The Hunter's Rede

by F. T. McKinstry

  She emerged into the light, cloaked in black and moving with the sinuous, primeval grace of all women. She reached up with a pale hand, touched the edge of her hood and turned, drifting like fog without a sound across the earth. A wolf gazed over the fire with pale gold eyes staring deeply, completely, until she turned away and vanished into the shadows.

  Lorth awoke with a start. Nothing moved in the forest, and the mare didn’t stir. He let out his breath, gazed around until his heartbeat returned to normal. Then he lay down, pulled his cloaks closely around his body and yawned, relaxing as best he could as sleep took him.

  ~ * ~

  Tall pine trees swayed in the wind. Icaros’s house loomed in the pale light, a stone building with a black locust door. At the foot of the steps stood pillars in the shapes of perching ravens. The windows were tall and thin on the first floor, and small and square on the second, with glass set into geometric symbols. Above each window was a stone ornament of twining leaves.

  From a wide chimney in the center of the house, a thin cloud of smoke wafted through the boughs of old maples overhanging the roof. The gardens around the house, where in summer grew herbs, flowers, vegetables and all manner of viny, rooty things, had been cleaned out for the winter, except for an untrimmed rose bush, some asters left to frost and a young apple tree. Snow filled the empty flower boxes beneath the downstairs windows.

  Flurries swirled in the air, silent as feather down. He drifted slowly around the house, through gardens, by trees he had never seen, along the low stone wall bordering the forest, and to the back, where the barn stood. A familiar horse pulled on fresh hay sticking out of a round grate made of saplings. A horned goat stood in the barn, two sheep huddled together across a small rise and the chicken coop was closed up against the cold.

  Fresh cat prints followed a line towards the house. Thick strands of ivy, greenish-brown and dusted with snow, surrounded the back door. A black cat with long fur sat on the steps patched together with broken stones, its eyes half-closed. Wood had been stacked to the right of the door, beneath a roof held up by posts. Faint light glowed from the window above, which looked into the kitchen.

  The cat lifted its head, and then slipped over the edge of the steps.

  A shape moved past the kitchen window. The back door opened.

  ~ * ~

  Lorth awoke in the forest, clenched with cold. All his senses came alive with a violent shudder as sleep fell away from him. A snowflake spun down from the invisible sky, then another. So much for my woods-sense, he thought.

  A scream rippled across his solar plexus as his watch-web broke.

  Voices rang out in the distance. Lorth jumped to his feet, scattered the remains of his fire and went for Freya. The mare was awake, her ears perked, large eyes shining in the dying light. He unwound her reins from a branch and led her into the deeper shadows, where he cloaked her in a hemlock mist.

  He grabbed his weapons and crept into the trees. The faint light of torches glowed up from the direction of the gully. As he reached the crest of the hill that sloped down into the ravine where he had crossed the stream, a Faerin company splashed noisily through the water and rode up into the thicket. Their leader wore a helmet with an elm tree and a bright red cloak, putting him above the ranks of captain. A high commander or a lord. Behind him rode a smaller man, clad in black. The company gathered, their torches smoking and tearing the frosty air.

  The lord spoke to the black-cloaked man, whose low hood covered his face. “You sure he came up here?” The hooded man nodded and pointed in the direction of Lorth’s fire.

  A tracker—or a wizard. But Lorth didn’t sense that.

  No chance to fear.

  He focused on the space between the ground and the sky and breathed a word that caused a watery form to rush over the company and spook the horses. In the resulting chaos, the hunter moved. From his first kill, he acquired a bow and quiver. Then he slipped through the shadows sending one warrior after another in a reckless tumble from his mount. He missed the last one, causing him to rue losing Icaros’s bow to the Keeper at the Gates of Os. Horses with empty saddles bolted through the trees, whinnying and snorting.

  I am swift.

  The lord and his last man-at-arms surrounded the black-cloaked man as if to protect him. Lorth loosed another arrow. The warrior fell with an arrow in his throat. His horse stomped its hooves into the ground, one after the other, breath pulsing from its nostrils.

