Heart of the Hawk
Caelin Tyr has never been the son his father wanted. Now he’s being sent into battle by his father to die. Instead he saves the life of an enemy soldier, who is more than he seems. Where he expects to find only death, in this man Caelin finds something altogether different - Someone to live for.
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Chapters 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Chapter 1
“So what do you think, My Lord?” an obsequious voice asked smarmily.
“An interesting collection,” another, deeper, voice replied coolly. “I see that you have some extremely exotic creatures here. I few of them aren’t legal to be sold in the League. I’d keep those away from the eyes of the king’s men when they come nosing around here for your sales tax. You wouldn’t want to be thrown in jail and have all of your merchandise confiscated.”
“I am aware of the dangers inherent in selling those beasts, Lord Avhonari. But they are so profitable that the danger of being caught is worth it. I will be careful, I assure you.”
“As you say. It isn’t my business anyway. I am merely here to acquire an exotic pet for myself. And I wouldn’t be so foolish as to buy any of the prohibited creatures for sale here.”
The speaker paused by a cage, staring in through the bars. The only occupant was a large cat, a gorgeous leopard that stared back at him indifferently out of a pair of golden eyes. The beast’s coat looked dull, and its body was thin. The lord turned with a frown to the exotic animal seller. “Why have you allowed your merchandise to get in this condition, Gelsket? It is not good for business to treat your animals this way.”
The pudgy merchant’s fat hands made desperate motions in the air. “I assure you, My Lord, that I do not mistreat my merchandise! This beast,” he said with a sigh and a glance into the cage, “Was a poor acquisition on my part. I bought him from a hunter in Ikhonarrie, fresh caught from the jungle. I got a good deal…which should have told me it was a mistake to buy. The creature has attacked every one of my handlers, so now none will go near him anymore. Worse, he refuses to eat at all. Fresh meat is thrown through the bars, but he merely looks at it. He is wasting away, and I don’t know what to do to stop it. He was a beautiful animal when I first purchased him,” he added sadly. “What a waste.”
Lord Avhonari turned back to the cage thoughtfully. The leopard met his gaze once more, the golden eyes mysterious and full of (dared he to anthropomorphosize?) sadness and homesickness. This magnificent creature had been torn from his home and thrown into a cage, and then he was expected to live behind bars and to thrive there as well. He could understand the beast’s refusal to eat. Pity filled him. “I will buy him,” he heard himself say, and then blinked a little at his own words.
The merchant gasped at him. “B-But, My Lord! He probably won’t last much longer, and he certainly wouldn’t be an asset to your household. Surely one of the other beasts that I have for sale…”
“I want this one,” Lord Avhonari replied imperiously. “I will pay you four gold for him.”
The other man was silenced. Four gold was a princely sum for a dying animal, and well he knew it. If His Lordship had gone mad, far be it for him to try to bring the other man back to sanity again… “If that is your wish, My Lord,” he began.
“It is,” the lord replied calmly. “Have his cage transported to my estates at once.”
“I will, of course!” the merchant cried. “Will there be anything else today, My Lord?” he asked tentatively, thinking that the nobleman might like to purchase something else that would last longer than the dying leopard.
“No, that will be all. Here is your payment,” the nobleman pulled out a finely-tooled leather purse and extracted four gold coins from within it.
“Thank you, My Lord! If ever you should need anything else…” the merchant said delicately as he took the coins with a bow.
“I’ll be sure to let you know. Good day,” Lord Avhonari strode away down between the rows of cages. The baffled merchant watched his departure, shaking his balding head in puzzlement. Why had the nobleman bought this pitiful creature? He wondered as he glanced at the leopard. The dull golden gaze stared lifelessly back at him. He shrugged. Whatever the reason, he had gotten his money back and more for the beast. He was not going to look a gift leopard in the mouth. Not with those rows of sharp fangs in there, he wasn’t. The merchant hurried away to order his men to transport the cage to the nobleman’s estate, happy to get rid of the animal that had been dragging down the quality of his merchandise for weeks now.
Four hulking men carried the cage containing the dying leopard in through the gates of the estate less than an hour later. Servants ordered them to take the cage around to the back garden, which they did with much puffing and panting. There were sharp intakes of breath when the men saw that the ‘back garden’ was actually at least two acres worth of land, most of it behind high walls. They maneuvered the cage through a pair of wooden gates into this garden, and then set it down. Lord Avhonari himself appeared and waved them off. They were glad to go with only a few backward glances at the opulence of the estate that they were leaving.
