El dragón sangraba bajo Forest Falls; ella lo llevó a la aldea mientras los cazadores lo buscaban.

Emperor Orin took a hunting party’s arrow through the flank while flying low over the deep forest at dusk, mistaken in the failing light and the canopy’s heavy shadow for the kind of large game the province’s hunting season had drawn considerable numbers of hopeful marksmen into the woods to pursue.

The hunting party itself.

Six men from a nearby logging settlement who had spent three days tracking what they believed to be an unusually large elk based on broken branches and a set of tracks none of them had ever properly seen before.

Lucali the moment the shadowed shape moved through a gap in the canopy above them.

Entirely unaware that the shape belonged to anything beyond the ordinary game their whole expedition had been carefully organized to bring down.

The lead arrow struck true, burying itself deep in Orin’s flank, at an angle that made immediate flight considerably more difficult than the wounds actual severity might otherwise have suggested, and he broke off from his low pass with a violence that sent the startled hunters scrambling for cover, uncertain in the confused aftermath whether they had struck their intended elk, or something considerably stranger, he climbed as best his wounded, bleeding body would allow before the shock of the injury fully registered against his straining considerable effort, gaining just enough altitude to put meaningful distance between himself and the confused, shouting men below, before his own weakening strength forced a descent he had no real control over any longer.

The forest canopy rushing up to meet him considerably faster than any deliberate, careful landing would ever have chosen for itself.

He went to ground beneath the forest’s largest waterfall, a thundering cascade that had carved a modest hollow into the rock behind its curtain over centuries of steady erosion, driven there less by any deliberate strategy than by the simple animal instinct to find cover before his own weakening strength, gave out entirely in the open forest.

The falls themselves offered concealment, at least the roar of falling water masking whatever sounds his own labored breathing might otherwise have carried to hunters, still combing the woods for the creature they believed they had wounded, if not killed outright.

He had chosen the hollow more from desperate instinct than any deliberate strategic calculation the shape of the rock behind the cascading water registering in his fading awareness as the nearest available shelter from a forest that had suddenly become considerably more dangerous than the routine evening flight he had originally set out on.

The arrows shaft had snapped off during the crash landing, leaving the heads still lodged deep in the flank, and the bleeding, slowed but not stopped by his own body’s considerable resilience, continued steadily into the pool at the falls base.

A spreading stain the churning water diluted almost as quickly as it appeared.

Freya Lyndon found him there perhaps an hour later, drawn to the falls by the same forest tracking instinct that had made her the province’s most reliable guide for lost travelers and stray livestock, investigating a break in the underbrush that did not match any animal trail she recognized from her considerable years working this exact stretch of woods.

She had built her small guiding trade over nearly a decade of steady, careful work, called upon whenever the province’s logging settlements lost track of stray animals in the deep forest, or when the occasional lost traveler wandered too far from the marked trails, and needed someone with genuine knowledge of the terrain to bring them safely back.

It was work that suited her particular temperament well.

solitary, practical, requiring exactly the kind of patient attentiveness to small details that most people never learn to properly notice.

The broken underbrush at the fall’s edge had caught her eye precisely because it did not match any pattern she recognized.

Too large for deer, too deliberate for the ordinary chaos of a startled animals flight, and she had approached the anomaly with the same careful curiosity she brought to any puzzle the forest presented her.

She understood the moment she took in the wounds actual severity and the creature’s obvious size exactly what kind of trouble had produced it and understood almost as quickly that the hunting party responsible was very likely still searching these same woods for the trophy they believed their volley had claimed.

You are not an elk, she told him more to herself than in any expectation of a response, assessing the wound with the same practical eye she brought to tracking lost livestock through difficult terrain.

Which means the hunters who did this to you are going to keep looking until they either find what they actually shot or give up the search entirely.

And I do not think either of those outcomes is one I am prepared to simply wait around for.

She had seen enough hunting parties pursue wounded game through these woods over her years of guide work to know the particular persistence that a confirmed hit tended to produce, and nothing in the distant determined calling suggested this particular group intended to abandon their search anytime soon.

She could hear, even over the falls considerable roar, the distant calling of the hunting party, working through the forest in an organized search pattern, voices carrying the particular determined persistence of men who believed a genuinely large kill was still recoverable somewhere within these woods.

