The Memoirs of Light

Prologue

Prologue 

                The hunt was not going well.

                The moon was setting, and the only game in Caldor’s bag was two rabbits and a quail, taken by his snares. The lack of meat may have been due to the close of the fall season, or to the nearly empty flask of brandy at his hip, to keep him warm, he claimed. His muscular legs were growing numb with an uncomfortable, shooting cold ache as he crouched behind a tree trunk. His hands were chilled in the autumn night air as they gripped his bow. But no matter how restless he felt, he did not dare to move.

                A deer had wandered into the clearing before him and was now rooting through the dead, fallen leaves for grass to eat. Her wide, innocent eyes did not look his way. He didn’t have any qualms about killing such an elegant creature; this was a matter of survival. An entire deer would feed him for a week. He needed that deer to die.

He slowly brought his bow up, painfully slowly, an inch a minute, so that she would not see her death approaching. He breathed slowly, his liquor-soaked breath puffing from his mouth in a faint stream. His hands trembled with excitement, and he willed them to be still. His whole body tensed as he sighted the arrow straight at the deer’s heart. Then, just as slowly as he had raised the bow, he drew it. The string creaked as it stretched. The deer’s ears twitched, but otherwise she did not react.

He breathed in, said a silent prayer for his shot to hit its mark, and then breathed out. As the last of his breath left him, he let the arrow go with it.

The string twanged and the arrow sprang away like a hound from its cage. It rushed toward the doe, faster than sight.

Still, no matter how swift the arrow flew, it had been released a second too late. In her search for fresh grass, the deer took a step forward, and the arrow took her in the side, instead of behind the shoulder and into the heart. With a cry of surprise and pain, she bounded off into the trees.

Caldor cursed. He had no doubt that the strike was fatal, but if he couldn’t find the doe again, it would do him no good. He fought the urge to follow her immediately, though. He knew that if she did not sense a pursuit, she may just give up and die from her wound, while a deer than knew it was being followed might run for miles before collapsing. He breathed deep, paced to get the blood back into his legs, and counted to one hundred before he finally started to follow the deer’s trail.

It was difficult to track her in the moonlight over the bed of dead leaves. It also didn’t help that his vision kept going blurry. At times he simply stumbled forward without a trail to follow. Yet somehow he always managed to find a fresh hoof-print or a broken branch that told him he was on the right track.

At last, through the trees, he caught sight of a body sprawled on the ground. But as he drew near, he realized that it was not the form of a deer.

It was a child.

A girl, to be specific, probably seven or eight years old. Her golden hair was tangled with leaves. She was clothed in a simple white dress; her arms and legs were bare on the cold ground. As Caldor approached, it seemed to him that a soft white light came from her skin, but he supposed that he had just taken too many sips of brandy.

He knelt at her side and felt for her pulse. It was weak, but it was there. Caldor brushed the hair from her face, and couldn’t help feeling the desire to help this strange child. Without knowing why, he decided that he would take her home to his village and care for her. The idea of doing otherwise never even entered into his mind.

He looked up at the moon to see how late it was, and his glance settled on another shadow in the trees. It was the deer that he had shot, collapsed in a pool of blood. She had grown too weak to run any farther.

A minute later Caldor began his journey home with a deer slung over one shoulder and a girl on the other. As he trudged away through the trees toward his village, the first snow of the winter began drifting softly down.

The dark eyes of a black wolf watched him go with a satisfied expression, then sank into the shadows of the forest.