The fae and the hunter, p.7
The Fae and the Hunter, page 7
He stared at her for a moment, then flushed. “Maybe, I suppose. Isn’t that exactly what you did, though?” Ryheart accused, partly to deflect his embarrassment.
“Excuse me?” she said, raising an eyebrow.
“Didn’t you make your little magic deal with me to get what you wanted? Knowing you didn’t have anything to pay me with?”
“Yes, but the thing I wanted was negligible,” she protested. “You wanted a fortune in return for something you barely even noticed!”
“If you didn’t have anything to give, you could have just asked!” he said hotly.
“You would not have helped,” she scoffed.
“Who knows? I didn’t get a chance to, did I?” he retorted. “Your go-to was trickery. You purposely let me think you could help me and dangled hope in front of me to manipulate me into getting what you wanted. You didn’t even think about asking.”
There was a long silence between them as they stewed in their recriminations.
“I did not realise you were so desperate,” Fali half apologised. “If I had have known—”
“It’s fine,” he said with a sigh. “Maybe I didn’t exactly treat you as graciously as I would have if you were human.”
“Perhaps we could both stand to treat each other with a touch more consideration,” she acquiesced.
“From now on, then,” he said, holding out a hand.
She stared at it a moment, then laughed. “I agree, but given how we got into this mess, perhaps we should avoid shaking on any promises we make?”
“Shall we carry on, then?” he asked.
“Why, absolutely, dear-heart. After you,” Fali said with a gesture.
He bowed as grandly as he could manage with a grin, then led the way.
Chapter Fourteen
Camp
After a long walk, Fali finally, joyously, declared it was time to stop and camp for the night. Tired past pride, Ryheart dropped his pack where he stood and let himself fall to the floor. He felt drained, entirely and utterly, his clothes soaked with sweat from the exertion. Fali, meanwhile, somewhat annoyingly, looked as fresh as she had when they set off. She even still had the light scent of freshly bloomed flowers that he caught whenever she brushed by him.
“I think we are making quite good time,” she said with a smile. “You are fitter than you seemed.”
“Cheers,” he said wearily, pulling off his boots and throwing them across the clearing.
She wrinkled her nose in distaste but didn’t say anything.
“I suppose we ought to have supper before we sleep,” he said, getting back up despite his protesting body.
“I will dig the supplies out,” she said, rummaging through the bag he had dumped. While she searched, he gathered up a small pile of dried twigs for kindling, layering them over some larger chunks of wood. Sparking his flint together, he set a fire ablaze.
She turned around at the noise, the colour draining from her eyes. “Ryheart, what are you doing?” she half-shouted.
Proud of the blaze in the manner men usually are of things they’ve set on fire, he looked at her, confused and ever so slightly irrationally offended. “It’s fire. It’s for food. What’s wrong with it? I can’t expect you to eat cold, can I?”
“Well, that is very nice of you, Ryheart,” she said in a level tone, “but you remember the dryad we met a few hours ago? I do not think she is going to be very happy if you have just snapped off her cousin’s finger.”
“I only used dead wood off the floor. That’s fine, isn’t it?” he asked worriedly, hoping very much so that it was.
She exhaled with relief, and the tension left him with it.
“Yes, that is fine. Just do not start snapping branches off any trees. As a rule of thumb, ask me before you do anything irreversible.”
“I’ll be careful,” he assured her. “Look, I made a ring of stones and everything.”
“Well, that is alright then,” she said, seemingly appeased, handing him a small pot with ingredients to stew piled inside. “I do not want any, by the way.”
“I’m a decent cook, you know,” he said defensively. “It’ll be edible at the very least.”
“I am sure it will be, dear-heart,” she soothed, “but I ate already.”
That puzzled him. He hadn’t seen Fali eat, and he had been with her all day.
“When?”
She pursed her lips a moment as if she were considering. “Last night. I had a small bit of food from your pantry. Well, the shelf you have in lieu of a pantry.”
“That’s ridiculous, aren’t you starving?”
“No, I have barely used any magic all day,” she said simply and, seemingly to Ryheart, irrelevantly.
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“Everything. I only eat to break down energy to replenish my natural well of magic, if I have put enough of a drain on it that it has not refilled naturally,” she explained, adding in a musing voice. “I will have to use some soon though, or I will get hiccups.”
If anything, that only confused him further. “Hiccups?”
“Yes. My heart regenerates and refills my magic reserves, but I have a maximum capacity. Hiccups vent the excess when I am full to bursting.”
“Huh,” Ryheart said. Knowing he shouldn’t, but unable to entirely stop himself, he added a follow-up question: “Do you, well, trump out magic as well?”
“Ryheart!” she exclaimed, sounding scandalised. “I do not ‘trump’.”
“Why, because you’re magic?”
“No, because I am a lady,” she said, with the hint of a smile belying her offended tone. “Ladies do not ‘trump’; they break wind. But, as it happens, I do not do that either. My conversion of matter is perfect. That is because I am magic.”
“Oh. That’s good. The conversion thing, I mean,” Ryheart clarified, “not the trumping thing.”
“If we meet any other Fae on our trip,” she cautioned in a light tone, “please do not ask them about how they expel gas.”
