Art Catsinni.
They rode until the sun forgot them.
The forest thinned and thickened by turns, a long green tide dragging them forward. For a time, the road was little more than two ruts threading between roots swollen like knuckles. Ferns brushed their boots, leaving dew on leather. Birds sang in brief flurries, as if they, too, were on edge. The four of them, Rafael, Caleb, Joaquin, and Jihye, kept the sort of silence that wasn’t quite agreement and wasn’t quite suspicion. It was a quiet made of breath and hoofbeats, of unsaid things.
Jihye heard everything. It wasn’t only her ears, though the fox in her fought all morning to show them, to flare at each crack of twig and scrape of bark. It was the way sound travelled here: true and unadorned. A woodpecker’s measured violence. The light lash of a branch against Joaquin’s sleeve. Rafael’s steady cadence of breath matched a horseman’s rhythm. Caleb whispered prayers when he thought no one could hear.
The longer they rode, the more the monotony worked its blade. The forest turned from cathedral to corridor. Trees became the same tree; shadows were the same shadow repeated endlessly. The mind reached for anything that broke the pattern.
Caleb broke first. He rode up alongside Jihye and cleared his throat in the formal way he’d been raised to. “We’re going to need a landmark or a fight soon,” he said, attempting a smile. “I’m beginning to think we’ve angered a god of boredom.”
“Don’t,” Rafael said without turning his head. “They listen.”
“Right. Sorry.” Caleb’s smile died, then staggered back to life. “So. Joaquin. You said the ridge after the birches, then the split rock?”
Joaquin nodded from the rear, where he habitually rode, watching their back trail, measuring the wind. “Two ridges,” he corrected. “Then a cut through the old burn. From there, the Lurines’ vales aren’t far as birds fly, but we’re walking, and the birds don’t owe us favours.”
“You speak like you’ve walked this path too often,” Rafael said, easy as a test.
Joaquin did not answer at first. His freckled hands were light on the reins, and sunlight made the ink along his forearms glimmer, those vine-twined sigils that marked the wood-elves’ sworn. “Often enough,” he said finally. “I served the King before I served you three.”
Caleb shot Jihye a look: the same question, shared and unvoiced. Jihye kept her eyes ahead. The King’s embrace lingered on her shoulder like a pressure she could still feel if she sought it. Remember, Arcanthus, he had whispered, naming a thing and then refusing it.
She hated puzzles that bled.
“Served the King,” Rafael repeated. “In what capacity?”
“As son,” Joaquin said, so simply he could have been telling them what the weather was.
They stopped out of instinct. Even the horses knew a turn when they felt one.
“Son,” Caleb echoed. “You…” He looked Joaquin over again, as if a crown might be tucked beneath the braid behind his ear. “You’re of the royal house?”
“The youngest of four,” Joaquin said, and there was something like relief in the saying. “Fourth branch on an old tree. A wind can take me, and the canopy won’t notice. Don’t call me prince,” he added, almost pleading. “I’m a guard. An archer. A path-walker. I like those better. Less bowing.”
Rafael’s mouth thinned, not in disapproval, but thought. “That explains why the King spared us bread and shelter,” he said. “And why he sent you with us, rather than a cohort. A son is a message you can write in your own hand.”
Joaquin shrugged. “He knows I’m happiest with my feet on a road and leaves in my hair. I want no throne. My brothers can have the weight.” He smiled, quick and crooked. “Adventure sits better on me than rule.”
“Adventure,” Caleb muttered, glancing at Jihye. “That’s one name for this.”
“Would you rather go back?” she asked.
“No.” He surprised himself with the speed of it. “No, I wouldn’t.”
They wore the conversation a while after that, testing seams. Joaquin spoke a little of his brothers, of Eldren the stern, Maelor the patient, Ilyas the clever, careful stories that revealed nothing of strategy and everything of affection. He spoke of the wood that raised him, of teachers with sap on their hands and knives on their belts; of the hunting hollows and the king’s court grown from living oak. He never once called it home, and Jihye noticed. Names mattered.
“Your father told me… a word,” Jihye said, once the path widened and the horses could walk close enough for quiet voices. “Arcanthus.”
Rafael’s head tipped almost imperceptibly, as if something inside had pricked him. Joaquin’s brows knit. “He did?” The surprise seemed genuine. “He’s parsimonious with those old names.”
“I gathered.” Jihye felt for the amulet through her coat, the bronze disc warm as breath against her palm. She did not take it out. “I don’t know what it means.”
