The fae and the hunter, p.8
The Fae and the Hunter, page 8
The list was relatively short, and nearly all of them were either fire elementals or particular creatures during the autumn.
Fali’s personality is fiery, at least, he thought.
“Could a fairy make a magical deal?” he asked, a sudden thought entering his mind. Perhaps abilities were a better identifier than looks.
“Oh, yes. Any creature of old magic could.”
So much for that, then. Ryheart thought about going back to descriptors, deciding the marking on her cheek might be a good shout. Really, though, he was only incidentally curious about what she was. The strange magic tying her to him, though, that he was interested in. Especially since his reluctant ally had been somewhat reticent with some of her explanations.
“Could they make it powerful?” he queried instead.
“Fairies, you mean? Modestly so, I suppose,” the book replied after a moment of contemplation. “What do you mean by powerful, exactly?”
“So strong she literally can’t leave my presence until her bond is completed.”
“Possibly,” the book mused. “Who was the other party?”
“Me.”
“Oh,” the book said as if that changed things, “and you are not magical in any capacity?”
“No, just a regular human.”
“How was it made? Do you remember how you phrased it?”
“‘I offer you sanctuary’, I think I said.”
“Peculiar,” the book murmured. “Offer is such a weak term, it should carry barely any weight. Did the other participant say ‘offer’ as well?”
“Yes. She said, ‘I offer to help with your debt.’”
“Well, if only one magical party were involved, they would have nearly all the control over both the power of the spell, and how strict its terms were as to what constituted its fulfilment. Perhaps they might make it so strong to absolutely ensure that you must fulfil your end of the bargain?”
“I don’t think so,” he contemplated. “I mean, all she wanted was a shelter, and she seemed surprised herself by how strong it was. Besides, she seems tied to me, rather than the other way around.”
“Aside from an external modifier, I cannot think of any reason that might be so.”
“An external modifier? Like what?”
“Some extreme ritual significance to the deal, or a blood pact, or if it was made somewhere holy. Something along those lines.”
A sudden spark of clarity hit him with that. A seemingly insignificant coincidence suddenly taking a new meaning. He knew, he thought, what had happened. And he was sure Fali would know how to fix it if he told her.
He jumped with a start as he heard movement from the tent. He had been so enthralled reading he had lost track of time, but her half an hour must have passed. He shoved the book into his bag quickly, his heart hammering.
He just had to tell her. If nothing else, it would be good to see her face when she found out he was the one who knew something she didn’t know for once. He could hold that over her for the rest of the trip.
Except… would there be a rest of the trip? She was here to help him, yes, but only because she had no choice. Once he told her, would she just leave him? What if she could immediately fix it, and she just left him here? Doubt started to creep into his heart. He needed to pay his debt. He needed to kill the Nemean Lion to do so. He needed her to do so. Without her magic, without her guidance, he wasn’t even sure he could find the damn thing. Let alone kill it.
She clambered from the tent and stretched delicately, her golden skin glowing softly in the light of her shield, and she walked over to him.
“Morning, Ryheart,” she said with a smile.
His gut twisted, and he smiled back weakly. “Hi. Did you, err, sleep well?”
“Adequately,” she said. “How was the watch?”
“Oh, fine, yeah. The shield kind of did my job for me,” Ryheart said, trying to avoid looking directly into her brilliant eyes.
“Well, do not worry,” she said with a laugh. “As soon as we get this deal done, I will be out of your hair. Then you will not have to put up with me forcing you to keep watch and being so demanding of you.”
“Yeah. You must be sick of babysitting me as well, I guess,” Ryheart replied, trying to return the humour.
“Oh, we all make sacrifices,” she joked, then tilted her head. “Are you alright, Ryheart? You seem a little peaky.”
“Just tired,” he lied.
“Well, do not let me keep you. Sleep well, dear-heart,” the Fae said graciously.
“Yeah, goodnight,” he said, turning away, gut wrenching even harder. He had to tell her, but he couldn’t. Besides, he’d only be delaying her by a week, anyway, he justified to himself. As soon as they got the monster, they’d be clear either way.
Chapter Sixteen
Shield
Ryheart woke up feeling like his eyes were full of sand. His exhaustion had overtaken his conscience, but his sleep had been fitful. Judging from the sun streaming through the tent, he’d had more than his allocated time.
He got dressed quickly and climbed out.
“Ah. Morning, Ryheart,” Fali greeted him. “I was about to wake you. I figured it would not hurt for you to get a little bit of extra sleep, but we probably ought to set off before the moon says hello again.”
“Yeah, sorry. Rough night,” he apologised. As he drew closer to her, he couldn’t help but notice that despite their long hike and their sleeping in the woods, Fali still carried the scent of flowers. He, on the other hand, wasn’t quite so fresh.
“Same plan as yesterday?” he asked.
“More or less. If we make good time, we should hopefully reach the naiad lake the report mentioned today. They can point us in the right direction, and then we can go a-hunting.”
“Great. The naiads are friendly?”
