Dandelions and Briars
@deshonneurs
Curse the moment he had accepted to accompany the Baron in a hunt! The cheery bastard had a booming voice and an awful, awful tendency to pat Fabien on the back as he used to do ten, twenty years earlier.
Come, Marquis, come, am I to be denied the pleasure of your company yet again? We’re going, Maker willing, to catch a boar and eat it this evening. We’re going to have a feast.
At last Fabien had agreed and, if a forest could smell of regret, currently such was to him the perfume of the Applewoods.
The Baron was a man who enjoyed game banquets and his frame was proof of it; but he’d been suppler once, when Fabien’s mother yet lived. There had been rumours about them, back then, rumours that Fabien only understood later, when he was a little older and slightly more acquainted with the blush upon a maiden’s cheek. The Baron, despite the size, did not crush twigs and branches under his boots, and his breathing was silent and restrained. Perhaps he’d been a fine man once, but he remained a fine hunter still.
Fabien was a fine man, or at least so he liked to believe, but he was not, and had never been, a fine hunter. He so wished for this to end as soon as it was possible; the woods were kinder to him when he merely walked down their paths and made no attempt at catching their creatures. Silks and glass and the fruits and meat of the land were kinder still when enjoyed between the walls of the chateau.
The noises ahead, approaching them, came as a relief. Well, he used to be able to shoot arrows, at the very least and he had caught a wyvern once, after all.
Ah, let it be over. If he were the one to catch the animal, the Baron might show him the mercy of not inviting him again, in the future.
In the silence of the undergrowth, heavy as the light was heavy (so yellow and dense, like dripping honey), Fabien stood up and took aim, drawing back the bow.
« Marquis, wait, that is not--- »
And released it. The arrow hit something beyond the foliage, but the shape that had been his target made no animal sound. Possibly because it was no animal. Indeed, the shape shone, like something metallic, and stood too tall, either like a gargantuan boar, or like a man.
Fabien sucked air in with a sound that was not unlike the arrow’s as it had cut the air. « Oh, gracious Maker. » He sprung forward and, between brambles and ferns, found a knight with hair like a dandelion --- doubting for a moment whether the stranger was man indeed, or rather a wilder and stranger thing that the deepest clearings of the Tirashan forest had forced to blossom and had then put on a path leading to a more civilised land.
But no, he did appear to be extremely human. And wounded, too.
« Gracious Maker », Fabien repeated, frantic. « You have my deepest apologies, monsieur. You are--- well, you are within my hunting grounds, to be entirely fair. But--- can you stand? Walk at all? My horse is not far, if you need--- anything. Such as taking that arrow out of your leg. Maker. »
