Woodson's Arc

Chapter 6 of 10

The bloom was spent and the vein was gone. Woodson still knelt in the snow, unable to stand. Lunara watched him. Neither spoke. The moon had passed its full and the light dimmed, but he did not want to leave the clearing. He had lived his whole life alone. An old Ranger had taught him that a man who needs no one loses nothing. He had believed it for years. Now his chest felt tight in a way no arrow wound had ever matched. He looked at Lunara and could not name the feeling. He only knew he had never felt it before. "You're staring again," Lunara said. Her voice had strength in it now but a slight blush on her cheeks as she can’t help but find Woodson handsome. "I know." He waited for her to look away, to redirect, to name some task ahead the way she always did. She did not. She held his gaze. "I hunted you for six weeks," Woodson said. "I came to kill you. I don't understand what I feel now." "I do." Lunara said it plainly. "I have watched men look at my antlers. They want a prize. You stopped looking at them days ago." She paused. "You look at me." He had no answer. The truth of it sat in him like a stone. "When you first woke in my cave," she went on, "I slept apart from you. I kept the knife where I could reach it. A hunter does not change his nature." She lifted her hand and touched the side of his face. Her fingers were warm. "You changed yours." "You knew," he said. "Before I did." "I knew when you cut the stem instead of my throat." Woodson closed his hand over hers. He had spent his life measuring risk, keeping distance, wanting nothing he could lose. Now he wanted her. That want frightened him more than any blizzard on the peaks. "I don't do this," he said. "I work alone. It's safer." "Safer for whom?" He had no answer to that either. Lunara drew her hand back. She sat straighter against the pine, healed and steady, and for the first time she looked past the grove instead of at the road ahead. "You gave me my life," she said. "I will not send you away from it." Something settled between them. Woodson felt it close like a clean shot finding its mark. He was no longer a danger to her. She knew it, and she had said so, and now he knew it too. He helped her to her feet. She stood on her own, but she kept her arm through his. "There is more you don't know about me," Lunara said. "About what my antlers are. About who wants them, and why they will come." Woodson looked down the dark slope beyond the trees. He had made an enemy of no one by saving her. But someone, somewhere, still believed the silver stag was a prize to be claimed. "Then tell me," he said. "I'm not leaving."