Chapter 17: Chapter 17
Unknown
He paused, idly touching the sword strapped down his back. Grey eyes surveyed the drowsy woodland, picking out buzzing insects and birds with unnaturally glossy feathers.
Not wanting to bring anything that would be of value should it be stolen, he’d left the detailed map of Eldda and its inhabitants behind. He’d spent his whole life staring at it, tracing fingertips across the whorls of land and sea. He’d learnt the territory lines before he was ten, and by the time he’d taken his place as Alpha at age twelve, he’d been well-versed in every pack, their rights and rituals, their trade, and where their borders lay.
Knowing the markings was one thing. Losing himself in the no man’s land between packs was quite another.
In the days since he’d left the Sea Pine pack’s territory, he’d fought off a slew of mossmen – a race of terrifying creatures born from undergrowth and old, dark magic. Crafted of sticks and stones and thistles and grass, they were intent on dragging anything they caught under the hedgerows they lived in, in order to return them to life as mossmen, too. He’d avoided bowstrings, and, perhaps worst of all, he’d nearly drowned at the shallow edge of a lake after the ropey limb of a lengathul had dragged him in. Huge, many-limbed beings, they haunted the shallows and rested their long legs close to the shore, only to drag people beneath the water and eat them alive.
He was terrified of water as it was. The presence of a lengathul did nothing to ease his fear. All of that, combined with dodging the patrols of the packs he passed by, meant that Ithia and Caslein’s warnings were weighing heavily on his shoulders as he ventured further and further into the forest.
No matter his doubts, something far greater pressed him onwards.
With every step he took into the forest, he could feel her. The thrumming pulse of her heartbeat strengthened, and her scent – though masked by dirt and the stench of an eleve, something which angered and worried him in equal parts – grew clearer as he tracked her.
His hunch was bordering on certainty when his gaze faltered. Stomach tightening, he knew his hunch had been right. Her scent had pooled here, in a nest of death’s ivy and thorns; pine and wild berries swelled beneath the leafy boughs of the trees, winding between gnarled, uneven trunks. He’d felt snippets of her as he’d walked, and he’d clung to each and every one of them like a lifeline.
He didn’t know what she’d mean to him, what she’d be to him, not yet. But she was important, even if she turned up her nose at him when they finally met. His kind revered love: both halves of him, both cultures, found hope and promise in soul bonds and eternal love matches.
The scorn of his first and only love remained with him, a knot of thistles pricking his heart every time it dared swell. But he’d shoved aside his fear, and allowed himself to breath in every bit of her light, of her fire, no matter the bindings already in place.
She owed him nothing, but he would give her everything.
Even if all she wanted was for him to leave, to forget her face and the intoxicating flashes of her strength. If that were her desire, then he would turn tail and leave, if only to be left with the memory of that one, singular meeting.
His throat bobbed. True terror, unlike that inspired by the mossmen or the bowtsrings or even the lengathul, tore through his chest as he stared down at the remains of a canvas tent. Tatters of torn cloth dangled from snapped poles, draping across the undergrowth as though sheathing a body.
Desperately, he felt for the heartbeat echoing his. Sucking in a breath, he brushed the dark ends of his hair, sun-bleached in places, over the pointed tips of his ears. She was okay.
He drew his sword. She was okay, and he would make sure that remained the case. Creeping closer to the wreckage of the tent, he poked at its crumpled entrance with the point of his sword. Nothing moved, save for the limp flap of fabric that split against the sleek metal with no resistance.
Crouching down, he peered at the mess before him. A bedroll lay in its centre, shredded by long, thick claws; beside it, a canteen had been dropped, though it had escaped destruction. The same could not be said for anything else in or around the small tent. He prodded at a large backpack, and pulled out a single, untouched item of clothing: a shirt, clearly a man’s, clearly well-worn, thick and fleecy on the inside, faded plaid on the outside. The now-familiar scent of pine and berries clung to it, as well as something darker, muskier, though not entirely dissimilar to her scent.
He gathered up the remains of her belongings, rifling through the pack and tying her shirt around his waist. There was evidence of food amongst the wreckage, all of which had been eaten, crumbs of bread and oatcakes left to rot amongst the torn canvas of the tent.
There were signs of scuffles everywhere, aside from the shredded tent: lengths of thorns and thistles snapped in two and bent backwards; crumpled moss and broken twigs; dried blood, which made his heart twist.
