“Your beast knew well enough to avoid us,” I muttered under my breath, as I bent beside him. And then, louder. “I forbid you to come or go by Carterhaugh, Thomas Shepherd. There are safer paths for a mortal like you.” If the Hunt should pursue him again, or Amadan did, I might not be around to intervene.
Save him or not, I could not play this game among the mortals any longer. I had grown too large for that skin.
Thomas’s limbs shuddered, askew in a way I misliked greatly, like a doll abandoned by a small child. Even worse than the angle of his body was the expression on his face. His eyes stared wildly, his mouth gaped wide with horror, like some grotesque carved onto a chapel wall.
I feared his wits lost, his body broken, that he might never be the shepherd I knew and loved again.
I turned around to see many armed warriors behind us, horned and with skeletal faces, the largest and most ancient with a spear at Thomas’s throat.
When the Hunt comes to a people, it means war. When it comes to a man, it means his death, and he meets neither rest nor salvation at the End of Days.
This I could not allow.
I stepped in front of Thomas.
The breath of the hounds blew hot on my skin, and the stench of rot rose from the bodies of the host. Rot and grave dust and yet somehow, the slight tang of flesh. An air of moss and loam and something innocent turned foul and profane. My eyebrows raised, and I noticed one among their number whose face was shadowed almost completely. When the moonlight hit it, it illuminated flesh, not bone.
Amadan Dubh.
Again.
Bile rose inside me, curdling my belly.False trickster. Liar.
He had sworn to do no harm to Thomas. Had told me, “I will leave the shepherd be until you are done with him, and care not whether the wild beasts should tear him limb from limb.”
If and when that time should come,Iwould be the one to make the choice.
Thomas moaned; he might have whispered my name, too soft to hear.
The Hunters held themselves still. Perhaps their spears lowered a bit. They seemed only slightly less likely to kill me than they would my love.
“Who dares to stand between the Hunt and its quarry?” said their leader, the Horned One. His voice echoed through his helm like a great cavern, roaring like the sea. Every sound to ever frighten fae or mortal resonated in his voice.
I swallowed my fear and squared my shoulders. “I do.”
“Half-blood.” The Horned One’s head dipped slightly, eyeless sockets passing over me like footsteps over my grave. “We have of yet no quarrel with you. Leave us our prey.”
“Yet I do have quarrel with you.” My eyes fixed upon the Dark Fool as I summoned stony rage. “There is one among you who has sworn he will cause the shepherd no harm.”
“Is there?” said the Horned One. “But what shepherd is this? I had thought him a nobleman instead.”
“That does not matter. There are rules, and I will hold you to them. I have claimed this man, and he is under my protection. He will not be harmed by the likes of you.”
Then, horribly, the Lord of the Hunt began to laugh—a malicious sound, chuckling at someone else’s misfortune, a gleeful, triumphant gloat. “Your bond is broken. Your man allies himself with another instead.”
Margaret of Roxburgh.It hurt, oh, how it hurt to admit this truth.
“Nevertheless, you cannot make him your prey,” I insisted. “I will not have it. I have not released my claim.”
The Horned One took a step forward, flooding my senses with the chill of dread. “Who are you that we must heed your will?” Something in his voice made it more than a simple challenge. This question stood at the crux of all I had experienced thus far, and everything to come.
Who was I?
“I...” I faltered, on the cusp of discovery.I am who the wolf says I am. I will deny it no longer. Manipulative as he may be, even the Dark Fool cannot lie.
The Wild Hunt waited, and the forest waited with them, eerily still, excruciatingly silent. Like a criminal about to make my last confession, I still might find execution on the other side.
The answer they craved was on the tip of my tongue.
