Traps, Tricks, and Beasts [Book 2 Complete][Fantasy, Adventure, Underdog]

Stories

### Chapter 1: Chapter 1 Squirt Summoned

Decoded by Lord Everwinter using the Dex’at cipher:

Dear Lord Everwinter,

I am glad to hear you have arrived in your lands. I suspect them to be in even worse shape than the previous lord reported before his demise. I entrusted the title to you as the only one I trust to manage this border province without prejudice or greed blinding you from the needs of the people. We’ll need to show strength to prevent our coup from turning into a bloodbath, and I have it on good authority the other Royals from our neighbors to the west are biding their time to strike.

I grant you full permission to do as you see fit. Should any of those title holders under your command take issue, you have my permission to do away with them as needed. Those who need the outlet can address their concerns to me directly but know they will receive the response that my trust is in you.

We knew this would be a difficult road going into our choice. I can only pray to the gods above that it was the right one.

Be well,

Queen Annabelle

Squirt had always thought Stalf’s voice was gruff and irritating—he’d smoked fey tobacco for too long, or maybe he just gargled every night with shards of glass. She certainly wished that fate on him now.

“You’re going, and that’s final.”

Hating the glimmer of amusement in his dark eyes, she glared at them. It was difficult to do for two reasons. The first being the height difference. He was seated, sure, but pixies were usually only around four feet tall to begin with, and she was small even for a pixie, meaning the angle made it difficult with how he leaned back, his arms crossed. The second reason was that his eyes were almost entirely hidden by the layers of wrinkles denoting his age. It was, after all, why he was in this backwater, nameless village to begin with—a soldier so advanced in age he was sent off to a farm for retirement. She knew from experience to not judge the fey by his age, of course. He could, and regularly did, whip her butt in the practice yard.

He nonchalantly used his pinky finger to dig the wax out of his ear. “It was either you or Havort, and that fey having a new babe on the way meant it was you.”

“If you wanted me dead—”

“I don’t want you dead, lass.” He shrugged from his seat at the table in the guardhouse, his aching knee set up on the pillow she had made for him last year after getting fed up with all of his griping about it. Like most things this far north, the thing was made almost entirely of scraps of furs from the end bits and animal legs that didn’t make good gowns or cloaks for the titled fey of better means. Still, unlike its misshapen appearance, it had to be comfortable since he never sat down without it anymore.

Tall enough to still stare down at her despite being seated, he droned on. “New lord, new orders. Every able-bodied trainee in the territory to his lordship’s house, and you’re a trainee until I say you aren’t. If I don’t send someone, it’ll be my neck on the line.”

“Gee, thanks. You’re just risking mine now. And I’m a hunter, not a guard.”

He shrugged. “Same title up here.”

Her eyebrow twitched in annoyance. Technically, this place didn’t have an official hunter. Technically, she was a member of the Guard. And technically, she had never been promoted from trainee, since that would require Stalf retiring. “Sacrificing me over your retirement, I see?”

He snorted and chuckled. “Nah. Relax, kid. He’s gonna take one look at your scrawny ass and send you right back with all the other rejects. Them noble lot do this after a power change. A way to establish new guards and soldiers without loyalty to their old masters.”

She muttered, “Like they’d even let peasants like us lick their cobbler-made boots.”

He crossed his arms and raised an eyebrow at her. “I’d start working at reining in that tongue of yours, lass.”

“I’m weak, not stupid.”

He gave her an odd look then; one she swore held a bit of warmth. “Aye. You’re not that.”

Unsettled by his attitude change, she eyed him warily. “Slip the laughers in your tea, again, elder?”

The look was gone as he cleared his throat and leaned forward, rubbing his knee with a groan. “Ah. Would you mind doing the rounds today, lass? This knee and all…”

Damn old fart. She glared at him before snapping. “Fine. But only because I need to stock up on supplies before you send me off to die.”

He barked out a laugh. “Always were the dramatic.”

Without another word, she turned on her heel and stalked out the door, shutting it gingerly behind her even if she wanted to slam it shut. Since she slept in the guardhouse during the winters, she found it best not to risk cracking the door, no matter how irritated she was.

Unfortunate.