“Later,” Rafael said. Not unkind. Not soft. Just done. The word made a shelf of his mouth.
Jihye tucked the question away and let the trees resume their march.
The day leaned. Shadows elongated and went thin at the thighs. The ferns gave way to scrub and to stands of birch that gleamed as if someone had lifted the bark and polished the pale underflesh. One ridge crested; another shouldered up to replace it.
When it came, it came in the way a storm does, the air itself changing its mind.
It was small at first. Jihye’s skin noticed it: a heaviness, as if the world had taken a deep breath and then refused to let it go. Her neck prickled. Her ears wanted to rise and refused because she held them down with will alone. The horses tossed and snorted, hooves chuffing restless dust.
“Do you feel that?” Caleb whispered.
Rafael’s eyes narrowed. “Yes.”
Joaquin pointed, not ahead but low. “There,” he said, and Jihye followed his finger to the edge of the path, where the leaf litter looked wrong. Not disturbed. Arranged. The lines of it were too neat, the spirals too regular. A glyph written in the language of desiccation.
“Don’t step there,” Rafael said sharply, as Caleb’s horse sidled. “Bind your breath. She likes the answers you exhale.”
“She?” Jihye asked, but she already heard it: a sound too high to be human, too thin to be a branch, a sound like knives playing at bees.
The wasps came like a thought you couldn’t unthink.
They poured out of the birches, not from a hive but from the seams in the air, a black and gold torrent. They had a shape: a spiral, a spear, a woman’s height. They swirled and tightened, bodies striking bodies until they became dense, until the buzzing pitched into the centre and made a new sound entirely, a kind of voice.
What stood in the road after the swarm had wrung itself into a form was tall and pale as unbaked clay. Her nails were dark, curved like sickle moons. Her teeth were neat and pointed, childlike and wicked at once. The whites of her eyes were the raw red of a wound that had not learned to scab, her irises glossy and black as polished seeds. Her hair hung in ropes that reminded Jihye of the roots of strangler figs.
The smell of her was sweetness turned, the way fruit does when it forgets itself.
She hissed, a long exhale over a mouthful of needles. The hiss became a word that wrapped itself around Jihye’s name and wore it like a skin.
“Jiiiiiihye.”
Every muscle Jihye had ever owned told her to run, and every lesson life had carved into her bones told her that running first was how you died. She did not move. Her claws ached within her hands—fingers, now, but not by much. Fox, fox, fox, her blood chanted.
The woman, no, not a woman, never a woman, dragged her attention sideways and saw Joaquin. Her head cocked half a degree. A slow smile bared her small, sharp teeth.
“The little king’s sapling,” she said, amused. “How curious that he sends his own rootling into sure rot.”
Joaquin’s bow was already in his hands. “He didn’t send me. I asked to go.”
“The tree does not ask to sway,” she said. “The wind tells it.”
Rafael’s palms faced each other, a span apart, the way he held them when he was lining up a working. Heat gathered between them like a plan trying to be born. “Ellamerelda,” he said, naming her as one names a knife one recognises.
She smiled with all her small, neat teeth. Her gaze returned to Jihye and bore itself a degree. “Come, fox. Bring me back what you borrowed. That shine in your ribs is not yours, and you know it.”
The other thing in Jihye, the long-limbed wrongness that had leaned close at a fire and asked to be invited, stirred at that. She strangled it with her attention and spoke in her own voice. “You wore my name in my sleep and tried to make me call it a gift,” she said. “I owe you nothing.”
Ellamerelda laughed softly. The leaf-spirals shivered, pleased to be in a scene. She began to walk forward without disturbing a single edge of the pattern.
Rafael’s hands closed. Fire became a hard brightness, a white-orange wheel. He cast it with a flick as economical as a signature.
Flame hit Ellamerelda’s breastbone and blew out like a dandelion. It became a thousand petals of heat and then forgot it was heat at all, unmaking itself around her like a curtsey. The glamour in the air drank it and sighed.
Rafael’s jaw tightened. Ellamerelda glanced at him with the cattish curiosity of the beloved keeping one eye on the boring friend. She touched two fingers together in the air as if pinching an invisible gnat. Rafael jerked, caught, not lifted, just held, every muscle declaring its outrage and obeying anyway.
Caleb made the mistake of shouting his name. Ellamerelda, without looking, wrote a little line in the air with her nail. The sound around Caleb thickened. His breath stayed behind his teeth. His eyes moved too much because nothing else could.
