Brandon Ashveil's Arc

Chapter 2 of 18

Three days after he swore to bring back a piece of the fae lord, Brandon woke on the herbalist's floor with a split lip he had not earned. Somewhere his enemy had taken a fist to the mouth. Brandon spat blood into the ashes and knew he was running out of time. He could not track a man he could not find, and the bond was eating him from the inside. Dayna Sable stepped over him with her satchel and a mug of something bitter. She was small, ginger-curled, streaked with dirt at the wrists, and the only human Brandon had ever seen walk this forest without a fae escort. She had not warmed to him. She had let him sleep on her floor because his dying on her step would be worse for business. "Drink," she said. "Then get up. You're no use to me leaking." "I don't know where he is." "I know you don't." She crouched and set the mug by his hand. "But you carry him. Every cut he takes, your body answers. That's a map, hunter. You just don't know how to read it." He sat up. "Teach me." "I'll show you once." She whistled, and the red dog with the white-tipped tail padded in from the doorway. "Outside." She led him past the longhouse to a small bamboo shelter she kept for drying leaves. Green canopy overhead, a plank bench, herbs hung in bunches. She sat him on the bench and pressed two fingers to the pulse under his jaw. "Close your eyes. Find the ache that isn't yours." He did. Under his own hunger and the throb in his lip, something else moved. A cold weight along his left side. A pull, faint, like a rope tied to a rib. "North," he said. "He's north. And down. Wet ground." "Bogland." Her mouth tightened. "He's holed up in the sunken groves. That's bad for you. Iron doesn't hold there, and the fae keep their sick close." "He's sick?" "You tell me. What else do you feel?" Brandon breathed. The cold weight had a shape now. Fever. A slow, grinding fever he had mistaken for his own tiredness. "He's fevered," he said. "He's weak." "Then move." She stood. The dog watched him with its head low. "A weak fae lord is still a fae lord, but weak is what you get. You won't get better." Brandon stood. His legs held. He had a direction now, and a body that would keep telling him where his enemy lay as long as the bond stayed lit. The same thing killing him was pointing the way. "North," he said again, and reached for his knife. Dayna did not wish him luck. She picked up her bowl and went back to grinding.