The proximity of that search, combined with the wounds obvious severity, left her with a narrowing window to act before the hunters either found the blood trail leading to the falls or expanded their search close enough to stumble on the hollow directly.

She had encountered hunting parties before in her years of guide work, and knew well enough the particular determined persistence that gripped a group convinced they had wounded a genuinely large trophy.

The kind of persistence that did not easily give up a search, especially once blood had confirmed a solid hit.

Six men working in a coordinated pattern would, she judged, eventually work their way to the falls, regardless of how carefully they had missed it on their first passes.

And every additional minute she spent assessing the situation rather than acting on it, narrowed the margin she actually had to work with.

I do not have a great deal of time to decide what to do about you, she told him, already beginning her own practical assessment of what moving a creature of his size might actually require.

But I do not see much choice in the matter either.

Leaving you here means the hunters find you eventually finish what their arrow started, and I am not in the habit of leaving a wounded creature to that particular ending when I have any alternative available to me at all.

The rain began in earnest as she worked out the practical mechanics of moving a wounded creature of considerable size through several miles of difficult forest terrain, a task that any reasonable assessment would have called impossible, but that her own stubborn practicality refused to abandon simply because the difficulty was considerable.

I know a route that avoids the trails the hunters are most likely working.

She told him already beginning the slow, difficult process of coaxing his weakened body toward the falls hidden exit path.

But it requires crossing some genuinely difficult ground.

And I am not going to pretend the crossing will be comfortable for either of us.

I would ask you to trust that I know these woods considerably better than six loggers chasing an elk that was never actually here to begin with.

She had walked this particular stretch of forest since childhood, first at her own father’s side, and then in later years entirely on her own, and the confidence in her voice carried the weight of genuine, hard-earned familiarity, rather than any false bravado meant simply to reassure a frightened patient.

He managed, through what remained of his own strength, enough coordinated movement to follow her lead, and the two of them began the slow, rain soaked journey through terrain that tested every year of Freya’s considerable tracking experience, moving with the particular careful quiet that avoiding six searching hunters required across ground, already treacherous, with the rain steadily accumulating mud.

The route she had chosen deliberately avoided every marked trail and well-worn path a hunting party might reasonably think to search, instead threading through dense underbrush and along the steep, unglamorous margins of the forest that only someone with her particular depth of local knowledge would think to use at all.

It cost them considerably more time than the direct route would have required.

Each mile demanding careful navigation around obstacles that a healthy traveler might have crossed easily, but that taxed Orin’s weakened body considerably.

Several stretches requiring Freya to physically brace against his flank to keep him upright through the worst of the uneven ground.

I am sorry for the pace, she told him more than once through the journeys difficult rain soaked middle stretch, but the alternative is a faster route directly through ground.

The hunters are considerably more likely to be searching, and I do not think trading time for safety is a poor trade, given everything that is actually at stake in the trading, he said little in response through most of the journey.

conserving what strength remained to him for the physical demands of simply staying upright and moving, though the occasional grateful glance he managed to spare her, even through his own considerable pain, told her plainly enough that her care and considerable caution had not gone unnoticed, despite his limited capacity to properly voice it.

The journey’s most dangerous stretch came roughly halfway through, where Freya’s chosen route required crossing directly through the edge of the hunting party’s own search pattern, close enough that she could make out individual voices, calling coordinates to each other through the rainheavy forest air.

She held them both motionless behind a fallen logs cover for nearly 20 minutes, waiting through several genuinely tense passes as hunters worked the nearby ground.

One man coming close enough that Freya could see the particular frustrated set of his shoulders that spoke to a search party, growing increasingly convinced their quarry had somehow eluded them entirely.

Orin’s own labored breathing, impossible to fully quiet even at his weakened state, seemed to her ears loud enough to carry across the whole forest, though the rain’s steady drumming against the canopy above them, apparently masked it well enough that the passing hunter continued on without breaking his search pattern.

That was closer than I would like to repeat, she whispered once the immediate danger had passed, and she judged it safe enough to resume their slow progress toward the village.

I do not think we have many more encounters like that one left in us before our luck runs out entirely.

The remaining stretch before the village proper required two further careful detours around search patterns.

Freya tracked as much by sound and instinct as by any visible sign.

Her years of reading this particular forest’s rhythms, proving considerably more valuable than any map could have offered through the rainobscured dark.