“I wouldn’t,” he said defensively, grinning, “but you did bring it up. Kind of.”
He ate while she busied herself preparing a camp, which he felt a little awkward about. Frowning, he realised that while she’d packed all manner of camping paraphernalia, maps, provisions and clothes, she had only packed his single, one-person tent.
“Where’s your tent?” he asked.
“Hmm?” She glanced back at him. “Oh, I do not have one. You should have realised by now I have little to no possessions besides my boots, my scabbard and a few clothes.”
“Isn’t that one a bit small, though?” he asked, gesturing at his threadbare tent.
“No?”
“But we won’t both fit,” he said, apparently needing to clarify.
“We will not need to,” she said, looking over to him. “We are going to take shifts keeping watch, are we not?”
“The forest’s peaceful, isn’t it?”
She sighed exasperatedly. “Ryheart, there is an angry rampaging lion somewhere in this forest. I have experienced being eaten, and I do not like it very much.”
“Yeah, but it’s behind the barrier, isn’t it?”
“Okay, I will give you that,” she conceded. “However, even if these woods are absolutely, utterly free of monsters, a bear is just as capable of eating you in your sleep.”
“Yeah, I didn’t think of that,” he said, scratching the back of his head in embarrassment.
“So every time you go on a hunt, you just sleep without any sort of protection?” she asked, sounding incredulous. “How are you still alive?”
“Well, I’m usually in the city,” he said defensively.
“By the Twin-Divinities, this is the incompetent I have to babysit,” she murmured, before sighing in a long-suffering way. “Alright, well, let us chalk it up to inexperience.”
“Sorry,” he murmured with an embarrassed laugh, “I’m a tad out of my depth here.”
“That is alright,” she said primly, before perking up, seemingly to signify her point had been made, and it wouldn’t be dwelled on. “Now, if we sleep until dawn breaks, we should still have a good eight hours or so,” she said, looking up at the sky. “Fortunately, we are still in Junicana’s time, and we still have a lot of light in the day.”
“Junicana’s time?” he asked.
“The month of Juma, to use the colloquial language. It is what you used to call it before you forgot the god you named it after in the first place.”
“Oh. Do you want me to go first, or second?”
“If you could go first, that would be delightful. If you cover the first half-hour for me, I will take the rest.”
“What? That’s not fair,” he said, confused.
“Well,” Fali said a touch on the huffy side, “I suppose I could only sleep for fifteen minutes, but I think it is rather rude of you to demand it.”
“No, Fali,” he said with a sigh. “I mean, we should both have four hours each.”
“Oh,” she said with a laugh, “well, that is very kind of you, but there is no need. I only need to sleep to allow my thoughts to sort themselves out and regenerate magic if depleted. I do not even need it, strictly, but it helps me stay sparky.”
He gaped at her. He could accept strange psychic rabbits, size changes, even lack of food. But no real sleeping was insane. He loved to sleep.
“Well, I’ll still feel bad,” he said. “How about I just take four hours, and I’ll at least keep you company for the rest if it’s too dark to set off straight away?”
“Alright, fine,” she said with a warm smile. “Just see when you wake up.”
Her rabbit scampered into the camp. It sat before her, grey nose twitching, and she crouched down to it and stroked between its floppy ears lovingly.
“How are we looking?” she asked. The rabbit didn’t answer, at least as far as Ryheart could tell, but she carried on as if it had. “Grand. Keep an eye out anyway, will you? Let me know if anything comes close by.”
“How’s he keep up with us?” he asked. He hadn’t seen the rabbit ahead of them for quite some time.
“Well,” Fali pondered, “do you want the long or short version?”
“Short, please.” He laughed.
“Magic,” she said, wiggling her fingers again as she had once before. Despite her warm temperament, she seemed to have a degree of reserved formality and wariness about revealing any more than she needed, Ryheart noticed. Little by little, though, she seemed to be relaxing the walls around her. However, her speech remained resolutely formal in its lack of contractions.
“Well, I best make preparations and burn off this magic before I sleep,” she said, standing gracefully.
She walked around the camp, tracing a wide glowing circle around the clearing, then drew in a series of intricate lines intersecting each other. He tried to fix on one end and follow its path all the way around, but found his eyes kept getting lost and jumping to another line. She stood in the centre, her eyes glowing with a bright blue light, the air around her crackling.
“This is a little gauche,” she said apologetically. “All the light and sparkle is the result of inefficiency in this case. But, well, the point is to burn off magic, so I may as well let loose. No one is going to pick us up out here.”
She placed her hand on the ground, and a small pentacle appeared around her, then blue fire burst alive through the lines she had drawn as they raced to the outer circle, five further pentacles spaced evenly along its length. A translucent sphere grew over them, casting the air in a blue hue, before fading until only the slightest tinge of colour suggested it was still present.
“It is nothing too powerful,” she said modestly, “but it will give us a heads-up and a chance to prepare if anything tries to get in. Just in case.”
“Oh. Is that tiring?”
“A little, yes. I will take my nap now, Ryheart. Goodnight.”