  The lord circled the hooded man. He looked around with a wild stare at his fallen company, then spoke a sharp command and headed down the hill towards the stream, not being of a mind to die that night.

  Lorth had a different mind. He drew one more arrow from the shadows of wind and snow and leveled the black, shiny tip through the trees, drifting along in a track as the lord rode down. Then the small man called out—in a woman’s voice.

  She stopped and turned, slowly pushed back her hood to reveal the face of a wolf, gray with a white muzzle, her eyes flashing moon pale as they leapt over the surroundings. Beneath her cloak, which had parted with the movement of her horse, Lorth saw the flowery colors of Tarth—the same woman he had seen in his vision at the guardsman’s cottage—

  —and standing at the back door of Icaros’s house in his dream just earlier.

  Lorth lowered his bow as his strength scattered. He kept enough of his wits to hold onto his cloaking spell, and then he waited, his heart pounding like a drum.

  The lord returned to the wolf-woman, leaned close and said something rough to her, then whipped her horse’s rump with the end of his reins. The noise resounded through the silent wood like a snapping tree. Her horse jumped forward, nearly unseating her as it thumped down the hill with the lord close behind, driving them on.

  ~ * ~

  Lorth stood there and gazed at the wind-stirred blackness of the woods long after the flickering of the Faerin lord’s torch faded into the night. At last he moved, when he was sure the Destroyer didn’t stand out there, watching, waiting. He ran up the hill and found his doused fire. He went for Freya, strapped the bow and quiver he had taken onto the saddle with his other things, fumbled for the reins and leapt up. Then he grew still, leaning down to feel the horse’s strength beneath him. “Steady on now,” he whispered, turning north.

  He rode as swiftly as he could in the piling snow. The faint breath of pre-dawn emanated from the air. He had slept much longer than planned; nearly the whole night, he had slept. Foolish—unless he still dreamed. That Faerin lord had spoken casually and with sharp authority to a woman with the face of a wolf! Lorth would no more have seen that than he would see the Destroyer at Icaros’s back door.

  Morning brought snow so heavy that he couldn’t see the features of the wood from one rise to the next. Freya plodded on undaunted, until at last Lorth spotted a long stretch of white between the trees. He dismounted and crept, slipping, down the bank above the road. No tracks marked the snow, but only recent ones would show up in this weather. He saw a thin, wavering line of deer prints along the edge. The lord and the woman must have gone the other way, towards Os—either that or they had made camp above the meadow, which meant they could be on the road now, coming this way.

  He found a flat spot on the ground, knelt and brushed the snow away. He pressed his ear to the earth, caressing the depths of stone, soil and roots with his mind to hear what it said. It spoke only of winter. He rose, brushed the snow from his ear, pulled the hood back over his head and returned to his horse.

  A woman with a wolf’s face. In the flesh. It was one thing to have a vision of the Destroyer—but this time, others were involved. That man couldn’t have seen what Lorth did, beneath the woman’s hood. It couldn’t have been real. Like a guilty conscience, the words the wizard had spoken to him years ago returned: You must take great care when stirring the waters of Maern, for you may not understand the consequences.

  Tarthian royalty. What was she doing up here? A Tarthian lord in a tavern with a Keeper of the Eye,
and a Tarthian woman traveling north of Os with a Faerin company. One of those events alone would have been strange. Both of them? That was alarming.

  ~ * ~

  The hunter rode all day, until he began to recognize Icaros’s realm. He moved off the road into the black, silent woods, found a stream and cared for Freya. Then he knelt against a hemlock tree and tried again to merge with Icaros in mindspeak.

  After a time, his mind stilled to a great depth, a hollow that resembled Icaros, yet spread beyond him to eternity. Lorth found himself in front of the wizard’s house, knee-deep in snow. The locust door stood above him like a portal to a dimension only wizards knew, closed and glittering with ice.

  “Icaros!” he called out, his breath clouding the air.

