The Shadowed Hunt: Seeking beta readers
Oct. 18th, 2014 08:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dracunculusI'm seeking honest criticism/critique but also, frankly, encouragement, because I have three small kids and sticking to a regular writing schedule is very difficult for me. Con-crit is also very welcome, but even just a quick "hawt" or "I'm into this" -- ANY kind of feedback/encouragement, no matter how short, is basically exactly what I'm looking for.
My intention is to post 1,000 words twice weekly (on a Tuesday and Friday update schedule), meaning that it will take roughly nine months to complete the novel. I'm making the first chapter public here, but future updates will be screened to those who have volunteered as beta readers -- so you'll need a Dreamwidth account to see the updates.
Please leave a comment if you're interested in following the story as it's written! Here's the back-cover blurb:
The Brothers of the Shadowed Hunt harness eldritch magic to face and bind monsters of legend. Their powers are feared, so when silver-eyed Feran comes to a village brothel, only young Ary will accept him into her arms. And after a night more magical than anything she has known, Ary risks everything to follow her lover into the shadows. Now she, too, must learn to hunt the creatures of the night...or else become their prey.
Read on for the first chapter. M/f, explicit.
We didn’t know what was happening when the shadows began to lengthen. I was out front with a few of the other girls, to give the men a choice if they wanted one, even though they mostly just went with whoever approached them first. We took turns on that, or we were supposed to. Betha often cut in.
It was me, Betha, Nan (who wanted us to call her Yseult when she was working, but we never did), and Mistress Fiora (we did call her that, even though her real name was Priss Tanner), along with a few of the local men. Our drinks were mostly water, but theirs were strong. It’s how we made money even on nights when none of the locals had enough coin for a tumble.
We were laughing and flirting and urging the boys on. Betha was in the miller’s lap and I was listening for the nineteenth time to Pai Greavey’s story of how he got drunk one night and woke up under a hawthorn tree with a fistful of horsehair and no boots. (“Ridden by a woodwose” was his explanation. “Fell off his old grey nag and got robbed” was a lot more likely.)
Then the fire, crackling and spitting in the hearth, died down suddenly to nothing but embers and a few thin pale flames skittering ghost-like over the blackened logs. The shadows reaching into the center of the room took on an unsettling depth, as if they had substance to them. One of the girls shrieked, but the noise seemed muffled and faint. The door opened, and blew in cold, darkness, and a man.
He said something, too soft to hear, and suddenly the fire leaped up again. I could hear the normal sounds it made as the wood hissed and split, and Pai Greavey’s breath coming heavy and fast. We all stared at the stranger. We knew what he was.
“Oh, festering graves, no,” Betha said, her voice loud and harsh. “I’m not letting any shadowman diddle me.”
The stranger pushed back the hood of his jacket. He had straight dark hair brushing his shoulders and a scarred, grizzled face. I flinched at the sight of his eyes -- a bright, flat silver, they reflected light in the same way as a cat’s. They were not human eyes.
He ran those witch-eyes over the lot of us, settling on Mistress Fiora. “I have good coin,” he said in a low, rough voice, “and no woman here will come to any harm by me, I promise.”
“I won’t take your rotting coin,” Betha said, her voice even louder. “None of us will!” She swung to face Mistress Fiora. “You can’t ask us -- he’s a -- he’s --“
“I am a brother of the Order of the Shadowed Hunt,” the man said. His voice was still low but now there was an edge to it: I saw he was looking at the miller, who was clutching Betha with one hand and reaching for his belt-knife with the other. The miller flinched, reddened, and grabbed his beer mug instead.
Mistress Fiora’s face tightened. I understood her position: if the girls were unwilling she’d not force us, but neither did she want to offend a shadowhunter. They were dangerous men. Their Order was secretive, shrouded in rumor. Its members lived apart from normal men, walled in their own cloisters, save when called out by duty or contract. And it was never good luck to meet one.
I didn’t quite know what I was doing until I stood up. It was partly the way he stood there, just inside the threshold, holding himself very still as if he didn’t want to spook us with sudden movement. But mostly it was what he’d said about coin.
“I'm Ary,” I said. I was very conscious of everyone watching me as I walked over to him, but shame was something I’d learned to hide long ago. I reached out my hand, and he took it, his cold fingers wrapping over mine. He had straps of black leather criss-crossing his palms, and a ring of carved bone on his thumb. Those silver eyes were fixed on my face. I kept my voice steady as I could. “I have wine back in my room if you’d like to join me.”
“I came here to do more than drink,” he said carefully.
I swallowed. “I know.”
“I want the whole night,” he said, looking over at Mistress Fiora. “And no interruptions.”
“Show me your silver,” she said, so he dropped my hand and untied his coin purse. There was a lot of money there, as much as Mistress Fiora collected from all of us put together, and that on a good night. She counted out about twice what she’d charge one of the locals. The shadowhunter didn’t object.