“Don’t,” Jihye said. Not loud. Sharp. “If you want me, come and take me.”
“Want?” Ellamerelda’s red eyes brightened. “Such pretty mortal verbs. I prefer the older ones. Claim. Forfeit. Owe.”
Jihye moved.
She chose the fox because the other thing inside her was a door she did not trust yet. Bones re-articulated, muscles running like a river down a steeper bed, nine tails tearing free like banners. The first rush of speed felt like memory, not motion. She hit Ellamerelda low, claws hungry for tendon.
It was like grappling with a reflection. Resistance was there and not there, as if Ellamerelda had remembered to be solid in some places and forgotten in others. Jihye’s claws scored lines that gleamed like silver and didn’t bleed. The wasps that made Ellamerelda’s dress loosed in angry clouds and pelted Jihye’s muzzle, dusting her with powder that stung like nettle-fire. She snarled, spat, slashed again.
Joaquin moved when Jihye moved, using her ferocity the way a good archer uses wind. He went left, into the margin where Ellamerelda’s glamour was thinner. His first arrow flew easily and straight. Ellamerelda’s head tilted lazily, and the shaft kissed her cheek and passed through, a trick of light and not. The second arrow, loosed before the first had finished its thought, found purchase in the woven bramble of her hair. The head sank; the hair closed around it, attempting to grow it back out of existence the way a body deals with splinters.
Ellamerelda’s smile twitched, not wounded, not truly, but annoyed. She turned one delicate hand toward Joaquin, and the air by his knees went to syrup. His next arrow dragged through it like a fish trying to fly.
Rafael, held in her pinch, spoke through teeth. “Caleb,” he said, and Jihye loved him for the way he made it a command and a request simultaneously. “Right pocket. Iron.”
Caleb’s eyes flicked. His right hand, hand by millimetre, found the small knife hidden in the seam of his coat. Ellamerelda’s gaze was on Jihye; she didn’t see the way the blade dropped, slow because glamour wanted it so, true because gravity has its own gods. Rafael pivoted his palm. The iron kissed his skin and asked a price. He gave blood. He spoke four words. One of them wasn’t a word.
The smell of iron is a memory: wet, sharp, older than bone. The glamour around Ellamerelda wrinkled, offended. Rafael’s blood-thread coiled and hardened into a chain that didn’t exist and had always existed. It snapped around Ellamerelda’s wrist, and she screamed properly, not in fear but the fury of a queen corrected in public.
The wasps in her dress tried to smother the chain. They died in black snow. She ripped her arm against it, and the links burned brighter.
“Hold her,” Rafael ground out.
Jihye didn’t nod; she simply became the part of the world Ellamerelda would have to go through. She took another rake of those lacquered nails across her side, pain like heat going mean, not just hot, and clamped down on the fae’s hips with fox-teeth. The taste was flowers left too long in a vase.
Joaquin stepped through the thick air like a man deciding water should have been a road all along. His stance was a long-practised prayer: knees soft, shoulders down, breath stacked into muscle. He drew. He let go.
The arrow took Ellamerelda in the eye.
It was not some fabled slayer’s shaft. It was a good arrow, fletched with care, iron-headed and honest. It entered with a soft, wet sound and buried to the feathers. Ellamerelda’s head jerked back as if her hair had been seized. For an instant, the glamour around her went thin, and Jihye could see the shape under the shape, too many angles, too few. Ellamerelda’s free hand came up almost daintily and snapped the shaft. Half of the arrow fell, the other half remained in her skull like an accusation.
She laughed. It sounded like glass breaking underwater.
“Little hunters,” she murmured. “You still think there are throats to cut.”
Joaquin loosed again without argument. The second arrow hit wrong, glanced off glamour like rain off oil, nicked the corner of her other eye and sank low into her cheek. The iron there steamed.
Rafael snarled something that tasted of old temples and pulled. The chain wrenched Ellamerelda’s arm with it, and something in a joint decided it had been asked for too much. The pop was both mundane and appalling. Ellamerelda’s face went slightly wrong around it, like a mask had been put on.
“Enough,” she said, and the word carried. The leaf-spirals bucked as if at a lash. The moths in the air convulsed.
Jihye braced for a shattering. It came, but not the shape she’d imagined.
Ellamerelda dissolved.
Not into rot. Not into dust. Into butterflies, a thousand black-and-red wings, eyespots like little wells of midnight. They poured out of her, out of hair, skin, dress, as if she had been a nest for them. They rushed the world like a thought trying to be remembered, and as they flowed, the chain burned through empty air and snapped on itself with a noise like a bell being told a secret it hated.
