If one of the Folk hunts you,
run, and pray.
There is no mortal creature who can help you.
And what of Eire, our dear middle sister? You might have supposed that the wolf killed her, and you should have been right, but luck was on her side that night (they say the luck of the fae is as fickle as it is cruel; they do so love their irony), and those snapping teeth only tore the strap of her quiver and grazed her thigh before the arrow drove him back, away, into death.
All those years hunting had made her a creature of instinct. She let fly her arrow and watched it bury itself in that terrible yellow eye; the wolf howled, a terrible sound that split the night in two - and then as he fell away and lurched into the snow, she let go of her perch and rolled to the ground, her skinning knife drawn - pitifully small, nothing next to the size and sheer mass of the beast, but it was all she had.
It didn’t matter. The wolf stumbled once, twice, and then fell heavily onto his side, the great dark flank heaving, the long red tongue lolling from his fearsome jaws. He whimpered once and then was silent.
That was wrong. Something of his size - so big he dwarfed even the trunks of the spreading old firs above him - wouldn’t fall to one arrow. Eire was sure of that much.
Her mouth tasted like iron and copper, thick and heady and salt-sweet. She should run, she knew. She should go home. But something compelled her to get closer instead - maybe the hunger that still gnawed at her belly, for the deer the wolf had killed, her stolen mark, still lay there in the snow, throat torn open, steaming gently.
At home she knew Niamh would be angry that she’d been out so long, and angrier that she’d wasted her last arrow in the quiver. Father had made the ash arrow for her long ago, before she’d learned to make them herself. She knew well enough his stories of things that lurked in the woods, things that weren’t mortal - weren’t right - that could only be felled by ash and iron. But she had never really believed him.
Yet something strange and persistent drummed in her gut as she circled nearer to the wolf, near enough to see what remained of its pierced eye.
In the twilight gloaming, for no waxing stars or moon pierced the clouds above her, she thought at first that snow was falling over the wound where her arrow met his face, but that couldn’t be; the rest of him was pure black and untouched. There was a glimmer, though, right where the ichor oozed from his socket. Not snow - flowers.
Eire stumbled back, stunned.
More of them sprang up as she watched; they sprouted from his pelt like it was loam, too many to count. Where blood should have run, there were flowers instead. They cascaded over his snout and pooled around her feet, and each one was a cluster of three blossoms, lovely and pale and growing nightmarishly quick.
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She knew those flowers. Mother had stitched them on white fields for embroidery. They were snowdrops, heralds of spring, and of the end of each of South-of-the-Wall’s cursed fae winters.
In the distance echoed a long, mournful howl.
Eire yanked the arrow from the rent socket, dripping ichor and petals, and turned and fled.
It would have been easiest to go back to Avon, to her sisters and her father - the first place her fear urged her to turn - only she knew that was the one place she must not go. She was bleeding a little where the wolf had grazed her with his teeth before dying. That blood would paint a bright trail back to the rest of them, and then they’d all be dead.
She didn’t know where else to go, though, and as she ran - her pulse thundering in her ears, her mouth dry and hot - it struck her that there was nowhere else. She was alone. And her head was ringing, her sight narrowing, worse than only the kind of tiring that found one afraid and hungry in the woods.
It started slowly, the heat in her leg, and spread up and out, a feverish itch that by the time she’d gone from where the birches made a solemn white cathedral overhead to the deeper parts of the forest where the pines grew so thick and dark and large they kept new snow from falling on her, it was unbearable. She found herself stumbling with every step. Still she carried on. The ichor on the arrow - not blood, something thicker and sharper and darker - coated her palms and made her grip damp and fickle. She had to thrust the head of the arrow into the rough cloth of her tunic to clean it of enough slick to keep from dropping it, and the stain colored her shirtfront nearly black.
At least her bow (good solid hardwood, something she’d carved herself from ash trees close to their village in one of the older, fatter years) made something to lean on, and the thicker the drifts got the more she did just that. The graze at her hip where the creature had gotten her had soaked through now. She shut her eyes and thought of Aislin, of Niamh, of Father, and of their garden blooming in happier times, and her breath came short and harsh and quick, but she hardly felt like she was getting any air at all.
It was in the shade of a spreading old fir - so vast and ancient and overcome with moss and lichens that it overshadowed what little moonlight pierced the scattering clouds and made a gloomy, buttressed wall around her - that she finally could go on no further, and there she dragged herself into a dry hollow of old leaves, where she knew the undergrowth would cut the wind and cold a little, and laid herself down by her bow. The pain that had started in her leg was now a fire that blazed up into her ribs, tugged at her heart and made coals of her gut. When she moved, jolts of angry heat flashed through her head. There was a dryness in her throat that she had known many times before. Fever.
She couldn’t bear not to look. The best way to fight a sickened wound, she knew even in her dizziness, was to arrange poultices and chew prepared roots and brew teas and rest; the second best was to pray, but to whom? She believed in the gods as much as she’d believed in faeries before tonight, and that left her third and final - her only - choice, to peel back the leg of her trousers and try to carve out as much of the stricken flesh as she could before she was overcome.
But something was wrong with it. Her trousers wouldn’t come off. When she sawed at them with her skinning knife (palm clammy, grip already sliding), the blade struck something hard and rough. With her fingers, in the brimming darkness, she felt clumsily around the dizzying heat, and there was no blood, no damp, no oozing pus and rent skin. Instead she met with something that felt like nothing so much as a knot in young wood - and that wasn’t right. Even half delirious, she knew that much.
The moon came out suddenly through a clearing in the clouds. With her last breath, she saw it: a spreading, twisting mass of roots that traced dark lines just under her skin, knobbled her flesh, and burst forth from the puckered scrape where the beast had gotten her. And, crowning these, a cluster of three perfect blossoms - snowdrops, but not white: blood red.