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In the Land of Stories Old
Serena was quite upset that Jack was hurt, even though both he and Arthur had assured her that it was nothing to be concerned about, and she only reluctantly left the camp just before moonrise. Arthur had already scouted out a good route for her to take, making sure there weren’t any traces of other people in the area, and had said he’d come find her once the moon was up. Jack, of course, was asleep. Arthur didn’t like leaving him alone in their camp, but Jack had already told him that was preferable to leaving Serena alone. “Just…follow her once the moon rises,” he’d said. “She gets lonely.”
Arthur still didn’t like it, but once the moon rose he checked around the camp one last time and then went to the spot he’d picked out. Serena’s clothes were there, but she wasn’t. She’d left a trail, though, or at least he hoped that was her trail, because the tracks he could see were really large ones. On a whim he picked a handful of flowers for her, and then followed the trail. He finally emerged into a clearing brightly lit by the full moon…and came almost nose to nose with the largest wolf he’d ever seen. He started to jump back, to reach for his sword…and then he stopped. And held out the flowers. “I…picked these for you, Serena.”
The wolf’s blue eyes blinked at him, and then she rubbed her head against his hand and nudged him. “You want me to…what?” She huffed, and then slowly and very gently took his wrist in her mouth and tugged. “Oh, go with you. All right.” She let go again, and he buried one hand in her silken fur and followed her to a different spot with a higher vantage point, where she sat down and stared out at the moon, and then she started to howl. Arthur eased himself down beside her, letting his hand stay in her fur. Within a few minutes she had leaned into him, and he could feel the vibration of her wolf song all the way down to his bones. It was wild and beautiful and it touched a part of him he hadn’t known existed, soothing some of the ache he’d been carrying in his heart since his return to Avalon.
Back at the camp, Jack came half awake when he heard Serena howl. He noted that Arthur wasn’t there, was glad for it, and started to go back to sleep…and then he heard something else: A voice, gruff and cruel, muttering to itself from somewhere nearby. “Finally, I’ve got the beast’s trail. I oughta go back and charge them extra for havin’ to track it this far outside the kingdom’s borders. They said it didn’t stray far from that one spot.”
Jack’s blood ran cold. He’d been afraid of this, afraid the worst kind of hunter would come after Serena. Whether or not it was her parents who had sent him was no matter; the man must not find her in her wolf form, even with Arthur nearby. This man, Jack had no doubt, would happily kill them both.
He reached for his cloak, fighting back nausea as his head protested the idea of moving. At the very least, he needed to slow the bastard down.
The hunter heard him coming, of course—Jack was in no condition to move silently, nor was he trying to. “Who’s out there? Show yourself!”
“If you like.” Jack stepped out of the trees, and only reacted to the man’s rude guffaw by sticking his nose in the air with all the snobbery he could muster. “Go back the way you came, Hunter.”
“If you know what I am, then you know what I’m here for,” the hunter said. “And I’m not leavin’ without it. What’s it to you, anyway? A wolf that big would eat a little troll like you in two bites. Now go back to wherever you came from and I won’t teach you a lesson about gettin’ in the way of your betters.”
Jack snorted; it made his head feel like it was going to explode. “You have never been my better, you bloodthirsty ruffian. Hunting an innocent in the dead of night, for who? Her ridiculous parents who think daughters only exist to be a trade item? Their advisors who believe the same?”
The man just smiled. “For me and for gold,” he said. “Once the wolf is in ‘em they’re just a monster, and killin’s all they’re good for—mostly, anyway. Now get out of my way!” Jack grinned, made like he was going to jump at the man, and then flipped up the cloak and dove sideways. The hunter heard the dive, of course, but his eyes fooled him just the same and he turned…and unfortunately Jack was suddenly too big for the cloak to completely hide and the shifting drew the hunter’s eye. He cursed himself for a fool. He should have tried to lead the man away, confronting him had been stupid. But he could do nothing about it now.
The game of cat and mouse had begun. Jack just hoped he could keep it going long enough.
Arthur sensed something wrong before he heard it, and he saw in the sudden flick of Serena’s ears that she had as well. He rolled to his feet, sword already in hand. “Stay behind me, but stay close,” he ordered. “We don’t know what that is, they might be after you.”
And then he started to run, the wolf-princess close on his heels. He could hear it better with every step, the sound of something that was not quite a fight but close to it, and he realized what must be happening with a sinking heart. Jack was trying to distract whoever had stumbled upon them, and with their luck it was probably a wolf hunter.
He reached their campsite just in time to see a kick connect and hear a sickening crack and crunch as Jack was thrown several feet and landed just shy of what would have been a very unforgiving tree. The dwarf’s invisibility cloak had come halfway off, making for a somewhat disturbing view, and his blue eyes widened when he saw Arthur and Serena. “No! Arthur, get her away, he is hunting her!”
“Well, I’m huntin’ him now then, I guess,” Arthur growled, circling as he sensed Serena fading back into the trees. “Drop that knife unless you want me to cut it out of your filthy hand.”
