The Hunter's Rede

by F. T. McKinstry

  As the moon fell dark and began to wax again, his days in the Hall of Thorns became as tapestries woven with images and impressions of the things he did with Leda in the softness of her bed surrounded by cats, beneath the hemlocks in her garden or in the farthest shadows of her sacred places. He didn’t go to her every day, or even every other day; he went enough to ease his need and mind, while still keeping enough tension in his body to fight and enough space around his heart to trust.

  His companions in the High Guard continued to tease him about finding a woman. They would have teased him in any case; however, if they had known he was stealing after their Mistress, they would not be amused. He therefore took comfort in their jokes, which had become a kind of watch-web to him.

  One morning, in the wake of the Barren Moon, Lorth headed down to the refectory, as he usually did before going to the yard. He passed by the long serving table set with a big pot of steaming oats, bowls of dried fruits and nuts, salted bacon and hard fresh bread, still warm from the ovens. His stomach growled as he filled up a plate. He headed for the table where he usually sat. Bran and Cael were there, with Aran and Ivy. They looked up as he approached.

  “Ho there!” Bran said warmly. “Here is our sneaky wolf. You’re up early.” Lorth swung his leg over the bench as Bran moved over to make a space for him.

  “What’re you about today?” Aran asked him.

  “Blade,” Lorth replied. He grabbed a spoon from Bran’s empty bowl with a raised brow. Bran nodded.

  “I wouldn’t use that shovel,” Cael said. “Don’t know where it’s been.”

  “Been in his oatmeal,” Lorth said.

  Bran leaned towards him. “You apologize to Astarae yet?”

  Lorth dropped his spoon in his bowl and grabbed his bread, tore into it with his teeth. “For what?” he said with his mouth full.

  Bran leaned back, and Cael slowly shook his head. “Stubborn as an old horse,” he said. “You know she’s expecting it.”

  “So. Regin hasn’t said anything about it. Nor Eaglin.”

  Cael snorted. “Regin is staying out of this.”

  Lorth spooned a bite of oats into his mouth, swallowed. “Out of what?”

  “Out from between you and Master Eaglin, that’s what,” Bran said, reaching over and snatching a dried plum from Lorth’s plate. “Master is taking it personally, you know.”

  “Taking what personally?”

  “That you insulted Astarae and won’t apologize. It’s come between them, we hear. She’s blaming him.”

  “She chewed up his ear real good,” Ivy added.

  Lorth reached for a pitcher of mison and poured himself some. He took a long drink, gritting his teeth as it went down in a sparkling fire that did little to calm him.

  “What did you say to her, anyway?” Aran said. The table creaked as he leaned on it.

  Lorth sat back and let out his breath slowly. His hunger had left him. He could have put his fist through a stall door. As if things were not complicated enough, now he had to risk dishonoring Eaglin unless he apologized to his woman. She had set it up that way, of course.

  Ironically, Lorth wouldn’t have given a dead rat about Eaglin’s honor if he hadn’t been stealing to his mother’s bed.

  “I threatened to hunt her,” he said. “I just might, yet.”

  Aran muttered something in Maelgwn. The others said nothing as Lorth slammed his cup down and left the table, his cloak tearing the air in his wake as he strode from the hall.

  His anger still burned as he entered the tall glass house where the priestesses grew vegetables and herbs. Mist and light filled the hall, making it as damp as a Tarthian jungle. Lorth padded with a tomcat gait down the center aisle and approached a short, older woman with curly blond hair. “Is Astarae here?” he asked her.

  She blinked. “She’s in the next house. May I fetch her?”

  He shook his head and continued through the rows of greens and blooms until he reached the stone entrance to another, identical chamber. Near the end, Astarae stood leaning over a table of bushy plants laden with green tomatoes. Lorth let the tension in his solar plexus drain into the earth as his mood bled into an overcast sky.

  When Astarae looked up and saw him, her dark blue eyes hardened. “Who let you in here?” she said, straightening her back.

  “I didn’t see a guard at the door,” he returned. “I’ve come to apologize for my disrespect.” The words felt like swamp scum in his mouth.

