The Winged Hunter

by F. T. McKinstry

  When he spoke, his voice moved over her in a wave of soothing vibration that had a strange but not unpleasant effect on her body. Her breath caught as he raised his wings and moved. With one graceful step, he landed before her, parted his lips, and flared his nostrils.

  One of two things will happen: either you resist him and lose your heart, or you go to him and lose your life.

  The crowharrow knelt and leaned forward slowly, his every move in perfect grace. His hair was soft and wild and his skin glistened with some strange, fragrant moisture.

  The crowharrow can’t harm you as long as you choose to resist him.

  He began to chant. His voice vibrated in her flesh, warming and chilling it at the same time. Honey flowed from her heart into the cleft between her thighs. His song felt like water, flowering ivies, climbing roses, trees and stars wheeling through the night, the years, the ages.

  He reached out a hand. His nails were curved and sharp.

  When the crowharrow had called her from the garden, her great grandfather’s enchantment had protected her. Strangely, this had made her want to get out in the most terrible way. It was easy to tell the beast to go away from inside the walls; she hadn’t meant it. But now, there was no wall, no magic, only the power of her choice—or so the wizards had said. It didn’t seem like much.

  Remember your mother.

  Tansel’s heart pounded around in her breast like a caged bird as she let her awed gaze move down his chest, the ridges of his abdomen and his groin, swollen with need. She had never seen a man in this state and she only knew what it was—vaguely—because her mother had once explained it to her. At the time, Tansel hadn’t understood. But now...

  Lust. He was aroused. He wanted to—

  Whatever you think he’s offering you, death is all he will give you.

  A chill move down Tansel’s spine like a rippling scream. No garden wall. No one to help her. No one to hear. She was alone and she wanted to yield to this creature with a desire that plumbed far deeper than sense.

  Was choice the same as desire?

  Madness! She didn’t want to die as her mother had, but neither could she deny this, to push away the power and beauty of a man as her mother had done, and her mother before her.

  As Kalein had done with Caelfar.

  Foolish child. He is all things men are and worse.

  She couldn’t push him away and yet, if she didn’t resist him, he would take her, however he would—all sex, claws and fangs—and then he would kill her, assuming she survived that. Tears filled her eyes as a brief, violent image of Maetor with his boot balanced over the toad house flashed across her mind. If she resisted him, he would probably kill her anyway.

  The crowharrow spoke in his rumbling voice of mountains and storms, as if she were his, and lived only to listen to him. But suddenly, Tansel knew that her feelings had no more impact here than if she were to shake her fist at the Eastcold storm and tell it to go away. He was beyond the cares of mortals, as distant and aloof as the gray-eyed gods towering over her. Like Maetor, this creature killed gardens with unnatural winters just to please himself. For tea. For attention.

  With this realization, she looked up into his immortal eyes through a curtain of tears, and with a splitting resolve that nearly stopped her heart, she whispered:

  “No.”

  The word drifted on the air like a falling leaf.

  The winger hunter stood slowly. He stopped singing. He stopped aching. Silent as a frozen pool, he lifted his face to the sky, raised his wings and vanished.

  Tansel blinked at the space where the winged hunter had just stood. For some moments, her mind wouldn’t register his absence.

  She sat there for some time, until the sun fled behind heavily overcast skies. Wrenching herself from numbness and disorientation, she got up and moved to the narrow gap between two of the statues. A gorge plunged into a tangled, wind-battered tree line, far below. She backed away and turned around. In every direction, through every crack, it was the same: impassable terrain over impossible distances. Thunder rumbled in the distance.

  The crowharrow had left her here to die.

  Tansel returned to the foot of a warrior holding a bow to his heart. She studied the mison flowers clinging in the cracks on the marble floor. Abandonment had become such a basic part of her existence that it rarely occurred to her to cry over it. But something had changed. It had started with her great-grandfather’s arrival and grown like a loerfalos nourished by denial and loneliness. She could no longer put it back where it had come from.

