Woodson's Arc

Chapter 1 of 10

Woodson had chased a legend for six weeks. Men in taverns called it the silver stag. Its antlers, they swore, granted the hunter their true love. But you cannot hunt what you cannot find, and no one could tell him where the stag roamed. Snow packed the roofline of the tavern in thick white slabs. Icicles hung from the eaves like spearpoints. Woodson pushed through the heavy door and stamped his boots. He kept his hood up and his bow on his back. The old Ranger who trained him had taught him to watch a room before he trusted it. He crossed to the bar. Yuki waited there, drying a mug. Her snow-white hair fell straight past her shoulders. A leopard's tail flicked behind her, and her grey eyes tracked him the way a cat tracks a moth. "Six weeks, Ranger," she said, soft and dry. "Still hunting your ghost." "You said you'd ask the trappers." He set a coin on the wood. "White stag. Silver antlers. Someone must have crossed its trail." Yuki set the mug down. She did not take the coin. "No trapper has seen it," she said. "No hunter. No one who walks these woods for pelts." She leaned closer. Her voice dropped. "Because it does not walk these woods." Woodson frowned. "Then where?" "My grandmother spoke of it once, before she died." Yuki's tail went still. "The silver stag is no beast. It wears a woman's face. Pale skin. White hair to the floor. Antlers like a crown of bone. She keeps to the far pass, the one sealed thirty years past. My kind used it before the treaties broke." Woodson's hand slid off the coin. "A woman." "An elf, my grandmother said. The antlers grow from her own head." Yuki met his eyes. "You have been hunting a person, Ranger. You just did not know it." He stood there while the fire popped behind him. Six weeks of tracking a deer, and the deer was a woman who could speak, who could refuse, who could put an arrow in him first. His arrow gave a target one chance to comply. He had never planned that chance for this. "The sealed pass," he said. "You know the way." Yuki's jaw tightened. For a moment she said nothing. Then she reached under the bar and drew out a folded strip of hide, marked with faded lines. "I have wanted to walk that pass my whole life," she said. "A cold settles in my chest when I near it. I meant to go alone." She pushed the hide across the wood. "Now you have given me a reason to bring someone who can shoot." Woodson took the map. The lines showed a road he had walked past a dozen times, never guessing what waited at its end. "We leave at first light," he said. Yuki did not smile. "Then pray she chooses to talk, Ranger. Because you cannot hunt what looks back at you."