Despite being sure that a human settlement had to be close, Finn and Adi walked most of the next night before they stumbled on their first sign of any kind of habitation. It was a well beaten footpath, not wide enough for anything more than maybe a wheelbarrow, but much better trod than any animal trail. Finn and Adi came across it just as it veered away from the river and up into the hills.

They stopped at the mouth of the trail and turned, looking both ways, into the hills or the river.

“Which way do we go?” Adi asked, looking expectantly at Finn.

“Up the hill?” Finn suggested. “If our theory holds, if we follow the river we’ll eventually come to some kind of habitation. This path may lead to a house or a hunting blind, or maybe a more secluded cabin. A single building will be easier to rob than a whole village, so I would vote for that.”

Adi rubbed a hand over her cheek and seemed to turn the idea over in her head.

“Yeah,” she said slowly, after a moment of thinking. “Yeah, let’s do that. If we follow it for too long and don’t come across anything, let’s scavenge for food and then settle down for the day,” she added.

“Sounds good to me,” Finn agreed. With that, they began to follow the trail up the hill away from the river.

It was much easier going with the path to lead them. Following the river hadn't been easy, since there wasn't always a beach to walk along. Finn tried to keep a careful ear out for the sound of footsteps coming in either direction, but didn’t pick up on anything but the normal sounds of small animals moving around in the surrounding forest.

They walked for almost an hour and Finn expected Adi to stop them soon to give up and settle down to wait for the sunrise when the path suddenly widened near the top of a steep incline. Quietly, Finn pulled Adi into the woods off the path, and they continued on through the brush until they approached a single log building in a rough clearing.

They circled slowly, quietly, keeping low to try and take advantage of the thick tangle of bushes and brambles along the forest floor. The building they had come across was low and long, only one level built right into the side of the steep rolling hills leading down to the river. The bank was steep enough that the exposed timber frame of the foundation was open in the front and the back wall was pressed completely into the hill up to the eaves of the roof. There was a single chimney on the southernmost side, spilling sweet smoke into the late afternoon air. There were two big piles of firewood stacked underneath the building’s wooden frame near the tall wooden stairs leading up to the only door that Finn could see. Two deer carcasses were gutted and hung to the other side of the stairs, draining fresh blood into old rusted buckets sitting on the bloodstained ground.

“A hunting lodge,” Finn whispered so softly into Adi’s ear that it might as well have been a breath.

“Fuck,” Adi sighed. She pressed her back into Finn’s chest, leaning unconsciously away from the building. “This is too risky. Should we double back?” she breathed.

Finn ticked over the odds in her head. On the one hand, a hunting lodge should have everything that they need: food, clothes, and weapons. Hunters needed all of that stuff, so they would likely have it stored in the lodge. On the other hand, the humans inside were probably some of the most well-equipped to kill her and Adi where they stood, aside from soldiers or city guards.

They could abandon the hunting lodge and head back down the trail and follow the river to the village that most likely lay at the other end. But, then they would just end up with the same problems, but on a bigger scale. All the stuff they needed, with more risks of being caught or killed.

“No,” Finn decided. “Let’s wait them out,” she said, pulling on Adi’s upper arm to urge her back away from the clearing.

The smoke from the chimney meant there were probably humans inside. They could find a safe vantage point to watch the lodge and wait for the humans to leave before they tried breaking in.

Finn led the way up and around the clearing, the rest of the way up the hill until they were sitting slightly above the lodge. It took some circling before she found a spot where they could clearly see the back of the lodge roof and the clearing in front of it from beneath a small flowering tree that leaned down toward down over the bank precariously. It provided them a great cover, even if it was a little tooth rotting in its romanticism.

Adi scooted close to Finn, little white and pink petals catching in her thick hair and settling on her shoulders as she ducked under some low-hanging branches. If she took notice of them, she didn’t give any indication, her dark eyes focused intensely on the hunting lodge.

“When do you think they’ll leave?” she asked quietly.

“Probably early morning, before the sun comes up,” Finn replied just as quietly.

“Hm,” Adi grunted, trying to settle into a more comfortable position.