  It started to rain. Tansel huddled there, No echoing repeatedly in her mind. Her mother had once said, in response to a daft question Tansel had asked about her father, You will learn not to depend on anyone but yourself. In this, we are strong. Tansel had always believed that. But now? Just a gritty salve smeared into the emptiness.

  Tea by the river, Maetor sang. I shall bring your garden back to life, if you appease me.

  Tansel opened her throat and released a long, shuddering cry that echoed into the sky like an apocalypse. It howled in the ears of stone gods and gave them nightmares. She doubled over and retched. She got up and stomped around the circle, clutching her belly, blinded by tears. She struck the statues with her fists, kicked their boots, the drapes of their cloaks, the tips of their swords. “I hate you!” she screamed, her voice vanishing in the wind. She didn’t know to whom she cried: the crowharrow, Maetor, her father, Ravens, all of them. No. She lowered herself to the ground and wrapped her arms around her belly, stricken by sobs. No. No. No.

  Wind howled around the rocks like hungry wolves. The sky erupted with lightning followed by ground-shaking thunder that made her want to run into a hole. Before long, her body seized up with shivers. Like a toad under a frost, she slipped into drowsy despair. She knew, as all wild things knew, that death waited in sleep, in the lilting, soothing song of cold once the shivering ceased.

  She closed her eyes.

  The wind grew still; the cold grew warm. In the center of the circle, shimmering with the light of a glowing star, a being with shining black hair and eyes the color of summer moss stepped from the statue’s embrace and stood before her. He wore a dove gray cloak covered with twinkling stars. He held up his hand, and the crow on the warrior’s arm flew up and landed on his. He whispered something to the bird and released it to the wind. Then he knelt and gently touched her face.

  “Awake,” he said in a resonant voice.

  Tansel started awake to the wind and rain. She was too cold to move, and she couldn’t see; the darkness had swallowed her. Ages passed as the wind rose and fell like beating wings. It spoke in soft voices. Hands reached down and drew her up. Something said her name, and then words she didn’t understand. Light flowed into her breast and belly.

  “Tansel,” the wind’s voice breathed. It sounded like the statue with the crow. A canopy of wings surrounded her, and then strong arms lifted her into the air. Tansel had no strength left; not enough to be afraid, not enough to say No.

  The wind bore her high into the Eastcold river and then carried her away from the circle where she had broken the crowharrow’s spell.

  The Rites of Hawthorn

  On the wings of a sioros, Eaglin flew to the northeast, where the sioros’ lair hung amid the clouds. Since his visit to the lair, he retained not only bad memories but also an uncanny sense for the lair’s location, shapeshifted or not.

  His father’s presence was a stronger force, however. When a large crow swept from the fury of the storm and harried him with the insistence of the entity himself, Eaglin changed his course for the northwest. The otherworldly bird vanished into the mists as Eaglin caught sight of the tall, carven forms of an ofsinae, revealed in the inky darkness by a flash of lightning.

  He found Tansel crumpled against the foot of Farus, the Archer. She was dark to Eaglin’s mind; whether by magic or death, he couldn’t tell. As he reached for a pulse, she stirred. He gathered her tenderly into his arms and t
ook to the wing, descending through the rain into the forest below.

  He alit in the blowing shadows of a deep, rolling wood. He strode through the trees with the senses of beasts and ghosts until he reached a small cave in the shadow of the mountain. Tansel lay limp in his arms, silent. Eaglin stopped a short distance from the mouth of the cave and spoke a word in Aenspeak. A chill rippled through his body from head to toe as he returned to his human shape. The force of the change caused him to sway on his feet.

  The presence of a large animal filled the cave. Eaglin inhaled deeply and projected his mind into the black opening. A cat. The animal had grown alert with his arrival; its eyes gazed through the shadows with intense, silent vigilance. In the Dark Tongue, Eaglin requested shelter. After a moment, the creature moved deeper into the cave.

