Free Thrice Sworn: A Short-Story Prequel to Winterling by Sarah Prineas Page A

blue eyes. He was the source of the strange smell. What was he?
    The Lady quirked a smile and tickled again with the grass.
    “Laury,” the young man protested again. “I’m serious. We need to be careful. I don’t trust her. Something about her feels wrong.”
    The Lady nibbled at the end of the grass stem. “Owen, I have known the Mór for a long time.” She glinted a sly grin at him. “For far longer than you’ve been alive, dear one. She is my Huntress. She is sworn to me and I trust her completely.”
    From his hiding place, Finn stared. The young man—Owen, she’d called him—smelled strange because he was strange. He wasn’t from the Summerlands; he was from that other land through the Way. He was human .
    Oh, was this going to be trouble! Delicious trouble! Finn snorted out a laugh.
    At the sound, the Owen-human looked up alertly.
    Oops. Finn froze into stillness, hoping his dark head blended well with the night-shadows at the edge of the forest.
    Owen shook his head and gazed down at the Lady. “I still don’t understand how this oath thing works, Laury. She swears, and then you just trust her?”
    “Yes. Oaths bind us together, and nobody would ever break a sworn oath. The consequences would be too terrible for everyone, including the oath breaker. Do not worry, Owen.” The Lady ran her hands over her round belly and gave a happy sigh. “It is natural that you don’t understand oaths. You and I need no oaths between us.”
    Then there was some soppy kissing that Finn didn’t really feel much like spying on. Far better would be to track down the Mór. The Owen-human didn’t trust the Lady’s Huntress; that was clear. Finn hadn’t ever much liked her himself—any more than he’d like a cold, black arrow fletched with crow feathers. Maybe the Mór was up to something.
    This could be fun, and it might make a good story to tell his puck-brothers, or anybody else who would listen.
     
    It didn’t take Finn long to find the Mór, because he knew where to look. In a grove of slender ash trees the Huntress had her own pavilion—a tent made of silk that glowed whitely against the night, open on one side to the evening breezes. Nearby was another tent, this one made of canvas, which was where the Mór kept the tall, white horse she rode during her hunts.
    The Mór lounged on a camp stool in her tent. She wore her usual black silk, but her short, black hair was tousled and her feet were bare. Two of her extremely annoying wolf-guards knelt on the grass before her.
    “Not yet,” the Mór was saying to the stupid wolves, her voice with an edge on it sharp enough to cut. “We must wait.”
    Wait for what? Finn crawled closer, his ears pricked.
    “But the human suspects, Huntress,” one of the wolf-guards said, her voice low, subservient.
    The Mór gave half a shrug. “No matter. The Lady will birth her baby very soon. She will be weak then, and distracted, and her powers will be directed elsewhere. That is when we shall act.”
    “And your oath to the Lady, Huntress?” the wolf-guard asked. “What of that?”
    “My oath is not your concern,” the Mór said coldly.
    Finn shivered; his dew-soaked clothes felt heavy and chill. The Mór was plotting something, and it smelled deeply, horribly wrong. Oath breaking affected everyone, even the pucks.
    This wasn’t fun after all.
    Keeping his head down, Finn edged away from the Mór’s tent and melted into the night-dark forest.
     
    He could keep what he’d heard secret and then watch it all unfold. That’d be a pucklike thing to do. But this time, he couldn’t do the pucklike thing. He needed to speak, and this time—oh, yes, this time—he would be heard.
    Shifting to his dog form, he raced through the forest and back to the Lady Tree. There, the Lady and Owen had just gotten to their feet; the human was shaking out the blanket they’d been sitting on. They stood in a little cone of light: just one lantern still glowed; the rest was