Methods of Inheritance
I’m on very strict orders to put out the third section today, so here, this is the last section of this story. Murder happens, if blood is an issue for you. If you haven’t read them yet, here are Parts the First and Second.
Here are the things that everyone knows about Harry Ainsel.
One. Harry is short for Angharad, a nickname taken after years of mangled pronunciations and never shrugged off. (Fact: ‘Angharad’ means ‘more love,’ which Harry has always found funny, in a bitter and ironic sort of way. ‘Harry’ means nothing at all, and she is easier behind the armor of it.)
Two. Harry was born at the last stroke of sundown on the spring equinox. (Fact: this information could not be hidden from her cousin, and they could not be convinced to hide such a prime weapon from the rest of the world. Harry has borne up under the hisses of ‘half-folk’ and ‘shadow-girl’ for nineteen years, with teeth and fists clenched tight.)
Three. Harry’s father, Tam, was Touched just after her second birthday, on another spring equinox. (Fact: she has always hated her birthday for stealing the big, laughing man she only faintly remembers. The Touched are a particular nightmare, mindless puppets hunting their own kind for their faerie masters. She hates to think of her father, her papa, as one of them.)
Four. Harry’s mother, Margaret, tried to save him the next time the Hunt came through, three and a half years later, by dragging him off his horse and running toward the dawn with him in tow. (Fact: her body was found at the edge of the forest the next morning, her throat neatly slit and her hands clenched in the fabric of her husband’s shirt, his body unaged and only beginning to show the withering effects of the Hunt on its stolen mortals. The Fair Folk do not grant the mercy of a disappearance to those who anger them.)
Five. Harry has never backed down from a fight in her life, even when prudence and logic demanded it. (Fact: there are only two paths open to one like Harry, one whose life is so shadowed with the inhuman that she fits poorly among the bustle of mortal life, like a cougar cub among alley cats. She was given the choice to bend, to submit to the world at large and allow them to strip her down to fit their tastes, or to bare her teeth and fight back with everything at her disposal. Harry has never minded the taste of blood in her mouth, even when it’s her own.)
The nobility of the Fair Folk was about ten thousand times more intimidating than Harry had anticipated, ranged out like a pack of hounds, a sizeable cavalry force surrounding their leader. Jewels glittered on fingers and simple clothing in rich colors, woven with heavy embroidery, clad every figure, accented with weapons like nothing Harry had ever seen. The Touched mortals trailing after them, both mounted and on foot, had the look of shadows, ghostly and half-living beside the vivid reality of the Hunt. The Touched were a nightmare living, only existing for twenty-four hours a year and taking decades to die of starvation. Sick with fear, Harry let her eyes trail over the crowd of faeries, catching here and there on figures of particular vibrancy.
A woman on a deathly black horse with a silver circlet on her inky hair bore a spear that looked uneasily like it was crafted from razor-sharp glass, cradled in the crook of her arm. A copper-haired couple crowned with gold both carried delicately curved swords, the man spinning his absently in one hand, an arc of killing silver. A blond man with wild hair and a high-collared black cloak had foregone the reins of his horse entirely, twirling a pair of knives between his gloved fingers so that the emeralds in the hilts flashed. Beside him, a woman dressed almost identically toyed with a quiver of arrows, her long chestnut hair twining and untwining in the wind. The only unarmed rider Harry could see was a tall woman dressed in white and gold, riding an ivory horse without saddle or bridle and wearing a leather glove, two unfamiliar birds wheeling over her head with a third perched on her fist. The falconer, perhaps, Harry thought, although falcons would hunt poorly in the moonlight, and that did not explain the three rangy hounds trailing close after her.