“If they were not, I would have picked somewhere else,” she informed him, handing him leftovers to eat and pouring some tea from their beat-up teapot. “I suppose this old thing will have to do, till we get somewhere more civilised.”
“What, you like sitting around drinking tea with little porcelain cups and all that?” he asked.
“Why, yes,” she said, smoothing her dress down, “I do, as a matter of fact.”
“Oh. I didn’t peg you as that type.”
“What are you suggesting, Ryheart?” she asked with a hint of danger in her voice.
“Just that, err, you’d be a coffee person?”
She stared at him a moment, then laughed. “Well played, Ryheart,” she murmured. “Actually, to tell the truth, it is really my sister’s hobby, but some of her idiosyncrasies have rubbed off on me.”
Both his tea and meal were hot, but curiously Ryheart couldn’t see any sign Fali had lit a fire.
He had a quiet breakfast, Ryheart subdued somewhat by the moral quandary he was having, and then they packed up the camp.
“Come along then, Ryheart,” she demanded, and he followed her lead immediately. Strangely he found himself carrying out all of her little commands without question, and he didn’t really mind it. She was never outright demanding, but despite having only known her a short time, he had a strange compulsion not to disappoint her. The knowledge he was keeping from her probably didn’t help with that.
They set off once again, Fali unerringly following her ash-grey wraith-like familiar’s lead. They made good progress, and by the end of the afternoon, they came to a vast meadow within the woods, a rolling landscape of hills leading down to a lake with a small island in the middle of it.
The air past it shimmered with a sapphire glow, a wall of magic protecting the Fae territory, keeping it clear of monsters. It wasn’t entirely dissimilar from Fali’s little campfire shield, though stupendously broader in scope.
“I’ve never actually seen a barrier,” Ryheart exclaimed in amazement. “It’s huge.”
It towered higher than the walls that protected Londaya, and it curved into the sky.
“Yes,” Fali agreed absently, seemingly lost in the unending dance of its surface, “there is the magic of about a dozen species worth of Fae mixed up in there. It is beautiful.”
“It is,” he agreed. “What’s powerful enough to make that?”
“By themselves, perpetually? Unless you happen to have a very popular god handy, nothing,” she mused. “Not individually, anyway. No one mortal could permanently sustain something that large. The basic framework is the same as my somewhat modest campfire spell, but it has had entire generations of Fae pumping magic into it. It can keep itself running as long as it does not overreach and they keep topping it up. I could make a stronger shield myself, but nowhere near that scale, and it would need near-constant attention. The one I made at our camp burns itself out in about eight hours or so unless I replenish it. And that is if nothing touches it.”
“Is it circular like yours then?” he asked. “Why didn’t we go through it?”
“Oh, they are, yes,” she said with an approving smile. “Well noted. Given the hostile territories to this end, and humans are at least somewhat welcome, I daresay it is heavily front-loaded.” She gave him a sidelong glance. “I imagine it is designed to be able to distribute the magic more evenly, though, just in case any humans think the woods might be a nice logging resource and decide to ignore the Fae treaties.”
“And the Nemean is approaching it?”
“Apparently,” she conceded. “I am not sure why, though. It presumably had quite a lot of territory, and a Nemean is not one of the monsters that have to eat humans specifically.”
It wasn’t like he had expected it to be a herbivore. However, the confirmation that they did indeed eat humans, even if not exclusively, still brought a slight twinge of apprehension to his already thoroughly twisted gut.
“So what’s the plan to find it, then?”
“Why, we go and ask the locals, of course,” she answered with a smile.
Chapter Seventeen
Break
The pair carried on down the gently sloping clearing until they reached the lakeside, which stood glassy and still.
“Isn’t the lake a bit quiet?” Ryheart asked.
“It is rather sleepy,” she agreed. “I would have expected more naiads than this in a lake so large.”
“More? It’s empty,” he said, baffled.
He admittedly wasn’t any sort of expert on naiads, or on many things for that matter, but he was reasonably sure they weren’t supposed to be invisible.
“Oh, you just need to look correctly,” she said with a mysterious smile that he found simultaneously both endearing and frustrating.
“Well, how should I be looking then?”
“Oh, just look a bit closer.”
He frowned at her dubiously, then bent down to peer into the water. There was a ripple, and then an icy splash hit him in the face as something erupted from the lake. He let out a not entirely manly yelp, as much from the chill as from surprise. The water congealed and formed something human-like in the shape of a child. However, the sun shone lazily through its midriff as it simply melted, rippling into the water at the waist.
“Wotcha doing there, mister?” the creature, he presumed a naiad, asked him curiously.
He flushed slightly at his less than heroic reaction and scowled at Fali, whose only response was to beam at him innocently.
“I was just looking at the water. Both kinds, evidently.”
“Oh, that’s nice. It’s lonely here since nearly all our siblings left.”
“Left?” Fali chimed in. “To where?”
“To the shield. It’s our time to tend it.”
“You have a schedule between the different Fae?” Fali said, sounding impressed.