  She released a breath of derision. “You’ll do more than that. I shall see you brought before the Aenlisarfon for your insolence.”

  Icaros had once spoken of the Aenlisarfon, and not with reverence. A council of nine Ravens with the powers of earth, water, time and space in their hands, they decided matters of jurisdiction and involvement, coldly and without much regard for circumstance.

  Lorth leaned casually on the table, breaking a tomato stem under his hand. His mood deepened from clouds to night and the knot in his solar plexus gave way to a hunter’s calm. “I doubt you have the authority to throw me before that lot,” he informed her.

  “Eaglin does!” she hissed, her cheeks blazing with wrath.

  He fixed his wolf’s gaze on her. “I confess, I offered my apology to honor Eaglin, as I didn’t think you would accept it. But instead of accepting it for his sake, you threaten me with his stature.” He picked up the crushed tomato leaf by his hand and studied it. “I’m curious, Astarae, how you managed to become a name-initiated priestess of Maern when your only real power seems to come from the man who’s fucking you.” He tossed the leaf aside and looked up inquiringly.

  Attitude aside, Lorth was not prepared for the animal rage that came over the priestess’s face. She drew herself up and gathered power from the womb, some kind of undifferentiated storm of feminine maleficence. She cried out a sequence of words in Aenspeak that caused wind to explode from the north and howl through the hall, tumbling and breaking pots, shattering glass, uprooting seedlings and withering plants.

  From an odd place of equilibrium, Lorth said, “Lea Maern silin moth.”

  At once, the wind fell still. Priestesses ran into the greenhouse waving their arms and shrieking. Astarae swayed on her feet, grasped at the edge of the table, and collapsed. She lay there like a doll, her red-blond hair tangled up with a tomato plant that had toppled from the table next to her.

  The hunter turned and walked down the aisle, ignoring the cries and threats of the women, who naturally assumed he had wrecked their hall. When he reached the end, he stepped into a high corridor lined with tapestries and took a deep breath of the cooler air. Then he pulled his hood, uttered a shield of stone over his body and headed in the direction of the training yards.

  All is cyclic. Perhaps it was time to leave. He should’ve known things would get to this eventually. He had never been able to stay in one place very long; someone always had to push him, test him, and try his mettle. The world was one big arms training yard swollen with fools waving blades. Politics, back stabbing, sex and power struggles, petty talk fouling up the surface of deep pools like some oily filth—

  As he turned into a wide corridor lined with thin young trees, a breeze touched his face. He slowed his heated pace and glanced around as he noticed no one else moved in the hall. He had never seen this hall empty before.

  Shit. Erskin dropped from the bough of a tree and swooped down, nearly clipping him in the head. He dropped into a crouch, remembering that animals could see through energy shields.

  Animals—and a certain high priestess.

  Lorth hesitated as the bird alit in a tree. It chittered at him. He knew better than to ignore a summons from Leda, especially in this context, but he would not defend himself to anyone for this, including her. “Go away, Erskin.” He kept walking, and then ducked as the blackbird took another swipe at him. Then another. As he stopped, the bird landed on his head and pecked him above the brow. “Ow!” He reached up and wiped at it, then glared at the blood on his fing
ers.

  Erskin fluttered down the corridor in the opposite direction. Lorth hesitated, then released a heavy breath and followed. The blackbird led him through the palace to the western side, above the Wolf River. He entered a forested hall enclosed by glass set into arboreal images of woods, clouds and mountains. It snowed outside, and wind moved the flakes in swirling patterns on the glass. Running water whispered nearby. Erskin appeared and disappeared between rises, rocks and tree boughs. Lorth walked slowly into the heart of the garden, where the trees grew close and light gave way to dappled shadows.

  The Mistress of Eusiron stood like a statue by a stony pool, in a hollow filled with brown, red and gold ferns. She wore a pale lavender dress, and a braid of her hair fell over her shoulder and onto her breast. Her eyes glittered darkly; the gold around them had gone and her forehead held a single, vertical crease Lorth had never seen before.

