Chapter 3 Huntmaster
Mireya
The horn called us to war.
I had no intention of joining.
The hounds remained frozen around me, caught between my command and the violence gathering beneath their translucent hides. Blue fire licked along their ribs. Every flare cast the riders in pieces: Ivo’s broad shoulders, Zephan’s bloodied temple, Tomas’s pale hands emerging from black gloves.
Three alphas. Three horses. One forest that rearranged itself whenever I tried to leave.
The numbers were poor.
I kept my bleeding hand raised.
“Tell it no,” I said.
Ivo’s eyes stayed on mine. They were gray in the spectral light, flat and cold as iron left outside in winter.
“The Hunt does not negotiate.”
“You offered me a choice.”
“I told you I faced one.”
“Capture me or kneel. I remember.”
“That was not an offer.”
“Then make one.”
The horn’s echo faded. Sound returned reluctantly to the forest: branches rubbing in the wind, horses breathing hard, Zephan’s boots grinding into the mud.
Ivo studied me as if I were a battlefield he had been ordered to cross without a map.
“There is a lodge west of here,” he said. “The walls can contain your scent. Tomas has medicine.”
“The boundary destroyed my medicine.”
“His is made inside the boundary.”
“Convenient.”
“Necessary.”
“And the locks?”
A pause.
Small. Damning.
“There are locks,” he said.
“On which side of the doors?”
Zephan wiped blood from his temple with two fingers. “We could answer faster if you asked what isn’t a threat.”
“Is there anything?”
His mouth curved without warmth. “No.”
At least one of them had given up pretending.
I looked back at Ivo. “If I go to your lodge, do I keep my weapons?”
“Yes.”
“Do I choose my room?”
“Within reason.”
“That means no.”
“It means there are rooms the Hunt can enter without doors.”
“Then I choose one with a door.”
“You may.”
“I keep the key.”
Something tightened in his face.
Property mattered here. I had felt that when the forest closed around me. The Hunt did not only govern bodies. It governed thresholds, territory, permission.
“The lodge has no private keys,” Ivo said.
“Then make one.”
Tomas tilted his head, interest sharpening his tired expression.
Zephan muttered something in a language I did not know.
Ivo ignored both of them. “You bargain as if you have somewhere else to go.”
“I do.”
“The paths will not release you.”
“Your hounds won’t rise without my permission.”
His jaw shifted.
There it was again. Shame, or anger that looked enough like it to be useful.
“We are evenly trapped,” I said.
“Not evenly.”
“No. I have what you want.”
The scent of fir smoke deepened around him. Cold iron followed, sharp enough to taste.
My body recognized alpha before my mind finished naming the fragrance. Heat stirred low in my abdomen, a slow tightening that made me want to step nearer and strike him for causing it.
I did neither.
“What do I want?” Ivo asked.
“Obedience.”
“Wrong.”
“A claim, then.”
Pain moved across his face so quickly I might have imagined it.
“Wrong again.”
“You haven’t denied that the Hunt wants one.”
“I am not the Hunt.”
“You call yourself Huntmaster.”
“I did not choose the title.”
“Yet you use it.”
The hounds shuddered.
My arm ached from holding it raised. Blood had reached my sleeve, hot at first and now cooling against my skin. If I lowered my hand, I did not know whether my command would hold.
Ivo’s gaze dropped to the tremor in my fingers.
“You cannot keep them suspended forever.”
“Neither can you.”
“No.”
The honesty unsettled me more than a threat would have.
He released the reins and let them fall against his horse’s neck. Then he unfastened the sword at his hip.
Zephan stepped forward. “Ivo.”
“Stay where you are.”
“The covenant is pressing.”
“I know.”
Ivo removed the sword belt and laid it in the mud. A long knife followed. Then a short iron baton engraved with symbols that made the scar at my throat sting.
He held his empty hands away from his body.
“My bargain,” he said. “You come to the lodge under your own power. You keep your blades. No one bites you. No one restrains you unless you are a danger to yourself or another person.”
