Vesj Aamkena, a witch of the steppe
While Narshurian winter shows no mercy, the continental dry climate scarcely conditions one to tramping through heavy snow. My breath pillowed in thick fog with each of my cumbersome steps, while the patriarch sauntered as if sinking knee-deep into the icy stratum barely hampered him.
Rytna petrified in place into a statue of predatory excellence. My grip of the borrowed rifle tightened, yet nothing stirred in the frozen temple under the primordial canopy.
"We should rest for a bit", the man said. "It pays not to build up a sweat just yet."
In my case, it was late for that concern. I dropped my bag and sat on its integrated stool without hiding my relief. The patriarch squatted on a rock with the ease of a man half his age and stuffed the drinking straw from his hunting suit into his mouth. Liquid redder than blood seeped in between his lips. His extremely Jaan stare charged up the uncomfortable silence, until I was forced to utter something. Anything.
"It's a very beautiful place, this forest."
The patriarch let the straw drop from his mouth and licked his stained lips. "Very."
From my experience with Neru, a wordless unbroken gaze from a Jaan wasn't necessarily some bizarre form of passive aggression, yet I couldn't shake the pressing feeling that this man wished to see me gutted and exsanguinated at the backroom of a butcher's shop. After all, I did have enough hide to make for a rather grisly rug.
"It's fascinating to be finally be here", I said. "Neru has related numerous tales of the hunting trips you two made together."
The patriarch's lips curled up in what must have been a genuine smile, as the talent for acting didn't appear to run in the family beyond Nerutaara. "Is that so?" He paused as if waiting for a response, but luckily I controlled my nervous tongue and let him to continue. "She detested the kill, yet always insisted to come along with me. At times, I made sure to miss the prey so we could make the trip without reaching for a rifle." He nodded at me. "Speaking of rifles, you haven't loaded yours."
I chuckled and shook my head. "No, I haven't yet. I didn't want to accidentally shoot my foot should I trip."
"Smart." The Jaan's wrist lashed at his hip, bringing his pistol to bear and pulling the trigger in one barely perceivable motion. The weapon must have hissed, but a pounding pressure of terror drowned the sound inside my skull. Agony like flame licked the side of my thigh. I jumped on my feet, not in the righteous rage from being assaulted, but fear of bleeding out: the femoral arteries were one of the most dire spots to lacerate in the human body.
The pain didn't curl my spine in knots, but the horror was enough to rob my legs of strength. I stumbled on my knees into the snow. My hand reached for the rifle, which had disappeared into the soft white depths, and careened to press on the wound. The sore stripe lacked the fatal pulse of an arterial injury; a mere existential scratch. Even in my frantic state of mind, I didn't assume it was a mistake. The Jaan didn't miss.
"Stand up", the patriarch barked. "To keel over in the snow only gains you a case of hypothermia."
I straightened myself on my feet, without any air of confidence. Drawn tendons drew my limbs into wobbly demonstration of distress. With his pistol in a deceptively casual grip, Rytna stepped just close enough for me to grab him. I didn't fall for the trap. His smile had vanished, but in it place no malice materialised. The man appeared at worst disinterest.
"Either you are exceedingly brave", he said. "Or you figured that you'd be dead, should I wish that."
"The latter..." My breath wheezed sharply between my clenched teeth. "...is the case, no doubt of that."
For a moment the corner of Rytna's mouth inclined towards a smirk of sorts. His eyes, however, never shifted away from mine. That unflinching, raptorial stare was indeed familiar, but never before had I been afraid of its kind.
"We Jaan deliberate our marriage arrangements with due severity", the patriarch said. "I hope you understand." He motioned in the general direction towards the edge of the forest. "If you make it out of the woods, I shan't pursue you further."
"What will you say to Neru?"
"That I killed you. She'll understand."
That was unbelievable, but I didn't argue beyond concentrating on maintaining a stern expression.
"The child shall be raised as Jaan should be", Rytna said and stepped back. "Out of respect, I'll count to one thousand."
A moment passed, as I stared at the man. My mind thawed just enough for me to understand the situation. I ran, ploughing through the snow with the power of panic and scalding anger.
