Hunting for Destiny

Chapter 1

“You don’t really believe all that stuff about Dryads and witches being about again, do you?” the voice emanated in an undertone from the heather to Hadrin’s side, its owner a partially concealed boulder of a man whose face was striped in blue woad paint. Hadrin shook his head, raising his finger to his own half-painted lips, gesturing at his best friend to stay quiet.

Bran rolled his eyes. This was a complete waste of time. He poked his spear haft down into the soaked moss in front of him, investigating with some interest the slaters and beetles which scrambled for cover. He’d let Hadrin drag him out on yet another fairy-chasing expedition. A waste of time. When his own fire-haired woman awaited him in the family keep at just this moment. Kirsten, he thought dreamily.

Hadrin shook away beads of sweat from the blonde fringe which had fallen slightly across his brow, moist with sweat and the ubiquitous mist which filled the air this far into the mountains. His finely attuned senses strained for hide or hair of his quarry; a twig snapping in the underbrush had him tightening his broad hand around the antler-handled dagger he always kept at his waist. A broadsword sat heavy across his back; not that it’d be much use to him in this close, dense forest.

Hadrin was scanning, scanning… he held himself totally still, aware the slightest twitch could give him away. Suddenly: a new, sharp-soft scent. Not far off. Hadrin leaned over and seized Bran’s upper arm. Bran looked around in alarm, caught in a rare moment of idling on the job. He followed Hadrin’s gaze, but the mist blowing towards them was absolute, almost cloud.

Bran raised his eyebrows at his brother, sweat dripping down between his eyebrows. Hadrin knew that Bran would stay crouched in this underbrush with him for a week if he asked. But he also realised that his brother had other concerns. And there were some things a man had to do alone. Like catch and kill a Dryad, absorbing her power. The ultimate test of manhood.

Hadrin gestured at Bran to fall back, and to do it quietly. Bran nodded, only too happy to oblige. Hadrin knew to whom he returned, and he was happy for his brother. Kirsten was flame-haired and strong, exactly the right foil for the powerful, wilful and kind Bran. They made a great match, his boulder-strength to her curvaceous power.

Hadrin waited several long minutes after Bran had made his remarkably – given his bulk – silent retreat into the heather. He reminded himself that they’d both gone through the same training as children with the keep’s head Stalker, catching and killing Elk at the tender ages of ten and eleven years old, up hours before the sun and crawling up mountains and over ridges on their bellies until they’d reached the correct spot, stayed another torturously cold hour until the Stalker gave the nod and three magnificent Elk raised their antlers up over the rise, just as the sun pierced its first rays through their nine points apiece.

Both loosed arrows had struck true, and the boys had been clapped hard on the back by their father, a brutish but fair man who had loved his boys more than life itself. A fact the queen mother had found hard to accept. They had borne both sets of antlers down to the wide, grassy glen atop which their family keep sat, having owned that space and time for millenia; as long as people have known to shear sheep for warmth. It keeps you warm even when it’s wet, wool. The words of the queen mother, strong in Hadrin’s ear as he unconsciously rubbed a hand over his kilt, blue, black and green plaid with the family Tartan.

Hadrin inched forward on his hands and knees, scraping his belly on rocks and nettles. He paid it no mind. This Dryad – what he had come to think of as his Dryad – was right there. He could smell her, and he wouldn’t again miss this chance. To do so would be an unforgivable waste. He raised himself on strong, broad muscled shoulders, straining every sense. A light breath of air stirred the thick, unnatural-seeming fog which still obscured his vision beyond the next thicket. Hadrin reached out and lowered the branch of the sapling directly in front of him. Suddenly, the mist parted and revealed a small pool slightly downhill, ringed by trees. And there, long muscled legs folded into a crouch and sharpening an arrow from her quiver on the mossy bank… her. A forest panther, caught in a moment of repose. The arrow glinted with small green sparks each time it was struck and her whole presence was liminal, unreal.

Forgetting himself for a moment, Hadrin’s hand dropped silently from the branch. It sloughed off a sliver of silvery birch-bark, which fluttered to the ground. The Dryad’s pointed ear twitched, her entire form growing preternaturally still. Yellow-ringed irises scanned the trees, every line of her ice-green, taut and willowy form frozen as though carved from stone.

Hadrin held himself as a rock in the foundation of a mountain might, willing his heart to pause its infernal beating for just a moment. After a few minutes, the Dryad resumed her sharpening. Strike, glow. Strike, glow. Strike, glow. The Hunter coiled his screaming leg muscles, putting one foot then another underneath himself, placing feet on mossy protrusions, the breeze doing him a favour for once and continuing its uphill blast. His sharp nose picked up her scent again; forest loam, petrichor, sandalwood and the faintest hint of jasmine. She smelled like the open mountains, adventure, and sharp-edged predator.

He continued edging forwards, painfully slowly downhill as she completed her sharpening-having moved to her spear- and, just as he was poised to break the last screen of underbrush, the tricky mountain gully wind switched direction, blowing everything he was towards her. His intent, his sweat, his approach, his powerful attraction. She stilled again, pausing her sip of water, allowing the clear liquid to trickle down her chin and neck and rising in one swift, smooth movement; he had to catch his breath at her sinuous grace, all the while the self-preservation part of his mind screamed at him to run. This was such a stupid risk, and for what? To prove to everyone that this “mythical creature” was what had been stealing and killing livestock? To prove manhood?

