Hunter's Season (Elder Races #4.7)

Hunter's Season (Elder Races #4.7)
Thea Harrison



Chapter One

Hearth

As soon as Xanthe reached Adriyel, she left her mount at the palace stable and sent a message to Her Majesty’s Chief of Security that said: “It is done.”

Xanthe did not sign the note. He would know who had sent it. She did not expect a quick response either. With the completion of her assignment, any urgency or need for action had ceased.

Because she had been gone to America for some time, she stopped at the marketplace to buy food: fresh bread, meat, eggs, vegetables and fruit. The familiarity of the task soothed nerves that were tired and stressed from living with too much strangeness and danger for so long.

At midafternoon, the best of the goods had already been picked over, but there was still enough variety to meet her immediate needs. The market stalls were stocked with meat and fish, vegetables, fruit and grains from nearby farms, a variety of cooked foods, beautiful cloths of rich colors and intricate needlework, pottery, spices, soaps and metal work, and the recent, jarring addition of American goods. Hawkers called their wares, and the smells of cooking food wafted along the narrow cobblestone streets.

Xanthe paused as the small creature she carried in her pack stirred. A small creature might be too hungry to wait until she had cooked supper. After a moment’s thought, she backtracked to the baker’s stall to buy a meat pie. Her last purchase was an earthenware jug of fresh milk and a small tub of soft cheese. When she had finished the milk and the cheese, she would return the jug and the tub to the dairyman.

The wriggling in her pack became more urgent.

“Patience,” she said to it.

Then she walked out of the city, down the narrow road that hugged the river for a couple of miles to the overgrown path that led to the small two-room cottage that had been her home for her entire life. Ignoring the increasingly strong wriggles in the pack on her back, she studied the cottage as she approached. It had a neglected air about it, as well it should, since she had been gone for over four seasons, but the roof looked solid enough. It led her to hope that the inside was dry.

She opened the door and looked into the shadowed, dusty interior. For a moment, it all looked too rustic, small and strange. Then the strangeness of the last several moons—months, they were called in America—fell from her eyes, and the cottage became once again as familiar to her as the back of her own hand, and she was home.

She remembered something a human had once said to her while she had been in the strange tent city at Devil’s Gate in the American state named Nevada. The human had been sunburned and had worn a cynical expression when he said, “You know how that old saying goes—you can’t go home again.”

Xanthe had never been to America before, and she didn’t know how the saying went. She wasn’t sure what the human had meant.

She eased her packages onto the dusty table, shrugged out of her pack and set it carefully on the floor, and took off the shoulder harness that carried her sword, straightening tired shoulders. The day had already been full of travel, and there was still much to do before she could rest that night.

She propped the door open to the fresh, cooling air of the evening. Now the small creature in her pack was voicing shrill unhappiness. It sounded like a crying baby. She opened the pack and pulled out a thin, wriggling orange striped kitten that leaped out of her hands onto the table and circled the wrapped meat pie and dairy, meowing piteously.

“Yes, I know,” Xanthe told it. “But you must wait a moment or two longer.”

She had fallen into the habit of talking to the kitten on the trip from the crossover passage to Adriyel. They had developed a habit of sorts in the evenings on the short three day journey— the kitten would fall asleep, purring, either on her lap or beside the campfire while Xanthe studied the lovely hand painted cards of the Tarot deck she had been given by a Vampyre and two medusae on her trip to Chicago, to the crossover passageway that led back home.

People in America had such an odd term for places like Adriyel. They called them Other lands, but to Xanthe, America was the Other land.

Most of the time the kitten seemed to enjoy the sound of her voice, but it wasn’t interested in conversation at the moment. It swatted at the pie and meowed again, showing slender sharp white teeth and a tiny pink tongue.

Xanthe checked the cupboard that held the crockery. Along with all the other furniture in the cottage, her father had built the cupboard well out of hard seasoned wood. No small creatures had taken up residence in it, so she wiped out a bowl with the bottom of her sleeve, poured some milk into it and set it on the floor.

As the purring kitten leaped down and began to lap at the creamy liquid, she unwrapped and broke open the meat pie. It was still hot. Fragrant steam rose from the middle. She scraped meat and gravy onto a dish, blew on it until it had cooled slightly and set it on the floor by the bowl of milk.

While the kitten gorged itself on supper, Xanthe set to work. She dusted and swept out spiders and a few mice nests. With the kitten as a mouser, they wouldn’t be back. Then she brought in half rotted wood from the small pile left under the lean-to, started a fire, uncovered the well and drew water, diced the raw meat and vegetables into a pot and set it over the fire to cook, washed the table and chairs, dragged the mattress out of the simple bedroom and beat it until the clouds of dust stopped rising, dragged it back inside and unpacked the linens and blankets that had been stored with fragrant cedar chips in a chest.