She found herself grateful more than once for the storm’s own considerable cover, the heavy rain masking sounds that might otherwise have carried, and discouraging the hunter’s own search from venturing too far into ground that offered increasingly poor visibility and increasingly treacherous footing.

By the time the vill’s first scattered lights came into view through the trees, both Freya and Orin were thoroughly soaked and exhausted.

the day’s accumulated strain of the wound, the rain, and the careful evasion weighing on both of them in equal measure.

She allowed herself, in that final stretch, a small measure of relief at the sight of home, though she kept her guard up regardless, unwilling to fully relax until Orin was safely within four walls, and proper treatment had actually begun.

She reached her own village well past dark, the rain still falling steadily, and both of them thoroughly exhausted from a journey that had tested every reserve of strength either possessed, and found the village considerably less prepared than the valley town from other such stories, to receive an emperor bleeding on its main street in the middle of a storm.

Word spread quickly regardless through the rain soaked streets, neighbors emerging from their own homes at the commotion despite the late hour and the storm’s continued severity, and Freya found herself directing a hastily assembled effort to move Orin into the largest available shelter, the village’s modest meeting hall, its floor quickly cleared of the evening’s ordinary business to accommodate a patient considerably larger than any the building had ever needed to house.

A local healer, summoned from her own bed, arrived within minutes to begin the delicate work of removing the arrow head still lodged deep in the wound.

You brought this creature through the deep forest, past a hunting party actively searching for it in this rain, the healer asked, already beginning her careful assessment of the wounds severity.

That is either the bravest thing I have heard this season, or the most reckless, and I confess I am having some difficulty deciding which.

I would settle for either judgment, Freya said.

So long as it comes after you have finished treating the wound rather than before.

The healer worked with practiced efficiency, extracting the broken arrowhead with a delicate precision that spoke to years of experience treating difficult wounds in a settlement far enough from any proper city that its residents had long since learned to be self-sufficient in matters of injury and illness.

a self-sufficiency born of genuine necessity rather than any particular medical ambition on the healer’s own part.

Freya stayed through the whole procedure, holding a lantern steady against the treatment rooms dim light and offering what practical assistance the healer requested, her own exhaustion from the journey pushed aside by the more immediate concern of seeing the whole ordeal through to a safe conclusion.

The wound is clean now, the healer pronounced sometime later, wrapping the sight with practiced care.

He will need rest and quiet and considerably less excitement than tonight has already provided him.

I do not know that our modest village has hosted quite so distinguished a patient before, but I do not see any reason the treatment itself should differ from what I would offer anyone else who walked through that door bleeding.

That is precisely the kind of care he needs, I think, Freya said, watching the healer’s steady hands finish their work.

Ordinary, competent, and entirely unconcerned with who happens to be receiving it, the hunting party, having finally traced the blood trail through the rain softened ground, arrived at the village edge within the hour.

Six exhausted, frustrated men, still convinced they had wounded an unusually large elk, and determined to claim whatever remained of their pursuits rightful trophy.

We tracked our kill to this village, their leader announced, pushing into the meeting hall’s entrance with the particular bluster of a man unwilling to accept that a three-day hunt might have produced something other than the prize he had been anticipating.

Whatever you have hidden in here belongs to us.

by every hunting right this province recognizes, and I would ask you to hand it over before this becomes a more serious dispute than any of us want it to.

Freya stepped between the hunters and the halls interior with the same flat, unhurried composure that had carried her through the whole difficult journey, entirely unintimidated by six exhausted men, whose bluster, she suspected, carried considerably less actual conviction than their leader’s opening statement implied.

She had dealt with plenty of frustrated, tired travelers over her years of guide work, and recognized in their leader posture the particular bravado of a man more interested in salvaging some measure of pride from a wasted expedition than in genuinely pressing a dangerous claim.

I would think carefully before pressing that particular claim any further, she told them.

What you shot was not an elk.

The healer’s work concluded just as the confrontation reached its most heated point, and Orin himself, strength sufficiently returned by the treatment’s success, rose to his full height within the meeting hall in a reveal that transformed the hunter’s confident bluster into immediate stammering apology.

You shot the emperor of this province, Freya said into the sudden shocked silence that followed, believing him an elk in a forest where dragons in their natural form have flown for longer than any hunting tradition your families have practiced.

I do not think the hunting rights you invoked cover imperial persons, whatever form they happen to be wearing when your arrows find them.

