The Archer (The Blood Realm Series Book 3) (37 page)

I will have a choice. I will have a choice. I will have a choice.

By the time she loosed her final arrow, her nerves were one massive knot in her chest, tangling up her throat until she could barely draw breath. The cheers of her fellow contestants fell on dead ears, only the tiniest part of her brain registering the fact that they’d wanted her to win. That they’d supported her, recognized the injustice of the game and wanted her to get her land back. She shambled forward to claim her prize like a disoriented corpse stumbling from its grave. A fresh flood of confusion pulled her eyebrows together as a man with light brown hair and green eyes put the deed to her home in her open palm.

“You aren’t the sheriff.”

The man raised an eyebrow at her, but he was smiling. “No. He had to leave to see to official business.”

Bile coated the back of her throat. Nothing could be more important to the sheriff than Robin. Thanks to her connection to him, she was a close second. Which meant that if the sheriff had left her…

A violent tremor seized her muscles, threatened to rattle her until her teeth shattered. She slammed the deed down on the small table, snatched up the quill that had been put there to add the winner’s name to the document, and quickly scratched out her signature, then a small note, then Ermentrude’s name. She spun around, searching the crowd. Ermentrude would be here. There’s no way the woman would have stayed away with her precious garden on the line.

There.

The gardener was seated on one of the few benches that had survived being swallowed by the reaching wild grass, chatting excitedly with a woman Marian thought she recognized as the baker. Ermentrude spotted Marian when she was roughly twenty feet away and a broad smile spread across her face. Then she got a good look at Marian’s face and the smile died.

“What’s wrong?”

Marian grabbed her hand, pressed the deed into her palm, noticing with a swell of bittersweet emotion the dirt permanently embedded under Ermentrude’s fingernails. She realized with a twist in her heart that she was going to miss her. A lot.

The gardener stared down at the parchment in her hand, blinking. Then her eyes widened and she looked up at Marian with her mouth hanging open. Speechless, for the first time in her life.

“No one cares as much for that land as you do.” Marian put her other hand over the deed, holding it in Ermentrude’s grip as the gardener tried to push it toward her, started to shake her head. “Please, Ermentrude. My parents would want you to have it.”

“No, they want you to have it.” Her eyes welled up with tears and she shook her head stubbornly. “Lady Marian, I couldn’t—”

Marian couldn’t help it. She threw her arms around the older woman, hugged her as tightly as her shaky muscles would allow. Ermentrude stood frozen for half a heartbeat, and then she was hugging her back, just as ferociously.

“Thank you for everything you’ve done, everything you tried to do,” Marian whispered.

“Lady Marian…”

Ermentrude was crying, she could hear it in her voice. It was too much, too much emotion for her heart to process. She couldn’t bear anymore. Marian pivoted on her heel and bolted into the forest.

It would have been nice if the tears in her eyes and the thickness in her throat over leaving Ermentrude would have stayed with her. If, as she ran toward what had been her greatest fear her entire life, her mind and heart had been fully occupied with the gardener who was somewhere behind her clinging to a piece of paper that would change her life forever. All that bittersweet emotion would have made a grand shield, a psychic armor of sorts.

But the forest wiped it away. The first footstep past the rough trunks of cypress, the first glimpse of the glowing green moss-covered limbs of oaks, tore the thoughts of Ermentrude from her mind, flung them backward into the meadow. An icy chill slid down her spine, sending tendrils of frost out along her nerves, draining the warmth from her body and leaving her shivering as she crept forward with all the ferocious courage of a lame field mouse.

His scent was everywhere. Musk, crushed greenery, and underneath it all, just a hint of blood. She had no conscious memories of him, had no reason to remember his scent so clearly, but she knew it was him. Would have known it was him even if she’d never been in his presence at all. He was woven into her spirit, a part of her.

“Come.”

The command fell on her like a rock cast into a still lake, sending a rush of emotions shooting up, a spray of images flooding through her. Joy, urgency, need. Images of running beasts, sharp weapons pointed into the darkness, screams of fright. Now she was no longer walking—she was running. Running toward
him.

