Uneven
Breath escaping him in frosty clouds, Elliot stomps through the crisp fresh snow, the tall staff in his hand making for steadier footing as he contends with the uneven, icy ground. A next step has his foot plunging down deeper than he expects and he feels the crack of ice beneath his heel. His normally well kept boots are in need of a more thorough repairing, and he finds this out as ice water seeps inside. He hisses in surprise at the burst of cold soaking the sock beneath and sighs.
Looking forward, he squints a little down the narrow path. Skeletal stripped branches arc over the way ahead, branches Elliot knows are lively with growth and thick leaves in summer. Most of the year round this route is a sun dappled escape from the heat of the sun, a reprise from rain showers, but in the midst of the winter, it provides only a strange barren tunnel, awkward to traverse and cut through with harsh winter sunlight.
That sunlight is hardly there now, fading fast, and in the growing dusk, the snow has become shapeless, no definition to the hillocks and dips, the low light rendering flat the topography of the land around him. He shivers.
“Fuck.”
There’s nobody to hear it, but the hissed curse to himself somehow assuages the agitation beginning to buzz beneath his skin. Evening in winter is not a time it’s wise to wander alone.
He hitches up the bag on his back, cold gloved fingers curling beneath the strap that crosses his chest and holds it steady. He readjusts his grip on the staff and takes another more careful step, feeling out the ground with the base of the staff first. It’s slow, far too slow.
The path ahead of him seems to grow no shorter but the dark encroaches ever more readily. He hears the first howl a few minutes later, low and distant. It raises goosebumps on the back of his neck and attempts to quicken the pace without breaking his neck on the treacherous path.
The wolves have always been a threat, and Elliot is afraid of them, he’d be a fool not to be afraid.
In this valley, the wolves are king. Skulking monstrous beasts, lean and hardened by cold, made vicious and unpredictable by hunger. They’ll take anyone they can get, the old, the young, the foolish.
The wolves took his father in Elliot’s infancy, a mistake cost the man his life. Elliot had never known him, truly, so he did not grieve, merely took heed of the reminder it served. His stepfather had always been a more cautious man, and for Elliot’s mother’s sake, and the sake of his siblings, he was grateful for that sliver of steadfast dependability that the man offered.
If he moved quick, he would be home before the wolves picked up his frozen trail. If.
Travelling from his home village of Aylham to the next larger settlement of Tambridge is, in summer, the matter of a pair of strong legs and a couple of hours, setting off early and heading home in the hazy evening golden hour. In winter it is a daybreak slog, tying up business, trade and browsing as promptly as possible, and pushing to head home.
Elliot had gotten there fine, then the snow came, the clear blue sky groaning under the weight of heavy clouds that had Tambridge buried in a flurry of heavy, obscuring snowfall.
He waited it out in the smithy, content to watch the grizzled man sharpen their kitchen knives, but it didn’t seem wont to stop. He had just been resigning himself to a night spent in a warm barn belonging to any gracious stranger that might offer one, when the skies cleared again.
He should have known better than to push himself to leave with the day so late, but he did anyway. He paid the smithy, packed up his bundles and trudged out into the crisp freshness. In Tambridge, the snow was sparse, already soaking into the soggy frozen mud of the main thoroughfares, and that in itself had led Elliot astray. A short way out of the settlement, where the tracks from carts grow less deeply rutted and the paths less often travelled, the snow was thickly blanketed.
And so his current predicament, only perhaps two thirds of the distance to home, one foot wet, all of him cold, darkness imminent.
Elliot pauses to rub his hands together in a fretful fruitless search for warmth. It does little.
The wolves howl and it draws another shudder from him, hitching up his bag on his aching back. He’s sure they sound closer now. Elliot continues his path. Tap with the staff. Take a step. Tap with the staff. Take a step.
The lights of Aylham are flickering and shuttered, folks closed up for the night, but when Elliot sees them, the relief is so physical his knees wobble for a moment, as though they might give way. Despite the numb cold that’s settled in, his nose running and fingers frozen claws around the staff, he summons something up that has him walking with a straighter back, a faster gait.
The familiar wooden door is cold and his frozen knuckles smart at the ache when he knocks. It’s almost full dark now and the door swings inward to bring up a swell of warm golden light. His mother stands inside, stepping back to usher him in with a pinched smile that looks to ease as he crosses the threshold and puts down his back.