One butterfly hovered an extra heartbeat in front of Jihye’s nose, so close she could see the powder loosen from its wings with each beat. It did not look like forgiveness. It looked like a plan that hadn’t finished hatching. Then it turned and went the way all the others had gone: everywhere.
Silence fell in handfuls, pieces that didn’t quite fit together.
Rafael dropped as if the hook in his back had been cut. Caleb wheezed the first emergency breath of a drowning man, then another, then swore in three languages. Joaquin kept his bow up, the string humming almost imperceptibly, eyes fixed on the place where Ellamerelda had been as if she might change her mind and become a person again out of spite.
Jihye let the fox peel back down into her and sat, chin high, because if she lay down now, she would not get back up quickly enough. Her side was a furnace behind her ribs where those black nails had written something into her. It didn’t feel like a wound on the skin. It felt like a handprint somewhere more private.
“Is she dead?” Caleb asked hoarsely. “Tell me we killed a fae queen with two arrows and some iron and I’ll write a psalm.”
Rafael wiped blood, his, not hers, from his palm onto his coat. The smear smoked and then went dull. “No body. No ash. No heat to track. I don’t like it.”
Joaquin lowered his bow at last. He walked to the leaf-spiral and dragged his boot across it. Patterns resist being unmade, but the rudeness helped. “She won’t die the way people do,” he said. “She’ll have a heart-stone or a hollow or a spidered place where her glamour roots. Break that and the rest forgets what it is.”
“And if we don’t know where she keeps it?” Jihye asked, wincing as she pulled her coat back into place. She could still taste the floral rot in her mouth.
“Then we assume she’ll climb back into herself,” Rafael said. “And be angrier.”
“Wonderful,” Caleb said faintly. “Let’s send her a fruit basket.”
They didn’t linger. Places like this, where a fae had been too close to herself, held onto your footsteps. The forest changed again around them, the air losing Ellamerelda’s sweetness but not all of her weight. The birches gave way to older trees that had learned how to be dignified and dangerous. Light thinned. A narrow stream giggled across the path as if none of this was its problem.
“The Lurines lay their paths like nets,” Joaquin said, voice pitched to the level of a confidant who didn’t quite trust you. “If you see a road that looks too helpful, don’t take it. They keep their doors down the ways no one chooses.”
“They’re going to adore us,” Caleb muttered. “Showing up with moth dust and missing arrows and the scent of a fae queen’s temper in our hair.”
“Call her a queen to their faces and they’ll salt your boots,” Rafael said. “The Lurines think titles are diseases.”
“Good,” Caleb said. “I’m asymptomatic then.”
They crested a low rise and found a meadow soaking up the last of the day. Grass brushed their knees. Through a bite in the distant treeline, a pale cliff showed itself, the world beyond it a smear of hard blue. Joaquin pointed not at the pretty gap but toward a darker seam at the meadow’s edge.
“That way,” he said. “Quicker to their vales and less likely to be seen until we mean to be.”
They turned. For a blessed twenty breaths, no one remembered they had mouths.
“What do you know of Arcanthus?” Rafael asked then, as if the question had been waiting in the shadows and now had decided to step out.
Jihye’s heart misstepped, then corrected. “Nothing,” she said honestly. “The King put the name in my ear and pressed it down like a coin and left me with the weight. I don’t know why, and I don’t know what he expects me to buy with it.”
Rafael’s lips tightened, not refusal, not quite. Caution. “And if a god hears us speak it in his house?” he asked the trees, perhaps. Then he shook his head at himself. “Later.”
She gave him back his word without liking it.
The seam Joaquin chose swallowed light faster than the ordinary dark does. Branches knitted overhead too deliberately to be an accident of growth. Rocks underfoot had iron veins in them so thin they sang only to people who knew how to listen. Jihye did not like that they sang to her.
“We’ll stop here,” Rafael said at last, finding a gnarled beech root that could hold three backs at once and a fourth by their knees. “A small camp. No fire.”
“We’re already in a mouth,” Caleb said, but he unsaddled the horses with efficient hands and didn’t argue about flame. He had learned to trust Rafael about what sort of light made you a meal.
They ate by habit, cheese and a heel made less meagre when Joaquin, who’d said nothing about hunger, produced another heel and made the fractions less cruel. They passed a skin. Joaquin refilled it from a seam of water he found by listening for the way stones complain when they are forced to be bridges.