The hunting party’s leader, considerably paler than he had been moments before, managed a stammering apology that Orin himself, magnanimous in his returned strength, accepted with more grace than the man’s earlier bluster had probably earned him.

An honest mistake made in poor light, deserves a measure of understanding, Orin said.

I would ask in exchange for that understanding that future hunting parties exercise somewhat greater caution before loosing arrows at shapes they cannot properly identify in failing light.

The remaining five hunters, considerably more subdued than their leader initial bluster had suggested they were capable of, offered their own halting apologies in turn, several of them visibly struggling to reconcile the ordinary hunting trip they had set out on 3 days prior, with the considerably more significant encounter it had actually turned into.

One of the younger men, barely more than a boy by his own evident age, asked quietly whether the arrow itself might be recovered as some manner of restitution, a question that drew a surprised, genuine laugh from Orin, despite his own considerable exhaustion.

You may keep the arrow with my genuine blessing, Orin told him.

I do not think I have much use for it beyond the wound it already gave me.

And you have earned, I think, some manner of story to carry home from this expedition, however differently it concluded than any of you originally intended.

The young man accepted the offer with evident gratitude, tucking the recovered shaft carefully away, as though it had suddenly become considerably more valuable than any trophy elk his expedition had originally set out to claim.

The hunting party departed the village considerably chasened.

Their leader promising with evident sincerity to spread word through the province’s other hunting settlements about the importance of proper identification before loosing arrows at unfamiliar shapes in failing light.

A lesson Freya observed privately to the healer once the party had gone that had cost this particular group rather more fright than most hunting safety instruction typically managed to produce.

He remained in the village through the following week, his own strength returning steadily under the local healer’s continued care, and found himself across those recovering days, spending considerably more time in Freya’s company than any strict medical necessity actually required of either of them.

You did not hesitate, he told her during one such visit, turning the whole ordeal over properly now that recovery had given him leisure enough for reflection.

six hunters searching, a difficult crossing through their own search pattern, a village unprepared to receive an emperor.

Any one of those obstacles might reasonably have given a less determined guide pause.

You simply moved through all of them, one after another without once seeming to consider turning back.

I did not see much use in considering it, Freya said.

You were bleeding beneath a waterfall, Majesty, and considering the difficulty of the crossing would not have made the crossing any less necessary.

I have found across years of tracking lost things through difficult terrain, that hesitation rarely improves a rescue’s odds.

It mostly just wastes the daylight you actually need for the doing.

He studied her for a long moment, turning the observation over with the same careful attention he had given every other aspect of the ordeal since his strength had properly returned.

I have known a great many advisers across my reign, he said, counselors and generals and ministers of considerable learning who could produce an elaborate argument for nearly any course of action or its opposite given sufficient time to construct one.

I do not think I have met many people who simply looked at a hard problem and did the correct thing about it without first requiring an argument to justify the doing.

I do not know that I would call it a virtue exactly, Freya said with her usual plain unhurried honesty, setting aside the small task she had been occupied with to give the question her full and proper consideration.

I think it is simply what happens when you spend enough years alone in difficult terrain where the forest does not particularly care whether you have argued yourself into the correct course of action or not.

It only cares whether you act in time.

I have found that habit carries over rather naturally into other kinds of trouble once it has settled properly into how a person thinks.

I find I admire the habit considerably, Orin said.

and I find myself wondering whether it might be taught or whether it is simply a rare thing some people are fortunate enough to possess without ever needing to learn it deliberately.

I expect it can be taught, Majesty, the same as any other habit worth having, Freya said.

Though I suspect the teaching mostly consists of putting yourself in enough difficult situations that hesitation gradually stops feeling like the safer option it once seemed.

I did not learn it from any particular lesson.

I learned it from a great many small crossings over a great many years, each one teaching me a little more clearly that the difficult right thing rarely gets easier by waiting.

the village’s own healer, watching the pattern of those visits with the plain, unhurried observation of someone who had tended enough recovering patients to recognize when a recovery had quietly become something else entirely, remarked to Freya one evening that she had rarely seen a patient linger quite so long past the point his own body had finished requiring her care.

Freya offered no particular defense against the observation, only a small, unguarded smile that told the healer everything the words themselves had left carefully unsaid, and returned to her own evening tasks, with the same steady composure she brought to every other part of her life, though the healer noted, not without some private amusement, that the composure carried a warmth to it now that had not been quite so evident before the night of the falls.

