Chapter Text
The freshly fallen snow was almost blinding in the morning light, but the girl had grown accustomed to it.
This winter had been meaner than usual. Game was scarce. People from nearby towns were traveling up the forest more and more, encroaching on her territory, stealing from her usual herds. And worst of all, the pelts she had gotten from a snow cat two winters back in a strike of luck weren’t holding anymore. She needed new ones. Rabbit gloves had been a good new addition even if they were just mittens and she couldn’t use them to shoot. Even so, she still needed something to line her boots, maybe even her jacket, if she got lucky.
But luck was never on her side, so she had to make it happen herself. And she knew just what to do.
When people came north, it pushed her upwards, towards the wall, so as to not cross paths with anyone. And up there there were always interesting things to see. Including the prey she was hunting now.
She fixed her stance on top of the tree branch she was standing on. Her feet had fallen asleep long ago, her fingers half frozen inside her mittens, but her muscles were used to this. The waiting. The tension. She settled in to watch one of the gaps that existed in the evergreen fence that divided human and fae land.
The girl was no stranger to fae. If you went deep enough into the woods, you were bound to see their traps: mushroom circles, will o’wisps, crying babies, sudden mirages. As a principle, she kept her distance from everything that looked slightly magical. But this… if she pulled this off, it would be glorious.
She was going to bring down the dire wolf she saw crossing the border.
The wolf came every couple of days and headed down south, closer to the human settlements than any fae she’d ever seen. She had tracked its movements in one of her maps. He seemed to be looking for something. But most important of all, it was massive . Looked like rippling waves of grey fur, a sea of warmth.
If she managed to bring it down, it could mean her survival through winter. She’d be warm, she’d be fed, she could even make new weapons out of the bones. Hell, she might even have extras and sell it in town, even though that idea made her stomach churn. She smiled to herself.
Fae or not, that thing was going down.
Dispatching the creature wasn’t hard. Two ashwood arrows, perfectly shot, if she did say so herself. She even got the arrows back.
It was a bit harder to drag it back to the cave. She had planned for it, of course. She had built a travois out of long branches and twine. She unceremoniously dropped the body over it and started pulling it through the snow, trying to not trail blood on the snow someone could follow. It was heavy, but she had used the rest of her seal fat on the bottom of the travois and it had helped it slide better.
Once she made it to her cave, she parked herself outside and got to work: skinning, cleaning, cutting the meat. It took hours. Her fingers slowly lost feeling. She was almost entirely coated in blood by the time she was done. It almost didn’t phase her anymore. She might boil some water to clean herself eventually, but not yet.
She brought her canvas outside and started spreading the pelt on top of it, scraping the meat away to turn it into leather. As it dried with the days under the sun, she would still have to scrape it again and again, smear it with her concoction, the one that made the skin tougher, then scrape it again. It would be at least a week before she even thought about cutting it and sewing with it, that was if the weather helped it. But she had done it.
She killed it. It hadn’t even put up a fight.
Finally, she buried some of the meat in her cold box under the snow. Then, she let herself get close to her fire and put some of her winnings on a spit to cook. She didn’t require much nowadays. If the sun came out again, she might try to turn some of that into jerky, which was more useful and easier to eat. She had no idea how it would taste – deer was good, seal was regular. Today, however, she deserved this treat: warm food.
Alive. Warm. Fed. Free. It was more than she could have hoped for.
She’d had a name once.
She heard it still in her dreams. Feyre, they called her, back when someone called her anyone other than “girl!” or “hey, you!”. She didn’t think much of it. Elain, her sister, had a pretty little name because she was a pretty little girl. Nesta had a strong name because she was strong and tall. Feyre got a normal name because that’s what she was: unremarkable.
She didn’t speak much back then. Even in her dreams, she barely said a word, just watched things unfold. Not speaking meant not getting reprimands from her mother. Too young to be prepped for a wife, but too old to be nursed. Most of the time, people didn’t even remember she existed, except for father. He always brought her a little something from his travels: a toy boat, a music box, a stuffed animal. It always made her smile. But he was hardly ever home as it was.