“Yeah, we look after it during Maian and Junicana’s time,” he explained. As he spoke, a small number of other watery children sprang up, flocking around Fali, a single red flower in a pool of water.
“Are you a fire sprite?” one of them asked her, seemingly enraptured by her hair.
“No, dearest.”
“You have red hair, though,” the child pointed out.
“Yes.”
“And it’s not on fire?”
“No.”
“But you aren’t a fire sprite?”
“No, young one. It is just red.”
“Are you sure?” another asked, seemingly genuinely concerned she may be on fire and somehow unaware of it. “We could water it, just in case.”
“I am quite sure, thank you. I do appreciate the concern, though.”
“Well, if you’re sure,” the naiad said, still sounding dubious.
“How come you all stayed here?” Ryheart asked.
“We can’t hold our form yet,” one explained.
“Yeah, Flow here still dries the bed on a night!” another teased.
“Do not!” the youngest exclaimed.
“Now now, I am sure you have all done it at one point,” Fali chided, before turning to Ryheart to explain. “Naiads can stay somewhat solid outside of the water for a time, but it is something they develop. These precious little ones are not a day over thirty, by the look of it.”
“Thirty?” Ryheart exclaimed in amazement. They looked like little children. Apparently, they were older than him. “That’s young?”
“Why, yes, of course that is young,” Fali said, splashing water at one of them playfully. “They are practically babies.”
“Compared to what, other naiads?”
“Well, yes. And to me, for that matter,” she said with a smile.
“How old are you then?”
“Why, Ryheart,” she protested mildly. “What a thing to ask a lady.”
“Why are you both here?” one of the naiads asked.
“Well,” Fali said, crouching down to one of them, her tone light, “there is something terrible in the forest, and we are here to find it.”
“Oh, is it the stompy one? Daddy said it’s really big, and really upset, but it doesn’t even know why it’s so angry. Isn’t that sad?”
Fali’s eyes took on a sombre blue, and she sighed softly as if remembering something. “It is sad, yes. Once upon a time, such creatures were peaceful.”
“When they say it’s big…” Ryheart asked, trailing off nervously.
“Oh, I have fought a few before,” Fali said with a dismissive wave of her hand. “They are not all that much bigger than regular lions. They will just kill anything living that they come across for fun, rather than for food.”
“That’s a cheery thought,” he murmured.
“At least it cannot paralyse you if you look at it, or turn you into a chicken with its scream,” she said. “Anyway, between us, we shouldn’t have any—”
Whatever she had been about to say, she was interrupted by a monumental, catastrophic sound. The blue shimmer in the air flared brightly, then blinked. Then it vanished altogether.
“What in Divana’s name was that?” Ryheart shouted, half deafened by the thunderous crack.
The impact had thrown him from his feet, and he scrambled back up. The naiads had dealt with the issue by simply collapsing in on themselves, and a couple of the braver ones now poked their heads out of the water, surveying the situation curiously.
“Ekkksllpth!” Fali cursed, evidently another troll epithet. Her tone was slightly wild, even her usual self-assured demeanour seemingly rattled. “The barrier just shut down!”
“The Nemean?” he asked, wide-eyed.
Fali nodded her head. “Yes. It is through the barrier, I can feel it.” She made another harsh, guttural noise. “And it has not just pushed through it. It has broken it. The shield is gone.”
Chapter Eighteen
Decision
“Gone?” Ryheart gasped in disbelief.
“Gone. Shattered,” Fali confirmed.
“How near is the monster?”
“Close,” she said, her eyes distant.
“What’s the matter?” he asked, glancing towards the now-clear sky. “Besides the giant angry monster, I mean. We were going to kill it anyway, right? This just means we find it earlier.”
“Ryheart, the barrier is at the edge of wildlands, remember?” she said. “All sorts of filth could make a break for the border now the shield’s down. Any of them can get into Fae territory now.”
“I mean, that’s bad and all, but the Fae can repair it, can’t they?”
“I do not know that they will have such an easy job. The things relatively efficient once it is up, but the initial power needed to start it is huge. Besides, the longer it is down, the more things can pass through it. If we do not get that shield restored, they now have a direct path to Londaya, and all you have to stop them is stone and salt.”
“It’ll be enough, right?” he asked, feeling a chill pass down him.
“Who can say?”
“Well, we go fix the shield, then go get the monster,” he decided. It meant eking away his precious time until his deadline, but the monster practically throwing itself into their path had made things considerably more straightforward. Quicker, anyway.
“That would be the best option, but why is it coming in this direction?” she asked herself aloud. “It will instinctively work its way towards the biggest source of pure magic it can sense near to it to consume it. I would be the strongest, but it cannot be me that it is picking up on. I am masked. So why is it… oh,” she said, and her tone of voice made him decidedly worried.
“What?”
She glanced at the apprehensive-looking naiads, then leaned into him and lowered her voice. “It is after them.”
“What?” he asked, looking nervously over to them. “They’re the strongest thing in the forest?”