At the center of the cluster, unquestionably the leader, the Huntsmaster was tall and smooth as polished stone, dressed in black silk shot with scarlet and gold at the collar and cuffs. He could have walked into a modern conference room or a medieval court and fitted—or rather failed to fit—in precisely the same degree, distant and unearthly as the stars. He wore a crown of bone, simple and spiked, and beneath it fluttered feather-like locks of hair, loose and long and half-way to flight. His hair couldn’t seem to agree with itself on its color, every movement of wind and muscle altering the fall of light. Parchment white twined into pale gold as he looked down on Harry, gold bled to venous red as the wind whipped past in a curl of wicked laughter, and surely that shadow had clung and left heartless black in its wake, every shade limned with cold and cruel starlight. He bore a bow and quiver, and his horse was tall and powerful, ghostly white and proud, with a long mane and tail that flowed watery in the wind and eyes that were far too intelligent for comfort. The warhorse reminded Harry of the hounds at Marys’ command, something that only looked like an animal because it deigned to lower itself to mortal form, and any better approximation of itself would ruin the fun of the Hunt.
Quite possibly by driving the prey into screaming madness at a glance.
The Huntsmaster was almost worse, because—despite his silk-clad perfection—the lines of his face looked like they had once been human. His lips were full and expressive, his eyes dark and dancing, and he drummed his fingers against the curve of his bow, thoughtful, in a rapid staccato. Harry squared her shoulders as best she could with her hands bound in front of her, straightening her spine. If she was going to die, she was damned well going to do her species proud in the process.
“Bold girl,” he said. His voice was soft, although Harry had heard it ring out like a bell during the chase, and slid through the air with the gentle rasp of fine satin. “You ran well.”
“I tried,” she said, and felt her voice tremble off her tongue. She wet her lips and swallowed before she raised her chin at him. “You could stand to improve your strategy.”
“Proud,” he mused, and he bent at the waist, a movement as quick and fluid as water, to grasp her jaw in unyielding fingers. Harry clenched her teeth as he examined her, staring back at him, and his black eyes narrowed, insulted, his grip tightening until she could feel bruises stain her skin. His wrist flicked out as if chasing off a fly, sending her crashing to the ground in a tangle of long bones and aching muscles. Skin scraped off of Harry’s bound hands as she struck the dirt and the abrasions stung as she lay there for a moment, trying to steady her heartbeat and tasting iron from where her teeth had gashed open her cheek. Somewhere behind her, she heard the grumble of Marys’ hounds, scenting the blood. “It’s a character flaw, girl,” he said. “Prey should never mock the predator.”
She pulled herself up onto her knees and her mouth worked, blood pooling under her tongue. Spitting it onto the ground and watching in satisfaction when it splattered the hooves of the warhorse, she snarled up at him. With a target available for her fear and frustration, it was all boiling to the surface as pure, flaming rage.
“I’m flawed, what can you do,” Harry snapped, trying for sassy and landing somewhere north of vibrating with fury. She tugged at the rope around her wrists, feeling for any weaknesses despite the raw and bloodied abrasions she felt opening beneath the coarse fibers. “You can get in line to criticize me for it.”
The Huntsmaster observed her for a moment, as if she was a deer that had learned to speak and immediately begun mouthing off at a wolf. It wasn’t far off, she supposed. She expected to be executed on the spot for her cheek, but instead he tipped his head back, hair sliding back over his shoulders, and laughed. The sound rolled out like a snowmelt flood, cold and all-consuming, and around him the Hunt rang with laughter. Harry could attach some of the voices to their owners as the humor rippled through the crowd of nobles—the low and wicked chuckle belonged to the wild-haired blond, the childlike giggle to the gold-crowned woman with the sword, the strangely human burble to the brunette with the bow.
“Glad I amuse you,” she muttered, giving the hem of her jacket a tug as if she had any hopes of being able to preserve some margin of dignity. Something hard met her fingers, nestled into the depths of a pocket and aligned invisibly with the seam, something with a long, thin shaft and a flat head. Harry froze for a heartbeat as the laughter began to peter out. This jacket was old, years old, definitely old enough to have seen prior Hunts, and, on the spot, she could think of very few things that were long and thin with a broad, flat head.
“I have to bring you back to the Huntsmaster,” she remembered Marys saying, with that penetrating stare, as if trying to convey something she couldn’t say aloud. “He prefers to make the first kill himself. Usually with a knife.” It had seemed cruel at the time, but knives were short weapons, close-range only. The Huntsmaster would need to be almost pressed up against her, to kill her efficiently with the dagger at his belt.