He makes to bend down and begin to unlace his boots. His stepfather claps his shoulder warmly, Elliot’s youngest sibling, Carey, balanced on the man’s hip. The little boy’s eyes droop with tiredness, thumb in his mouth. From behind Elliot, the door is still open, the cold seeping in and making the candles gutter.
“Where’s Luca?” His mother’s voice has a faltering note to it, a frailty that rarely rears its head. Elliot twists to look at, her, rising to his feet again.
“What do you mean?”
Now she says it, a cold that has nothing to do with the winter chill makes its home in Elliot’s bones. Luca is not a person easily overlooked, a rambunctious lively boy on the cusp of his teen years and already convinced he is far older than anyone supposes and utterly invincible. Neither of the latter facts are true, but Elliot knows he himself felt much the same once.
“He went to meet you, at the sign post. Didn’t you see him?” Elliot thinks of the village sign post, the gaily painted and maintained little sign on the edge of the village by the main road.
“I didn’t come back that way, I went on a back path.” Fear swells in Elliot’s through like something barbed and poisonous and he glances through the doorway into the yawning maw of the darkness outside. He’s moving before his mind can catch up.
His stepfather juggles the dead weight of Carey and tries to hand him to Elliot’s mother, but the little boy clings and begins to cry. It’s distant as Elliot careens back out into the night, tripping a little with his unwieldy frozen feet.
“I’ll find him,” he calls back.
The snow begins to fall again, soft thick flakes that catch on his lashes and in his hair, a cold breeze whipping back his hood.
It’s scant distance to the village’s sign post, but there is nobody there. Elliot arrives with panting breaths, squinting in the dark.
“Luca!” he hisses. Of his brother, there is no sign. He casts his eyes downward and finds tracks in the snow, rapidly vanishing in the dark. They pace away from him down the small winding road out of the village. He curses beneath his breath.
It feels foolish to make those steps beyond the safety of the village again, past the encroaching dark tree line, even if he does stay on the path. But Luca should be home, and he’s not, so there’s no choice in it.
Elliot follows the footsteps where he can see them and the path where he can’t. He hisses his brother’s name, but the snow steals his voice, a pervasive silence. He hears the not so distant howl of wolves though, their song a discordant echo through the valley.
He thinks the noise he hears next is the wolves again, another howling chorus on the back of the first, but the tone of it is different, a deep threatening fullness that seems to penetrate deep into Elliot’s skull. Something in the resonance of it makes his belly twist and roil, and despite the lack of solid food in there, he thinks for a moment he might be sick.
The sound is worse than the wolves. It’s been a time since Elliot heard it last, but the Wild Hunt’s horn is something that belongs to nightmares and half waking fears.
The fey are a canny sort of evil, a natural one that, like the wolves, all children grow up knowing to respect, to hold a certain measure of healthy fear towards. Folks put salt on their window sills on traditional celebration nights where trickery was like to be rife, line their doors and windows with iron, send children out on midsummer with their clothes inside out. Superstitions, perhaps, but the folks of the valley do not cross the fey and in turn the fey, unlike the wolves, seemed content to pass them by.
The Wild Hunt is quite its own beast though.
It’s not been since Elliot’s grandmother’s generation that anyone’s been snatched up and spirited away by them, and even then that was a rare occurrence. The horns rarely ring out, and if they do, they are a sound the valley’s folk heart through shuttered windows, safe inside.
A rounding of a bend presents Elliot with a smaller figure up ahead on the track and he calls out with more urgency now, less weight on being quiet than he puts on being swift.
“Luca!” The figure turns and Elliot can make out the slighter shape of his younger brother who runs towards him in the snow. He stops just short of colliding into a hug, his face pale in the darkness and eyes round with fear. “We need to get home, come, quickly now.” The boy, normally quick to protest any kind of instruction or guidance, nods quickly, turning along with Elliot to follow the track home.
The Hunt’s horn bellows out once more and the wolves howl their answer. Elliot quicken’s his pace and longs for his staff, the stout, iron capped, ash wood a comfort when the fair folk threaten.
For a moment, they trudge rapidly homeward, and Elliot thinks they are safe, near to the village boundary and safe harbour, even if it’s not their own home.
The Hunt’s hounds are faster than their hope, the baying dogs a shadowy writhing mass that tumble from the forest’s shadow’s onto the path behind them. One of the beasts snarls, something other about it that sets it apart from any other dog, a slight wrongness to the bend of its joints, a matte sinking darkness to the inky blackness of its fur.
