Draekir
The forest should quiet my mind.
That's the principle behind a solitary hunt — remove the body from comfort, put it to work, let the rest of it follow.
I've used it for a century and it has never once failed me.
Four leagues of corrupted woodland between Mournhold and the wildspont's nearest fault line, and the territory is mine enough that nothing here should demand more than reflex.
Tonight it isn't working.
The ridge I'm moving along overlooks the lower canopy where the trees thin and the ground drops toward the wildspont basin.
The light down there is off — that bruised violet-white seep that the rupture line gives off when it's agitated, which has been every night for the past two weeks.
The bark on the older ironwood trees has started weeping.
I noticed it three days ago and said nothing to the house because speculation without evidence is noise, and I have enough of that already.
Three houses have sent riders this month. Two want assurances. One wants land.
I pull a breath through my nose and hold it.
The night seems to carry a depraved growth beneath everything else, that specific flat sweetness like overripe fruit left in a sealed room.
Something has been moving through here. Something large, and not recently.
The tracks I've been following for the past hour are old enough that the disturbed soil has dried and cracked at the edges, but the tread pattern is indifferent for anything that belongs in this forest. The stride is too long. The pressure points too deep.
I follow it anyway. But then, below me, the canopy shifts.
I see her before I hear her — a lantern, moving without any attempt at quiet, cutting through the lower trees at the pace of someone who knows the path but not what's currently using it.
Human. Female. Petite, from what the distance allows, with her hair braided back and a satchel knocking against her hip with every step.
Moving directly toward the worst section of the seam's reach.
The irritation that rises is immediate and not entirely rational, which makes it worse.
Humans do this. They look at a forest the region has marked cursed for sixty years and decide that whatever they need from it outweighs what they don't know about it.
They carry lanterns that announce their position to every predator within half a league.
They walk with their minds on their destination instead of what's between them and it.
And then they die in ways that create political problems for whoever holds the territory, because there is always someone willing to argue that a lord who cannot keep his forest clear of bodies is a lord losing his grip.
I watch her crouch near the cliff roots, cutting something with a small blade. Practiced, at least. She knows the plant she's after.
It doesn't excuse the lack of sense.
I'm about to move on — she's not my concern, and the tracks I'm following are pulling northeast — when the lower forest goes quiet.
Not gradually. All at once.
My hand finds the bow before the thought fully forms. I'm already scanning the treeline below when I see the vegetation shudder — not from wind, there's no wind — and the particular way the vegetation flattens before something heavy moves through it.
Grevhault.
The word surfaces from older memory: a classification used by Mournhold's previous hunters for the worst category of wildspont predators, the ones that have been soaking in fault-line energy long enough that the original animal underneath is more suggestion than fact.
I haven't seen one this close to the ridge in years.
The sheer size of this one is unnerving to some — it fills the space between the trees with its shoulders and still moves, lurching and fast in a way those proportions have no right to allow.
It hits her before she clears ten yards.
The crack of impact reaches me half a second after I see it happen. She goes into the cliff face shoulder-first, and I watch her spin and come up with her knife — a belt knife, against that — and my hand is already at the quiver.
Something tightens in my sternum that I don't pay attention to.
She runs. She's pretty fast for her little body and smart enough to cut for difficult terrain, making herself hard to track visually, but the grevhault isn't tracking visually.
I can see that from above. The head swings on that slow arc, locating her through something that isn't sight, and it corners her precisely against the ravine. She's out of room.
Something in my chest tightens—sharp, immediate, and entirely without utility. But, I disregard it, and my hand is already moving. Not concern. More like a want for the creature to be dead before it finishes the motion.
I nock the first arrow.
The angle is complicated. She's directly below and the grevhault is between us and I have approximately four seconds before it closes the remaining distance.
I calculate the shot the way I've calculated a thousand shots — wind correction, drop, the precise point at which the arrow's path intersects with the skull rather than glancing off the thing's corrupted bone structure — and then I stop calculating and loose.
Three arrows. Each one three-quarters of a breath apart. Not because I need three. Because one sends a message, and three sends a different one.