  Sometime later, he sat by a fire he had built with wet wood and Aenspeak. A draft from somewhere above drew the flames to and fro. Tansel lay nearby, wrapped in an extra cloak he had brought. Still alarmingly listless, she stared into the flames. The golden light touched the softness of her face, her poppy-leaf eyes, and the reddish hair curling around her cheek. Eaglin reached over and tended a small pot simmering with mushrooms and dandelion greens he had collected earlier that evening.

  He hadn’t sensed the sioros as he had taken Tansel from the mountain pass. He had spun a fine, highly sensitive watch-web around the cave and the surrounding area to alert him if the sioros came near. He couldn’t guess what had happened; the emptiness in Tansel’s eyes was both revealing and not. But the fact that she lived told him she had either found her strength of will or something else had intervened.

  Her expression changed as Eaglin pulled a cup from his pack and ladled some soup into it. She sat up with a shiver.

  “Are you still cold?” he asked her.

  She nodded. As he held out the cup, she drew up the corners of her cloak to pad her hands from the heat, and then took the cup as if it were a precious treasure. Eaglin put more wood on the fire, then took his meal and relaxed. As they ate, Tansel cast a nervous glance at the corner of the cave. A pair of eyes glowed for a moment, and then vanished.

  “What is that?” Tansel whispered, frozen in place.

  “A mountain cat. He’ll not harm you.”

  Tansel returned to her soup and drained it. “Thank you.”

  Eaglin took her cup. “You may call me Eaglin.” He refilled the cup and handed it back.

  “How did you find me?” she asked, holding the steaming soup beneath her nose.

  “I had help.” He hesitated. “A crow led me there.”

  She blinked. “You climbed up there?”

  “No. I shapeshifted into a sioros.”

  “A what?”

  “Crowharrow. Sioros is the wizards’ term for him.” He paused. “It was the only way I could help you.”

  She regarded him with unsettling comprehension. “I saw you like that. In dreams.”

  He leaned forward. “Tell me.”

  “You were by a river. And sitting on the rock over the garden where he used to watch me. But it was you. With wings like his, in a shadow. It was...” She looked away. “I couldn’t tell the difference.”

  Though chilled, Eaglin wasn’t surprised. “Is this why you ran from me in the Waeltower that day? You recognized me?”

  She nodded, and then took a long sip of her soup as if to distract herself from the intensity of the conversation. “When I was up there,” she glanced in the general direction of the pass, “I dreamed of a crow. One of the statues held it. The one in the center called it, whispered to it and let it go.”

  Eaglin smiled faintly. “That’s a statue of Ealiron. That place is called an ofsinae, which means, ‘lens of the gods.’ The crowharrows use them as portals to summon the Creators.” He studied her with newfound respect. “No small thing, that Ealiron revealed himself to you.”

  “He woke me up.”

  Eaglin nodded, thinking dryly, He’s good at that. “The crow you saw was the one that found me.”

  Her eyes widened. “Are you saying I caused that?”

  “No, but you saw it. Dreaming or not, that is powerful. So is your ability to see me in dreams as a crowharrow. To make connections like that is telling. You have wizards’ blood.”

  “My aunt told me that,” she said into her cup.

  By her manner, Eaglin surmised she didn’t know what had happened to Aradia. Unfortunately, that was not the only troublesome thing he had to tell her. But all that could wait.

  Eaglin removed the soup pot from the fire. “I need you to tell me what happened after you fled the hall.”

  “Nothing,” she said almost defensively. “In the forest, I—he came and I fainted. Next I knew, I was in the air. I got cold and asked him to bring me down. He brought me to those statues. But then...” She looked up as her breath spread into a flowery blush on her cheeks.

  “You were still under his spell.”

  She set her cup aside and pulled her arms over her belly. “I refused him.”

  Eaglin had guessed this as a possibility; however, hearing it caused him to realize something that put his hair on end with a sudden fright. The sioros had undermined Eaglin’s vow to deliver Tansel by seducing her himself. He had obviously believed she wouldn’t refuse him. But she had. It would only be a matter of time before the immortal came after Eaglin for breaking his vow. Tansel’s part in it wouldn’t matter.

