Two bodies collided, tumbling to the ground in a bruising tangle of limbs. The wind was knocked from Angharad’s chest as her sprint turned to a roll through the tall roots. When the world jerked to a halt and she felt a warm soft body beneath her, she quickly scrambled to sit herself up despite her dizzy head. 

Beneath her was a young hir man, hardly older than she by looks, a broad and thick figure sprawled out with the moss and dead leaves staring up at her with dark eyes round and blinking. Clutched in his wide hand was a large stone axe that Angharad could scarcely believe wasn’t buried in her skull. The instant he saw her spot it, he dropped it to the root cluster next to him and held up his empty palms to her, the warm brown of his skin dotted with callouses. 

For a moment, all Angharad could do was stare at him. 

“Are you alright?” he asked, his voice washed in air. He seemed a woodsman in dress and in manner, but he spoke soft rolling Glisc like Angharad had heard from storytellers come down from the high country. 

Angharad was breathing like a rabbit and lamented the stall in her dash, throwing a hurried glance over her shoulder. The rocky meadow behind was empty and still. 

He never took his eyes off her, puzzled but undaunted. 

“You have to help me,” she whispered. “Please—they’ll kill me.” 

The man’s brow curved. “Who will?” 

Angharad clambored off of him and got to her feet. He did the same, rising a head and more taller than her even at a slouch. 

“My village,” fretted Angharad. “They chased me from my home—they think I’m laying a curse upon them, or else I’m a spy for their enemies, and they’ll see me killed either way.”

“But you haven’t done and you aren’t so?” asked the man, scanning warily around as he picked up his axe. 

“I am no spy and no witch besides,” insisted Angharad. She wrapped her arms around herself, trembling in the dewy chill that hinted the incoming frost. She was poorly dressed for the falling night, her dress too thin and her feet bare. 

The two watched each other another moment, the urgency sapped by a hungry curiosity that played on both their faces. The man was old enough for a beard, but his face was bare. Angharad caught him eyeing her hair and shuffled uncomfortably as white and red strands escaped her braid and flurried around her head, stark against her young freckled face. 

“Am I known to you?” the man inquired, sounding dazzled. “Do you know my name?” 

Angharad shook her head, but not with confidence. She flinched when a rumbling cry came from the meadow behind and spun on her heel to see an armed party, two-dozen strong, emerging from behind the boulders that jutted up from the tight green hills like dragon spines. 

“I won’t outrun them,” she whimpered. “Please—”

The man ushered Angharad behind him with a sweep of his arm and stepped forward to face the approaching party, his axe held loosely at his side. 

“You who hides the girl!” called a deep rolling voice—Rotri. Angharad furrowed and glared at him, a bear of a man positioned at the front of the charge. “Stand aside or be felled!” 

“On whose order?” the man shouted back, his gentle voice carrying easily in a shout. 

Rotri held a leather-braced arm up to halt the march of the party, gesturing silently to them as he would on a hunt, and continued forward on his own. He was smiling like a wolf as he approached. 

“Rotri of the Lon,” he answered. “She is one of our own. This is our business, it concerns you none. Stand aside, or I will have it so you never stand again.” 

“I will not.” 

Even for his height and solid trunk, Rotri was still made small by the man standing full. The slight slope of the hill underfoot exaggerated the contrast, and Rotri slowed as he ventured beyond twenty paces between them. 

Angharad glanced quickly around, but there was no cover she could reach quicker than one of the village archers could nock an arrow. 

“And who is this oversized creature who would enter himself into a clan’s business with no right?” asked Rotri. He stopped a dozen paces out and leaned into the planted stalk of the spear he carried, squinting up at the man, who stayed just as he had been. 

“My name is Cadoc,” answered the man, casually adjusting his grip on his great stone axe. “I mean you no disrespect, Rotri of the Lon, unless you seek to bring harm upon this woman.” 

Rotri barked an angry laugh and leaned to peek around Cadoc. 

“Angharad!” he beckoned. “You are my sister’s flesh. I raised you. If you had ever any honour or respect for your kin, you would end this childish chase and return to face what you’ve wrought with dignity.” 

Angharad stooped to pick up a rock to throw at Rotri’s head, but before it could leave her hand, another of the party piped up.

“Cadoc, did it say?” said Branaugh, a well-travelled fisherman. He stamped forward with an accusing spear pointed. “I’ve heard this name before, in the Grey Foothills. It belonged to a high-held hunter there, bestowed upon a daughter, though born wrong—massive and monstrous. Spawn of his wife and a fairy prince, I heard. Razed the village to the ground, this Cadoc the Lesser did, and took to the wilds.” 