And the less she spoke, the less people wanted to hear of her, even when she did ask for things she needed: food, bath, playtime. People told her to be a good girl and wait for her turn, then her turn would never come. And she was a good girl. So she waited.
Then mom died. Things got worse. Dad got hurt. In the shack, it was like she didn’t exist, except as a punching bag. A slow maid. Get water, get herbs, get food. An errand girl like the ones they used to have. She remembered her mom’s words asking this one thing of her, talking to her of all people: take care of them. She cried, asking why was it her responsibility to take care of them.
Then she woke up and she was in her home and her family was no longer there, depending on her, and she couldn’t help but to give a sigh of relief. She might be lying in a sleeping bag in a cave filled with old bones of things she had to kill with her bare hands, but at least she had no more mouths to feed than her own.
That made her close her eyes again and fall back to sleep. There were no dreams this time.
A couple of days later, when the fur was almost turning to leather, she woke to the sound of a beast. A heavier step made her open her eyes and reach for her knife. Slowly, she pulled out of her sleeping bag and dragged herself to the darkness.
The beast was in the entrance, looking at her stretched out skin. If she had to, she was going to fight it, big and probably magical as it looked. It could snap its teeth and magic would solve all its problems. She had not such luck. If she lost this, she would have nothing but an empty stomach. And that will just not do.
Turning, the beast looked at her with shiny human eyes. It saw her even in the dark. She was not scared, not sorry. She was hungry. And so, she attacked first.
Beasts never expect a small thing like her to bite, to have claws as sharp as theirs. Taking a risk, she dove under it, knife up. It pierced its chest on the right side, but it pulled back before it could get any deeper, roaring. She rolled to the side so as not to get crushed by its massive paws. Pulling a half-burnt log from the firepit, she threw it at his face, spreading ashes and embers through his mane. As he pulled back and rubbed his face, she grabbed her bow and quiver with one hand, her pelt with another and rushed off into the cold of winter.
The beast had a keen sense of smell and kept following her, but she had the upper hand. She had been hiding from creatures all of her life and she knew these woods better than anyone. This wasn’t far from where she had just been lost, after all. When winter was about to settle in, she always ended up around there. There was something comforting about somewhere you know when the world turned white.
She smeared herself with the scent of something else. Then she took some of that stuff and spread it around the trees she was passing by, effectively ruining the scentscape. There, find a needle in a haystack, prick .
Once she stopped moving, however, the bitter cold took over. The fur was thick, but it didn’t cover all of her. She’d have to find somewhere to hide for now, until it was safe to return to the cave and grab her things.
She climbed a tree and looked around. She could try to find another cave that wasn’t too close to her own, but most would be teeming with predators at this time of year. Perhaps a burrow? Under a tree or something. She’d slept in many of those when she’d first gotten lost. Problem was finding one. She turned towards the town, gazing longingly at the plumes of smoke billowing from the chimneys. Sometimes she wondered…
No. She didn’t belong with other humans anymore. Nesta’s voice came back in moments like these: You are no sister of mine, creature. Out, now!
She bit the inside of her mouth. Burrow it was. She had survived every winter since and she would survive many more, faerie beast or not.
There was no burrow to be found. Even the ones still occupied by creatures she could easily dispatch weren’t big enough for her to fit inside. When she had been a dangly child, she would have fit. But not since she had grown, her annoying hips tightening her hard earned clothes, her stupid breasts aching and getting in the way of her bow.
She found solace in the trees, hoping to be able to watch from above if the beast was coming. But there were almost no leaves this time of year and her bones were quickly freezing. She was shivering under her pelt, the smell of frozen meat and half tanned leather wafting all around her. It was impossible to sleep.
So she kept walking. There was bound to be a place she could wait this out, there always was. A ledge, a fallen tree, somewhere she could take shelter under. But this time there wasn’t. This was the worst of winter, when the trees were bare and gaunt and the earth was frozen and nothing could be heard but the wind. She growled low in her throat, rubbing her hands together to try and get some feeling back into them. That damn beast… she was supposed to be set for winter. How dare it? She had gotten that cave set, she had gotten the berries during autumn to preserve them, she had built the leather canvas, gotten the right sap for tanning, made the sleeping bag, built the fire spot. She had drawn map after map on the walls with all she needed to know to survive.