Finn was trying to do the same when the sound of Adi’s stomach gurgling loudly broke the quiet. Adi flushed an embarrassed pink, and Finn hid a snicker behind her hand.

“Shut up!” Adi hissed.

“You know, I think someone told me you can eat these,” Finn suggested, gesturing toward the flowers clustered around their heads.

Adi looked up dubiously at the flowers. “I’ve never heard of such a thing. I don’t even know what kind of tree this is,” she frowned, looking disappointed in herself for not knowing.

“It's a dogwood,” Finn explained. “Here, I’ll eat one first,” she offered, reaching up to pull a soft, delicate bud off its branch. She looked at it for a moment and really hoped she hadn’t misremembered seeing these flowers in fancy salads at the Seelie Court, and then popped it in her mouth. It had a distinctly bitter taste, followed afterward by a weird perfume aftertaste that definitely wasn’t the most appetizing thing, but Finn was able to get it down.

Adi gave her a flat look when she opened her mouth wide and stuck out her tongue to prove she had swallowed it. Sighing, she did the same, pulling down a flower and tucking it between her plush lips for a moment. Finn looked away, then remembered that it wouldn’t be so weird to stare. Adi had watched her eat the first flower after all. By the time she looked back, the flower was already gone and Adi was chewing with a thoughtful look on her face.

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“Well, it doesn’t taste that bad,” she muttered after swallowing. “Let’s hope I don’t die of food poisoning,” she added while pulling down another few handfuls of the flowers.

Finn laughed a little nervously and tried not to stare too much as she crunched little flowers in her mouth. Her lips slowly were stained a delicate pink by the crushed petals.

“We should talk about something to stay awake,” Adi said after she had chewed through most of the flowers within easy reach of their hiding spot. There hadn’t been any movement in the cabin below.

“You can sleep, if you’re tired,” Finn suggested instead. “I’ll keep watch and wake you up when they leave.”

Adi shook her head, frowning down at the lodge or maybe at something else that Finn didn’t see. “I’m not tired,” she replied. “We’ve been together, what, three days now? But, we don’t know that much about each other,” she muttered.

Finn’s heart started to beat in her chest and she resisted the urge to pound at it in an effort to tell her heart to shut up. She wanted to read a lot more into that than she should. Adi wanted to know about her! Or, maybe she just wanted to feel more comfortable around the dangerous warrior she barely knew but had been traveling with for days. The latter explanation was a lot more likely than the former.

“What do you want to talk about?” Finn asked slowly and, hopefully, casually. Instead, she suspected her voice came out more wary than she wanted.

Adi frowned briefly and crushed some flower petals between her fingertips. They stained the pads of her fingers pink and released a sweet fragrance into the air. “I don’t know,” she said eventually. “Do you have any family? Brothers or sisters?”

“I have a brother,” Finn answered easily. “His name is Ruven. He’s a year older than me.” Talking about Ruven was easy enough and wasn’t incriminating, she didn’t think. “Do you have any siblings?” Finn asked.

Adi was looking at her with interest, when she glanced over at her. “I have two older brothers, Urrik and Briad. Urrik is a lot older. He's been living in another village for a while now. Briad and are closer in age. We don’t get along, though,” she replied, still looking at Finn with interest, rattling off the information on her brothers like it meant nothing. “What’s your brother like?” she asked.

“What?” Finn replied. “Wait, if you have a brother, should we try to get you to him? Or, was he caught up in the attack on the camp?” she asked.

Adi’s eyebrows lowered over her expressive eyes and she shook her head. “He was out of the camp the night the humans attacked, trying to talk to the villages again. He’s probably safe, but I have no idea where he is,” she finished with a sigh.

“Still, you’re not, uh,” Finn was going to say alone, but swallowed it at the last moment. Even if she did have family left, if Adi had no idea where her brother was, maybe that wasn’t the most cheerful thing to think about.

“You have a brother too,” Adi fired back, not bothering to wait for Finn to figure out what she wanted to say. “Would it help us at all to go to him?”