The party raised their spears higher but shifted back behind their shields, murmuring to each other. Branaugh and Rotri held position. Angharad looked up to Cadoc, brow knitting, and gripped the stone tight in her fist. 

“Daughter…?” Angharad pondered aloud. 

Cadoc drew long and slow breaths, still shepherding her behind his body and staring down the party as a hawk perched on the edge of a threatened nest.

“Is this… true?” asked Angharad in a small voice. She took one step back. 

When Cadoc turned to look at her over his shoulder, his fawn brown eyes finding hers, Rotri rushed and lunged forth with his spear. Cadoc barely reacted in time, catching the point of the spearhead along his side and crying out. The momentum buried the spear in the ground next to him and, half-tripped, Rotri was an easy target. Cadoc issued a sharp kick to his ribs, knocking him down and away. Angharad heard the snap of breaking bone and the sharp wheeze of troubled breath as her uncle slid and flattened the dew-wet grass ten paces away. 

As soon as Rotri fell, Branaugh advanced in turn. He was quick, but Cadoc was quicker. He grabbed Branaugh’s spear as he thrust it for a strike and tore it from his grip. He swung his stone-axe low and landed a blow upon Branaugh’s leading leg. With a sickening crunch his knee bent backwards and he dropped to the ground shrieking. 

There was a moment of pause, tense as a teeter on the edge of a great height. 

“Kill it!” gargled Rotri, his breath whistling like a broken flute. “The monster and the traitor both!” 

With a rallying cry, the party charged forward. Cadoc emptied his hands of his axe and the stolen spear by throwing them to slow the advance, but the party simply split around those felled like a river around a rock and carried on. The archers—young men Angharad had grown up with, her cousins and friends and neighbours—took aim upon hill-peaks and shot right for the two of them. 

Angharad felt an arrow fly past her face, disturbing her loose locks of hair, and a shallow sting cut across her cheek. 

In an instant, Cadoc bent and scooped Angharad up in his arms, fleeing in a curve off between the jutting boulders, winding through them with strides long and swift. The party pursued, crying and banging their shields, and more arrows whipped past them, barely missing a burrow into flesh. Cadoc stumbled only once when an arrowhead nicked his shoulder then twirled away and snapped against the face of a towering ivy-choked stone. 

The Lon were formidable hunters, but Cadoc clearly knew the hills well. His strides were longer and their direction more clever, forcing the party apart as they were turned hither and thither and slowed to climb ridges in the rocky ground Cadoc could take at a leap. Soon, the shouts and footfalls behind became distant, and then few, then silent. 

Angharad clung tight to him the whole way, gripped by icy dread, awaiting a strike, a fall, pain and end. None of them came. Cadoc flew on in spite of his injuries, cradling Angharad against his sturdy core like she weighed no more than a lamb. Somewhere along the way, the rock she had clutched in her hand fell and was lost to the countless others hidden in the green.

Their route and its distance were unknown to Angharad in the falling dark. All she could discern was the sharpening smell of the sea. On they went until Cadoc came to a stop outside of a weathered mossy stone box of a structure, nested at the edge of a bluff overlooking the ocean—an old fortress for guarding the shores against pirates. 

Cadoc didn’t set Angharad back on her own two feet until they were inside the fort’s thick stone walls, the pant of the ocean muffled through them. It was as cold inside as out. The roof was mended in patches but still leaked sea-spray, filling the single wide room with damp water-cool air. There was a low bed with a hay mattress and blankets, three-legged stools next to a wall hung with tools, clothes strung upon a line of rope, an old flag lain out as a rug, and a kettle wreathed with ashes in the hearth. Everything inside smelled like Cadoc. 

As Angharad looked around, rubbing at the goose-flesh on her arms, Cadoc closed the door and moved towards the pile of firewood in the corner, his broad hand pressed to his side with a wince. 

“Leave that to me,” insisted Angharad, taking the log from him. Cadoc offered no resistance or objection as Angharad filled the hearth and used the flint kept there to light a fire. “Sit.”

Cadoc did as he was told, placing himself down on the bed with a creak, breath heavy. As Angharad fed the fire, Cadoc peeled out of his fur jacket and tunic, both now in need of mending and stained with sweat and blood. Angharad could tell he was trying to hold in his whines of pain and her chest ached as she hurried to nurse the flame in the hearth. She had spent many a restless night dowsing the sound of her own sobs in her bed to avoid disturbing her uncle and cousins. 