  Moments passed. The door opened slowly, soundlessly. Lorth waited on the bottom step between the two stone ravens. From the cold shadows of the house, Icaros emerged wearing a pure black cloak. His face was pale, his stone-gray eyes were sad and his white hair covered his shoulders in curling strands.

  He gazed down at Lorth with an expression of infinite care, then held out his hand and said, “Lea Maern silin moth.” A gale blew, bitterly cold and heavy with the force of ages, causing the wizard’s cloak to billow out behind him. The dark folds became the wings of a great raven that lifted off into the air. The stone ravens on the ends of the step came alive, shook off the snow and fluttered up after him, calling out with raucous cries that echoed through the forest, then faded to black like the trail of a falling star.

  Lorth’s consciousness rushed into damp, heart-thumping awareness as if he had just dropped into his body from the sky. He knelt by the tree, covered in snow and shivering with foreboding. Lea Maern silin moth, Icaros had said. Aenspeak. Lorth didn’t know the words. Something about the Old One, but the arrangement and context of the words were lost on him.

  Later, he moved northeast through the forest. Heavy weather obscured the mountains. He cast his mind around for Icaros’s enchantments, which he remembered as a cloak of shadow and light that deterred most from finding their way to his house. He didn’t feel anything.

  By nightfall, he would be there. It would be warm, and smell of herbs, wood smoke, pipe weed and old leather from the hundreds of books Icaros had shelved on every wall, nook and cranny of the place. Lorth imagined the silence of old fabric, wood and stone, whispers of wisdom, wind in the chimney, the bleating of goats and the calls of birds.

  It continued to snow into evening as the hunter rode on, probing the frozen blanket with his mind and shielding his face and body from the wind. Snow fled through the forest in great, billowing gusts, and the trees swayed and creaked under the weight of ice. Branches, leaves and bits of fallen debris scattered the forest floor. The bitingly cold air grew colder as the features of the wood grew dim with blended shadows.

  When he finally reached the house, he could hardly see. No lights shone inside. Though already chilled to the bone, a chill came from a deeper place as he rode around to the back.

  Icaros’s horse, a tobacco-brown gelding named Oak, stood in the opening of the barn. As Lorth came into view, the horse trotted to the fence, snorting and shaking his mane defiantly, as if some wrong had been done to him. Lorth dismounted, noting the absence of hay in the feeding grate. One sheep trotted over and stood by the grate as if waiting for something, its long black face peeking from a tangle of dirty white curls. Lorth didn’t see the other sheep.

  “Ho there, Oak,” he said, stroking the gelding’s neck beneath a mane crusted with snow. “Where is your master?” It didn’t make sense that Icaros would leave his animals like this in a storm, all standing around in the yard or in the corners of a wide-open barn. The goats emerged and began to cry at him as if, like the horse and the sheep, they had missed their feeding time.

  Lorth looked at the back door of the house, half expecting to see the cat—or worse, the Destroyer. Empty and quiet, no light shone and nothing moved. His heart began to pound. He stepped away from the fence, from the crying animals. Wind blasted across his back. Then he spun around in his tracks as darkness suddenly swept from the trees overhead.

  In a wavering upheaval of wings and claws, a huge raven flew down and landed on the edge of the woodpile roof by the back door, where it croaked once and stared at Lorth with a black, glittering eye.

  Chapter 5

  Shade of Silence: Life departs unknown.

  Certain kinds of events lifted the shrouds from everyday perception, those thoughts and feelings that took for granted the solidity of time and space. Lorth knew this well, having lived so close to the thin veil of life and death. But as he uprooted his cold feet from the piling snow, first walking towards the back door of Icaros’s house, then running, skidding in a spray on the final step as the raven squawked and took to the air, he saw a rift in his own presumption.

  He burst through the door, stopping with a breath as something skittered across the wide cupboard edge Icaros used as a table. A mouse. Lorth couldn’t remember ever seeing a mouse in here. A half-eaten loaf of bread sat on the table, and the round-bellied stove in the corner threw no heat. Silence fell, a dark, unnatural silence cut by the calls of hungry animals outside; a deep, bleeding gash.