Tears still welled in the corners of her eyes, but they were no longer for Ermentrude, no longer for a difficult goodbye. Her heart leapt into her throat and she ran faster, forcing her legs to work harder. He was here. She had to get to him.

Everything would be all right.

The curtain of leaves suddenly lifted, flinging Marian into a small clearing. The grass here was an almost perfect circle of cultivated green, surrounded by towering oaks, rowans, and cypress trees, all standing like wardens overlooking the small haven in the middle of the forest. A figure stood at the edge of the clearing opposite her, his back to the trees. Marian choked on a sound low in her throat, muscles tensing to fling herself to the ground at his side—

Stop!

Her arms and legs pin-wheeled, halting her forward momentum and dropping her to the grass in an undignified heap. The ground slammed into her side, bouncing her head off the packed earth. At least two of her arrows snapped inside her quiver, the jarring impact too much for their slender shafts. Dull pain throbbed in her shoulder and her head, but she forced herself to get up, to face the man who had called her so easily.

Herne. Master of the Wild Hunt, King of the
Sluagh
. The greatest hunter man or fey had ever known.

Her king.

Her master.

Herne stepped forward, the great antlers adorning his head brushing the leaves of the boughs that dipped low enough to touch him. Opaque black eyes stared at her, alien and unreadable. His skin was a smooth tan, with warmer tones that suggested he spent time in the sun despite his reputation for riding at night. His black hair was straight, dark slashes against the green of his cloak. He held no weapons in his hands, but there was a bow and arrow on his back, and a thick hunting knife sheathed at his side. The leather armor he wore didn’t make a sound as he moved and if Marian hadn’t been looking right at him, if she couldn’t smell him, she would never have known he was there.

“Why do you stop? Come. Let me look at you.”

His voice was deep, and she felt it more than heard it, a dull rumble in her bones. Marian dug her fingernails into her palms, the sharp pain a welcome distraction from the compulsion in his tone. His words drilled through her, down to a part of her she’d never acknowledged—didn’t want to acknowledge now. A part of her that wanted to run to him, let him welcome her home. A part that knew he was her home.

“What do you want?” she bit out.

Her voice shook so badly she wasn’t sure he’d understand a single word. The urge to draw her bow was nearly overwhelming, the desperation to have it in her hands, have some means of protecting herself, a maddening need. But drawing a weapon would not help her. Not now. Not against him. Better to let things proceed peacefully for as long as she could.

Herne arched one slender black eyebrow. “What do I want?” He took another step, this one to the side. His head tilted as he studied her, took another step. Pacing around her in a mimicry of some sort of livestock inspection. “I want you, child. I want you to come home where you belong.”

Marian’s fists trembled at her sides and she had to fight not to turn her head, to follow him as he took another step, still circling. “I am where I belong.”

The great hunter passed out of her sight. She strained to listen, but he moved in complete silence. Not a rustle of grass, not a single disturbed leaf gave away his position. The perfect predator. The muscles in her neck ached with the need to turn, to look…

“I have searched for you since the night I discovered you were missing.” His tone was light, conversational. Just a chat two friends might have over tea. “I was not aware that your mother had brought you with her to hunt that night. You were far too young for such things, and I’d expected her maternal instinct to be enough to keep her home with her babe.”

A thread of anger warmed his voice. “Looking back, I should have known better. Your mother is a flighty thing, immature despite her years, unable to think of anything beyond her desire for the hunt. Still, when I learned that you had fallen off her back during the ride—that she’d left you behind instead of going back for you…”

He stepped into her line of sight again and Marian’s eyes widened, her body pulling her back a step before she caught herself, stood her ground. Herne’s anger had changed him. It was subtle, not a flashing in his eyes, or a deepening in the lines of his face. It was more like the change one might experience after spotting a sleeping
barguest
, of creeping past the large predator, trying to get to safety, only to glance behind you to find the
barguest
has opened its eyes and is watching. She held her breath until Herne started moving again, resuming that maddening circle.