  Erskin perched on the branch of a hemlock tree and sang.

  “What just happened?” Leda asked.

  Lorth lowered himself to sit by the pool, and folded his hands into a temple of unease. “During the solstice feast, I”—a sheepish pause—“insulted Astarae. I just went to apologize. She refused it.”

  “So you tried to dismantle my greenhouse?”

  He looked up at her. “Is that what they told you? I did no such thing. I admit it, I provoked her. But she raised that wind, not I.”

  The Mistress gazed down at him, her nostrils flared and her breast heaving with emotion. “You invoked Maern in wholeness!”

  “Aye. To stop Astarae.”

  She stood there, towering in the shelter of her garden. Then she lowered herself beside him like a tree dropping all its leaves at once. She reached up and touched the small wound on his forehead. “What’s this?”

  Lorth glanced up at Erskin, preening itself on a branch. “Nothing. I’m sorry, Leda,” he said, meaning it. “I shouldn’t have said anything. I only went because Cael told me I was dishonoring Eaglin by keeping it.”

  She looked down into her lap. “This has nothing to do with Eaglin,” she said quietly. “Astarae believes she has the Old One’s authority to throw anyone around. She even tried to threaten Eusiron once.”

  He touched her face, lifted her gaze to his. “Are you serious?”

  “It started in the Waeltower last summer, during a lesson. He appeared to me. Astarae laid eyes on him and fell in love. Unbeknownst to me, the foolish girl later invoked him, and offered herself to him. He refused her.”

  “Why?”

  She slipped a laugh. “Do you think the gods wander around taking mortal women as it pleases them? They prefer not to complicate our lives. The love of a god is perilous, Lorth. The price for mingling with them can be very high.”

  Lorth caressed her shoulder. “But you...”

  “I am the mother of a Dove, the highest order of the Eye above Raven. Mortals like Eaglin are born to gods to train for birth into the divine hierarchy of Formation. Ealiron chose me to bear him. He will not choose another in this age.”

  Lorth absorbed that, but he might as well have tried to swallow a starry sky. “You said Astarae threatened Eusiron. What happened?”

  “She threatened to call the Old One down on him.” At Lorth’s expression of astonishment she continued, “Only a woman scorned would dare such a thing—but threatening Eusiron was beyond reckless. Another god wouldn’t try that. He told her she would die by the hands of a wolf.”

  Lorth thought back to his first encounter with Astarae. “During the feast, she saw me through your spell.”

  She stared inward for a moment. “Interesting. Did you say anything to her?”

  “First time I saw her, it put my hackles up. Later, she accosted me. She said something about the Destroyer that exposed my heart.” He grimaced. “I threatened to hunt her.”

  “You think that’s a coincidence? She put up your hackles for a reason.”

  “I thought I just didn’t like her.”

  She clicked her tongue. “Since when did you allow yourself personal feelings around the things you observe? You are a hunter. What would you care about Astarae? Something in her set you off and made you visible to her.” She took his hands into hers, caressed them.

  “I need to know something. Is Eaglin on the Aenlisarfon?”

  “He is not. Why?”

  “Astarae threatened to bring me before them.”

  She breathed a laugh. “That’s an empty threat. The Aenlisarfon answers to Ealiron. Not Eaglin—and certainly not Astarae.” Her expression darkened. “I’ll strip her name for that.”

  Lorth gazed over the lines around her eyes and mouth, the blush on her cheeks and the way her hair lay against her neck. He closed his fingers around the braid, drew her close and caressed her mouth with his. He paused as she caught her breath.

  “Leda, what’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.” A tear slipped from her eye.

  “Why are you—”

  “He told me you were coming. He didn’t say why. You’re his, aren’t you.”

  “What? Who?” A chill rattled him as he recalled his vision of a war god, in the Haunt.

  “Eusiron.”

  He inhaled as a raft of questions floated into his mind. But as she brushed her hand over his crotch and entwined her fingers in the buckles on his leggings, he abandoned them.

  “Damned troublemaker,” she breathed.