But none of those were right. None of them spoke of which way she had gone, or with whom. The relief at the knowledge that the blood was not hers was short lived, but he used it to level himself, to focus.
And then, once the flame of fear had died, leaving behind only smoking remains, he continued on. He did not need to track her using traditional means, though he was more than capable of doing so. He did not need to, because he had something else.
He was a man undone, and he was searching for his mate.
* * *
Shadows stretched across the forest floor, morphing into figures watching silently as he picked his way towards her. Dusk hung low and thick in the air, the promise of darkness hovering about his shoulders with every uneasy step. Rushing water to the east unnerved him, and he was grateful that the tug of her heart pulled him to the west.
He was afforded small glimmers of her position, and his certainty grew as he watched her climb a tall ladder snaking up a tree without the use of her hands. He knew of these people, of their tricks. They had once been allied with the other, shameful half of his people, before an ineffective treaty, proposed after The Longest War, had barred further alliances and attacks.
Fire threatened to crackle against his palms. He paused, his eyelashes dusting his cheeks as he allowed them to rest. She was there, teeth gritted, full lips pulled back in a snarl. Eyes flickering behind closed lids, he watched, and he waited, until – there.
There was her captor. A mortal man, by the looks of it, sharing some of her features: he recognised her skin tone in his, a deep, sun kissed olive; he saw brown eyes, flecked with gold. This was no mortal. He had to be her father, making him a wolf.
But he had scented the eleve at the site of her capture. He frowned at the werewolf, the image crackling and pulsing, fraying at the edges. The ladder, and the clean manner of her capture, all pointed towards the eleves. They were fond of trickery, not torture. He was missing something – something obvious.
Then it clicked. Eleves could shape-shift, in a sense. They could glamour their victims to appear however they chose. If he were seeing through the lens of her eyes, then the glamour would work on him, too.
Certainty settled in his gut, though it did not lie easily. Eleves were tricky creatures, and were surely the reason behind her terror – the terror that had drawn him to her, all those long nights ago. He had seen only flashes and flickers of her since then, though he’d traced her movements using their bond. Until it was fully formed, it could only show him slivers of truth, rather than the whole.
Relying on the bond, though useful, was draining. It dredged up too many memories, and as he rested at night, curling up amongst the moss and stones, unprotected by even the thinnest layer of canvas, the heady rush of running water stole his breath and marred his thoughts. Planning an escape was no easy task, not when the darkness clustered, and thoughts of her were muddled by memories of his first love.
She’d been ruthless, and beautiful in her fury. A wolf through and through, she had revered the moon, her innate power as a woman, and her position as the Young Luna. Her eyes, blue and endless as the churning, windswept sea, still watched him sometimes. She had always been able to breeze through life in a way that he had not – until she’d learned the truth of his heritage.
He swallowed hard as her name rose to the surface of his mind, utterly unwanted and entirely unbidden. Leahne Page. It was some small mercy that she’d returned to her original pack after rejecting him; doubtless he would have succumbed to her waves and drowned had she stayed.
Her name was like a curse upon his bones, staining his blood black and stealing the breath from his lungs. He fought to shove her memory aside, desperate to replace her cold eyes with gold-flecked brown ones, or, failing that, anything at all. He longed for her to be irrevocably removed from him, for the feel of her blonde hair brushing his cheek to be taken, for the curve of her hips beneath his palms to be stolen away.
He slept restlessly that night, memories and dreams warring above his scarred heart. Her soft, full mouth turned to Leahne’s over and over, sweet nothings melting like tar into the cruel final words she had spoken to him before leaving.
“No one will ever love you as I did,” she’d sworn, tears and starlight glittering in those endless eyes. “You are unlovable, for your past and for your lies. I do not wish to forget you, and forgiveness is an impossibility. I merely wish to pretend as though this never happened, and soon you shall mean nothing to me.”
He could still feel the swell of water pushing down on him from above, could still hear Ithia and Caslein’s cries from the riverbank. Reeds had tugged at his ankles, and he had let them drag him down to the stones.
He relived that night and the following dawn over and over, until he rose with the sun, sweating and shivering, unease curling deep in his gut.
Even when he reached the outskirts of Oakhame, he wondered if he should have turned back long ago. He hovered on the edge, stomach aching with the terrible fear that he had made a mistake in trying to find her. He was unlovable, and a fool for ever believing otherwise.