Three truths for a life debt. But something mentioned in passing, to frighten prey into submission…that was freely given. Or perhaps the payment was Harry’s fear, Harry’s shaking hands. Either way, cruelty and kindness were tangled concepts when it came to the Fair Folk, but pragmatism was pragmatism no matter the species of the speaker. If she could slip the nail out of her pocket, she might be able to startle the Huntsmaster, even hurt him, enough that she might have time to run again.
Harry’s brain ticked over to the glacial clarity of desperation, with a tangible click in the back of her mind. She needed to be knocked down again, preferably without breaking anything, or she would never be able to sneak the nail into her hand.
She looked up at the Huntsmaster again, pulling her legs up underneath her, and he looked down at her, eyes meeting hers steadily. As she reeled upright, his lips curved again and this smile touched his eyes.
“You are determined to die on your feet, girl,” he noted, voice laced with the same harsh laughter as before.
“It’s a humanity thing,” she spat, thoughtless and blindly furious at his amusement. She had never had a reputation for kindness, and throwing barbed words was easy, familiar. Perhaps she could show the Hunt that humans could be cruel, too. “I’m sure you got it, once upon a time.” Her words made his smile vanish, lips thinning and eyes going cold.
“Bold, proud, and clever,” he said, and reality dropped out from beneath Harry like a roller coaster starting to fall.
There are two ways for a human to survive the Hunt, Marys had said.
There is only one way for a human to truly join the Courts of the fae, she had said.
Marys’ apparently random truths settled into a different shape in the face of the Huntsmaster’s terrible humanity. He was unwithered, lacking in the starved eyes of the newly Touched or the skeletal limbs of those who would drop dead from exhaustion. He was truly fae, a ruler of rulers for two nights a year, but—just maybe—once he might have been a terrified and weary mortal standing at the feet of a warhorse. Her mind clattered to a halt, deafening.
Fortunately or otherwise, Harry’s mouth was perfectly capable of running off without her help, and she felt her lip peel back in a sneer.
“It’s amazing how you can say that like an insult.”
“In this instance, you might have been longer lived if you were none of those things,” he said.
Harry drew herself up, feeling her spine stiffen, and her sneer broadened into the sort of grin that humans inherited from ancestors who could bare their teeth as a real threat, something between terror and defiance. Her lips moved without permission, and she crisply said, “Fuck. You.”
The Huntsmaster considered her for a moment, leaning toward her in his saddle with a preternaturally perfect balance, and his hand flicked out again, almost too quickly to be seen. The back of his hand struck her cheek so hard that she felt a tooth rip loose from its root, and for the second time in as many minutes she crashed to the ground.
Harry lay there for a few long seconds, cheek pressed to the ground and hands pinned between her belly and the dirt. Her head ached, ears ringing and jaw starting to throb, and her abused forearms were beginning to bleed in earnest, the joints twisted into shapes they were never meant to assume beneath her weight. She took a breath and pushed the pain out of her mind. Trying to look stunned, to keep her shoulders still, she wiggled her fingers and tugged gently at her jacket until she could slip an index finger into the pocket.
The cold iron against her skin felt like hope.
Palming the nail, Harry groaned and levered herself onto her knees, nudging the loose molar with her tongue and wincing as it prodded sharply at a nerve. It took her a moment to gather the will to force herself back onto her feet, wavering as her head pounded, and she took a step back from the warhorse, out of reach of the Huntsmaster’s hand.
“Are you going to kill me or are we just going to stand around?” she asked, words breathless and slurred with the swelling already starting in her cheek. “Because I want to know if I should at least give running a try.”
The Huntsmaster glided down from his horse, fluid and easy, and with both of them standing on the earth, Harry was startled to see that he was only inches taller than she was. Harry was uncommonly tall, true, but he seemed less unquestionably lethal at this level than atop his wicked-eyed warhorse.
