Predators

The place where a girl named Fiach has grown up is attacked by bandits, her foster father is killed.

V. Predators

                She heard Rush die and was away from her bedroll before his last breath escaped his body. Her bow and two arrows were in hand and she quietly exited the cabin from the leather hinged hatch that led out into the woodpile. The leather hinges of the hatch made for a totally silent exit. It was still dark Rush must have gone outside to relieve himself. In the forest there were sounds always, most you expected, some you did not and those were the ones that could rouse you from sleep and send you running. The gurgle as a throat was opened and the massive arteries in the neck flooded the windpipe was one of those sounds.

                There was no panic in her. Panic froze the deer and the rabbit, made them easy prey, there could be no panic in Fiach. She kept low on the ground. There would be at least one watching this side of the house and she’d have to move slowly and find him and avoid being spotted. Only when she’d slipped out into the night did she open her eyes. The moon was still up and she used the hulking piles of logs for shelter; moving through the moon’s shadows as much as possible.

                Her enemy was careless, darting his head back and forth standing, he was clearly and carelessly visible in the moonlight. Three was her guess at the count. She only had two arrows. The Dark Lord was not here. How had they known he’d be running with the pack? Had Fletcher betrayed them? More likely these were bandits and they had no knowledge of the dog.

                She needed to call him, needed to find a way to reach Donnachadh. Only he could help her now, she couldn’t kill three men. She thought of Rush, his gentle ways, her father in all but blood, a sob almost wracked her. She replaced the grief and sadness with a rage that spilled through her and filled that place in her mind that could speak to the dogs and in that place a howl echoed, she felt it reverberate across the landscape silent to the ear but not to the mind.

                She notched an arrow and rose from the wood pile, sighting her target she released the arrow straight through the air on a slight arc toward the plumb; an area at the base of the skull that, when hit would drop her target in absolute silence. The watcher in the moonlight turned his head to one side and the arrow hit him just behind the jaw line, directly on target he thumped to the ground and Fiach sank into the shadows of the wood pile.

                She waited, the forest around her was silent and she heard the faint sounds of someone moving around in the house. She spied the hatchet she and rush used for splitting wood and removed it from where it hung oiled and covered by the wood pile. Then she moved across the open ground to where her target had fallen.

                She found and retrieved a hunting knife and two arrows from his person. His bow was sub-standard so she stuck with her own. Then she heard a shout from behind her. She notched and arrow and turned. From either side of the house two men were bearing down on her. She released an arrow at one but faced with a fight she knew she couldn't win fear stole into her mind now and the arrow veered wide.

                Fiach stood for a second in indecision, like a rabbit about to be torn apart by wolves. Then her mind filled with a familiar presence and all her fear left her. She broke into a run, not away from the men but toward the nearest. She threw herself forward into a roll across the loam, came up on her knees and lashed out with her new hunting knife.

                The blow caught the attacker across the back of his leg and he issued a scream of pain as the blade bit deep. The other attacker was closing the distance to Fiach when a shadow burst into the clearing closing its own distance to the man far faster. The Dark Lord’s jaws closed on his throat only heartbeats later. When the two fell to the ground the dog twisted the great muscles on his neck and in two great jerks the part of the man’s throat in the dog’s jaw came away in a great spray of flesh and blood.

                Fiach stood up and hefted the hatchet in her right hand. She turned to the man she’d injured.

                “What are you, girl? Are you a witch?” Sixteen she was, slight of build at that, standing over the bodies of three experienced woodsmen.

                “I was raised in the wilds.” An overhead blow stove in his skull, she dummied with the knife so he brought up his hands in front and then she swung behind his guard making solid contact with his head.  She wrenched out the hatchet head from his skull and left the body twitching and turned to the dark lord whose bloodied muzzle and lolling tough looked for all the world like a joyous smile.

                She knelt and put her arms around the dog and held him, shaking. The emotion flooded over her and she sobbed into the dog’s neck for many long minutes. The Dark Lord just sat implacably enjoying the attention. For long moments she simply couldn’t face going around the house to see Rush’s body. When she finally got a hold of herself the sun had come up and a morning mist had come up with it. The stark light of early dawn rendered everything monotone. Now would be as good a time as any.

                She stood and separated from the dog to go toward the front of the house. As soon as she was away from the dog, she heard the twang of an arrow departing a bow and she knew it was meant for the Dark Lord, she'd given the bowman a clear shot. There must have been a fourth man, she had miscalculated and now her dog would be dead and she had no more surprises to wield. Fiach cringed and turned to watch her last friend in the world be mortally wounded.

                But it never happened, she heard singing, it was the damnedest thing but she heard it in the same place in her head that she spoke to the dogs and felt the presence of the dark lord. Her eyes went back to the dog and as they did something exploded in the air near them, something silver left the explosion with seemingly a mind of its own and departed into the woods where there was heard the sound of two thumps one meaty, then there was the unmistakable thump of a body hitting the ground. The silver singing went back off into the woods.