Marcus Aurelius wrote, Orin said, turning the old philosophers’s words over slowly, as though testing their full weight against everything he had witnessed across the past difficult week.

Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be.

B1, I confess, I did not expect to find that particular philosophy so thoroughly embodied by a forest guide moving a wounded stranger through rain and hostile searchers, without once pausing to debate whether the moving was wise.

You did not argue about what a good person should do in that hollow beneath the falls, Freya.

You simply did it and kept doing it mile after difficult mile until the doing was finished.

I have never had much patience for arguing about the right thing to do.

Freya said when the right thing was generally obvious enough the moment I actually looked at it plainly.

You were dying.

I could move you somewhere safer.

The rest struck me as details rather than genuine questions.

He spent the remainder of that final week of recovery in her company more often than not.

The two of them settling into an easy rhythm that had little to do with his rank or her modest trade, and considerably more to do with a compatibility.

Neither had quite expected to discover in the aftermath of such a difficult ordeal.

She showed him across several of those recovering afternoons the practical work her guiding trade actually required.

Reading broken branches for the story they told distinguishing one animals tracks from anothers.

The whole quiet careful discipline of a skill that had until the night of the falls existed entirely outside anything his own considerable experience of the world had prepared him to properly appreciate.

I do not think I fully understood before this week how much genuine skill your work actually requires.

He told her, watching her identify a set of tracks he could not himself have distinguished from a dozen similar possibilities.

I had thought of forest guiding as a simple trade requiring mostly familiarity rather than any deeper expertise.

I find I was considerably mistaken in that assumption.

Most people are, Freya said, without any particular offense at the admission.

It is unglamorous work, majesty, and unglamorous work rarely gets much credit for the skill it actually requires.

I do not mind the lack of recognition most days, I find I mind it rather less.

In fact, now that at least one person has troubled to properly notice, he returned to the village often in the months that followed, drawn back by reasons that extended well beyond his own full recovery.

Each visit stretching a little longer than the last, until the whole village had come to expect the emperor’s periodic arrivals, with a fondness that would have seemed impossible in the immediate aftermath of the hunting party’s confused confrontation.

Freya herself continued her guiding work through those months without much visible change to her ordinary routine.

Though the healer remarked more than once that she had never seen the usually solitary tracker quite so consistently in good spirits as she had become across that particular season.

He married her the following autumn in a ceremony held at the very waterfall where she had first found him bleeding in the hollow behind the rushing curtain of water.

The hunting party’s leader, invited, despite the awkward circumstances of their first meeting, brought as a wedding gift a carefully carved token depicting the falls themselves.

A permanent reminder, he said, of the day his own hasty arrow had led, however unintentionally, to a rescue considerably more remarkable than any trophy his party had originally set out to claim.

He had, in the month since the incident, become something of an advocate among the province’s other hunting settlements for the very caution Orin had first requested of him, a reformed enthusiasm that Freya found she rather appreciated, however unlikely a source it had originally come from.

Freya kept the token on her own mantle for the rest of her life, alongside a simple inscription of Aurelius’s words, a daily reminder that goodness required considerably less debate than most people seem to think, and considerably more plain, immediate action.

She continued her guiding work well into her later years, training a small number of apprentices in the same patient, observant tradecraft that had first led her to the falls that rainy evening, and told the story of that particular rescue often enough in her own plain and unmbellished way, that it became in time one of the province’s most fondly repeated tales, not for its drama, though the drama was considerable, but for the plain, unhesitating decency at its center, which every retelling seemed to find freshly remarkable, regardless of how many times the story had already been told.

The province’s other forestguiding trades, in the years that slowly followed, began quietly adopting elements of her own careful, patient methods, and Freya found herself, somewhat to her own considerable surprise, regarded as something of a quiet authority, on matters of both careful tracking and, more improbably still, on the particular question of when hesitation served a person poorly, and when genuine caution actually mattered most.

She never fully reconciled herself to the modest fame the story brought her, preferring the solitary, practical work that had always suited her best.

But she never once regretted the long rainy night that had first tested every reserve of her considerable skill, and found it, against six searching hunters, and a killing storm, entirely and completely sufficient to the difficult task laid out before

Copyright: Moonfang Romance