, hazarding a guess at their relationship.

  The woman shook her head. “He is my uncle,” she explained, wrinkling her nose in amusement. “His sister—my mother—is much older than him. Usually we get mistaken for siblings. It’s not often I hear someone ask if we are married!”

  “Oh,” was all Tempest said, feeling embarrassment flush her cheeks. “Well… I guess there’s a first time for everything.”

  Pyre squeezed her shoulder, reminding Tempest that his arm was still around her, which only served to make her flush even harder. She shifted out from beneath his arm and ignored the curious glance Rina cast between the two of them. Tempest barely kept herself from scowling at the woman. The kitsune might be handsome, but she’d stab herself in the eye before anything happened between them.

  “Temp is a little out of her depth today,” Pyre said, not unkindly, though Tempest was sure that if she looked at him he’d laugh at her. “Perhaps you could help her feel at home in the village today?”

  Rina beamed. “Of course, Pyre. We’ll take good care of her.”

  Tempest managed to keep her surprise hidden and snapped her jaw shut as Pyre turned on his heel and left her. Right in the middle of a shifter village. Either he was the stupidest man ever, this was a test, or he trusted her.