Chapter Text
He is the largest man Fiona has ever seen. He is tall and broad, with long straight hair the color of pale wheat and looping tattoos running down his arms. His eyes are dark and his small horns come up into sharp points. He isn’t wearing a shirt or shoes, and he chased her for almost 10 minutes before she was able to scramble up a tree and out of his reach; snapping the lowest few branches on her way up to keep him from following. Her pale pink dress is torn badly down one side and she wonders nonsensically if Storyteller will be able to mend it if she manages not to get stolen by the man trying to coax her down from the tree.
“Please, please I’m sorry I chased you but come down. You’re going to fall, young one. Where are your nursemaids? Your mother?”
Fiona answers him with a scream each time he asks that nasty little question. Mother? Mother? Mother? His eyes sweep her face every time he asks, like he’s looking for something from her. He won’t be quiet, cajoling and pleading and asking. Every couple of repetitions she climbs higher, hoisting herself away and enjoying how panicked it seems to make him. At one point a branch cracks under her foot and he pales, jolting forward as if to catch her before she regains her footing.
“I know you must be frighted, please let me help you. What is your name?”
“Go away!”
The man sighs, rubbing his hands over his face before staring back up at her. He looks at her as though she is familiar, as though he knows her already, and the look makes her stomach twist uneasily. A warning sign. She reached for the next highest branch and this time, when her foothold snaps, she does fall. She barely gasps as she tumbles down, leaves tearing in her branches, and catches herself on one of the lowest boughs. She catches it at the chest with a thud and an ache, knocking the breath from her lungs as she slings both arms over to anchor herself. For a moment her legs swing free, then a hand engulphs her calf. The man pulls very gently, trying to dislodge her more than wrench her off, but Fiona screams as if burned. The man tries to grab her other leg but she kicks violently at his hand his arm his head. Anywhere she can make contact as she tries to wriggle free and lift herself back into the safety of the tree. He is cooing at her, calm little words and promises. His grip is tight and steady
“I’m not going to hurt you, I promise. I just want to get you home, get you safe. You should not have been left alone out in these woods. Does she know you are out here? Is she close?”
Tears are pricking at her eyes now, her face red from screaming and her arms shaking with the efforting of holding herself up.
“Daddy! Help!” she wails, a sob finally cracking free (“Don’t cry! Please don’t cry! You’re safe!”) as she screams “Story! Please help!” She had just seen him. Just played a silly little game of hopscotch and asked for a bedtime story that night before skittering away to play. She digs her claws into the branch as she calls again for Daddy or Story or anyone. The bark is scraping her arms red. She is losing her grip. The man is pulling more firmly, his grip harder, and she is slipping. Hyperventilating and wet faced. Clawing at the branch as she slowly starts to fall.
She is ready for those impossibly big arms to wrap around her and steal her away. Ready to claw and bite any flesh she can reach. She thinks of her little straw pile in the barn, warm and dark as she naps, with Daddy and Mr. Enoch talking quietly over her.
The grip on her leg vanishes and she hits the ground at the exact same moment the man lets out a strangled cry. She rolls over onto her stomach, dazed for a breath, before the view of Storyteller comes into focus. His hat is missing and his hair is pulled back, face twisted in a way she has never seen on him before. Angry and sharp, his teeth bared. He has the man by the hair, his fingers tangled with the long locks as he wrenches them back so tightly his knuckles turn white. The man is bending backwards slightly from the pull and cradling his hand, the one that had held Fiona. Storyteller’s hunting knife is poking clean through just past the wrist. He bleeds green, and some of his blood has splashed onto Storyteller’s flowy white shirt.
“And just what do we have here? What are you trying to get at ya’ fuck?” Storyteller spits the last word and Fiona cringes. He’s never cursed, not once. Storyteller’s free hand moves to his belt, slipping out a strange tool Fiona has never seen before. Long and thin with a curved wooden handle cradling a hollow metal barrel.
“Chasing little girls in the woods?” He sticks the metal end against the man’s ribs, finger wrapping around a metal latch in the handle. The man freezes, breathing heavily and glancing down at where the metal meets his skin. Storyteller drags him away from her step by step, muttering things to the man as they go. Once they are a few yards away he glances at her. He looks her over, eyes darting to her torn dress, her tattered branches, and her tearstained face still red from screaming. She’s still hiccuping a bit from her crying, arms shaking as she tries to push herself up off the forest floor. He huffs a deep breath then calls to her, voice steady and soft.
“Fiona darling can you walk?”