  He rolled her over in the ferns and slid his hand up under her dress. As she arched her back and sighed under his attentions, he glanced up to make sure Erskin was still with them. While a hunter never ignored his sense, a lover usually did, and so the blackbird had become a reliable lookout for times such as these. But the bird had flown.

  The owl flies near.

  Leda parted her thighs and guided his hips over hers. With a rough groan, he drove it in, the only thing in his mind, the end of the universe and the birth of a star, his only crying need as he rocked in the pond, stirring it into a tempest.

  A shadow dimmed the light, a dark wing tearing over his peripheral vision with a screech. With a hunter’s reflex, he flattened his body against Leda’s, wrapped his arms over her head and stared at the rustling hemlock as it stilled.

  “Lorth?” Leda whispered against his neck.

  He breathed a word, let his gaze go out of focus and clearly discerned the fading imprint of a human energy field in the aura of the hemlock tree.

  Erskin fluttered to the ground by his hand, and chirruped.

  Chapter 12

  Shade of Fault: Confidence escapes notice.

  Wind battered the ramparts of Eusiron like the fists of gods as Lorth sat on the stool in his room, coaxing the flames in the hearth with a glare. Freil hadn’t come to stoke it that evening, or to bring more wood. There was no wine, and Scrat had thoroughly investigated the remains of the food.

  A day and a half had passed since Lorth made love to Leda in the garden. She had assured him that whoever spotted them through the hemlock branches could cause no harm; frighteningly, the whole thing had amused her. Lorth hadn’t lingered to watch things unfold. He left the garden as if he’d just completed an assassination job, lacing up his shirt and fastening his leggings as he went, drawing on the tension of unsatisfied lust to return quickly to the Hall of Thorns.

  Avoiding the yard, he had gathered his wits and gone to the Archers’ Wood, where he shot arrows all day and into evening. He had skipped supper and gone to bed with his arms and shoulders aching.

  Now hunger had caught up with him. He gave up on the fire, grabbed his warm guardsman’s cloak and left the chamber. Hopefully, this late in the morning, the refectory would be deserted. He didn’t wish to talk to anyone. But no one noticed him with any more interest than usual. Some greeted him with a nod or a raised hand. No trouble here.

  Men milled around the tables and benches of the refectory, but the morning meal had passed and most of the warriors had moved on with the day. On the serving table, Lorth found bread, a dry
piece of what looked like ham and a bowl with a handful of dried cherries in it. He lifted the bowl and emptied it into his mouth. The tart flavor caused him to squint. He tore off a piece of bread and held it in his teeth as he poured some mison wine into a cup. He peered into the pitcher and swished it around to mix in the grayish sediment on the bottom. A ripple passed over his solar plexus as he set the pitcher down.

  Confidence escapes notice.

  He took the bread from his mouth and turned as something blurred behind him. He twisted aside, but not quickly enough: his jaw exploded into a white shock that sent him stumbling back into the table, bread flying. When he came to his wits, Eaglin stood over him coiling his fist for another blow.

  “Ho!” Lorth shouted, tasting blood. “What—”

  He ducked the next swing, but before he could get into a position to defend himself Eaglin put his fist into his stomach, knocking the wind out of him. The wizard hauled him up by his shirt, took him off balance with a smooth series of blows he never saw and then threw him into a bench. Lorth managed to roll over the top and land on his feet. Somehow, he had lost his cloak; it lay in a lump on the floor by the serving table.

  Since the solstice feast, avoiding Eaglin had been easy. But after what happened with Astarae in the greenhouse, Lorth hardly felt surprised by this. Maern knew, the spiteful priestess hadn’t likely given her lover an honest account of the event.

  Lorth held out his hand as the wizard moved towards him. “Eaglin—”

  “That’s Master to you.” He spun around like a whirlwind. The sole of his boot slammed Lorth in the chest and knocked him over a table, smashing cups and plates and sending a basket of raisin rolls bouncing and rolling across the floor.

  Men began to gather around the fight, but no one got involved. Tangling with either Eaglin or Lorth would have been foolish enough, but getting in the middle of them was unthinkable.