Muttering to herself and rubbing her hands together to ward off the chill of early spring, she paused long enough to string her small bow, grabbing a quiver from the small storage shed as she went. She fell quiet, but no less irritated, as she trotted silently into the forest, focusing instead on crafting a mental list of what she’d need. He’d told her he was shipping her out in a damn carriage with the caravan tomorrow, which would severely limit her options.

After all, it was early spring, which meant her personal stash of supplies was quite low.

Gods damn it, she knew she should have stocked up before this. She shouldn’t have waited for the snow to finish melting.

The guardhouse was set slightly away from the rest of the village, right on the edge of the Wylds. The Wylds, of course, were not a standard forest. They were created by the Hunt herself when she escaped her father, with magic imbued into every leaf, twig, and stone. Even the very air was saturated with magic, rich with a crisp earthy scent that invigorated her on each inhale.

This was her haven. The haven she’d discovered twenty years ago.

Her true home.

Here, amid trees that could sometimes rise a hundred feet in the air or more, light was sparse. Despite the shade, there was a rich variety of verdant vegetation, all tangled together in a tapestry of life that centered around the trees that dominated the landscape.

Some of the trees were ancient, their trunks stretching a dozen feet across. Others were several trunks packed together in a twisting maze-like structure, or clusters of thin shoots striking up from the ground towards the sky. While there were some that stopped only a few feet up, others stretched to fill the space between the forest floor and the canopy, their disparate limbs weaving together and creating a natural highway for the adventurous.

Or the stupid.

Through the maze of roots and greenery, Squirt kept low and used her diminutive size to her advantage, avoiding the occasional patch of snow. She ducked and wove her way through the treacherous terrain with practiced ease.

The forest floor was no different in the richness of its foliage. Ferns and bushes and flowers all competed for any scrap of light they could reach, tucked between large roots that rose above the mossy ground, most of it taller than she was. Squirt slipped between leaves, bushes, and branches silently as she trotted along, bow strung and at the ready should she come into contact with the feybeasts she needed to hunt.

This far out, hunting feybeasts was most of the Guard’s job. In more populated districts, hunters and guards were both members of the Royal Guard, but different jobs. One hunted feybeasts in the forests, while the other protected city walls. Here, the roles were one and the same.

Every spring, the cycle of magic brought life to feybeasts. They started small and relatively simple to manage. As the seasons passed, they grew increasingly more powerful by eating other feybeasts to gain their strength, before naturally dying out in the winter. Then the cycle started again.

Feybeasts were unlike the regular beasts of the forest. They were not born, they simply appeared. Then they would simply die.

Luckily, once they got to the larger, dangerous sizes in winter, they rarely ever lingered in an area this devoid of fey. There were less than a hundred residents in this district, and all of them were of a weaker variety. Powerful feybeasts hungered for powerful meals.

It was over an hour of sneaking through the forest before she finally found one—a riiset, a feybeast the size of a large rat, only with glittery butterfly wings attached to its furred body and venomous fangs instead of sharp teeth.

Perfect.

She shot it, pinning it to the tree trunk it had been resting on. It screeched and squirmed as she ran over, covering her face with a handkerchief she had enchanted for just this purpose. She quickly pulled out a small sheet on the ground and carefully cut off the powdery wings. The creature died as she sliced, and she managed one last quick swipe to get the venomous fangs at its head before there was a small poof of an indigo cloud, and it dropped to the ground as a feystone.

She collected that too, tossing it up and catching it as she did. Despite the small size, riisets had a decently sized stone, about the size of her thumbnail. Perfect for small, one-time enchantments.

Once she finished gathering up every bit of the venom and powder and had them safely stashed away in her pouch, she notched another arrow and continued, seeing what else she could bag.

As she traveled in the long, slow loop in the forests around their village, she checked on the traps she had laid out for wild surges—where feybeasts ran rampant due to fluctuations in the ambient magic. Everyone’s magic was stronger during a surge, and the beasts tended to charge anything with magic. It was why everyone lived within the compact confines of their small village and tended to the fields outside and around the walls. Those walls were the titled fey’s duty to enchant, meaning they were supposed to be safe.

Supposed to, anyway.