“Who decides that?”
“You do, while you remain lucid.”
“And when you decide I’m not?”
“Tomas assesses you.”
I looked toward the healer.
Tomas met my gaze. He had a face built for trust: gentle eyes, a thoughtful mouth, no visible hunger. I distrusted him immediately.
“I don’t consent to him assessing me.”
“Then choose a witness.”
“Davor Petric.”
All three riders went still.
It was the first name I had given them besides my own.
Ivo’s expression revealed nothing. “The beta ward-maker?”
“You know him.”
“I know his work.”
“Bring him here.”
“I cannot cross the eastern wards while the Hunt is awake.”
“Then let me cross.”
“The forest will turn you back.”
“Ask it not to.”
“The forest does not answer questions.”
“Your beasts answer me. Perhaps you’re asking badly.”
Tomas covered a cough that sounded suspiciously like another laugh.
Ivo did not look away from me.
“You come to the lodge,” he said, “and at first light I will send a hound to the ward with a message for Petric.”
“A hound that obeys whom?”
“You.”
The word changed the air.
Zephan’s anger became a bright citrus blade. Tomas went very still. Even the horses seemed to listen.
Ivo was offering me a piece of his authority.
Perhaps one he could not reclaim.
“I write the message,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Davor chooses whether to come.”
“Yes.”
“If he refuses, you take me to the boundary.”
Ivo’s silence lasted too long.
“That was the bargain,” I said.
“It was not.”
“It is now.”
The Hunt moved through him.
The change came before he noticed.
His pupils swallowed the gray of his eyes. His shoulders locked. The scent of fir smoke turned acrid, resin burning too hot. Beneath it came something animal and furious.
The hounds rose.
My hand was still raised.
My command had not changed.
Theirs had.
“Ivo,” Tomas said.
Ivo’s canines lengthened. Blood appeared where one cut his lower lip.
“Run,” he told me.
I backed away. “You said the paths won’t release me.”
“They won’t.”
“Then give me a useful instruction.”
His head jerked as though something had pulled a chain attached to his spine.
“Blackthorn,” he forced out. “Iron. Blood.”
The Hunt took him.
He crossed the space between us before I could draw breath.
I slashed at his face. He caught my wrist, turned, and drove me back against a tree hard enough to burst light behind my eyes. His free hand closed around my throat.
Not squeezing.
Holding me still.
His mouth lowered toward my scar.
The forest wanted his teeth there.
My body betrayed me with a rush of heat so sudden I nearly choked. Alpha scent filled my lungs. Fir smoke. Iron. The brutal biological relief of a compatible body close enough to answer mine.
It was not consent.
I drove my knee toward his groin.
He twisted aside. My strike caught his thigh. His grip tightened by reflex, and panic tore through me.
White walls.
Leather restraints.
A man’s breath against the gland I had opened myself rather than let him claim.
Ivo recoiled.
For one heartbeat, his own mind surfaced.
“Ward,” he rasped.
Blackthorn. Iron. Blood.
My knife lay three paces away. The baton he had discarded was closer.
I stamped on his foot, shoved my thumb into the wound on his lip, and smeared his blood across my palm.
He snarled.
The sound vibrated through my bones.
I slapped my bloodied hand against the blackthorn trunk behind me and seized the iron baton from the mud.
The symbols burned my skin.
“By blood freely taken,” I said, guessing at the language of old wards, “and iron freely surrendered, no hunter crosses.”
I drove the baton into the roots.
Light burst between us.
Ivo flew backward.
The ward formed as a thin red wall around the blackthorn, no wider than the reach of its branches. I stood inside it, one hand clamped around my bruised wrist.
Outside, Ivo landed on one knee.
Zephan drew a knife.
“Don’t,” Ivo said.
His voice had returned, but the Hunt had not released him. Every muscle in his body strained toward me.
Zephan looked at the ward. “She used your blood.”
“I gave it to her.”
“She tore your mouth open.”
“After I put my hand on her throat.”
