The two boys followed the girl, and the blood, across the hard, uneven hill country. Making their way through a thicket of ironbark trees, the boys marched quickly along behind the girl saying nothing, trying to make sure that their feet did not stumble on the rough ground. The rust-green scrub––bracken, hopbush and narrow-leaf wattle––rustled and bent as they passed. The scent of bruised rosemary and lavender rose under their feet. Lethargic clouds of pollen, golden in the early morning sunlight, mingled with the steaming breath of the sister, brother and half-brother in the frigid air.

The blood was shockingly red against the dark earth and the moss-coloured leaves of the wild sage. As bright and vital a colour as the trio had ever seen. A secret colour. Fascinating somehow. The girl paused by some jagged rocks, stained with spreading lichen. Dipped her fingers into a thick warm splash of crimson. Saw where it had begun to clot in places to a darker red.

They followed the blood trail and emerged from the brush onto a ridge. Broken scree underfoot, with pendulous redleg grass growing in spiky profusion down and across the shallow but treacherous slope. The three of them picked their way across the face of the long hill, the lay of it turning them westward. They discovered a narrow game trail. Followed it around a promontory so that they found themselves standing halfway up a far larger slope. Thigh-high heather covered it; a roiling swathe of purple and white that blanketed the hillside from the valley floor to the tops of the tors.

The girl stopped and crouched. Pointed out a smear of blood against the rotting trunk of a fallen cedar. She looked to the sky. There were no birds circling. Not a hawk, buzzard or crow to be seen. She gazed up the hill, then back at the blood, and then down the slope into the gently waving sea of grass.

“Fia,” one lad said, “how can you tell which way he went?”

The girl, strands of loose ash-brown hair flying about her face from where they’d escaped the leather cord, regarded her brother. Eyes, a messy mix of dark blue and light jade, glittered. She was two years younger and a foot shorter than the older boy, but both lads followed her unquestioningly.

“A wounded thing is like water, Arlen. Takes the path of least resistance. You ever see water run uphill?”

“No,” Arlen said.

“Redmond?” Fia asked the other slighter, younger boy.

“No,” the half-brother, Redmond, said sullenly, as if he was offended at being asked the obvious.

“No,” Fia said, and started pushing her way down through the heather.

They had found the billy goat by his smell at first light, at the spring, as they approached it slowly with the wind in their faces. The musky stink of piss. They’d been looking for a doe, even a boar, but the billy had been the only animal by the water and so Arlen had tried an arrow at him. The shaft had punched in just behind the shoulder and the creature had run. Arlen had cursed softly and brushed the peaty fen soil from the knee of his trousers.

“He’ll be in this brush,” Fia said, her words etched with excitement. “No way he could’ve gotten far bleeding like that. Let’s split up to sniff him out quicker. Arlen, you follow this track. I’ll cut across the slope up here and flush him out if he’s laid up somewhere. Redmond you head to the bottom and stop him if he’s still got any running left in him.”

The youngest of the three nodded.

“We’ll find that beggar, Fia,” Arlen said, his enthusiasm mirroring that of his younger sister’s. “He stank bad enough to knock a buzzard off a gut pile. If he’s bleeding bad… Well, you’ve your knack.”

Fia winked at the vaguely nauseous look on Redmond’s pale face and hurried away, leaving the other two to their tasks.

She moved with a hunter’s grace that would have dismayed her mother and all the tutors she had employed in her attempt to refine Fia. Quiet. Sure. Rolling her feet from the outside in as she stepped carefully through the underbrush. Her nostrils dilated, questing for the metallic, cloying tang of fresh blood; a scent which Arlen had remarked on more than one occasion she’d a strange aptitude for picking up.

Fia did not expect the billy to have taken the high ground. A thing choking on its own ghost was like the average nobleman in that respect. That was why she’d sent Arlen down the central track. That was the most likely route the goat would have taken. Older though he might be, her brother was not good with the sight of blood, even less so with the taking of life. She knew he only hunted to please her and because it was what was expected of him. She also knew it was because he worried that Redmond did not respect him as he might.

That was why Arlen needed to kill the billy. His position in life was going to require him to get used to having blood on his hands if he wished to make a mark in the pages of history. The saga of Fallaros was, like the other four realms that made up the known world, a red book.

