Feathers and Flame

Chapter 1

Safely hidden away behind one of the thickest tree-trunks, Faye examined the wound around the knife. Although it was bleeding quite a bit, she wasn’t in any immediate danger. She peered out around the tree to see if they had followed her. She had run off the path and into the dense forest, not even stopping to take the small knife out of her arm. She couldn’t see the men who had attacked her, but she could hear them approaching.

“Come on out.”

The voice echoed through the trees, making it hard for Faye to tell exactly how close they were.

She closed her eyes and tried to block out everything but the sounds of the men, like she had been taught. She tried to hear not just the voices, but the snapping of twigs as they walked through the undergrowth, their quick breaths and the sounds of animals scurrying or flying away from them made it difficult. It was much harder with a knife sticking out of your arm and blood freely flowing down to your fingers. The pain was distracting. She could make out that there were four men, less than she had initially thought, and they were getting closer to her but that was about it.

 Faye untied the strap of leather she wore like a bracelet, put it between her teeth and ripped out the knife. She didn’t quite manage to muffle the scream completely and it made it’s way out of her mouth as a loud growling sound. Then she looked at the knife, coated with a layer of her blood, and dropped it in disgust. She used her other arm to fix her bow back around her shoulder and then opened a pouch at her belt and removed a package of pig skin.

The pig skin had done it’s job and kept water out of the paste wrapped inside. Faye scooped some up and smeared it on her wound. Her eyes watered because of the sting, but she blinked back the tears. She re-wrapped the remaining paste and put it in back into her belt-pouch. It began to feel like the paste was burning into the wound, but the bleeding stopped and began to numb. She wrapped the strap of leather around the wound anyway.

Faye checked the wound once more before beginning to climb the big oak she was hiding behind. Born and raised in the shade of forests, Faye was a quick and steady climber with the confidence to climb quickly.  She was almost to the top when she glanced down and saw the men approaching, drawn be her pained growl. They looked well fed and fairly clean, so Faye ruled out the possibility that they were wanderers or tramps who jumped her on the road because they were desperate. They didn’t appear to be very skilled either, none of them bending to search for her tracks. Something about their movements, the way they held the clubs and short bronze swords, struck Faye as amateurish. From her perch, she could now see that two of them were just boys. These were not men who should have been able to take her by surprise.

It wouldn’t have happened if she had been paying attention.

It shouldn’t have happened. She needed to be more vigilant than that. After all, Faye was on her own now. The choice had been hers, and she had chosen to be alone. She was the one who had wanted it this way, with no more babysitters. She shook her head slightly in frustration as she watched them and thought of her own imcompetence. 

Then Faye continued to climb, going to the higher branches where she could disappear amongst the leaves. In a way, she was lucky that they had attacked her now, and not in a few moon turns when the leaves would fall and she would have had no cover.

When she was high enough, she stood on the branch (which was just sturdy enough to hold her weight), ran across it and lightly leaped onto a nearby tree, one closer to the men. She was fast to travel across this branch also and then pressed against the trunk of the tree, relying on her brown clothes to blend into the bark and conceal her.

“We won’t hurt you,” called one of the younger men, “Come out.”

Hard to believe, especially after one of them had stabbed her. It was unfortunate that she hadn’t seen which one of them had left his knife in her arm. If she had, she would gladly return it to him with a well aimed throw from where she was hiding.