I didn’t know his name—this faceless Fae who thought to claim me through magic.
But I felt him, pulsing inside me like an infection in my blood. It was different from the knowledge that the Wild Hunt were hunting through the Kingdom, the howl of their hounds and stomp of horse’s hooves echoing through the air.
I’d felt the moment his feet touched the human realm, treading upon the soil of Nothrek. I felt him inside my skin, my Mark writhing as if it could reach out and call to him.
“Him,” I said, and Brann’s presence at my side disappeared as he stumbled. Just like that, he was gone, lost to the night in a way I didn’t have a hope of finding him by sight. “Are you okay?” I asked, lowering myself to a crouch and feeling around the ground. The dirt beneath the layer of leaves on the forest floor was damp, the soil rich and hearty as my fingers dragged through it to feel for my brother.
Something slithered over the back of my hand, all smooth and scaled as it went past me without stopping. I squealed, lifting a dirt-covered hand to my face to cover my mouth and muffle the sound. “Brann!” I whispered, spinning around in my crouch and trying desperately to find him. Panic coated my skin, waiting for his answer, and then finally he groaned.
“I’m here, and I think I fell into our hiding place.” Something touched my ankle, reaching under the hem of my dress and grasping it. “It’s me,” Brann said, holding me steady when I tried to shake off his grip.
“You scared the—”
“Give me your hand. I’ll help you down,” he said, and I did as he bid. He helped me step down off the ledge I was standing on, the moist decay of a tree root touching my free hand when I lowered myself into the hole.
Sitting beside him and leaning my back into the dirt and roots behind me, I couldn’t stop the hysterical giggle that bubbled up in my throat or the feeling of Brann’s incredulous eyes trying to glare at me. “How are we supposed to know if we’re hidden, when we cannot see?” I asked when I could finally breathe past my laughter.
He snorted, dropping his head to rest on my shoulder as he shook it from side to side. I curled my legs into my body, hugging them tightly as he wrapped his arms around my shoulders to keep warm. With the frigid night air surrounding us, the lack of movement made freezing to death a very real possibility. We needed a fire, but nothing would attract all manner of predators from the woods like a flame in the night.
Would the sun rise in the morning? Or had the Fae plunged us into an eternal darkness that we would never escape?
My eyes drifted closed as the exhaustion became too much for me to bear. Longing for the feeling of the sun on my skin, I drifted into the realm of dreams, where monsters didn’t threaten to take me to a world of mystery and enchantment, and the most dangerous being in my life was the lecherous Lord who wanted to make me his wife.
And I slept.
My eyes flew open. The press of a hand at my mouth jolted me awake and tore me from my nightmare. A shrill scream burned its way up my throat, clawing to get free. “Shh,” Brann whispered in my ear, his voice trembling as I nodded frantically against his hand, which was covered in dirt and smelled of rotting leaves and decay.
He pulled his hand away from my mouth finally, and I lifted my own to cover it. I didn’t know what had made Brann wake me so fearfully, but I did my best to muffle my breathing. My own skin bore the metallic scent of blood along with the dirt that caked my skin, while the crumble of fallen leaves dusted my wounds.
The sky was still dark, and I had no sense of time or whether it was truly night now. I could have slept for minutes or hours, but all I knew was, it hadn’t been enough. I waited, tempted to ask him why he’d scared the life out of me as the silence spread and nothing happened. I was about to do just that when I heard it finally.
The thudding of hooves striking against the earth, muffled by the foliage covering the ground and the lack of a hard surface for the horses’ shoes to tap against as they moved. Whoever rode kept their pace slow and steady, and I spun to look up through the tree roots above our heads.
There was only darkness, only the stillness of the night in front of my face. I watched, pressing my hand tighter against my mouth as I squinted, pressing my body into the dirt in front of me, making myself smaller and for once being grateful for my stained, lackluster dress as it blended in with the rotting woods.
For once, being poor and not able to afford a new dress seemed to work to my advantage.
I stopped breathing the moment the first hoof stepped into view, gleaming silver as if it created its own light and sparkled in the pitch black. Where there would have been hair on any normal horse, the smooth surface of bone was glossy and polished as it lifted and fell in its next step. The entire body was made of bones, a skeleton of an animal that was no longer alive.
And yet it moved through the night, step by step, and more followed in its wake once it had passed. I lifted my gaze to the spectral form of the man who rode it. He seemed to glow, a twisting mass of white and black shadows. Dark hair fell just past his shoulders, floating off them as if it could defy gravity. It faded into the inky, dark air, bleeding outward and becoming part of the shadows themselves.
His eyes shone with a shock of white, all traces of color missing from them as a magical haze enveloped him. His shoulders were broad, encased in a fur cloak that would have made the wealthiest of men in Mistfell jealous. Feathers were braided into the dark locks of his hair, shaking with every one of the skeletal horse’s heavy footfalls.
The only color in the swirling tendrils of shadows, which seemed to compose his entire being, was the shock of icy blue tattoo on his face. It stretched down the center of his forehead, severing his face in half and arching over the bridge of his nose before the glowing ink separated and curved across each of his cheekbones.
Even though there was nothing solid to his appearance, he was devastating. A translucent being that felt Other in a way I’d never dreamed of seeing.
He moved past us, a line of other horsemen following at his back on their own skeletal steeds. They each varied in appearance—different hairstyles, a different blend of shadows and light that very nearly resembled a person—but each bore that glowing blue mark on their face.
I knew without a doubt who they were: the force that our legends told would be the first to hunt down those marked by the Fae.
The Wild Hunt.