“She was punished.”

Marian had the vague thought that she should feel some emotion over that last statement, some fear for her mother, concern over what sort of punishment Herne had meted out. But she felt nothing. The woman who’d birthed her had never been her mother.

Suddenly Herne stopped, angled his body to face her with only three feet separating them. His opaque black eyes were still unreadable, his face composed with too much care to give away his thoughts.

“I have come so close to finding you over these past few decades. So many times I’ve caught your scent, followed it only to have it snatched away from me—wiped clean by a brush of magic. I could no more hold onto your scent than I could hold a breeze in my fist. I would find myself standing in the forest, lost, wondering what had drawn me there, all memory of you scrubbed from my consciousness.”

His face hardened, frozen and cold as if a sudden touch of winter had turned him to ice. Marian’s breath froze in her lungs.

“That does not happen. Not to me. Who cast that spell on you, and why?”

Marian’s mouth opened and closed, but her words were trapped somewhere inside her. She couldn’t move, couldn’t look away from that black-eyed gaze. A tiny voice inside her mewled for forgiveness, told her to fall to her knees, beg him to excuse her disobedience, to let her come back home. She clenched her teeth until a dull ache throbbed in her temples, forbidding herself to give in to the humiliating urge.

“You must have felt the draw to return to me at some point. Why did you fight it? Why didn’t you break the spell, come back to your rightful place in my court?”

“I… I wanted a choice.”

The sentence crawled from her throat, dragged itself forward by its fingernails. Herne tilted his head, his thick antlers cutting through the sunlight that soaked through the canopy, slashing the forest floor with shadows.

“What do you mean ‘a choice?’”

“I know what I am.” The words came more easily now, though her voice still had a thin, breathless quality that ground over her nerves. She dug her fingernails into her thighs, distracting her from the persistent urge to kneel. “I do not want to be an animal, ordered about and at your beck and call for all of my days. I want to choose my own life, my own path. Like any human.”

The great hunter wrinkled his nose as if a foul smell had invaded the clearing. “Humans. You speak of them as if a life among them could compare in any way with what I offer you. It is no doubt the humans who raised you who instilled such fear in you, such disdain for your own people—for yourself.”

He stepped forward, eating the distance between them, and Marian moved away, not wanting to be within arm’s reach.

“Stay.”

The command was barked at her, and that single word seized her body, held her immobile as surely as if he had grabbed her. Stomach acid washed against the back of her throat and she fought not to be sick over the display of control, the confirmation of what she had always feared, what she had spent her life running away from, hiding from.

“Listen to me, girl. You are not a mere animal, a slave. You are a member of my court, and you would be treated with the utmost respect. You would have the same freedom there that you have now, the freedom to come and go, the freedom to shape your own life.”

Again, she had the urge to fall down and beg forgiveness, to abase herself before her master and pray for his mercy. Her neck felt cold, and an image flared to life in her mind, an image of herself at Herne’s side, his large hand resting on the back of her neck, kneading the muscle there. He was not a cruel master. He would care for her. Marian’s knees grew weak, threatened to spill her to the ground. Had she been wrong? Had this lifetime of hiding been for nothing? Was the nightmare she’d imagined a lie?

She pulled against the urge to kneel, grasping for a thread of thought that would distract her, help her remember why she had fought this, why she had to keep fighting this. “The stories I’ve heard of the Wild Hunt. Hunting down fugitives from the other courts at the behest of their queens, leaving a swath of chaos for the sake of chaos. What if I choose not to participate in such pursuits?”

Herne blinked, his brows furrowed as if he had trouble processing the thought. “You do not know yourself overly well, it seems,” he said finally. “I believe you will find that once you are home, once you are encouraged to be who you are, you will participate with all due enthusiasm.”

“Killing marks you… Too much killing will frighten away those who would do you good and attract those who will do you ill. In our line of work, it would be too easy to kill too many, too often and then…and then we wouldn’t be a force for good anymore.”