“You don’t want to try a bit harder than that, Hunter?” She asked, her voice low and raspy, as though she didn’t have much cause to use it. The silver edge of her blade glimmered dully at him in the low forest light, and her yellowed irises found his through the several remaining metres of dense undergrowth. She brushed at a strand of silvergreen hair, sweeping it up over high cheekbones to tuck behind a pointed ear.

“Wouldn’t be fair though, would it? I like to give my quarry a sporting chance,” he called back, feeling light-headed with victory and vindicated at having clapped eyes on a Dryad, the first in his keep in a generation, he was sure of it. His father was evidently wrong about having “wiped them out”. He tucked this information away for later.

She chuckled dryly, and a sudden gust of cold, sharp-smelling wind swept through the clearing, blowing leaves and dirt into Hadrin’s eyes. He cursed, rubbing them for a moment; when he saw the clearing emptied he plunged forward, scrambling against every instinct and item of Stalker’s teaching, falling for the trap hook, line and sinker. As he arrived by the poolside he felt, not without satisfaction, the cold press of metal against his throat. She could kill him. She was real.

“This will be fun,” the Dryad whispered against his ear, pressing her dagger in more firmly. A warm trickle of blood escaped down his neck and she pressed her long, lean length against him, her arm snaking around his front to grip the top of his kilt. “You like that?” she asked, pressing harder with dagger and hip. Despite himself he felt a stirring in his groin. He didn’t care. The ecstasy of being this close to her, the pull and push, it was heaven. Never had he been this excited by any of the women pressed on him by his mother. The Queen mother. You’d better get yourself married. And, he reminded himself, the blood draining too rapidly away from his brain, it had to be, to be thinking about marriage an inch from death at the hands of a mythical fae creature. She is not a human.

“That’s right,” the Dryad breathed, “and today, princeling,” she said, biting his earlobe hard enough to draw a little more blood, “you got lucky.” Another gust of wind tore through the clearing and the warm willowy presence at his back was gone. Hadrin collapsed onto the moss bank at the sudden loss of balance, twisting back up and blinking in the sudden sun, which had pierced the low cloud cover, and seemed to shake its head at his folly. He cursed. His Dryad was, once again, gone.

Chapter 2

Aine passed at speed through branch and twig, speaking greetings to each of the tree-spirits she passed, gratefully bowing her head in thanks at their energetic gifts, given in return: small halos of gold and blue were placed around her as she passed, like wafting trails of shimmering ribbons, invisible to humans, of course. She shook her head ruefully. That stupid human man had come after her again, as though he could ever actually capture her. It was laughable.

That man had smelled good, though, Aine mused as she worked her way downhill, hopping gazelle-like down a series of moss-covered boulders into a narrow gully opening, with walls of glistening black-veined rocks crowded around the base of a small waterfall. Her hunter had tasted like determination and delicious salty human sweat, and the full ripe flowering of that species. She would have let him put in a good sexual showing for his species, were the opportunity to present itself. It had been a few decades since she’d last properly tasted humans – and that was Yana.

Aina smiled at the memory: Yana’s soulful eyes, soft hands and a truly, gloriously enormous, bosom. They had had fun for a few sweet seasons, but Aina was precluded from allowing that again, on account of the whole newly minted murderous intent front. Another crucial misunderstanding that had grown between their tribes since the human settlements had crept up and up into the mountains, and encroached onto the fae’s own. The humans had sought out and killed what fae they could find an forgotten how to share, and now most of them weren't even worthy of seeing the fae folk anymore. A pity. A damned pity.

Aina hopped lightly down over the rocks and waded into the shallow pool. She stood for a moment and allowed the waterfall’s overspray to kiss her sweat-beaded brow with gentle drops of spirit-water. She sighed, then, realising she was already quite unforgivably late, closed her eyes and spoke the wyrds. In a moment, she was on the other side of the cliff face, but could still faintly hear the water splashing down the rocks at her back.

“You’re late.” Said a triumphant voice, its owner a small, wriggling fire sprite who sat curled over on a piece of jutting rock up near the cavern’s ceiling. The sprite reached behind itself, placing a fiery tail against one of several glowing patches of rock. “Flora is going to be furious.” She sounded delighted.

“Shut up, Sinne” grumbled Aina, tossing a gentle barb of her newly acquired forest energy up at the Sprite, who wriggled, squealing, back from the ledge. The energy bounced harmlessly around until Aina summoned it back into herself. She took off her weapons and handed them to the tired-looking guard at the door, avoiding his gaze. Energy work was definitely not intended to be used thus. His lined face and downturned mouth gave him an extremely weathered look, even though he wasn’t quite three hundred yet.

“How was it out there,” Lierd asked in his dusty, creaky voice.

“Nothing to report,” said Aina casually, though her mind kept returning to the feel of her hunter pressed up against her, his shoulders of a height with hers, making him unusually tall for a human. She grabbed a soft mountain peach from the bowl by the door, biting into it and sauntered down the corridor.

“Hey! That was my offering!” shouted Sinne crossly. Aina ignored her, hopping into the golden circle cut into the floor at the end of the entrance cavern, tapping off a mock salute as she disappeared down the golden tunnel into the world of the Fae folk.