  “You are strong, Tansel. I’ve never heard of anyone, anywhere, refusing the seduction of an immortal hunter. How did you do it?”

  “Strength?” she breathed scornfully. “I’m alone for that. He knew how bad it hurt to be alone. He used it against me.”

  Eaglin didn’t need to guess of what she spoke. “He made you want him by withdrawing.”

  She threw him a glare that would have soured milk. “My aunt warned me. She told me what it was and I didn’t care. I didn’t realize it until I was there, before him.”

  “How did you resist him?” Eaglin pressed.

  “Before my great-grandfather came, there was a wizard who courted me.”

  Eaglin leaned back and tossed a piece of wood on the fire. “Maetor? Caelfar told us about that.”

  “He killed my garden because I wouldn’t have tea with him. But he would’ve imprisoned me. Just as my mother said. Give a man what he wants and die, in body or soul, or refuse him and die anyway.”

  “You saw the same pattern in the crowharrow?”

  “It was the same, how he wanted me.”

  Eaglin took a long, measured breath. “When pure male force does not know itself.” When she turned to him with a puzzled expression, he continued, “He reflects, but he doesn’t see his own reflection.”

  “But didn’t he want to...” She blurted a crazy sound that could have been a laugh but was not. “Love me?”

  “His sex wouldn’t have healed your need or made a woman of you. He is wild and his lust knows no bounds. It would have killed you.”

  Something crumbled apart in her. She lowered her gaze into her lap in resignation. “It was the same as Maetor, and yet it wasn’t. I didn’t love Maetor.”

  “Tansel,” Eaglin said gently. “The crowharrow is immortal. You can’t fall in love with him.”

  A tear fell into her lap, caught by the firelight. “Has he no heart? How can something so fair not have a heart?”

  “His heart is pure, without stain, without awareness. Like a sun shining in eternal brilliance. If you get too close, it will burn you.”

  “He wanted me just to kill me? It seemed more than that!”

  “It was. But it wasn’t about you personally. He saw the Old One as a maiden. Every woman becomes Maern in her transitions.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Have you ever been with a man?” She shook her head and looked away, as if embarrassed. “You’re a woman untouched, a maiden. Maern in her first aspect. That’s what he saw.”

  Tansel picked up her soup and sniffed it, then too
k a sip and put it back by the fire. “What will he do now?”

  Eaglin gazed into the flames. “With you, he’ll do nothing. The Old One is protecting you.”

  A pause, then: “So, he won’t ever come back?”

  “Not for you.” He decided to take a chance and initiate this girl into the darker ways of the mountains, if nothing else. “He’ll come for me. What you saw in your dreams wasn’t imaginary. I’m a wizard with a long, dark shadow, and through it, the crowharrow captured me and made me agree to something terrible.” He didn’t look at her as he continued, “He made me swear to give him your innocence. Initially, I refused. He abandoned me to death, just as he did you. I had to agree to his terms in order to get out. I hoped to find a way to thwart him after that—but you solved your own problem.”

  “But not yours,” she said.

  “One does not break a vow made to an immortal.” He hung his head and listened to the wind and rain tearing the forest outside. The big cat slept in the darkness, warm and breathing.

  Tansel pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. For a time, she watched the fire, chin resting on her knees. Then she stirred and said, “How are you supposed to give me to him now? He doesn’t want me anymore.”

  Eaglin’s heart tripped as if something had kicked it. When he didn’t respond, she continued: “You have a crowharrow in you. If you,” she lifted her hand and moved it around to illustrate something mysterious, “did that with me, could you say it’s the same? Giving me to a crowharrow?”

  A laugh wheezed from Eaglin’s throat before he could suppress it. Then a chill seized him. How had this beautiful girl seen this when he had not? By swearing to give her maidenhead to the sioros, Eaglin had essentially given himself a chance to heal his one and only attempt at the Rites of Hawthorn—by becoming a sioros himself. A trick worthy of a trickster! Unfortunately, while it might satisfy the Destroyer, it wouldn’t likely appease the hunter that served her.