She put her hand on his shoulder briefly, then retired into the tent. Evidently, she wasn’t quite prepared to leave her safety entirely in his hands. In fairness, he didn’t blame her.
Chapter Fifteen
Tome
Ryheart sat on a stump at the edge of the camp and rested his lantern by him. The shield made him feel somewhat redundant, but he kept his sword ready at the belt. If there were any indication something hit the shimmer of magic that guarded them, he would be prepared.
He fished through his pack and picked up the small leather tome Fali had given him. A Complete Study of the Creatures of the Garden and the Other Realms. It was catchily titled. The author was ‘Lady Dolati’. Fali had told him to study it if he wanted to avoid being killed. Given the barrier shimmering between him and the outside world, this seemed as good a time as any.
He opened it to the glossary and frowned. It didn’t have any page numbers in it. Just a list of monsters and Fae. He wasn’t exactly the most avid reader, but he was reasonably sure that was a flaw. Scratching his head, he flicked through the pages, but if anything, that was even more bizarre. The entries weren’t alphabetical, nor were they grouped by category. At least, not any he could determine. There was an entry on pixies, followed immediately by an entry about a spider-like creature called a jorōgumo which appeared primarily far off across the ocean in Nippaya. Apparently, it seemed to be a handsome woman and lured people into waterfalls to drown, which was a lovely thought. The following entry was about an albino troll only found in the mountain ranges of Nordaya. He could not for the life of him figure out any order to the pages.
“How in Divana’s name am I supposed to find anything in here?” he muttered.
“Well, you are reading in a very inefficient manner, you know,” a rich voice declared, startling him so much he threw the book on the floor. Looking around, he found he was still very much alone, and Fali was soundly asleep, so far as he could tell.
The voice had seemed to come from the book. Deciding that if he was going loopy and hearing voices, he might as well see what they had to say, he picked the book back up.
“I’m, um, reading it wrong?” he asked, feeling like a buffoon for talking to himself.
“I have a name,” the book replied haughtily. “Calling me ‘it’ is most discourteous.”
Oh, great, he thought. Not only is the book talking to me, but it’s also giving me sass.
“I don’t know your name?”
“Dolati, dear,” the book sighed wearily, apparently not impressed with her new charge’s intellect. “It is on the cover. You have read a book before, have you not?”
“Sure, ones never talked to me before, though.”
“Ah.”
“Well, I’m Ryheart,” he said, feeling very odd introducing himself to a book.
“Dolati. Charmed, I am sure,” the book said cordially. The voice carried an exquisite grace and courtesy to it, at least now it wasn’t insulting him. “And what do we wish to study today?”
“First, can I ask, well, to put it bluntly, what in the gods’ names you are?”
“I am a book, dear,” the book said tartly. “I would have thought that rather self-evident.”
“Yes, but books aren’t usually vocal like you.” Or as lippy, he might have added.
“Oh, that. Well, simply put, I have my author’s personality imbued within me, along with her knowledge of the subject matter I was created to impart,” she said, further elaborating. “In this case, her knowledge of Fae, monsters, spirits, magic, realm-dancers and empty-ones, and everything else that either lives in, or visits, the garden.”
“The garden?” he queried.
“Ah. A rather romanticised colloquialism for the land of mortals, or more expansively, the physical realm.”
“Oh. Well, Realm-dancers and empty-ones are nonsense,” he argued. “Hunters would know about them. Someone would, anyway. No one’s ever seen either.”
“That is nice, dear,” the book replied so agreeably it almost sounded affirmative. “What did we want to learn about, if not the truth?”
“Nemean lions would be a good start.”
“Now that we can manage,” the book said, flipping open to a page with an illustration of the beast, along with text about it. At a glance, the creature might have simply been a lion, but further inspection showed subtle differences. The teeth were longer, claws thin and razor-like, with a spark of cruelty to the eyes not present within its mundane counterpart.
Fortunately, beyond its origin, it wasn’t supernatural in ability. It didn’t breathe fire or shoot lightning from its eyes, and it didn’t require magical items to kill it. If you stabbed it hard enough, it would die. Ryheart started to feel a glimmer of hope that with Fali’s magical assistance, he might be able to maybe, just maybe, kill the thing.
“Okay. Could you maybe tell me what species my friend is?” he asked, glancing towards the tent to check it was still quiet. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Fali, exactly, but he wasn’t entirely sold on the Fairy Queen’s fairy-ness, nor for that matter, her queenliness.
“I am sure we could elucidate what she is for you,” the book replied cordially.
“Alright, great. Well, she’s over there,” Ryheart said, pointing towards the tent.
“I cannot see her,” the book said after a long pause. “I somewhat lack the optical functions to do so. If you are trying to identify something you do not recognise, perhaps describe her to me? Or I can provide a blank page, and you could draw her?”
“Oh. Well…” Ryheart pondered, stating the first thing that sprang to mind when he pictured her, “she has red hair. Not like, ginger. Red. Bright red.”
“That is a fair start,” the book said approvingly, flicking through its pages until it landed on a list of creatures, all of which typically had red hair. Ryheart was sure the book hadn’t been ordered in such a manner before, nor had enough pages to contain such specific groupings.