At each trap, she started by killing and collecting parts from any feybeasts, or freeing the occasional non-magical forest beast that got caught up in the mechanisms. Once done, she would note any issues or repairs that would need to be made for the other two. Both Havort and Stalf knew how to maintain the traps even if they couldn’t make them from scratch. She had to make all the individual building blocks that would fit together to catch the feybeasts alive—a necessity, as otherwise their stones were eaten by other beasts, defeating the point of hunting entirely.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Once the trap was reset and cleared, she pulled out her notebook and meticulously checked it off, scribbling down anything important as she went. Squirt’s notebook was much like Stalf’s pillow—not made of parchment, but thin leather scraps light enough in color for her charcoal pen to write on. Anything important she would transfer to boards back at the guardhouse, and the rest she could erase as needed by washing the charcoal from the leather and leaving it to dry. The binding was ties, not glue, so she could add or remove the “pages” as needed.

Some of the traps had caught feybeasts for her, so she managed to collect a good few items, thinking up the best uses for it all. Another riiset. A couple of flamesacs from the squirrel-like wa’vus. Then Squirt hit the jackpot with a ganok, a type of bee-like creature that would shoot a bunch of stingers out of its abdomen, and her eyes gleamed as she considered the types of traps she could make with it.

The route took her most of the day, so by the time the sun started going down, she knew she wouldn’t have much time left at all. Chewing on her lip, she abruptly trotted back into the forest, pulling special pendants out of her pocket and hanging them on her ears. They itched and were rather bulky, but they worked well enough.

She had no idea what kind of challenges this new lord was going to put her through as part of this exercise. They could range from mundane archery competitions to mock battles, and if she ended up facing off against her fellow members of the Guard, she would need laughing mushrooms and blazing ants.

Knowing her luck, she would be made to do whatever whole song and dance the new lord would be putting the entire damn territory through instead of being sent home immediately, and she would need every advantage she could get.

Squirt pointed to the firing mechanisms. “You have thirty of these, so you should be fine until I get back. Remember to send Havort’s mates to get some more sand for the bait traps—”

Stalf waved her off, “I promise we’re covered. We’ve yet to go through the entirety of one of your stashes in twenty years, pipsqueak.”

Squirt muttered under her breath, “You haven’t run out because I’ve been restocking them.” She was severely limited in how often she could restock each mechanism or joint that made up the different traps, meaning most nights she spent enchanting or crafting in the guardhouse closet she called her own. Neither Stalf nor Havort could make the pieces, instead relying on her to supply them as they used them as building blocks, either repairing the broken traps or putting together new ones. As the seasons went on, the traps needed to be larger, after all, so the traps needed to be flexible enough to accommodate larger, more powerful feybeasts.

Truthfully, if the need arose, Miles the blacksmith could craft most of the individual pieces in a pinch. That was just an expensive use of his limited time, particularly since his apprentice died during a surge last year when he couldn’t make it to shelter in time. Instead, she usually crafted them, as with the right materials she could use the small bit of magic she had to rearrange the molecules more reliably than the average smith.

“You got everything, runt?”

“Always,” she muttered. A habit long since ingrained, she carried everything she owned on her person at all times. She had even cleaned out the closet that had made up her bedroom as her first chore of the morning despite the exhaustion clinging to her.

It had taken most of the night to finish making the blazing ant and laughing mushroom powder bombs, and there were still only so many she had managed to make. Even stretching what she had by making weaker varieties to use on fey and not beasts, she was still limited to only a handful. She hadn’t even gotten the chance to finish processing the riiset powder or poison into weapons, but those she would be able to do on the road when the caravans stopped for the night.

At least, she hoped.

Stalf, never one for emotional anything, merely grunted and led the way out of the small guardhouse they’d shared together for the last twenty years.

Squirt hesitated at the door. Not long enough for Stalf to comment, just long enough for her to take one last glance over the familiar space. The pillow she had made for Stalf’s aching knee. The fireplace where he’d regaled her with stories of the Hunt. The oven they had built together when she had first appeared on his doorstep with nowhere else to go. She spared a thought for wondering if anyone else would do this man’s dishes or sew up the patches in his clothes with her gone.

Just as quickly as the thought arose, she quashed it. No. She wasn’t needed here. Without her, he’d finally move back in with his daughter into the village proper, defended by the measly wooden walls and safer during the roughest months of late spring and early summer. With any luck, she’d be back by then. Back to continuing her way of life, eking out an existence on this side of the mountains, away from the archaic laws that forced her constant subservience, with only one crabby old man as company.

She needed nothing more.

Before Stalf could say anything to hurry her, she shut the door and trotted after him.