Father covers my back.
Thoren stays under the cover of trees and picks the creatures off from a distance.
Of course, there was a time when Father took the first strike.
But he soon learned that telling me to hang back was pointless.
He drops to a crouch twenty paces back from the lush trees, both of his hunting daggers drawn and ready. He and Thoren have similar coloring, both blond-haired and gray-eyed. I, too, inherited Father’s eye color, but I have my mother’s dark hair.
As I continue onward, the boughs up ahead appear densely packed, but it’s a dangerous illusion. The wall of greenery is as unnatural as the destruction the Blacksmiths have wreaked on this land.
Know your prey.
Father’s training informs every step I take out here on the mountain. His father trained him—not in fighting strangecreatures like we do now, but in fighting other men. But he brought all of those skills with him and passed them on to me.
He doesn’t talk much about his past, except to make sure we understand that he escaped that life for good reason. Thoren was only a baby at the time, and I was too young to remember much at all. Sometimes, in the dark of night, I recall the runes etched into the side of the longhouse where I slept as a small child and I smell the scent of blood on my father’s hands when he carried us away from his clan.
I shake off the memories, clearing my mind.
Carefully, I study the leaves on the trees ahead, noting the darker-black smudges on the snow in front of the leafiest one.
The creatures we’re hunting are nocturnal and far weaker in the morning just after they’ve fallen asleep. Their hearing is also poor, but they can sense vibrations. The time of day makes it possible to creep up on them, but only as long as we’re as quiet as a breeze.
If it were night, they’d be swarming us already.
As for how many there are, it’s impossible to tell when they’re so aptly camouflaged within the tree’s foliage.
The only way to find out is to strike.
Focusing my mind, I exhale into the crisp air, grip my knife, and remind myself I can reach for my bow and the arrows on my back if I need them.
I crouch into position, raise my hand, and steady my heartbeat.
Then I give the signal.
Now.
Thoren’s arrow flies through the space directly above my head and hits the foliage dead center.
Shrieks fill the air, high-pitched and piercing, making my hearing buzz.
In that same instant, all of the emerald-green leaves burst outward in a storm of wings and claws.
I have barely a second to make out the features of the critters now screaming toward us. Each one has leaf-shaped wings, bright green, but beneath the wings, their skin is dark gray, like a corpse’s. Their faces sport multiple eyes: black, soulless, and packed together like a spider’s.
They fly low, no higher than the top of the tree from which they’re swarming, since their body weight doesn’t allow them to gain any greater height.
We call them ‘butterflies’, but they’re a far cry from the few real butterflies I’ve ever seen.
Thoren’s arrows fly quick and fast, taking down two of the creatures within the seconds that it takes me to drop even lower and avoid the creatures’ claws as they soar through the air above me.
The butterflies aren’t my target.
They’re a distraction I trust Father and Thoren to take care of.
My focus is on the monster that was hiding behind them.
Chapter 2