The man laughed. It was a cruel laugh, and the gleam in his dark eyes as he turned around was almost gleeful.The dull metal of the long knife in his hand glinted in the moonlight, probably inlaid with silver Arthur thought—the man would have smaller blades of pure silver on his person somewhere, for throwing or for finishing off his kills once they were helpless. Arthur kept his guard up. Jack seemed to still be conscious, but there was blood trickling down the side of his face and the way he was holding his arm told Arthur exactly what the cracking sound had been. That the hunter had been closing in for the kill when they’d gotten there enraged him. “Will you attack me?” the hunter taunted, shifting the knife in his hand. “Can you do it before I jump right in the middle of your little friend back there and finish him off?” He spat. “You look like you should know better than to travel with such a weakness, no matter what kind of magic he has. Even now you’re distracted…”
He went to lunge, and then from out of the trees a large shape hurtled into him from behind and drove him to the ground, the knife flying out of his hand; Arthur kicked it even further away for good measure. He needn’t have bothered, though, because Serena’s jaws had already closed over the man’s head and…well, crunched. Arthur blinked, and blinked again, and then he shook his head while re-sheathing his sword. “Well, I feel useless right now. That was impressive as hell, Princess.”
The wolf shook her head and sort of spat, obviously trying to get the taste of the hunter out of her mouth, and then she bounded over to Jack and whined. Jack smiled up at her. “It was…very impressive,” he whispered. “You are so beautiful in the moonlight, Serena. I am sorry…I could not hold him off better. But Arthur…he will take good care of you. I…promise.”
Serena howled when his eyes fell shut, nosing his cheek, and then howled again in surprise when pink light flared over the clearing in an explosion of magic. It felt like it lasted forever but was probably only seconds, and then Jack was laying there in his original, beautiful human form, still bleeding and pale as death.
Arthur quickly closed the distance between them to verify that Jack was not, in fact, dead, and once he had he closed his eyes in relief. “I didn’t need you takin’ after Merlin on this, Jack. I really…really didn’t.”
Jack was an unwitting passenger in the wagon the next day, and he didn’t wake up until the cart hit a particularly unfriendly rock in the road, jolting him painfully. Sitting up in startlement was not pleasant.
Vomiting over the side of the cart wasn’t either. And his broken arm was definitely in the running as well, as were his also-broken ribs. Luckily they weren’t far from a stream, and in short order he was out of the cart, cleaned up, and sipping something that may have been tea. Jack considered himself lucky that, unlike Merlin, he was able to hold the cup by himself. And thinking of Merlin… “I am not taking after Merlin!”
“You did, shut up,” was Arthur’s response. “You didn’t see because you were doin’ it, so you don’t get to tell me what went on.” He sat back on his haunches and regarded Jack with a weary sort of relief. “Glad you’re feelin’ alive enough to be your contrary self, though. What happened?”
Jack blinked surprise moisture out of his eyes and focused as best he could—everything was still a bit wavy—on his almost-tea. “I heard him before I saw him, and I thought I could tease him away from her trail. But I…was not thinking clearly, I suppose, and the triple-damned change was working against me. I would distract him, he would see me shift out of the corner of his eye, and we would be right back where we started. I do not know how long we were at it…but it was long enough that I grew too slow to move out of his reach.”
Serena dropped down next to him and kissed his temple. “Thank you,” she said. “You saved me twice now. Next time it’s my turn.”
Jack started to laugh, then stopped himself with a wince. “You already had a turn, Serena—I remember seeing it, you know, and I stand by Arthur’s assessment that it was quite impressive.”
She made a face. “He tasted nasty. Rabbits don’t taste like that.”
Jack discovered that shrugging was out, too. “Well, rabbits are a clean animal that live in pretty meadows among the flowers. That ruffian had nothing clean about him from what I could see, and a flower would probably have wilted from his unwashed stench.”
“You’re not wrong, he was a filthy animal,” Arthur said. “I buried everything except the gold in his pouch with him, because he owes her at least that. There was…a considerable amount.”
So the bastard had received payment up front, most likely with the caveat that once he’d killed the princess he would leave the kingdom and not come back. Jack took another slow, careful drink of the not-tea. It might be his imagination, but he was feeling somewhat…languid, and the pain he was in seemed to have lessened. “With any luck, his employer will think he completed his task and is drinking his money away in a disreputable tavern somewhere.”
“That’s why I buried him and hid the grave,” Arthur confirmed. He sighed, stretched. “I’m glad we had this break, I needed it.”
Jack made a face. “Sor…ry…” The mug fell out of his hand, but it didn’t fall far because Arthur’s hand was already on it. The last thing Jack saw was his friend’s relieved smile.
Serena shook her head. “I’m so glad you remembered what was in that book your friend Hans found. How could we have forgotten all these things?”
Arthur shrugged. “The Cataclysm took a lot away from all of us, from the whole world. The old books in Snow’s castle describe the world then as bein’ very different. And the maps…it wasn’t all islands in the before-time, you know. It was huge masses of land, with large kingdoms scattered all over them. There were creatures called ‘horses’ they rode on to get from place to place, because the distance was so far. We don’t have those anymore, at least not on any island I’ve ever been to.”
“I wish we had one here, it could pull the cart.”
Arthur laughed. “I think I’m our horse, at the moment. Thank all that’s good and perfect that my cousin Kai isn’t here to see, I’d never hear the end of it.” His expression once she turned away, though, dropped into a worried frown. The weather was starting to turn, and he was the only one able to pull the cart now that Jack had to ride in it. There was just no way they could take Serena to their old home on the other side of the mountains now, the risk of running into heavy rains on the pass or while crossing the land-bridge was too high, as was the chance of more human trouble finding them on the road. Not to mention that Jack needed to be someplace that wasn’t in the back of a rough cart being dragged over even rougher roads sooner rather than later. “Serena,” he said. “I know Jack said we’d take you to our old home, but given our current circumstances I think we need to consider changin’ our plans a bit…”
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