Jihye shrugged out of her coat. The welt down her side where Ellamerelda’s nails had found her wasn’t on the skin; it made a smear of heat beneath it. Rafael leaned in, hand hovering, not yet touching. The air around his palm warmed like a hearth, thinking about its life choices.
“This isn’t a wound of meat,” he said. “She scratched where the fox sleeps. If you let it scar wrong, it will be a map that takes you places you don’t mean to go.”
“I have maps enough,” Jihye said, because she did. The amulet under her shirt made its own opinion known against her palm: warm, insistent, the way someone’s name feels when it is about to be said aloud.
They let the twilight become its own person. When it was old enough to be trusted, Rafael spoke as if the conversation had never really paused, just circled to find a more protected angle.
“Arcanthus,” he said, and the air in the beech’s roots listened with more than ears. “He’s not one of the new gods you can invite into a house with bread and salt and expect to leave with your children still wholly yours. He’s of the first lot. The original. The ones the world made by accident when it was still forgetting itself.”
Caleb swallowed audibly. “The ones we don’t call by name.”
“We just did,” Rafael said dryly. “So our manners are already poor.” He stared into the not-fire and continued. “Those old gods were not people you could flatter into mercy. They were… engines. Hungers that thought. They didn’t care for mortals. Not at first, anyway. We were background, weather in our little houses, insects that built stories to keep from drowning in the size of things.”
“And then?” Joaquin asked quietly.
“Then we kept building,” Rafael said. “We made names, and names are traps even gods step in. We sang, and songs are bridges. We prayed, and prayers are spoons: we kept scooping and scooping at the ocean. Some of the old ones retreated into the places under the places. Some were bound. Some still answer when someone foolish enough knows how to knock.”
His eyes slid to Jihye’s, and then away, as if he’d hoped not to make it a look.
“And Arcanthus?” Jihye asked when he didn’t continue. She wanted the knife of it. “What name sits under his?”
Rafael’s mouth tightened. “Disdain,” he said simply. “He despised the slowness in us. He hated the way mortals trip into each other and call that stumbling love. He called our frailty a contagion. He went hunting.” Rafael’s voice did not falter, but the beech seemed to lean closer around them. “Whole peoples. Whole songs. He drove them until nothing was left of their names but an ache in the world where those names used to fit. If you’ve ever stood on a shore and felt like you were forgetting a word that tasted like salt, that’s one of his extinctions, echoing.”
Caleb put a hand to his chest as if to steady something inside. “How…how was he stopped?”
“He wasn’t,” Rafael said first, and then amended it, because precision matters. “Not by killing. By binding. One species, records quarrel about which, stood, and did not break, and made a shape of their stand that held. Maybe it was the ancestors of the Lurines. Maybe it was a person with no one left to claim the story. Maybe it was something that isn’t around to tell us how proud it felt. But they held him. They made a prison that only gods can feel. It’s frayed,” he added, almost to the bark. “These things unwind. Time pulls.”
Jihye thought of Ellamerelda calling the shine in her ribs not hers. She thought of the King’s hand on her coat and the weight of Arcanthus in the space behind her heart. She thought of Valerian, counting her choices and betting on the one that would make her most like him.
“Why me?” she asked, and hated the child-ness in it. “Why would a king put that name in my mouth? Why would a god who hates us even notice a fox with a knife and a grudge?”
“I have guesses,” Rafael said. He looked so tired for a moment that Jihye could see the boy he had been, too clever for his own good and already making bargains with the wrong kinds of silence. “None of them kind. None I’m willing to set on fire by saying out loud before I must.”
“Later,” Jihye said, giving him back his earlier mercy and not missing the bitter echo of it.
“Later,” he agreed, and made it a promise instead of a stall this time.
Beyond their hollow, the paths of the Lurines braided and unbraided themselves: dark laces being tied by invisible hands. Somewhere inside that weaving, a city waited that wasn’t a city, where people who had chosen not to be seen built lives out of the parts of the world that still remembered how to keep secrets. Somewhere not so far behind, a thousand butterflies had divided Ellamerelda into little errands.
Joaquin rose soundless as a breath and strung his bow. Caleb checked his knives as if they were teeth, and he meant to smile with them. Jihye pulled her coat close to hide a heat that wouldn’t cool. Rafael tipped his head back against the beech and closed his eyes for three heartbeats, the way a general does who knows his soldiers are also his friends.
When the forest finally told them it was night enough to move, they were already ready.