Elliot stumbles to a run and pulls Luca along with him, forcing his gaze forward, onward. A little more, a little more.
Heart pounding in his ears, Elliot’s feet are numb form his earlier travel, body aching, but he urges Luca on, even as the cacophony of hoofbeats approach behind them.
When the Hunt’s horn bellows through the night
When the hounds cry out their violent delight
Get you to bed, lock up your home
Or the Hunt will claim you for their own
Wheeling around and cutting them off, Elliot and Luca are forced to a halt by a ring of horses, monstrous great things that toss their heads and snorts harsh breaths that muddy the air with smoke. Their great hooves stomp in the snow with impatience and a potential for violence that seems tightly reined. Their riders are shadowy, dissonant things, hard to see in the snow and looming. Luca makes a short sound of terror and grabs for Elliot, as though Elliot himself were not swallowing down the fear like a stone in his belly.
Elliot longs for the staff he does not have with him, abandoned with the pack in his home. One of the riders urges their horse forward and reaches down, a callous grasping movement. Elliot sees a brief glimpse of leather and dark fingers before the fey rider’s hand skitters away from Luca, a short snarl audible. Luca trembles and cries out, pressing closer and Elliot feels the fabric of his brother’s coat, the seams outside and lining exposed. Clever boy. Elliot feels the smallest sense of relief. They couldn’t touch Luca.
“You need to run.” He feels oddly calm imparting the instructions, low and shared close to Luca’s ear. “Your coat,” he clarifies. “They cannot touch you. I want you to run, run all the way home and don’t stop until you are inside with the door closed.” Luca shivers in his arms and the affection overwhelms Elliot for a moment, embracing the boy tightly and pressing a kiss to the side of his head, against the blonde tangle of his hair. “Run, Luca.”
With a burst of movement not unlike the panic of a trapped animal, Luca bursts into motion. The enormous horses rear back, their whinnies like shrieks in the night, and Elliot’s brother ducks through, running as fast as his legs can take him. The Hunt stays put, content, it seems, in the knowledge that Luca is untouchable. Elliot feels caged in though, the towering steeds and figures around him shifting and restless. Elliot’s fear is a wild thing in his chest, a writhing unwavering terror that has him breathless, dizzy, nauseous.
But for the fall of snow and occasional pawing of a hoof to the floor, the night is silent, eerie, the hounds gone quiet, the riders unspeaking. Elliot straightens his spine with a resolve he does not feel, spitting onto the snow.
“Take me then,” he demands, “or go back to hell.”
There’s a thump as one of the figures drops from their horse, then another. The snow and the cover of night obscure much of them, flashes of fabric all that’s visible. Elliot tries to look them in the eye, but finds a distortion, as though he had turned his head too rapidly and not focused quite right. His rapid back step is involuntary, jerky, but the hands that find him have no hesitation, no gentleness. His arms are bound, wrist to elbow, immovable and tight.
The hand that fists in his the back of his clothes feels like steel and he kicks wildly as he’s lifted from his feet as though he weighed no more than baby Carey. The two figures not atop their horses grab for his flailing ankles, bind them too. Elliot feels the scream caught in his throat, the fear overriding his senses. He has no more ability to beat these folk, strength against strength, than a kitten might.
He finds himself thrust bodily over the lap of a rider and something deep beneath Elliot’s fear is surprised to find warmth. The horse has the heat and sweat of any normal steed despite its nightmarish size and strength, and the rider he is sprawled indelicately across hitches him into place better without a word.
The jolting little steps of the horse as the group begin to move again are accompanied by the Hunt’s horn. So close, it overwhelms Elliot, fills his senses, sends a strange sort of echo of pain through him that hums discordantly in his bones. He groans and feels the nausea rise in a way he cannot control. The bile burns up his throat and he chokes a little as the vomit drips from his mouth. Above him, there is a snarl of distaste, but the rider shifts and the horse breaks into a gallop and a canter.
Elliot's nose burns, his mouth taste acidic and rancid and the earth flies beneath them, a rush of white and grey and mud, all turned washed out in the dark. His head spins and his body slips, making him whimper in fear. Above the baying of the hounds that rush around them, the thunder of hooves and the inhuman occasional shrieks of the Wild Hunt around him, Elliot feels a strong hand adjust his position and warm fingers settles against the back of his skull. It seems likely it’s mean to hold him still, but it feels almost gentle.
Their running shifts, and Elliot sees the ground drop away, the world eddy and twist like blood in water. It feels like falling, and Elliot passes out.