Tracking me through the thick snow should have been trivial, even without the trickle of blood I left after myself. In the narrow sector left of my vision, the environment blurred into a grey mush of snow and one singular tree trunk, copied kaleidoscopically by the deranged creator gods worshipped by primitive Jaan in their mad rituals of butchery and conquest.
I spared one glance behind me. The patriarch stood, eyes closed, as still as the cursed arboretum around him; another part of the majestic relic surrounding me. I ran.
The azure of the sky stabbed my eyes with its lurid intensity. Rays of the low sun stretched to the snowy canopy, painting the trees in glittering shades of electrum. The crackle of the icy layer drowned the muted quiet. Like vaporised acid, the scent of cold air stung deep in my heaving lungs.
Without a plan, I'd end up exhausting myself, which would make me as good as shot and bagged. But there was no real chance to outrun the Jaan. Even Neru, with her rather limited athletic training, might have kept up with a herd of reindeer until the poor animals keeled over from exhaustion. Her father presumably wasn't 'out of shape' in their kin's ludicrous endurance standards. Yet a thousand times ten heartbeats wasn't enough to reach anywhere near the edge of the forest.
My mind struggled at the edge of despondency, leaving flesh to trudge on automated. I only regained outside awareness when icy fog surrounded me. The weather hadn't warmed, or at least I didn't think so, even if I myself teetered near overheating.
A shape stalked in the preternatural mist, one too large to be a human, even someone of my size. It raised a head crowned by fluted spines and turned one of its dark sapphire eyes at me: a ghostkin elk, a cow based on the arrangement of the majestic quills, on which light rippled like on a polished crystal chandelier. The fog must have been the beast's making, even if it felt incredible that one animal might evaporate so much water.
The animal spun and jogged away, its clawed feet stabbing the snow in the rhythm of a leisurely trot. After some distance it stopped to look at me with its unfathomable eyes.
Having no other plan, or much anything in my head, I followed the animal. Perhaps I planned to mask my footprints in those of a herd, but such must be post hoc justification. The mist did clung to the air and give a modicum of cover, even though the sound of my lumbering gait had to be audible beyond woodland visibility.
The regal beast stopped at a stream, not quite a river, yet fierce and wide enough not to have frozen. The icy water coursed towards the edge of the forest. After I caught my breath and looked around, the ghost-animal was gone.
If there was any time left, it couldn't be much. I pulled off my boots and socks, rolled up the legs of my trousers and strode into the water. The cold seeped straight into the bones of my feet, but at least I didn't leave any prints. The smooth stones juddered under my steps, but the stream was shallow enough that I managed to walk upstream. While I didn't put it beyond Jaan to track underwater spoor, I did hope my little scheme might bifurcate my potential track. Half and half odds were already better than I had before.
Once the pain stopped worsening, my struggle upstream became surprisingly tolerable. The water wasn't high enough to risk immediate hypothermia. I might end up losing a toe or two, but Nerutaara is worth more than a limb or two. Much more.
Eventually even a noble wrath couldn't sustain my resolve, and I had to clamber out of the water. I had made quite far, and nothing seemed to follow me, so I sat on a log and did my best to dry my feet. Sense of touch returned as a hail of needles, but through gritted teeth I found myself elated that my skin didn't show signs of acute frostbite. It did pay to have a lot of warm blood. Once inside the thick fibrewool socks and gumboots, the remaining moisture didn't stop my feet from thawing.
Though in completely unfamiliar surroundings, I wasn't entirely lost. There was only a half of the forest I had to search for the Ekku manor, with the river on my side.
Living on the steppe requires a good sense of direction due to the chronic lack of landmarks. However, the ominous trees and the lack of visible horizon ruined my ability to remain sure of my direction. The only thing I could do was to hope I didn't start walking circles. At least it was easy enough to notice my own tracks, a fact which didn't exactly reassure me.
The snow-covered terrain appeared largely uniform, but was nothing of the sort. Underneath, boulders and pits threatened each of my steps. The snow's ability to hold my weight varied. As careful as I was, one careless leap sent me plunging into a ditch, neck-deep in snow. Had there been no young tree at arm's reach, I wouldn't have been able to heave my bulk out before exhausting myself.