                She checked the dark lord for an injury, he was unharmed panting and looking at her expectantly. They ventured over to where the sounds of death had come from. Sure enough, the last man had been concealed in the tree line.  He now lay on the ground with a ragged hole through his chest and out of his back, something had gone clean through him.

                The Dark Lord growled.

                Fingers of sunlight had started to venture in through the trees and among them moved gray shapes that seemed to fade into the morning mist then appear again as corporeal forms. Fiach didn’t realize how fast they were moving till they were six feet from her before she could react.

                Two gray men with gray skin, tall with long silver hair and eyes that were open pools of blackness now stood before her. Their garb was an amalgam of gray shades and faded green, cloaks and tunics. The one splash of color between them was the red blood that adorned the three-bladed metal star that one of the gray men held in his hand.

                “An bhuil fhois agath duinn a Cailin?” They spoke the language of the plains, which was their language, to begin with, the language she’d named her hounds with and the language she herself had been named with. Do you know us, girl? They said.

                “Ta tu na doine an amhraini” you are the song folk. She said and they nodded sagely as she spoke their language fluently and without hesitation.

                “Clogg’ag’Titm is a anim dom.” Said the first one, the one not holding the bloodied weapon “Sin e Machalla Tonn” My name is the sound a bell makes as it falls, and this is the sound the sea makes in a large cave at high tide. When he saw her confusion not quite understanding the specific terms of their names, he spoke in the common tongue.

                “You may call us Clogg and Machalla.” The Songkin said.

                “You saved Donachadh’s life,” Fiach said gesturing to the dog who sat panting and relaxed.

                “We heard the intent of the men who attacked you, we heard your friend die.” At this, he frowned. “He thought of you at the last, but we didn’t hear you at all. So we decided to investigate… you are like the dog, and you killed two of them.”

                Fiach could not fathom how this creature was looking at her. He seemed to be having trouble expressing the fine concepts that had brought them here.

                “I don’t know what you mean I’m sorry.” The other one Machalla spoke up then.

                “These men were hunters, you were their quarry and they are well used to a certain connection with their quarry that they themselves do not understand. It is the noise of fear and panic that they can sense with their minds on a level that to them seems just like experience and guile but there is something more. Your heart and mind did not make these sounds in the fight, we would have heard you, you didn’t make any sounds your mind and heart were quiet as a wolf on the hunt, as a hawk on the wing, you have the silence of a hunting animal, like the dog here, who doesn’t noise like a human raised dog at all.” Fiach took this to mean that she there was something different about the way she thought which was advantageous to hunting and in truth she was a highly accomplished hunter.

                “Thank you, for the compliment,” she said and bowed. The two Songkin exchanged a glance and then Machalla started cleaning his bladed star with a scrap of leather he removed from one of his belt pouches. They seemed a bit frustrated like they hadn’t gotten their point across in an entirely concise manner.

                “In any case thank you ten thousand times for your help, for saving Donachadh.” She looked around at the corpses. They nodded and then turned and stalked off toward the White Pass without another word.

                She buried Rush, it was a thankless sweat ridden task through which she sobbed. At one point the sobbing overtook her and she sat at the side of the hole she’d dug for the only family she’d ever known, wracked, and feeling, for the first time in a life of hunting and running alone through the wilderness, alone.

                She supposed that she should remember him at this point, mark him somehow. As she filled in the hole she thought about how his big arms would hold her and tell her stories by the fire in winter. He had been a big, soft, affectionate man. He called her his princess and told her stories in the language of songs about faeries and the Songkin who lived across the planes.

                He lived in such a harsh place, yet he was so good and so warm. He didn’t deserve to be opened like a goat in his own door yard by some thug.

                The Dark Lord came over then and pressed his great head and neck up against here so that all of him from shoulder to nose tip was pressed to her side. She got a hold of herself and finished the job then she looked to where the Songkin had gone. She looked at the corpses of her attackers.

                She gathered traveling clothes, food, water, bow, a quiver of arrows, money, and a cloak. When she was ready she set off after the Songkin. For whatever they might be doing seemed to Fiach far more interesting than burying rapists and murderers. The forests would take these b******s within a couple of days; bones guts and all.

                Dogs didn’t speak, even into the place that she shared with him inside her mind.  If you can listen, however, they will make their intentions plain enough. The Dark Lord followed her and she turned to him. If you want you can go and run with the packs, let your blood mingle with theirs and be no more one, you can let yourself be all. She spoke through that place in her mind to the Dark Lord. He did not answer; he simply regarded her with his implacable stare.

                Suit yourself then. She said to him and with a roll of her shoulder she invited him to join her and they were gone into the woods, the foothills, and the White Pass to the Fallow Kingdom.