The impression of decreased danger lasted until he tipped his head, cold smile returning, and said, “Normally this is where the begging begins.”
“I don’t beg,” Harry said, feeling the shivers of repressed tears beginning to start in her chest. She didn’t dare add anything else, any other cutting remark, for fear that they would escape and ruin her composure for good.
“You even refuse to call for your mother? For your father?” He paced around her and she shuffled, trying to keep him in sight. The back of his hand brushed over her cheek and he spoke again, in a mocking sing-song. “Mein Vater, mein Vater, jetzt faßt er mich an! Erlkönig hat mir ein Leids getan!”
“’My father, my father, he seizes me fast; sorely the Erlking has hurt me at last,’” Harry said, the poem surfacing through the clear blankness of her mind. “And no. I don’t have anyone who would come.” She swallowed down the edge of tears and said, “You killed them on a Hunt, years back.”
“Tragic,” he whispered, a breath of wind that skittered over her neck and joined a giggling thread of breeze, and he drew his knife.
Without giving herself time to think about it, Harry spun on her toes and drove the nail into the first soft bit of skin that presented itself. Blood spurted between her fingers, smearing over her knuckles and flecking her bound arms in the shallow spray.
The Huntsmaster gave a strangled gasp, air bubbling in his throat, and she stumbled back, feeling the slick wetness cloying on her skin and staring at what she had wrought. Her hands fell free to her sides, the rope sliding loose at the touch of blood. The nail, slick and shining in the moonlight, nestled at the hollow of his throat, a grisly jewel. Almost an inch of iron stood out from his skin, and blood leaked around the shaft in black streams. Harry could hear his breathing strangle around the nail as she stood there, the tremors fading from her hands, her heart thundering in her ears like the rise of a storm.
The gathering was silent, the air electric as the Huntsmaster’s hand rose to grip the nail and his skin hissed and smoked where it touched. A dark bloom seeped across his throat, a lethal black flower of iron-sickness. Hand pressed against his throat above the nail, he stared at Harry, and his eyes were bright and human in his fear. The iron-sickness spread, vine-like, through the veins up the proud column of his throat, down beneath his richly embroidered collar, and the nail sank deeper into his flesh.
When he fell to the ground, braced on his hands and knees, black blood dripped onto his fingers and the dirt below. The rattle of his breathing grew louder, more desperate, and Harry felt, dim and distant, the tug of nausea in her gut and in her throat. Mostly, though, as he crumpled in on himself, terribly small in that moment, she felt relief, as if the danger of the Hunt had washed away in the spill of his blood.
When it was finished, the Huntsmaster was left lying on his back, eyes wide and blank, tendrils of iron-poison reaching up to sprawl in artistic coils over his sharply-drawn jaw. His crown had fallen to the leaves, bone set with gems as red as berries, and his hair spilled in loose curls of black around his shoulders. Harry wondered if that was what he looked like, when he was mortal, an angular, foxlike face with thin lips, eyes framed by thick lashes. He seemed very young, not much older or more worldly than she was.
The long beat of silence, this time, hung in the air like a heatwave, tangible and promising terrible things when it broke. The nail, the three inches of steel that had caused such destruction, still rested at the hollow of the Huntsmaster’s throat. His knife lay in the fallen leaves not far from his crown. His warhorse stared down at him with dark eyes, its dished face tilted at a slight angle as if watching for movement. The gathered Fair Folk had remarkably similar expressions, half dispassionate and half curious.
It was the wild-haired blond king who broke the silence, sheathing his knives with another low, rich chuckle. “Such a pity,” he drawled in an accented voice, deep and strong enough to shudder through Harry’s chest even at a distance.
His queen laughed again, her bubbling wicked giggle, and brushed her long hair back behind a shoulder. “What’s done is done,” she said, in the tone of someone telling a private joke, and they laughed again, high and low.
As if their amusement had shattered a spell, the tableau broke, and the world shuddered back into motion.
Harry felt eyes land on her as clearly as she had felt the moonlight curdle so many hours ago, and she dragged her gaze away from the Huntsmaster to see the fae watching her. Behind her, she could feel the cold presence of the hounds retreat, replaced by the still-familiar shape of Marys.