Pain is thrumming in her chest, something deep and aching where she hit that final branch, and it pulls into a sharp sting when she tries to rise to her feet. She falls back down with a yelp and chokes out a gurgled sob before shaking her head. Before he can answer the man jolts a step backwards, throwing his elbow into The Storyteller’s face with a crack and a shout. The Storyteller reels back, losing his grip on the man’s hair and clasping a hand over nose. A second swing of the elbow lands in his stomach, knocking him into the dirt. The man stumbles forward, pulling the knife from his arm and dropping it onto the leaves below, before lurching towards Fiona.
“That’s enough. Fiona, right? It’s ok, we’re going to get you home. We’ll get you back to the others, then we’ll find your mother, ok?”
He is reaching for her, strange green blood dripping down his arm as he closes in. Before he gets too close there is a sound, a great and terrible cracking sound that echoes through the trees and leaves Fiona’s ears ringing. The man freezes, a weird gurgling wheeze leaving his throat, before he collapses to the ground. Fiona can see that the tattoos spiral onto his back as well, curling to crisscross behind his neck and flowing into intricate circles on his shoulder blades. There is blood splattered across his back, leaking from a hole in between his shoulders. The Storyteller is propped up on one arm a few yards away, the strange tool pointed at where the man had been standing and smoking slightly at the end. He is heaving. Deep, heavy breaths as he stares at the fallen man.
Fiona hears her name, shouted once in the now quite woods, and falls to darkness.
. . . . .
Storyteller kicks the man’s body as he walks by and the man lets out a wet groan. The wound is already healing, flesh knitting back together like moss across stone. He has time, plenty of time, but the man will be up sooner or later. Fucking faeries. Iron bullets are not too common in this part of the Unknown. He’ll have to find something else to finish the job.
Fiona is breathing steadily and deeply, but her arms are deeply scraped. Her dress is torn, her face splotched and red from crying. He turns her carefully onto her back and presses a gentle hand to her chest, prodding carefully. She whimpers, but nothing under her skin shifts. If anything is broken, it isn’t severely so. He checks her dress briefly, something horrible in his chest unclenching and loosening when he is sure that the tear must have come from a branch or a bramble, not from hands reaching where they shouldn’t. He shoves the pistol back into his belt and scoops her up, mindful not to jostle her. He doesn’t know exactly where he left his horse. He has never run so fast as when he heard her scream.
The light is just fading towards evening when he reaches Pottsfield, a few voices drifting from the houses as he heads for Enoch’s barn. He thinks he hears someone call his name. He does not stop.
“Well hello there Storyteller–see you found our little wanderer!” Enoch is in the maypole, ribbons drifting in an imaginary wind. The Beast is in the rafters, lantern hanging from a hook as he lounges near Enoch’s head.
“I need an axe. Iron,” Storyteller mumbles, softly dumping Fiona on the straw pile reserved just for her. He pulls her blanket over her and, after a moment of thought, tucks one of her worn stuffed animals in with her. She whimpers again as she settles and the Beast tenses, shadows bleeding out into the soft light of the barn as he tumbles down. He seems to slip in and out, a shadow flickering in the light and suddenly he is towering over Fiona, head tilted as he looks down at her battered little body.
“What happened, Storyteller?”
“I’m handling it.”
“Storyteller!”
The Beast’s voice shakes the nails in the boards. Like frost creeping through a battened window, The Storyteller feels a shiver down his spine and for a moment his breath mists in the air. He only pauses a moment, back to Beast as he heads to the door
“There was a man. A faery. My bullets aren’t iron,” he swallows once “I don’t think her ribs are broken, but she will be sore when she wakes up.”
Silence, then a deep and hollow sigh sweeps through the barn. When Storyteller finally looks back The Beast is already gone.
“I do believe you’ll have to race him, Storyteller. If you want to take care of things yourself, that is,” Enoch’s voice echoes strangely, as though he is both much larger and much farther away than he seems, and The Storyteller is overcome with an odd sense of vertigo. He is reminded, almost musingly, of when he was standing on the edge of his own grave all those years ago. Enoch is descending, ribbons billowing out as he settles over Fiona, and in a blink she is hidden away behind stripes of green.
The Storyteller steps outside, his mouth tastes like honey.
Old Johnson is there, work clothes muddy and scuffed from the fields. He has already shed this years pumpkin, never one to dwell on a season, and his clean bones shine in the fading light. He looks confused. Dazed. Something drifting in the darkness of his sockets. He hands The Storyteller an axe then, with a weird little jerk of the shoulders, steps off to the side.
The people of Pottsfield watch silently, some twitching here and there, as Storyteller leaves on foot into the darkening woods.