I'm calculating. If I can get the blade into something soft, redirect it even slightly — if there's any purchase on the ravine wall — if I throw myself left at the last possible second —
It lunges, and I close my eyes, expecting to feel the pain immediately.
Instead, it's paused. Something has distracted it flying above. I look in the same direction. Arrows.
Three of them, so fast the sounds blur together. Not the light hiss of a human hunter's shot. Heavier. Almost even, like each one was given with the same precise pause between them. Black shafts, fletched dark, tipped with something that catches the wildspont's light silver. They hit the beast behind the left eye socket in a cluster so tight they're nearly touching.
The thing drops.
No drama. No slow fall. It just stops being upright and the ground shakes like an earthquake when it lands, and I'm trying to move because my body hasn't caught up to the fact that I'm still alive. But, my leg gives. I catch myself on the ravine with both hands and haul back from the drop.
I look up to see a figure on the ridge, coming down. Moving with the kind of easy, slow, smooth precision that takes centuries to build, nothing wasted, nothing uncertain. Silver armor, dark at the bracers where the blood has dried. A bow still in hand. And even at this distance, even with my vision going soft at the edges —
Not human.
The ears. The height. The proportions that are just slightly too long, too deliberate.
A dark elf.
I try to process this.The beast is dead. The dark elf killed the beast. A dark elf is now walking toward me.I'm not sure if this is better or just different, and I'm losing the ability to reason through it because the blood from my palm has reached my elbow and my shoulder has progressed from fire to a deep, grinding wrongness that suggests something more serious than bruising.
He reaches the forest floor. Closes the distance. His face resolves — hard and angular and utterly unreadable, and he's looking at me with a quality of attention that I've never experienced from another person. Not alarmed. Not sympathetic. Just — watching. Like he's deciding something.
I open my mouth.
I have no idea what comes out. Something. Nothing useful. But I'm sure as hell not asking the elf for help.
The wildspont vibrates beneath me, and I stop being able to hold the edges of things together.
The last clear thought I have is of the feverroot still in my satchel.
Someone needs to get it to her.
Then the dark elf's face, and the silver of his armor, and the glow of the corrupted forest all fold into each other, and there's nothing left at all.
2
DRAEKIR
The forest should quiet my mind.
That's the principle behind a solitary hunt — remove the body from comfort, put it to work, let the rest of it follow. I've used it for a century and it has never once failed me. Four leagues of corrupted woodland between Mournhold and the wildspont's nearest fault line, and the territory is mine enough that nothing here should demand more than reflex.
Tonight it isn't working.
The ridge I'm moving along overlooks the lower canopy where the trees thin and the ground drops toward the wildspont basin. The light down there is off — that bruised violet-white seep that the rupture line gives off when it's agitated, which has been every night for the past two weeks. The bark on the older ironwood trees has started weeping. I noticed it three days ago and said nothing to the house because speculation without evidence is noise, and I have enough of that already.
Three houses have sent riders this month. Two want assurances. One wants land.
I pull a breath through my nose and hold it. The night seems to carry a depraved growth beneath everything else, thatspecific flat sweetness like overripe fruit left in a sealed room. Something has been moving through here. Something large, and not recently. The tracks I've been following for the past hour are old enough that the disturbed soil has dried and cracked at the edges, but the tread pattern is indifferent for anything that belongs in this forest. The stride is too long. The pressure points too deep.
I follow it anyway. But then, below me, the canopy shifts.
I see her before I hear her — a lantern, moving without any attempt at quiet, cutting through the lower trees at the pace of someone who knows the path but not what's currently using it. Human. Female. Petite, from what the distance allows, with her hair braided back and a satchel knocking against her hip with every step. Moving directly toward the worst section of the seam's reach.
The irritation that rises is immediate and not entirely rational, which makes it worse.
Humans do this. They look at a forest the region has marked cursed for sixty years and decide that whatever they need from it outweighs what they don't know about it. They carry lanterns that announce their position to every predator within half a league. They walk with their minds on their destination instead of what's between them and it. And then they die in ways that create political problems for whoever holds the territory, because there is always someone willing to argue that a lord who cannot keep his forest clear of bodies is a lord losing his grip.