Fia moved like smoke through the brush. It was not long before she heard staggered steps and ragged breathing coming from down below her. Slowing, she crept cautiously to a break in the tall bracken and looked down into a crushed little dell maybe some fifty yards down the slope.

The billy tried to heave itself to its feet when it sensed Fia’s invisible presence. From her hiding place, Fia could just make out the vivid blood that spotted the trampled undergrowth. Fat ruby beads scattered across the emerald grass and amongst the cow parsley. She wasn’t even sure that she could see it with just her eyes, but her nose helped build the picture.

The goat started to scream. It was a thin, tearing shriek that made the young woman’s face crease up tight. Her heart clenched like a fist in her chest. It sounded like a human screaming. Like a child.

“Where the fuck are you, Arlen” she muttered, her teeth gritted. She hated to watch a creature suffer. Confused. Helpless. Shit-scared. The guilt tasted like bile in her mouth. Fia raised her own bow. Reached behind her right shoulder for an arrow. Fletched with turkey feathers; rigid but durable.

“Where the hell are you, Arlen?”

The billy goat shrieked and shrieked. Its bloody sides heaved. It seemed to Fia that it barely needed to draw breath, just carried on squealing and crying ceaselessly, with froth foaming over its lips.

Fia nocked the arrow to her string. She’d have to put the wretched creature out of its misery. If her brother couldn’t find the fucking thing by this time then she shuddered to think of the mess he’d make of sticking it.

She steadied herself in her crouch, rocking her feet deeper into the grass. Took a breath in as she drew the bowstring to her ear.

Exhaled.

The arrow fled the string, thrumming; a sound that usually rang like silver and gold in Fia’s ears.

But she twitched at the last moment as, with a cry of astonishment—at finally finding the gods-damned billy, maybe––Arlen stumbled heavily into the small clearing; eyes wide with surprise, head half turned.

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The arrow hit him just below the collarbone at a downward angle. Hard. Smacked into his chest and drove the wind out of him. Fia saw, clear as day, the little ‘O’ of surprise form on his lips.

Then, he just flopped over.

Shocked.

Boneless.

Any fight to survive exorcised right out of him by the metal and wood.

“No,” Fia said.

She fell more than ran down the slope. Crashed through the bracken and heather. Hit some buried rocks and cut her knees all to shit. She landed in a spray of grass and mud and crawled to her brother’s side.

Arlen’s face was smooth except for the patchy beard that Fia had teased him about. Smooth and pale. No hard lines cut deep into the brow and mouth by a hard life. Not yet. Not like their father’s had been. Not like most men who’d spent their days pressed to one grindstone or another.

He’d had no time.

He was spitting up blood and making a terrifying slurping sound in his chest. A bubbling suck that, bizarrely, reminded Fia of a calf trying to pull its leg free of a bog. He was looking at Fia. He looked confused.

The goat was still screaming, screaming, screaming.

Fia looked at the goat. Into the strange slit of pupil. In that moment, it struck her how canny and knowing a goat’s eyes were. How cynical. She wondered what the goat saw. What it thought. Whether it knew that it was going to die.

“For gods’ sake kill that fucking goat, Redmond! Kill that fucking goat!” Fia hissed through her teeth, looking back at her brother.

She had no idea when her half-brother had got there, but there he was, standing and gripping a knife in a trembling hand.

“Wh-wh-what happened?” Redmond. “How—”

None of it felt real. Nothing that was taking place around her could actually be happening. They had gone out hunting just as they always had, and now Arlen was coughing black and red into the grass, drowning on the arrow in his chest, and it just wasn’t possible.

“Y-you sh-sh-should run, Fia. You should run,” Redmond gabbled, panic etching his words.

Fia couldn’t think. She felt the air cold in her lungs. Heard the rushing sigh of the wind in the grass; Arlen’s desperate liquid wheezing; the haunting, panicked bawling of the goat. Sunlight gilded the feathery tops of the heather.

She pointed at the furrow where the goat’s neck met its chest.

“Here,” she said to Redmond, her voice coming from a long way away. “Here the blood comes straight from the heart. Do it.”

Redmond clenched the bone handle of the knife, but didn’t move.