“Show our guest to your room, Ary,” Mistress Fiora said, and I ducked my head. The voices of the others swirled up excitedly as I led the shadowhunter upstairs.
My room was small, but it still seemed a luxury that I had one at all. I used to sleep in the kitchen. After my parents died of the plague, Mistress Fiora -- she was Mistress Tanner to me then -- was the only one willing to take me in. I worked for my keep, serving as bar wench and scullery maid in the brothel, until I grew enough that the men started asking for me. Mistress Fiora always told me it was my choice, whether I’d sell my maidenhood and leave the kitchen, but in truth there wasn’t much choice for me at all. I had no other way to earn coin, and I knew that charity couldn’t last forever.
I held the door open for the shadowhunter. He had to duck his head to clear the lintel. He unbuckled his knife-belt and dropped it in the corner along with the other weapons he carried -- a bow and a bundle of arrows -- as I went around the room lighting candles. In the far corners of the room I felt the darkness take on that weird substance again; I had to push through it like cobwebs. But the candles caught, and the light drove the shadows back.
Then I came back to stand before him and began pulling at the laces to my bodice. “Tell me what you want me to do,” I said, forcing a smile.
He reached out, slow enough that I could have flinched away if I wanted, but I held still. His palm caressed my hip and skimmed upward, cupping my breast, before he lifted it up to my chin. He tilted my face upward to meet his gaze.
“You’re very young,” he said.
“I’m older than I look, my sir,” I said.
“And willing?”
“Yes, sir.”
He kissed me then, surprisingly tentative: not like an inexperienced boy, but gentle and slow, pulling back several times to scan my face. I couldn’t read his, and I wasn’t sure how to respond. I was more used to drunken louts who thrust their tongue deep in my mouth. I tried to answer in kind, nipping at his lips a little in encouragement. His arms went around me then, drawing me firmly against him, as his kiss became more insistent, and I yielded to it. His hands moved up and down my body, feeling the curve of my hips and ass, tangling in my hair. At last he held me by my shoulders and moved me back. “I need to see you,” he said, in that roughened voice. “I need to touch you.”
I started working again at my bodice, but he moved my hands away and took over himself, pulling the laces free and letting the fabric drop to the floor. Then he turned me, guiding me with a gentle push of the shoulders, until I stood with my back to him. He drew up my dress and undershift and pulled it over my head, so that I was naked but for my bloomers. My hair fell back over my bare shoulders and he gathered it up in his hands, pushing it aside, and bent to kiss the back of my neck.
A warm shiver crossed my skin as his mouth moved over it, the heat and wet of his kisses and the scrape of his stubbled chin. I had never been touched like this. I was used to being told what position to take, and enduring what followed for the brief time that it lasted. I was half-dressed and facing away from the stranger, but as his hands moved around to cup my naked breasts I felt more exposed before him than I had ever been in my life. I had to let the men play with my breasts, of course, but I never liked it; they were sensitive, and the pinching and groping made me writhe in discomfort. When the shadowhunter’s fingers closed on my nipples I couldn’t help but flinch.
He stilled, behind me. I thought he might say something, but he only relaxed his hold on me, still cupping my breasts but not tugging at them. He held me like that for a long time, nuzzling at my neck and shoulders as his hands moved leisurely across my body. He palmed my breasts sometimes, and the texture of the leather straps wound around his hands grazed against my nipples, making them hard. I shivered again, feeling a looseness and a heat spreading out from my center, and the next time his hand wandered up to my breast, I leaned against it. He ran his thumb over my nipple, and the sensation made me gasp with its sudden sweetness.
Then both his hands were on my breasts again, fingers flicking lightly, and my knees almost buckled with pleasure. “Oh,” I said, in genuine surprise.
“You like that,” he murmured, his breath tickling my ear.
“I…do,” I said. “I didn’t know.”
“Let me look at you,” he said, and moved his hands to my shoulders again, turning me to face him. I stood, bare-chested before him, as his bright silver eyes ran slowly down my body. He pulled at my bloomers, tugging them down over my hips, and I gave a little shake so that they fell around my feet. I was fully naked then.
“You’re beautiful,” he said, as if he believed it. I knew myself as far from the most popular girl in the brothel, at least once my novelty had worn off -- Betha had bigger tits, and Nan longer legs. But I liked my own face, freckled though it was, and I was proud of my hair. It was brown, but long and thick, and when my mother used to brush it out she'd called it "the color of polished heartwood.” In any case: I wasn’t a beauty, but I was pretty enough, and "beautiful" was still a nice thing for a man to say while I was bare-arsed under his gaze.
I smiled at the shadowhunter. A genuine smile this time, and he smiled back: a wry and fleeting gesture, as if he was unused to it.
“Lie on the bed?” he said. There was a lift in his voice at the end, making it a question. I did what he said, laying back on the straw matting, and he followed me, covering my body with his own. He had not taken off his own clothing -- a woolen tunic with a hood, dyed a rich wine color, worn under a leather jerkin strapped close to his body. His trousers were made of a softer, suppler leather. That wine color was something our local dyers could never have produced, and I didn’t think Mistress Fiora’s husband, the tanner, ever made leather that fine. I wondered, briefly, if the shadowhunter was also used to whores of a higher quality, but then he kissed me again, and those thoughts left me.