When the fire could hold its own, Angharad moved to the hanging clothes and took one of them, a linen shirt laden with the smell of river water from washing, and used all her might to tear it along the grain into long strips. 

As she did, Cadoc huffed something that could have been a laugh or a soft groan. 

“I don’t have many of those,” he informed flatly. Angharad ignored the jab and scanned around the mostly scarce space until she found a bowl and a pail of fresh water, scooping some and taking the bowl and stripped fabric to Cadoc’s bedside. 

“Let me see,” she demanded softly, meeting Cadoc’s eye for the first time since she’d entered his home. He was watching her very intently. An apprehensive lull meandered between them. 

“I can handle myself,” Cadoc finally said, a distracted mumble. His voice was strained with the unaffected posture that was quickly failing. 

“Please,” entreated Angharad. “You saved me. Allow me to return the kindness.” 

With a deep breath, Cadoc slowly straightened up and lifted his red-stained linen shirt off over his head. He couldn’t hold in a sore cry as he stretched open the slashes to his ribs and shoulder. Each oozed fresh blood as Cadoc settled uncomfortably on the edge of the bed, stripped bare from the hips up, and tilted his wounds towards Angharad. 

Just as her mother had taught her when she came home with skinned knees as a child, Angharad flushed the gashes out with water, using one section of fabric as a cloth to dab at them. Cadoc hissed through his teeth at the pressure, recoiling, but did his best to straighten his back and endure as Angharad rinsed and dried his side and shoulder. 

As she worked, she couldn’t help but notice all the scars that lined Cadoc’s skin—the skin of a seasoned fighter, one who had seen battle upon battle. She flinched a little when she accidentally brushed her arm against his hip. She did her best to avoid allowing their skin to touch, despite the beckoning heat of his body under her numbing fingers. His spilled blood heating the wet cloth in her hand was an odd sort of comfort, but one that brought her no sense of ease.  

“I know you want to ask,” Cadoc murmured. His voice was as vulnerable then as his torn and bruised flesh. 

Angharad kept her eyes down as she linked the strips of fabric together in her lap with shallow tears and knots. “I don’t know what you mean.” 

“Yes, you do. You want to know if it’s true, the tale of your kinsman.” 

Angharad frowned. “Branaugh’s word is worth very little to me now.” 

“Does it not frighten you?” pressed Cadoc. “Do I not?”

Angharad kept quiet as she finished joining the bandages and lifted them to cover the slash in Cadoc’s side. She had to lean in as she passed the bandage around his broad torso, reaching her arms in a near embrace. Cadoc drew in another sharp breath. 

Angharad’s heart galloped in her chest as she glanced up and confirmed what her periphery had suggested—Cadoc’s chest was more ample than any man’s she’d ever seen, shaped much more to the form of the women of her village she’d been so fascinated by since she was young. His breasts shifted with the pull of his ribcage as he drew out a long exhale. Angharad tore her gaze hastily away, her face alive with heat, and secured the wrapping as best she could, saving just enough to bandage Cadoc’s shoulder afterwards. He gripped tight to the bedframe as she pulled the fabric taut over the tender flesh, cursing lightly under his breath. 

“There,” Angharad said upon tying the final knot, withdrawing her hands but not moving herself away. She shivered in the absence of Cadoc’s heat on her hands. “They’ll be painful, but they’ll heal with time and care. It seems luck blessed you today.” 

Cadoc looked upon her then with such intensity in his eyes that Angharad felt the gaze like a touch.

“Yes, I believe she has,” he mumbled. The corners of his mouth perked up just slightly, a seed of a smile quickly crushed by a twinge of pain. “You know, some would deem it of the utmost foolishness to offer aid to something dangerous.” 

“Others would deem it of the utmost cruelty to abandon someone hurt in their hour of need,” countered Angharad. 

Cadoc hardened his look. “All that was said was true, without care to detail.” 

Angharad hesitated a long moment before replying. “You’re a fairy daughter?”

“That’s what concerns you?” Cadoc scoffed, nearly a laugh, but a joyless one. “I am no longer anyone’s daughter, or anyone’s anything. The only family I had, however troubled, is now gone and their deaths lay upon my shoulders. That makes me little but a monster.”

“I don’t believe you.” Angharad shook her head, but still a growing chill of fear was dulling the confidence in her voice. “A monster would not have saved my life.” 