She looks at her arrows, wishing she had more ashwood. These two would have to be enough. They had been for the wolf, they just might be again.
Yes. A wicked smile took her features. That sounded like a plan.
The Beast was waiting for her at the cave.
“You have guts, human.”
She fixed her arrow on her bow. So it could speak. Big deal. When she didn’t reply, it took a step outside, allowing her to see the mess it had done inside. All of her belongings, broken, ripped, spread in pieces. Even her maps on the walls were ruined.
“You have taken a life that did not belong to you. For that, according to the laws of the Treaty, you must be punished”.
She waited, raising an eyebrow. Oh, it thought it could punish her ? Sweet. She even gave out a chuckle. The world had been punishing her for existing since she was born. She had lost her parents, her home, her family, her name. No longer. Not if she could help it. She would survive or die trying.
“You have two choices. Either you die here, like the creature you are…” You are no sister of mine, creature. “Or you come to Faerie with me.”
She snorted. Her, off to Faerie? Like one of those Children of the Blessed that never came back? As if. Her life was awful, but at least she wasn’t indentured to something cruel and magical. She kept still. The creature showed its fangs.
“Choose, mortal.”
She shook her head once. He showed his fangs.
“This is a fight you cannot win.”
So was life. So was winter. And yet…
She shook her head again and lifted her bow.
“So be it.”
She released at the same moment he lunged at her. The arrow would have pierced the eye, but when he moved, his head was down, like a buck attacking another. The arrow snapped against its powerful horns. Then he was at her, over her, her back banging hard on the cave floor beneath, the air whooshing out of her. He snapped his teeth just above her, on the skin around her.
“What kind of monster kills a man then wears his skin?”
A monster who’s cold , she thought, squirming, struggling to breathe. When he tried to pull the skin off of her, she grabbed his mane with one hand and with the other she grabbed the other remaining arrow from her quiver, aiming to stab it in his eye. He shook his head and she missed. The tip grazed him just under the right eye, making a red line of blood. The wood immediately splintered. She kept attached to his fur when he shook his head again.
Managing to slip from below his paws, she jumped back, running into the wall of the cave. He was suddenly around her again, one paw on each side. His face was contorted in pain and anger, the cut bleeding.
“What even are you?” He grumbled.
Hungry, she thought, clawing at the cut in his face. No sister of mine, her memories insisted. He roared and the mere impact of it almost deafened her as she tried to wriggle out of his grasp.
His paw pinned her to the wall, the massive claws digging into her skin. She let out a shriek of distress, hands trying to push it away. Still, she faced it head on, holding back her tears. She had no fear. She had no fear. She had no…
“Last chance, creature.” It said. “It’s Prythian or death. I’ve been more than lenient.”
She hadn’t spoken in so long. The very shape of words in her mouth felt weird. Her first instinct was to say death . Then, for some reason, her father came to mind. His calm smile when he showed her how to operate a simple mechanism in one of the toys he had brought from his travels. When she did it, his smile grew. You are everything, he had said, putting a lock of golden hair behind her ear. She hadn’t known what that meant back then, but every so often, this memory came to haunt her. She thought she was understand when she was older, but she didn’t. She struggled to find another of those, another good memory, any time someone had said something so beautiful, had told her that she mattered and she couldn’t remember it.
But one person had. One person she had lost and could never find again. One person who had wanted her to live. That she had wanted to protect so much she got lost for.
In his memory, she could not give up.
With that, she stopped struggling, breathing in short spurts. She looked inside of her for the right muscles, for how to twist her mouth and her tongue. Finally, with a broken voice she didn’t recognize, she said:
“Prythian.”
The beast didn’t say anything. She slowly raised her eyes at it. He watched her as if waiting to see if it was a trick. But she was out of tricks. She was cold, she was hungry, she was defeated. Even predators had to know when it was time to quit.
It pulled her from the wall, then slammed her back against it. The back of her head connected to it and she was out.