Kalis Grendyr's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

The fox was dying, and Kalis Grendyr had no idea how to stop it. He knelt in the dirt behind his cabin, dark hair falling over his eyes. The animal's flank was slick where an arrow had punched through. Kalis had pulled the shaft two days ago. He had cleaned the wound with boiled water. He had wrapped it in strips torn from his own shirt. None of it mattered. The fox's breathing came shallow now, and its three tails, each tipped with a spark of pale fire, lay still against the straw. Behind him, in the lean-to he'd built against the cabin wall, the others waited. A moss-backed hare with a broken leg. A young griffin chick that would not eat. A serpent with scales like river stones and a fever he could not break. Six creatures the hunters had left for dead. Six creatures he had carried home in his arms, meaning to build them a place where no crossbow could find them. Meaning to build a sanctuary. He was killing them instead. Kalis pressed his palm flat to the fox's ribs. The markings along his forearm caught the low sun. He had good hands for a blade and bad hands for this. He knew it. He stood up. He took the forest path at a run, gold hilt slapping his hip, and did not stop until he reached the crooked door at the edge of the village. He pounded it once. The old woman opened before his fist came down again. Cryla Fendir. The village healer. The one every mother sent her sick child to, and the one Kalis had avoided for a year because she asked too many questions. Her white braids were wound with wire and bits of colored glass. She looked him up and down, at the blood drying on his sleeves, and did not seem surprised. "You smell like a dying animal," she said. "How many?" "Six." She laughed, short and dry. "Six. And you thought hot water and prayer would do it." "I thought I could learn as I went." "You can't." She stepped back into the dim of her cottage and jerked her chin. "Come in, hunter. Before your fox is a corpse." Kalis followed. Herbs hung from every beam. On her table sat a golden flower he had never seen outside old carvings, its petals cupping a pool of shimmering nectar. Cryla lifted it carefully and pressed it into his hands. "This will hold your fox through the night. Nothing more. If you want the rest to live, you'll need what's written in the old wizard's tower past the ridge. Books I can't read anymore. My eyes are gone for small letters." She fixed him with yellow eyes. "Bring me the books. I'll teach you what's in them. That's the trade." Kalis closed his hand around the stem. The bloom was warm. "Tonight," he said, and turned back toward the ridge.