Becoming Her Knight

Chapter Fourteen

Hunting was both easier and harder than Finn expected. The last time Finn had to rely on her hunting abilities was when she was a child, learning the basics of survival from her father over a backbreaking summer in some wild and nearly uninhabited woods far from the Seelie Court. Finn had been small and relatively weak back then. The draw of the bow was physically difficult, remembering how to tie a slip knot for traps was a daunting task, but the most difficult part of it all was the loneliness she felt without her brother by her side. He had been her constant shadow up until that point. The experience had been trying in the extreme.

Compared to that, Finn found some aspects of hunting easy that were once extremely challenging. Her shoulders and arms were full sized and developed compared to her child self, so instead of struggling to draw the bow, she had to be careful not to draw it too hard and snap the string. And, she was no longer alone. Adi was waiting patiently for her at the small camp they had set up just a short ways from the trickling waterfall, where they had spent a torrid moment in each other's embrace.

It was still embarrassing to think about it, but it didn't seem to have changed anything. Adi wasn't treating her any differently than she had before. Finn wasn't sure if she felt happy about that or crushed. For her own sake, she tried to focus on being happy about it.

Saying that hunting was easy would have been a lie, though. Because, it absolutely wasn't.

Finn hadn't had much of an education in survival, back when she was a child. Her father had given her a book that he assured her would teach her how to survive in the woods. Then he had abandoned her for a month to fend for herself in an unknown stretch of woodland. At the time, Finn thought that her father had some kind of spell on her, or maybe he had sent one of the sneakier species of fae to keep an eye on her. After years working under her father, Finn no longer thought that was the case.

Over a decade later, Finn hardly remembered anything from that beaten up little paper book. After she had finally returned to the barracks after a month of hard living, she had shoved it to the bottom of her footlocker and done her best to forget it existed. That being the case, it took her over an hour to reconstruct the most basic of rabbit snares. Afterward, she felt a dawning recognition about how much she didn't know. It was becoming clear just how hard becoming a hunter, even a shitty hunter, was going to be.

Still, Finn was determined. Luckily for her, her own species was especially well-built for hunting. Elves, even untrained ones who lived lives of luxury, could hear the latent magic of any woodland if they listened well enough. When Finn climbed up high into a swaying birch tree and let her mind go quiet, she could sense the gentle undulation of natural magic within the forest. An ancient weave of plants, animals and earth energy that had been persisting in the same place since time immemorial. It was in Finn's blood to be able to feel and taste the life essence of the forest itself, so she let herself sink into it.

Finn wasn't much of a tracker. But, after honing in on her own natural sense for the forest, she was able to find the paths through the underbrush that certain animals favored relatively easily.

This wasn't a skill she had when she was a child. Belatedly, Finn felt a lot of respect for her younger self for not starving to death in the middle of those woods. She must have been a lot tougher than she remembered.

The first thing she managed to shoot was a fat pigeon. In truth, she had loosed an arrow at it just to see if she could hit it as it bobbed along under a big sprawling maple tree. It would have been a waste of an arrow if it had broken, but luckily it didn't. It skewered the bird cleanly from one wing through its body to the other. When Finn had bashfully presented it to Adi, expecting some cutting words about returning to camp with so little meat, Finn had instead been pleasantly surprised by Adi's enthusiasm.