The nobleman stood and gazed once more into the cage. “Welcome to my home,” he said to the beast, not sure why he was speaking to the leopard as though it were a sentient creature but driven by some instinct to do so. “I will be letting you loose here in my garden, where you will have plenty of small prey to hunt at your leisure. You will be a prince here, instead of a caged slave. But first you must accept the meat provided for you. You must grow strong before you can hunt for yourself once more. In the state you’re in now, you couldn’t hunt down a staked goat.” He used the key the merchant had given him to open the cage. The beast inside was too weak to harm him. Lord Avhonari swung the door wide and motioned for several servants to bring in a freshly-slaughtered calf and lay it down near the cage.
“Eat or do not,” the nobleman said to the leopard. “If you choose not to do so, I will understand. The choice to live or die is yours.”
He and his servants retreated back through the gates, shutting them so that there was no way that even an active, healthy leopard could have escaped. Left alone, the cat lay unmoving for some time. But at last the smell of the meat drew him to get to his paws on shaky legs, his stomach growling loudly as he staggered out of the cage. His golden eyes were fixed on the dead calf, his nostrils flaring as he salivated heavily. Reaching the carcass, he sank down on his belly and weakly tore at the flesh. It took some trying, but at last he managed to pull a strip of flesh loose. He ate it slowly, feeling the food sliding down into his shrunken belly. A low moan of pleasure left him at the taste of blood in his mouth and flesh in his teeth.
The leopard began to eat with more vigor as the food revived him a bit. He couldn’t eat much, not when his stomach was so much smaller than it had been. At last he was done, and he dragged himself around the little courtyard the cage was sitting in until he came to a fountain full of clear water. Thirstily he lapped at it with his pink tongue until he was full of liquid as well. Then he laid down on the cool stone of the courtyard with a sigh, falling asleep almost immediately.
Time passed. He would sleep for several hours, then wake up and go eat or drink some more. Slowly he felt his energy and vitality returning, and after several days (what was left of the calf was getting a little rank), he left the courtyard proper to begin prowling through the vast garden. There were bushes and trees and flowers of all kinds, fountains and recessed alcoves where people could sit on stone benches, lovely shaded walks and little pools with fish in them. He used his paw to do a bit of impromptu fishing at one of these, and was soon munching on a fat orange-and-black body with relish for the different taste. It was good to have a fresh-caught kill under his paw, and the sun on his body as he lazed by the pool. The golden eyes went lidded with pleasure as his tail tip twitched a bit.
He did more exploring after that, slowly learning the extent of his new territory. Soon enough he found the prey that the nobleman had mentioned, rabbits and ground squirrels and tiny ornamental deer. When he felt well enough, he draped himself in a sturdy tree and dropped on an unsuspecting deer from above. He tore at the flesh eagerly, enjoying his first real kill in all of the time since he’d woken up in a cage. He ate most of the carcass, and then napped in the sun because he was decidedly bloated.
One day, a few weeks after the nobleman had bought him, the leopard knew that it was time. His strength had returned, and he’d gained back almost all of the weight that he’d lost. The beautiful animal padded into the small courtyard where his empty cage still stood, glaring foully at the iron bars that had kept him from the Change. He growled to himself, then shook his head a bit and concentrated. His eyes closed as he diverted some of his bodily energy into making the Change happen.
His spotted skin began to ripple like water on a windy day. He made a low sound of pain as his muscles began to change configuration, as his bones rearranged themselves, and his skin shrank and lost its color. His back bowed as his spine reformed. His legs twitched as they lost their fur and became human. The front legs changed as well, becoming arms. The paws elongated into human fingers. His tail dissolved away into his body as haunches became buttocks. His muzzle shortened as his features rearranged themselves. In a short time, a naked young human laid on the stone of the courtyard where the leopard had been.
This person lifted his head, revealing an exotically-handsome face as he looked around with his new(smaller) golden eyes. A hint of the cat was still in his features, and his hair was the same tawny-reddish color that the leopard’s had been. There was even a very subtle scattering of darker brown spots in his hair. When he opened his mouth, it was revealed that his teeth were still decidedly sharp. And there was also a hint of claw in his overlong fingernails, which he flexed as he grew used to his humanoid form once more.