Slowly, my subconscious noticed certain irregularities, or more accurately unnatural regularities, in the placement of the trees. It was subtle, and not something I could easily describe, except as phantom galleries that existed as long as one didn't concentrate on them. Perhaps I only saw the traces of construction long since submerged into the moss and humus. Regardless of whether or not I imagined it, I oriented my trudging towards the centre of these non-existent avenues.
By sheer chance, I spotted the looming dark shape of the manor, peeking behind shifting trees. The building's position on a fortified mound made it difficult to approach from an inconspicuous angle, but I did my best. In the end, I inched on, body pressed in the snow to a vantage point on a hillock some distance from the manor.
Even peeking through thick coniferous bushes, I felt dangerously visible to the tiny windows dotting the side of the circular fort-home. I might have been able to scale up to the bottom of the walls themselves, but not any further. I definitely would not have fit through any of the orifices save the main gate. I could have hoped to spot Neru in one of the windows and catch her attention, though that was terribly risky. The best I could do was to wait for her to realise that aught had gone awry and come look for me. In fact, perhaps I should have escaped the forest and waited for Nerutaara. After all, she was in no danger.
From behind me emanated a sound so terrible the shock nearly ripped my heart out of its place: a man clearing his throat. I spun like a cornered animal to face Rytna. He had his pistol in hand, in a casual manner that threatened to slip the weapon off his grip.
"You. When did you catch me?"
"I was already here", he stated without a hint of gleeful boasting.
"What..." I stood and patted snow off me to maintain a shred of dignity. "This was a test."
"Yes." The patriarch thumbed the release catch to let out the needles and spun the gun on his finger while it wheezed out pressurised gas. "She is our daughter."
"She... is." The bleeding of my thigh had mostly ceased, leaving behind an increasingly stinging soreness. Anger flared crimson inside my skull, but faded into peculiar fuzzy warmth; all this man did today was out of love for the woman I also loved. Nevertheless, the shreds of tired ire lingered. "You shot me."
"The ruse required a dose of shock humours clouding your mind. You are too smart and burly to be intimidated by mere words."
That might have been a genuine compliment, coming from the Jaan. I walked to him, only to be myself browbeaten by his utter tranquillity at my presence. He sheathed the gun and offered me his hand.
I, of course, took the hand, and to my surprise, smiled. Laughter, fuelled by nervous tension, nearly burst out of me at the absurdity of the moment. I could already feel that this was one of those horrifying moments in my life that would make for altogether amusing tales in future.
"Did you 'test' the husbands of your other daughters?"
"We did." The patriarch blew out a ring of mist and shot through it with a flick of a finger gun. "But not in this manner. Military men both, those two are more dangerous than you, and I didn't want anyone to get hurt."
"Aren't you afraid I might be vindictive enough to try something right now?"
The man's placid face cracked in a lupine grin. "Are you?" He sighed and calmed his expression. "Should you wish to spar, we can do that some time later. Now, let's get you inside and something warm in your gut before you freeze."
Tremors of overarching tension rippled through the whole frame of my wife. Her hands curled into fists tight like dead arachnids under the pressure of an ocean. "How could you? This is despicable, even for you."
"Hey, it's alri––" I reached for her shoulder, but her hand shot up as if about to grapple my arm, though she kept her attention on her parents.
The matriarch rested her palms neatly on a knee above the other. "Indeed. No harm done."
"No harm? Father shot my husband!"
"It's was just a––"
Neru's eyes snapped to me. The fury burning in them sent me aback. Her mouth wavered, before she spun to stride to the patricians. "You shall apologise, make amends. Otherwise ––and I promise this–– you shan't ever see your grandchild, or me for that matter, ever again."
The smug amusement melted off Zoviheena, revealing a cold glare. Nerutaara however didn't baulk at her mother's displeasure: she answered with a murderous gaze of her own.
"I am sorry", the father said, snapping the tension in half. "I went too far."
"Not you", the matriarch said with a theatrical sigh. "I had you do it. The fault is mine. I apologise."
"And I accept the apology", I said, before Neru could respond.
She spun on her heels with enough force to sent her bulbous body wobbling. I hurried to steady her. Though the woman let me hold her, she didn't press into an embrace.
"Very well", she muttered. After glancing at her parents, she pushed me towards the exit. "Let's go see to your completely alright scrape, Vesija."