  “Icaros?” He walked slowly, as in a dream, through the narrow opening of the kitchen. The house smelled strange, like stale flowers. Instinctively, Lorth cast out his mind for impressions. What came back to him caused his stomach to roll over like a wave of warm mud: thick green water, croaking frogs, drumbeats, rain and black, misty pools.

  Tarth.

  Coals glowed faintly in the hearth. Icaros lay on the stones, unmoving.

  Lorth approached and knelt with the detached calm of an assassin. Only slightly warm, the wizard’s pale flesh had no pulse. Beneath his hands, the shirt across his chest had been torn open, revealing a purplish red, five-rayed star.

  Lorth felt nothing but the hollow beneath the shroud. The veil between the worlds ripped in the wind howling in the chimney top. He knelt there by the hearth and stared at the spider bite branded on Icaros’s heart.

  He didn’t understand. He knew death. Not this.

  You must take great care when stirring the waters of Maern, for you may not understand the consequences.

  He had first seen the Destroyer just before he became her, when he had bested the most skillful blade he had ever fought. Then he saw her again, in the forest. In the shadows. Beneath the hood of a woman dressed in Tarthian colors. And—standing in Icaros’s back door.

  Icaros. The wizard’s eyes, gray as a cloudy sky, stared at nothing. Lorth touched them closed. He removed his blue cloak and covered the wizard’s body with it. The Eye stared up through the black hexagram as if to accuse him of invoking the Destroyer against a Keeper of the Eye. Stirring the waters and not understanding the consequences.

  May you die by your own kind, he heard the warden say.

  The Hunter’s Rede returned then, from the place it had fallen when he had entered the yard. He clung to it as he would a branch overhanging a bottomless chasm.

  No death is mine.

  Disoriented, he turned towards the kitchen. The blurred impression of animals moved through the glass in the back door.

  Feed the animals.

  He started forward, then stopped and spun around, staring wildly at the body on the hearth, covered in a stolen Keeper’s cloak. Bury Icaros. Return him to the earth.

  He heard Oak whinny. Something slammed into the fence, as if the horse had kicked it.

  Feed the animals.

  He went into the kitchen and lit a lamp. The golden light flared out, throwing ghastly shadows across the room. As he moved to the door, his hunter’s sense came alive, sharp as a new blade turned upon the wheel of masters.

  I have no place.

  He opened the door, and then paused as the black cat ran into the house. A female. The creature turned, came to him and caressed his leg with the side of her face, her body, her curling tail. She yowled. The body i
n the next room hit Lorth’s mind like a scream as he went to the cupboard where Icaros had once kept food for the cat, and found a familiar tin box there, blood red and nicked with pictures of cats jumping about in silly positions. It contained small bits of dried meat mixed with something that looked like cooked egg and crushed catmint. He knelt and bounced some into the barren yellow bowl on the floor, put the tin on the counter and went outside. The eerie glow of twilight illuminated the yard.

  I have no name.

  He trudged through the knee-deep snow, found the gate and fumbled with the frozen catch. He had to pound it with the pommel of his longknife to open it. As he moved into the yard, the animals crowded around him, lowing, bleating and tossing their heads. He moved past the covered well, by the fence the horse had just cracked, and into the barn. The animals followed him. He gathered them into their stalls, put hay on the floor and grain in the pails, drew water from the well and filled the troughs. He opened the inside door of the chicken coop attached to the barn and filled the empty, shallow boxes there. Freya entered, and as she ate and drank from the wooden pails he provided for her, he removed his things from her saddle.

  He closed the barn against the wind and returned to the house, where he dropped his things on the floor. The cat had left her bowl. Lorth moved into the main room, to the body of the man who had raised him. The cat looked up from beside her silent master, her tail fluffed stiff with fright. She bared her fangs and hissed, then shot out of the room. Lorth watched her go, unsure of which he felt more like at that moment: the frightened cat, or the shadow of death that had frightened her.

  He removed his sword and tossed the scabbard onto the hearth like something worthless. Then he knelt and lifted the wizard, and carried him outside.