The grevhault drops, and I'm already moving down the ridge.
She hasn't fallen. I expected that — her leg buckled when she caught herself and the shoulder damage is bad, I could tell that from above — but she's upright.
Barely. Holding the belt knife and watching the dead creature with some quality of focus that comes from someone who isn't done fighting yet, just temporarily out of something to fight.
Then she looks up and finds me.
I watch her take me in. The armor, the bow, the ears. Watch her realization happen behind her eyes. She opens her mouth.
What comes out isn't a plea. It isn't even coherent, exactly — something brief and incomplete, words assembled by a body running on the last of its reserves — but the intent of it isn't supplication. She's talking, not begging. There's a distinction, and something about it stops me two paces away.
I look at her properly. Shoulder incorrectly angled. The leg taking too much weight. A palm that has bled down to her elbow. And she is looking at me dead in the eyes, steady in a way that has no business existing right now.
"You're not going to ask," I say. It isn't a question.
She doesn't answer. Her knees crumble, and I cross the remaining distance and catch her before she reaches the ground, one arm under her back and the other beneath her knees.
There isn't a sound from her when I move the injured shoulder.
The unconscious ones never do — the body's mercy, redistributing sensation when there's too much of it.
She's lighter than I expect though.
I stand there for a moment with her satchel still swinging against my hip where it's fallen, and I don't move. She smells of crushed herbs and rain-soaked earth and the copper-salt of blood. Very human. Very alive, though not by much.
I glance at the satchel. Feverroot, freshly cut and wrapped in damp cloth. She had gone into that forest for someone else.
"Vuldren," I call, without looking back. "There is feverroot in her bag. Take enough to Duskmire before morning. Find the sick child."
"And the rest?"
"Stays with her."
I start walking toward Mournhold.
"You're an extraordinary amount of trouble," I tell her, quietly, to no one. Her head has fallen against my chest and she doesn't stir. "For someone who cannot manage a forest at night."
Mirelle is waiting in the entrance hall, as she always is when I return from a hunt past the second hour.
Her gold hair pins catch the candlelight as she turns, and then she stops, and her sharp green eyes move from the unconscious human woman in my arms to my face with an expression that I recognize as restraint at considerable effort.
"My lord." Measured. "Is there something you would care to explain?"
"Get Nyssara."
"She's preparing for—"
"Now, Mirelle."
A pause. Two seconds of it, which is as much as she allows herself. "And the human?"
"Will be placed in the east guest quarters, which you will have prepared by the time I get there, and will not be moved or touched or spoken to without my explicit instruction." I'm already walking away. "None of that was a question."
Her footsteps follow at a precise distance. "The staff will talk."
"The staff talks regardless. That's what staff does."
"The noble houses will—"
I stop in my tracks. Turn to face her. Mirelle halts, and to her considerable credit, holds my gaze.
"She is under my protection. Every person in this house will know it before morning. If that creates political discomfort for anyone, including you, they are welcome to take it up with the grevhault that I pulled her away from. Otherwise." I turn back toward the corridor. "Get me Nyssara."
Nyssara is in the guest quarters when I arrive, pale eyes already moving over the woman in my arms with clinical attention. I set her down on the bed with more care than the situation technically requires, but I don't think about that.
"Shoulder, leg, the palm. The shoulder concerns me most."
Nyssara is already working, fingers moving over the joint with careful pressure. "Dislocated, likely. Palm torn deeply enough for stitches. The leg may hold once the swelling comes down, but she should not be walking on it tonight."
"Then she won't."
Nyssara glances up. "She may disagree when she wakes."
"Then I will be informed before she reaches a staircase."
"She'll need the night, at minimum."
"Then you'll have the night." I step back, toward the doorway. "She stays alive, Nyssara. Whatever it requires."
I don't wait for acknowledgment. I close the door behind me and stand in the corridor for a moment, in the dark, with the weight of something I can't name and will not attempt to yet.
Somewhere inside that room, the human woman with the belt blade breathes in and out.
I glance at my hands and see the blood I must wash off and retreat to the loostrayn to wash it off my hands.