Free J. H. Sked by Basement Blues

tray in front of him, and he looked up, startled.
    “Why don’t you have a bite to eat, lad, while my friends and I step outside. There’s something I need to speak to them about.”
    Ricky nodded, unable to believe his good fortune, and Seiren led the other two from the room.
     
    “The farmer that brought him in reported to the garrison right after he finished at market,” Seiren said. “His village is about five larna northward of Five Hands, and there’ve been incidents.”
    “What kind?” Ariaan cocked his head.
    “Animals slaughtered on some of the outlying farms. Hunters disappearing in the forest near Five Hands. The ones that came back reported strange tracks.”
     
    Amber felt the shock like a slap through the face. Ariaan’s face had gone so white she thought he might fall over, and from the numbness of her lips she knew she must look the same.
    “Oh, shit,” she whispered. “Seiren, are you sure?”
    He shook his head.
    “I think we need to speak to him first,” he jerked his head at the doorway. The silence from the room was broken by a long and unmistakably satisfied belch.
    Amber grinned.
    Ariaan smiled, feeling slightly better – he no longer felt like his face would break if he moved his lips, which was something – and went back inside, his seconds close behind him.
     
    The three hawks re-entered the room, and Ricky looked up at them, blinking owlishly.
    It was the first he’d eaten in almost three days, not counting the wild berries he’d gorged on just outside of the forest, and then paid for in cramps and cold sweat for the rest of the day. He only wanted now to curl up in a quiet place and sleep for as long as they’d let him.
     
    By the grim looks on the faces of the hawks, though, that wasn’t going to happen just yet, and Ricky tried not to whimper as he looked at them properly for the first time.
     
    Ariaan was a big man, bigger than Dakron even, with sandy blonde hair that fell to his shoulders and a broad, open face. Seiren was taller, although not as wide, but with the broad muscle in the shoulders and arms that all three, even the woman, shared.
    Ricky stared at her longer than the others. He had never seen an armed woman before, and she wore a short sword belted low on the waist. Her hair was unbound, falling in a thick black curtain to just below her waist, and she had red marks extending from her wrists to her elbows on each arm.
     
    Amber saw his gaze and smiled. “Wrist greaves,” she said. “They make you sweat, especially this time of the year.”
    Ricky had no idea what wrist greaves were, but nodded anyway, ducking his head so that his mousy hair fell across his eyes and peered through it, trying to study them less obviously.
     
    There was no mistaking them for human, not once you looked at their faces. The high cheekbones and full mouths seemed normal enough, and then you realised that the tips of their ears were sharply pointed, almost lobe-less, and their eyes were huge, great sweeping slants of sea-green colour with pupils that bisected them with jet-black arcs. There was almost no white visible, a mere framing on the very edge of the eye itself, and every few seconds a strange filming as a transparent membrane flicked over the surface of the eye itself.
     
    Ricky watched as Seiren and Ariaan picked chairs behind the desk across from him, Ariaan riding his backwards, and Amber drifted over to the open window and perched on the wide sill.
     
    His mother had had a cat, a semi-tame creature that moved with the same insolent grace and sense of self, despite numerous scars and missing half an ear. It had liked to sit and watch him do his chores from its usual place just beneath the eaves of the house, thrumming deep in its throat, blinking steadily from yellow eyes that were otherwise very similar to the three pairs turned upon him now, before nonchalantly going off into the forest and doing whatever cats like doing unobserved.
    It had disappeared shortly