Free Hart's Hope by Orson Scott Card

the ne’er-do-wells who had no hope of any other trade. To fill your fifties and your regiments you had to conscript soldiers, which gave you an unwilling, weakish army, on the whole. It was enough to keep the enemies of Burland at bay, but rarely enough for you to hope to overcome the Queen herself.
    And thus it was for days, for weeks, for years, for decades, for centuries. Your loyal followers would come to you and serve you, grow old, and die, but still you lived on, and Urubugala lived on, and Craven lived on, and Weasel lived on, for Beauty, broken as a child, could never grow straight however many years she lived: she would live forever exacting painstaking vengeance for a brief and unwilling cruelty so many years before.
    Three times you brought your army to the gates of Inwit. Three times Queen Beauty let you hope for deliverance. And then she sent terror into the hearts of your soldiers, faced them with whatever they feared most in all the world, and all but the most resolute handful of them fled from your army, and you retreated from the city that you had won from her father so many years before, forced to begin again, ashamed again before the other nations of the world.
    T HE H ART’S H OUR
    After three centuries and more of exile, on a day when you wore the golden cups over your eyes, there came a vision to you. At first you thought it came from Beauty, but in only a moment you knew that it did not. You saw the Hart, the great shaggy stag, the one that Zymas had seen. The eagle clung to his belly, holding closed the wound there. And the Hart stopped, and turned his heavy head to face you, and you saw that he wore an iron collar around his neck, and his hooves were also banded and chained, and he bade you follow him, and set him free.
    I cannot, you said.
    Come, he told you, though you heard no words.
    It will do no good, you said. Beauty will see me, and thwart all my works.
    Come, he said. For this hour, she sees not, and sees not that she sees not.
    So you took the golden cups from your eyes, and walked forth from your camp into the forest, and armed with your bow you followed the tracks of a deer into the wood, and went where the deer chose to lead you.
    It was all the power that the gods could muster, exercised for you that day in the woods not far from the town of Banningside. Did you not wonder why they led you where they led you, why you did what you did? Will you now kill what came from that hour? It was your salvation, Palicroval. It was your only son.

6

The Farmer’s Wife
    Now the life of Orem Scanthips, the Little King, began this way: with a man following a hart through the wood; with a woman bathing at a stream.
    S HE W AS A P OET OF A LL T HINGS T HAT G REW OF T HEMSELVES
    Molly the farmer’s wife had her six sons and didn’t long for more. Six sons, three daughters: too many sons to divide the farm among them, too many daughters to marry them off with any sort of dowry. It was not a son she longed to make when she went that spring morning to her hidden place on the banks of the Banning. She went with a twist of magic in her fingers, so none could follow; but she was followed. Or rather, she was found.
    It was a dark place, a still place, where the river ran narrow and deep and so swiftly that a twig was lost in an instant, so quietly that all songs were heard, all footfalls noted. The trees reached out over the water and met in a dense roof so that the sun did not dance upon the stream. It was cold here, even in the summer. A cave made of leaves and water, all the cold and terrible things of a woman: it was Molly’s truest home, the place where she dared to call herself by her most secret name.
    Bloom, she whispered, naming herself.
    Hush, spoke the river in reply. Hush, for the end of your life is coming, following the traces of a deer.
    T HE P ANDERING H ART
    A great grey hart stood across the stream from her. Molly knew him well, knew that in the hart and hind were