He set Eden down. “Go inside,” he commanded. “Do not speak of this until I return.”.
“No. I shall send for the constable—”
“What if this poacher is a madman, bent on killing any within his reach?”
The lie was convincing, for it was what Eden was most inclined to believe. She touched his face with anxious fingers.
“If you do not return quickly, safe and sound, I shall be forced at last to discharge you.”
He smiled, his heart too full to admit fear. “You cannot expect me to begin obeying your commands at this late date.” He drew her into the shadows of the wall and kissed her deeply and passionately. “Give Donal my love.”
Her body stiffened and then relaxed. “I shall.” She stepped back, her expression almost invisible even to his keen sight. “Take care, my… dear friend.”
She slipped through the gate before he could answer. He had no time to ponder her final words. Wheeling about, he ran across the park and pasture and onto the fell, searching for a scent and a sign of passage.
Come to me, my brethren, he called to the beasts pursing their nocturnal business. Find the one who dared to enter our sanctuary with the weapons of man’s violence. Find him, and hold him.
From all about came the rustlings of many tiny feet, the brush of fur on grass, the puffing of breath low to the ground. Stoats, foxes, weasels, badgers, hares—all that could run—set out in pursuit. Hartley did the same. Rage and hatred, born of Eden’s danger, fueled him as nothing else could. He let go all restraint and became the stag, covering many human paces in a single leap.
The man was clever. He knew the wood and the field and how to hide his track. But he was still mortal, and in his foolishness he had run higher up the fell, away from his own kind. Hartley traced him to a narrow cleft between two great boulders, barely wide enough to permit him passage.
None of the other beasts had caught up with him. He could smell the enemy beyond the cleft. Shedding his stag’s form, he prepared to enter.
“No!”
Tod appeared before his face, the hob’s expression twisted in terror. “Cold Iron, Cold Iron!”
Almost too late, Hartley smelled the bitter tang. Far more Cold Iron than existed in a single arrowhead or a dozen.
A trap. He leaped back, and Tod began to spiral out of the air. Hartley caught the hob as he fell.
An arrow’s broken shaft was buried in Tod’s shoulder.
Hartley howled. He ran far from the cleft and his quarry, cradling his servant in arms grown numb. The beasts he had called ran beside him. He found a hollow in the center of a thicket and set Tod down, closing the shrubbery about them like a fortress.
“Go,” he said to the beasts. “Follow the man when he leaves the cleft, but do not let yourselves be seen. Tell me where he runs. I shall find him.”
The beasts left again. He knelt over Tod. The small Fane’s body was slack as the poison worked its way into his blood. The longer the arrowhead remained in his body, the less his chance of survival. It might already be too late.
Hartley summoned all his power. He set his hand on the broken shaft and imagined the poison at the farthest points of Tod’s body, imagined himself drawing it out and up the shaft and into his own hand.
It came, and with it pain almost beyond bearing. Hartley did not stop. The shaft burned his hand, and fire moved up his arm. Still the poison flowed. After an eternity of torment, Hartley’s agonized nerves felt the change in Tod’s being. The shaft jerked in his grip as the wound began to close, forcing the arrowhead up and out.
He flung the arrow away with all his remaining strength and collapsed, lungs afire. He was so weak that should the hunter come upon him now, he would be helpless to fight back.
But no one came. Some beasts had remained to guard him, and the normal forest sounds had resumed, signaling peace.