“The curse put it there.”
“My hand.”
The distinction mattered to him.
I hated that part of me wanted it to matter to me too.
The hounds prowled outside the ward. Vuk pressed his noseless skull against the red barrier and whined.
“Stay back,” I told him.
He obeyed.
Ivo watched the hound retreat.
“You could command them to tear us apart,” he said.
“Could I?”
“You stopped Zephan.”
“I stopped his horse.”
“Vuk understood the purpose.”
“Vuk tried to eat his coat.”
“The coat was attached to him.”
Despite everything, a laugh broke out of me.
It was one startled sound, gone almost before I heard it.
Ivo stared.
The Hunt punished him.
His body bowed. One fist struck the ground. Black veins spread from his temple toward his eye, and the forest filled with whispers too soft for me to understand.
Tomas reached him first.
“What did it take?”
Ivo did not answer.
Tomas caught his face between both hands. “What memory?”
Ivo looked up.
There was terror in his eyes now.
Not pain.
Absence.
“I had a sister,” he said.
Zephan stopped breathing.
Tomas’s hands tightened. “Yes.”
“What was her name?”
No one answered.
The ward hummed around me. My heat pressed closer beneath my skin, but cold settled through my chest.
The curse had reached into him and removed a person.
Not a detail. Not a face glimpsed once in a crowd.
A sister.
Ivo stood slowly. When he turned toward me, the black veins were already fading.
“The Hunt offered me release if I completed the claim,” he said.
My fingers closed around the iron baton.
“And?”
“I refused.”
“You still attacked me.”
“Yes.”
He did not ask me to weigh one fact against the other.
Good.
“If you lose control again, I won’t use a ward,” I said. “I’ll use the blade.”
“Aim beneath the ribs. The curse heals the heart too quickly.”
Zephan swore.
Ivo ignored him.
“My order stands,” he said. “No one bites her.”
The Hunt tightened around the clearing.
This time, the command did not strike only him. Zephan staggered. Tomas bent with one hand braced against his knee. The hounds screamed as their blue fire flared white.
Ivo remained upright.
“No one,” he repeated.
Another whisper passed through the trees.
Ivo flinched.
“What did it take?” Tomas asked.
Ivo’s eyes lost focus for a moment.
Then he looked at Zephan as if searching for a name he should know.
Whatever he found, he held on to it.
“Not enough,” Ivo said.
I stood inside the ward with his blood on my palm and his weapon in my hand.
He was dangerous. The curse could use his body faster than either of us could stop it. His promises were not safety. His remorse was not innocence.
But he had paid for my refusal with a piece of his own mind.
That did not make me trust him.
It made him more complicated to hate.
The red wall around me flickered.
Tomas looked at the failing ward, then at the tremor moving through my legs.
“Her rebound is accelerating.”
“I heard you,” I said.
“Then hear the rest. When that ward falls, the Hunt will press him again.”
I looked at Ivo.
He had retrieved neither his sword nor his knives. He stood six paces from the barrier with his hands open and his mouth bloodied by my thumb.
“The lodge,” he said. “Your room. Your weapons. A message to Davor at first light. No bites. No restraints without your order while you are lucid.”
“And a key.”
“And a key.”
“You said there weren’t any.”
“I will make one.”
The ward cracked.
Red light scattered across the mud.
Every hound lifted its head.
I stepped out before the barrier could collapse around me.
Ivo did not move closer.
“This is not surrender,” I said.
“No.”
“It isn’t trust.”
“I know.”
“If anyone calls me quarry again, I leave.”
Zephan’s expression turned incredulous. “The forest won’t let you.”
I met his eyes. “Then I’ll make it.”
Vuk came to my side.
The spectral hound looked back at the three riders as if waiting to see whether they would follow.
I tucked my knife into my sleeve and kept Ivo’s iron baton.
“Show me the lodge,” I said.
Ivo picked up his sword but left it sheathed.
Then the Huntmaster walked ahead of me, and for the first time that night, he did not choose the path.
I did.