The were leopard slowly got to his feet. He was always exhausted after the Change; he’d need to recover some of his energy before he started to look around for a way to escape this garden. He meant to try to get back to his lands and his own people if at all possible. He simply hadn’t been able to Change before this because of the iron cage he’d been put into. Iron, while it didn’t sicken his folk like the Faerie people, did inhibit their ability to Change from one form to the other. He’d been stuck in his leopard form for months now, and had initially worried that he wouldn’t be able to return to his human form once more because of the length of time he’d spent in his animal form. Thankfully he’d been able to, and soon he’d try to see if he could get out of here and begin the long journey back to his own lands.
He sat back on the cool stone as he recovered his energy. He was really grateful that that fat merchant hadn’t realized just what he was. The man would had paid a wizard to force feed him, because an actual were-beast was worth a thousand times what a regular leopard would have been. His folk were considered mere stories to frighten children with in these lands. It had just been his bad luck that he’d been captured while in his animal form, then had been drugged before he could struggle or fight back against his captors. When he’d come to, he’d still been a leopard - and to his horror, he’d realized that he was in an iron cage. Unable to Change or escape, he’d decided to kill himself rather than live his life as a caged slave. He’d been quite close to that goal the day that a man in a fine robe had come and looked into his cage.
The were leopard remembered that man clearly, despite his weakened and half-dead condition. The eyes that had looked at him had been intense pools of night, the face hawkish and elegant. There had been an aura of power about this person. He might have been interested, except that he was close to death and he really hadn’t cared anymore about anything or anyone. But then the man had purchased him for some reason. He still hadn’t cared why, since he was on his way to the Spirit Lands. But then they’d brought his cage to this place, and that man had let him out of that horrible cage and had fed him…
He felt grateful to the human, but that wouldn’t stop him from trying to escape. He wanted to go home to the cool, shadowy green jungle and to his own clan. It might be a long journey getting there, but he didn’t care. He was determined to make it back home no matter what it took.
Finally he pushed himself slowly to his feet on shaky legs. He took a few steps, getting used to his new equilibrium. The stone felt strange under his bare feet. When his people went through the Change, they always kept clothes on hand for themselves to wear. He would have to steal some of the humans’ clothing as soon as possible, as he doubted that a naked man wandering around would go unnoted, and if any of them took a really good look at him they might realize that he wasn’t quite normal. If he ended up in the hands of a wizard it wouldn’t take the magic-user long to figure out just what his nature really was. He had to be extremely careful while travelling through these strange lands.
He approached the high wall that encircled the entire huge garden. His golden eyes studied it, seeing that it was approximately eight feet tall. Too high to jump over, but…there were vines growing on some parts of it that looked sturdy enough to climb. A leopard wouldn’t have been able to, of course…his lips lifted in a small smile as he coiled his muscles and hurled himself sharply at one of the thicket of vines, and began to swarm the wall easily. Reaching the top, he threw a leg over and sat there for a moment looking around. Not far away was an enormous house of dressed stone, with an astonishing number of glassed-in windows in it. He felt the hairs stand up on the back of his neck, hoping fervently that no one was gazing out of those windows right at this moment. But they meant that he couldn’t stay up here atop the wall for too long. He carefully moved so that his stomach was resting on the top of the wall, and his legs were dangling down the side. Then he pushed so that he was hanging by his hands, before he let his body drop altogether.
He knew how to drop, of course, in both human and animal form, and there was a cushion of soft grass at the bottom to help absorb the shock of his landing. He still grunted a bit in pain, but nothing was broken. He crouched on the grass, preparing to make a dash for the side of the house. But before he could move, a voice cried out to his left. He whirled to find himself confronting a guard armed with a long pike, the tip of which was nearly pressed to his skin. The wereleopard turned again to flee in the other direction, only to find other guards moving up on that side as well. He felt despair fill him. He’d been so close! And now he’d been recaptured. He’d never see his home again!
With a howl of agony, he threw himself at the guards. Let them kill him, he didn’t care. But the one behind him lifted his weapon and brought it down smartly on the back of the naked stranger’s head, making him crash to the ground. They circled the still body, and finally lifted the limp form to carry it inside the house to bring the intruder before His Lordship.
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