Huntress: Part II

In Seatown, a contingent of the King’s Guard was waiting to escort them through the crowded, noisy wharves.

Neither Kaede nor Taisin had traveled with the King before, and at first all of it was strange and overwhelming: the guards who rode with their hands on their swords; the rituals of greeting each evening when their hosts prostrated themselves before the King, holding their empty hands out to him for his blessing.

Sometimes the travelers ran after the coaches for a short distance, but the caravan stopped for no one.

“Your family has a farm?”
Pink crept up the curve of Taisin’s cheeks. “Yes.”
Kaede realized that Taisin was self-conscious about it, and that made Kaede feel tactless, clumsy.

Kaede realized that Taisin was self-conscious about it, and that made Kaede feel tactless, clumsy. She changed the subject awkwardly.

At a crossroads that had seen better days, the caravan had to stop entirely while the drivers climbed down and dug the first carriage out of a rut that had trapped the wheels in several inches of sludge.

She had reached for her without any awareness of what she was doing.

After the attack, there had been repercussions all around.

He was tall, and he wore an uncommonly fine dark blue silk tunic embroidered with white-capped waves, but his hair was as short as a guard’s.

“Kaede,” he said, glancing perfunctorily at his daughter, “the prince and I have business to attend to. You may leave us.”

But she would never allow her father to see her misgivings, so she said nonchalantly, “Of course. It all sounds fine.”

At night, there had been a phalanx of servants to bathe her in jasmine-scented water, and in the morning, more servants came to dress her in clothing so exquisite she was almost afraid to wear it.

But all the luxury in the palace did nothing to dull the sharp clarity of the emotions that gripped her every time she remembered her vision.

The fortress was on an island—or perhaps it was simply a particularly large ice floe—and Kaede was rowing toward it.

That Taisin had emotions that the present-day Taisin—the one clutching her cloak to her chest in the King’s palace—couldn’t relate to.

The prince introduced Kaede to Tali, a burly guard with a salt-and-pepper beard and hair shot through with gray.

When it stopped, there was no sun to dry them off, and they were still damp when they arrived at the hostel they planned to sleep at that night.

She dressed as quietly as she could, and after a moment’s hesitation she buckled the dagger that Fin had given her onto her belt.

She marveled at the way he made it seem so effortless: lifting the long bow, nocking the arrow, loosing the string so that his right hand arched back gracefully, echoing the flight of the arrow itself.

His words reminded Kaede of her teachers’ instructions at the Academy, but hearing them applied to archery was like hearing those lessons in a different language—one that was maddeningly familiar but as elusive as a slippery fish.

Before she left the stable yard, she couldn’t resist unsheathing her dagger and tossing it at the tree, just to remind herself that she wasn’t completely inept.

But a kind of unspoken camaraderie had developed among travelers on the King’s Highway in the last two years, for dark times gave cover to dark deeds, and it was better to pass on one’s news without learning too much about anyone else.

The child was one of the Xi, cursed to inhabit the body of a human to atone for a crime; the child was the reincarnation of a legendary sorcerer; the child was a demon who had eaten the human child.

Kaede remembered Maire Morighan’s theory that these disparate events were all connected, but Taisin spoke with an assurance that was surprising.

“The innkeeper told me that she lives in a house on the edge of town,” Taisin said, but beneath her briskness was a note of trepidation.

After the viscous density of the air, there was little resistance; it was suddenly like carving through fog or mist.

Warmth seeped over her skin, and time sped up again with a great whoosh like a blast of winter wind, and the monster shriveled up until there, in the woman’s bloody arms, was a baby with an iron knife protruding from its still belly.

Along the side of the baby’s face was an iridescent fringe of feathers, grown out of its skin like a strange mane, the only sign that it had ever been anything other than a plump little boy.

She backed away, flustered, and Kaede’s hand left a smear of red on her left cheek.

Kaede imagined tiny, gnarled fingers reaching up through the soil like a strange new plant.

He helped Kaede assemble the funeral pyre, and then they laid the small, wrapped body on top of it.

She folded her hands together just below her breastbone and felt the rapid thrumming of her pulse, her whole body taut with nerves.

The numbness inside her was being pushed away by hot emotion: resentment at her father, a sudden ache for her family—she missed them, she realized.

When Kaede only stared morosely at the arrow clutched in her hand, he said, “Come inside and eat some breakfast.”

When she arrived, flushed and proud of herself, only their host’s son was surprised; her brothers laughed and chided her for taking so long.

She was here because the Council of Sages believed the Fairy Queen knew something about why their kingdom was turning into a wasteland—a place where crops spoiled overnight, where farmers couldn’t replant because there was no sunlight.

Kaede tilted her head briefly at the campfire, where Con and Pol were sitting on their bedrolls, joking with Tali as he prepared whatever concoction they would be eating tonight.

“I’d like to hear a tale about an ordinary person for once. Not all of us are born princes.” She softened the sharpness of her words with a smile, but Con was chagrined.

Of course, if the unicorn found him guilty, he would be gored by the beast and die.

“How romantic of you,” Shae said, and she might have meant for her words to sound wry, but Con heard a thread of wistfulness in her voice.