Finn felt herself shudder at the thought. Ruven would probably much prefer if she tried to contact him by any means necessary in a situation like the one she currently found herself in. But, Finn knew her brother well enough to know that helping Finn would be his only priority. It wasn't completely unlikely that he might cut Adi down where she stood the second he understood who she was.

The look of exhausted agreement from Adi was all the confirmation she needed to know that she saw and understood. It didn't seem like Adi's brothers were likely to be much more help.

They both turned to look back at the human lodge at the same moment, letting the beginning of what could have been an explosive argument diffuse and fall away.

After both of them were no longer feeling the effects of their own melancholy thoughts, Adi picked up the thread of their conversation again.

“Is it just you and your brother?” Adi asked quietly.

“My dad too. But, uh, we don’t get along,” Finn replied, trying to keep her voice as quiet and gentle as Adi's, though she suspected she didn’t get close.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Adi asked with a nervous looking sideways glance.

Finn tilted her head side to side, thinking about it. She decided she could probably keep it vague enough that she could talk about it a little bit without really exposing her connections to the royal guard.

“Our dad was a knight, too. Kind of a big wig. I don’t know who my mother was or anything about her or her relationship with my dad. Supposedly, both she and he agreed that she would raise me until I was five and then he would take over. I can sort of remember her, but I never saw her again after my dad took me. I don’t think he really cares about me outside what I can do to make his last name more famous. The only time I spend with him was spent training. If I wasn’t training, he wasn’t around. I don’t know what else to say, really.”

Finn shrugged with one shoulder, feeling sort of numb. She’d explained all this before to others, but it didn't get easier with repetition. Her dad was famous among the court, after all. Finn knew it wasn’t uncommon for military families to function like her own, and it wasn’t uncommon for the kids to hate their dads as a result. Unfortunately, most of those kids had a mother and maybe other family members to rely on for some relief. Ruven and Finn only had what the other guards in the barracks had felt willing to give them or help them with. They largely had to fend for themselves in the cut-throat atmosphere of the royal court from the time they were kids.

“I guess the whole getting fired thing didn’t go over very well, then,” Adi said sympathetically.

Finn grimaced, forgetting briefly that that had been her explanation for wandering around near their camp. Luckily, Adi took it as her reaction to recalling her father’s reaction to being dismissed by her lord and put a sympathetic hand on her shoulder.

“Do you think you could reconnect with your brother?” she asked quietly.

Finn scowled down at her bare toes, dark with dirt from walking barefoot for days through the forest. “No,” she answered with a surprisingly authentic venom. “Ruven doesn’t like Father any more than I do, but he’s a lot better at putting his feelings aside. He's always so reasonable. He would tell me that I should just be quiet and do my job.”

Adi made another sympathetic noise and moved her hand so that it was cupping Finn’s far shoulder. The warmth of her soft inner arm pressed against Finn’s bony shoulder blades sunk into her chest and stayed there.

“I’m sorry,” Adi said. “That sounds hard. For what it’s worth, if we get out of this alive, I’m sure my father will welcome you with a feast for the record books. Hell, I’ll throw the feast myself if he won't,” Adi laughed a little, probably imagining a great party that Finn wished she had the imagination to conjure herself.

Finn sighed quietly and leaned into Adi’s side hug. Even though she had twisted some things, it was pretty much the truth. Something angry and caustic inside her heart felt soothed a little by Adi’s empathetic responses. She wished she could believe she would have a place at Adi's side after the shit storm they were currently in had passed. But, she had a feeling she wouldn’t have a place anywhere once the dust settled.

“Thanks,” was all Finn said. Adi squeezed her shoulder warmly and tilted her head until it was leaning against Finn’s.

The moment was so incredibly nice, but all Finn could feel was the weight of her own guilt. Adi didn’t know that Finn liked her. More than that, Adi didn’t know that Finn was really her enemy. Or, used to be her enemy. Whatever, once Finn told her, Adi would hate her. She would hate that she had ever offered Finn any kind of comfort, and she would hate that Finn had been shameless enough to accept it.

Finn was, as ever and always, completely fucked.