“You should f-f-flee, Fia,” he repeated. “You’ve shot Arlen! He’s the… He’s meant to… He was going to be Fallaros’—”

“Fuck!”

Fia stood and snatched the knife from Redmond’s slack grip. Felt the coarseness of the bone handle in her palm. Felt the slickness of blood already wetting it. She felt her life, the life she thought she was due, unravelling away from her. Arlen’s blood speckled the ferns. Blood and bone.

The screaming of the goat filled the little clearing. Relentless as the wind that scoured the hillsides.

The lethal point slipped easily through the skin and fat and muscle. Fia’s knuckles pressed against the warm, hairy chest and were suddenly drenched in hot blood as she jerked the blade sideways, severing the arteries as she’d been taught. The goat’s panicked cries were abruptly cut off. It heaved once. Shuddered as everything that it had been, or would’ve been, faded from its eyes, drained out of it into the grass.

“You should run, Fia,” Redmond said again. “When our mother hears about this…”

A simple case of applying pressure with a sharp bit of metal to make something stop being. All that it left behind was meat and a vague guilt.

“It was an accident,” she said.

“He’s going to die!” Redmond almost shrieked.

“He’s not going to bloody die, you bastard!” Fia snapped.

A scrabbling at her wrist made Fia blink. She had been staring down into Arlen’s face, but it had blurred. Fia blinked again and her tears fell away, dropping onto her brother’s cheek, and his face came back into focus.

She touched the arrow in his chest, but it was stuck as firm as if she’d shot it into an oak board.

“Arlen – Arlen, I’ll… If I just get you up and––”

Arlen squeezed her wrist. His breath was rasping, crimson bubbles forming at the corners of his mouth and around his nostrils. His eyes were staring about like he was looking for her, or for something that only he was expecting to see.

Fia held tight onto his blood-soaked shirt front, trying to anchor him. She leaned over him, trying to shield him from whatever might be coming for him.

“Fia,” he said in her ear, “don’t––”

With a lurch, Arlen vomited blood onto the side of Fia’s face.

Redmond staggered back and fell over the goat with a cry.

Somehow Arlen smelled worse than the shot billy, though that might just have been Fia's agonised imagination. His chest rose and fell. His breaths came slowly and irregularly now; long and terrifying gaps stretching out between the rattling liquid inhalations, each one tearing Fia's heart afresh.

“Promise I’ll be… alright,” her brother gulped.

“I promise, it’s fine––you’ll be fine,” Fia said desperately. “I swear it. We’ll get you home. I promise.”

Arlen eyelids fluttered. “Just… a… moment,” he said.

“No! Wait!” Fia shouted into her brother’s face.

Arlen stared up at the sky.

Beyond it.

He was travelling. He wouldn’t be looking back.

“Oh gods, oh gods, oh gods,” Redmond muttered.

In the south, the sky groaned and grumbled as the gods moved about above the clouds that massed over the distant Foldwood, sending thunder rippling slowly out over the rugged and dismally beautiful countryside. The wind turned to the north, driven by the building storms.

“Run, Fia,” Redmond said, and his voice was hollow. “When our mother finds out about this. When the people find out about this…”

Fia stood. Her mind was a cold, swirling mass of sorrow, dread and shock. She looked at her half-brother who was regarding her warily.

“I didn’t… This wasn’t meant to… It was an accident, Redmond,” she said.

The dirty woollen clouds were gathering fast, promising rain. Ahead of them, the first crows drifted. The cunning little bastards drawn by whatever sinister ability guided them to the freshly dead.

“You killed him. The heir to the High Seat. And then you k-k-killed the goat!” There was a note of hysteria in Redmond’s voice.

Fia turned, filled with terror and trepidation at the only two courses she could see before her. Her voice was flat in the sudden silence left in the wake of the goat’s screams and Arlen’s dying wheezing. She looked at the billy goat, but couldn’t bear to look back at Arlen.

“One day, Redmond,” she said, speaking over her shoulder to her half-brother, “you’ll see that killing is sometimes the generosity of a tender heart.”

Redmond gazed at her, his face inscrutable.

“Tell our mother I’m sorry,” Fia whispered, and then she ran.

In the wind and the heather, amid the swaying brush and the stink of dead goat and dead man, no one saw the smile that crept like a blush over Redmond Marr’s pale face.