“And what gives you such confidence?” 

Angharad, blood rushing through her in a terrible excitement, touched Cadoc’s bare flank with her fingers, trailing just below the bandaged wound to his side. He tensed, but did not recoil. 

“Rotri, the one who gave you this” —she ghosted her fingers up to graze over the tender bandages, holding Cadoc’s eye in a near challenge— “has called me the same since I was put in his charge. A bane, a monster, a witch.” Her eyes unfocused. “He would place my mother’s death upon me, despite my trying to save her.”

Cadoc furrowed. “Is that why your clan came after you?” 

“No. I was barely walking age then. This time, he thinks I’ve killed the clan’s livestock, all because I tried to issue a warning, and that I intend to curse him atop that.”

Cadoc drew in breaths with such even pace Angharad knew they were measured, as one would do before plunging underwater, but otherwise stayed perfectly still.

“And he thinks wrong?” he asked, tinged in uncertainty.

Angharad pulled her arm back. “Disease took the sheep and the cattle. All I took was this.”

From the extra fabric filling out the bust of her dress, Angharad retrieved a small shard of red metal just shy of finger length. It looked broken off from something larger and caught the hearth light so brilliantly it looked to be glowing, as if fresh from the forge. 

“It was a gift to my great grandfather from an allied clan, shorefolk from the mountains, back when he was the head of the Lon,” mumbled Angharad, distracted by the fiery wink of the metal in her hand. “A token of their friendship. Their wise women told well of its great power, a buried treasure uncovered in their mines. It was passed hand to hand and came to Rotri. When the livestock started dying, he was going to sell it.” 

In an instant, Angharad’s carefully crafted mask of calm crumpled and her voice strained with held tears. 

“Winter is nearly here and they’re facing starvation. Perhaps I am a monster after all.” 

Cadoc’s brow was harshly creased. “Why did you take it?” 

“I had a dream,” wept Angharad. “A horrible, terrifying dream. I didn’t only see the sheep and cattle slain. I saw a sword, as red as this here, dyed with the blood of hundreds upon hundreds. Children, elders, entire kinlines—no soul was safe. It had always made me uneasy, this strange thing, but I never knew why. Now I do. It’s a weapon, or else part of one. I cannot let that vision I saw come to pass.” 

“You dreamed of what was yet to come?” Cadoc’s eyes narrowed. “I thought you said you weren’t a witch.” 

“I did, and honestly,” harshed Angharad, sniffling. “I practice no craft, nor would I plot against my own people. I didn’t choose this. But I know what I saw and I feel its import deep in my soul. They can think of me however they will, but it would be truly monstrous to merely sit by and do nothing.”

Cadoc watched her for a long quiet stretch. “What are you going to do, then?” 

Angharad wiped at her eyes and stared down at the shard in her cupped hands. It made her stomach sour to behold it. Restlessly, she stood and paced over to one of the narrow seaward windows. She hadn’t noticed the vanishing of the sun and was hit all of a sudden by the reality of being with a stranger in an unknown place surrounded by night, gripped by it like a sickness. Hollowly, she watched what looked like sails far off on the horizon, bobbing between the waves and the stars. 

“I don’t know,” she admitted. 

“Well,” said Cadoc, grunting a little as he rearranged himself to lay flat, “whatever you will, I’m sure it would be easier done by daylight.” 

Angharad kept her back purposefully to the bed, but couldn’t help a little tilt of the head towards him. “You would have me stay?” 

“Your will is your own, and strong, that much is clear to me. What I would have of you matters very little.” A sleepy sigh softened his voice. “But, yes, if I could, I would have you stay.” 

Angharad’s face was warm even with the seawind lighting upon her cheeks, and she couldn’t hold back a smile. She was about to turn back to her host when something caught her eye in the blanket of the sky above the fort. 

A circle of ravens, gliding light as clouds on the breeze, spun idly through the dark, winking out a star here and there with their wide black wings. When Angharad glanced down to the thin strip of rocky beach at the foot of the cliff, she noticed as seagull there, limping to avoid the rising tide, its left wing ruffled and lame at its side. The ravens glided patiently above, waiting. 

Angharad lingered only a moment before trading the chill damp of the window for the warm comfort of the hearth. 

As the wind whistled through the walls of the fort, it brought in the smell of night jasmine with the rich damp of the ocean, a sweet edge to the cacophony of salt, seafoam, and the countless unseen things beyond the veneer of the dark churning water.