“He has given his life,” she said, voice vibrating with something just beneath the surface, a great dark shape under calm waters, like a leviathan.
“Given his life,” Harry echoed, nearly soundless, eyes falling back to the Huntsmaster. A thought was rushing toward her, that leviathan that Marys had spoken into being, ripples of water driven ahead of it. She held herself as still as she could manage, letting the thought come toward her, letting the leviathan surface, and when it came ashore it was another memory of Marys’ voice.
Any gift given, she had said, the third truth, must also be accepted.
“Claim the crown,” Marys breathed, her words sweet and soft as a summer breeze. The movement of air from her lips bore Harry forward as if she weighed no more than a dry leaf, until the crown was at her feet, pale against the earth and leaves. Her hands smeared it red when she picked it up and turned the cold circlet over until its spires were upright. The bone crown seemed to be watching her, daring her to choose, the silent promise of disaster if she put it down and walked away. The stories said terrible things about the fate of those who rejected the gifts of the Fair Folk.
“I have nothing and no one waiting for me in the mortal world,” Harry told the crown quietly. “I am not of that world either.” It stared back without reply, the bloody smears starting to sink away into the bone as if they had never been. “But I don’t want to be a killer.”
You already are, the crown seemed to say. Accept it or die.
Harry watched the blood clean itself from the bone, running her thumb along the cool rim and leaving a new track in its place. The Huntsmaster was a murderer, it was inescapable, but to become the Huntsmaster was to survive. She took a deep breath and raised her chin, and settled the crown onto her head.
The crown shifted until it was tight around her head, a weight both unfamiliar and safe. Lightning crackled down her spine and her eyes closed as white fire burst under her skin and along her veins. When Harry’s eyes opened again, the world seemed sheened with silver, bright and lively as midday. The blood on her hands gleamed like gemstones, and the deep abrasions littering her wrists were gone as if they had never been.
“The Huntsmaster is dead!” Marys cried from behind her, stepping up to rest a hand on the shoulder of Harry’s battered jacket. “The crown has passed into the command of Angharad Ainsel, child of the equinox, victor of the Wild Hunt! Are there any who dispute the crown’s choice?”
There was no response, and Harry nodded, dreamlike and distant from the events around her. She bent down and took the Huntsmaster’s knife, turning it over to watch the hypnotic gleam of light along the edge. The hilt fit perfectly into her hand, as if it had been made for her to hold, made for her to use. Crouching down beside his body, she took the leather sheath from his belt and slid the blade inside.
After a moment of consideration, she closed his eyes and stood.
“Huntsmaster,” Marys said, and Harry turned as if it had been her name since birth. Marys was on one knee beside the great white warhorse, her fingers laced together into a cup, both of them gazing at Harry. “Will you ride?”
Harry took a deep breath—not to calm herself, now, the tremor of terror drowned in the river-rush of power. The air tasted like honey and wine, she thought to herself, feeling the wind tumble over her skin and whisper secrets in her ears. “I will.”
Here are the things no one knows.
One. The Huntsmaster must exist, to rein in the Wild Hunt. (Fact: if the sun ceased to exist, the planets would dissolve into chaos and wreak destruction. The same principle applies.)
Two. The Huntsmaster must start their life as a mortal. (Fact: the Huntsmaster is welcomed with open hands and wary eyes, because, even in the Courts of the Fair Folk, one who washes away their mortality with the blood of another is to be viewed with suspicion.)
Three. The fae do not believe in destiny, they believe only in the twisting knot of time. (Fact: there is such a thing as a circular paradox. An event causes an effect, and the effect causes the event. It is impossible to say whether a child whose life is littered with the Fair Folk becomes the Huntsmaster as a result, or if their life is littered with the Fair Folk because they will become the Huntsmaster.)
Four. In six months, it will be the spring equinox, and, in a forest in the north of France, Harry Ainsel will put the Horn to her lips and call the Hunt to life.
