Free Don't Let the Fairies Eat You by Darryl Fabia Page A

staggered toward the woods, his feet stumbling over a root, and then tree limbs cast a shadow over him. He watched the hunting line for a moment longer as a guard waved Baelin’s stolen hat in front of the hounds’ snouts. Then the boy turned and fled, leaping over roots and down slopes, around thick tree trunks and brushing aside thin ones.
    It wasn’t long before he heard the frenzied barking of the hounds, heated for the hunt, and the thunder of horses’ hooves. Men hollered and laughed, fanning out through the forest. Tree branches shook and acorns fell. Ferns wavered on the ground and the tremble of tree limbs made the scant light waver. Baelin didn’t dare look back once, running across ground, scrambling over small ledges, sliding under fallen trunks. Every pine and briar prick sent him scurrying faster, terrified that a hound’s teeth had nipped his leg, or that an arrow had grazed his skin and one of the laughing huntsmen had found him.
    He slowed down as his legs began aching. The horses were everywhere now, whinnying and stamping the dirt. Baelin stopped near a thick set of trees and began digging, hoping to lay a trap, but he realized he had no time for digging a pit deep enough for a horse to break its leg when they were chasing him already. He didn’t want to come close to the hunters. Unfortunately, he also lacked rope to snare any of them, or weapons to battle them.
    “Their arrows would never give me the chance,” Baelin said to himself. “I’m not a man to them—not even a boy.” He took a moment to rest and then walked, hoping that faint footsteps and a quiet breath would keep him alive until nightfall. Lord Tremley wouldn’t stay in the woods through the night over a hungry boy, pride be damned.
    A clearing opened beyond the next line of trees and Baelin paused at the edge of the sunlit grove. The open space was the worst place for him, easily visible by any of the mounted men, and a clean breeze swept down from above that might catch his scent and carry it to the hounds.
    But a thin stream ran into a pond in the clearing’s center and Baelin’s mouth had gone dry in the chase. His belly and tongue seemed to command him these days, so he wandered to the shallow pool’s edge and cupped cool water to his mouth. The water’s surface rippled back from his hand at first, and then rippled toward it as the water broke across the pond. Baelin’s head jerked up, terrified that one of the hunter’s horses would be drinking ahead of him, but instead he spotted the white hart lapping gently at the water.
    He was the most beautiful stag ever imagined. His white fur was as clean as mountain snow and the gray underside as cool as steel. Thin muscles tore beneath his skin, as an animal used to the chase, sought by every hunter’s eyes in all the western kingdoms. Proud antlers curved skyward from his brow, as white as ivory, and his eyes didn't carry the nervous stare of most deer, but the same burning intensity as Lord Tremley’s eyes.
    Baelin smiled, looking Tremley’s failure in the face. “You weren’t slain,” he said.
    The white hart lifted his mouth from the water and stared back at the boy. “It was not my turn yesterday. Nor is it my turn today.”
    “No, it is mine,” Baelin said.
    “The odds are heavy against you, child. What will you do?”
    Lord Tremley’s hunting party turned in the woods, reforming near the clearing, and it was then that one of the lord’s huntsmen spotted the boy through the trees. His arrow slipped into his bow and swiftly flew off to the grove, where it dove into the boy’s leg, dropping him to the ground. The huntsman grasped the hunting horn from his belt, blew it twice, and then rode for the clearing, thinking he’d find the boy limping away. His jaw dropped when he spotted the white hart fleeing through the trees on the other side of the clearing.
    The other hunters gathered behind him within moments, and Lord Tremley rode at their head. “You’ve