His hands wandered over me as he continued his slow, exploratory kisses, and the heat he’d kindled in me intensified and spread, until I found myself making a mewling little sound as he teased my nipples again. He moved his head, then, closing his mouth around my breast, doing with his tongue what he’d been doing with fingers. I clutched the scratchy straw of the mattress and moaned. I’d heard the other girls making those noises, but assumed they’d been acting. I’d never tried making a show of it myself as I didn’t know how to be convincing. Maybe that’s why I wasn’t as popular.
His hand found my other breast, and the sweetness licked through me like electricity. I writhed beneath him as he laid claim to my body, finally withdrawing his mouth only to switch his teasing to the other breast. Meanwhile his hand ran down my body, skimming my hip, until he found my knee and pushed it firmly to one side. I had only a moment to feel how he’d exposed me, my sex open to the air, before his hand was there.
Assured of my response, his earlier gentle touches had given way to something more urgent. His fingers pushed inside my slick cunt while his thumb rubbed at my nubbin, insistent, demanding. I bucked against him, wrapping my arms around him and clinging tight.
He lifted his head. “You’re beautiful,” he said again. It might have been the low candle-light, but his eyes looked dimmer somehow, more human.
“You’re--“ I gasped. “I want you.”
He pulled away, but only to strip himself, peeling off his jerkin and tunic with a few deft motions. His body was lean and crossed with dozens of scars: some white puckered stripes, closely parallel, like the swipe of a bear or great cat; some puncture wounds that clearly came from the mouth of a beast; and some that must have been left by human weapons, by arrow or sword. I stared openly as he stripped off the rest of his clothing. He left the leather straps: wrapped, I saw now, not only around his palms but also his forearms, in tightly overlapping bands, and then in a much looser spiral up the rest of his arms, where they were tied at last behind his neck. There was some sort of writing burned into the leather, but I couldn’t see more, not in the dark. When he lay back over me I tentatively touched one of the bite-marks scarring his chest, feeling the divots marking his skin, and the hard muscle underneath.
He snaked an arm under my shoulders, holding me close. I opened my knees for him and felt his cock pressing against me. For once, the knowledge of what would happen next -- the certainty that I would be taken, would be fucked, until the man was done with me -- was an exciting thought, and not a leaden one.
He pressed into me, just enough that I felt a rush of pleasure, then withdrew. Again and again he thrust shallowly, a fraction deeper every time, until I made an inarticulate noise of protest and tried to pull him against me. Then, with a groan, he sank into me fully. The surge of sensation was so strong I could barely handle it: my back arched and I threw my head to one side, biting my lip.
“Did I hurt you?” he whispered, holding himself very still.
“No,” I said, “not at all,” and could not keep a note of surprise from my voice.
He kissed me strongly, his lips working against mine as he pulled his hips back, only to thrust deep into me again, and then again. Waves of pleasure swamped me and I gasped and moaned, clutching at him, rising to meet him with every stroke. He settled, then, into a steady rhythm -- yet to my own disappointment the stimulation seemed to ebb as my body adjusted to him.
I couldn’t expect more, I reminded myself. I subsided beneath him and simply held him as he took me, riding out the eddies of sensation.
Yet he seemed to notice: he shifted, pulling away. “Turn over,” he murmured, and obediently I did. He guided my hips with his hands until he had me as he wanted me, arse lifted a bit and knees spread, open to him. Then he filled me again, pushing all the way inside with a single stroke, and I cried out in gratification -- the feeling of him was fresh again, provoking the same overpowering reponse from my body.
He took me that way, pressed into the straw mattress. At the same time his hands wandered freely over my body, sliding between myself and mattress to cup my tits, and running lower. His fingers sought, and found, the nub of sensation just above the place where our bodies joined, and he pressed and circled and flicked at it as his cock worked inside me. I mewled incoherently, capable of nothing but the awareness of him and what he was doing to me. When the force of his thrusts increased it was almost too much: he was driving into me hard, and fast, and I could barely take the intensity.
Then he shuddered, his arms tightening around me as he spent himself inside me with a moan. I tried to catch my breath, coming back to myself. He released me, drawing away, and I swallowed an acute sense of frustration and disappointment, my body aching at his absence.
I rolled onto my back as he settled down beside me. I wasn’t sure what he wanted now: he’d paid Mistress Fiora for the whole night, but our business was done, wasn’t it? Yet his hands were still on me, guiding me firmly, and I went where he would have me. He arranged me on my side, with his arms around me, and the warm bulk of him pressed against me from behind. To my surprise his hands then went to my breasts again, rubbing and flicking, forcing from me another involuntary cry. As the heat rekindled between my legs I writhed against him, trying to find some relief, and then he was touching me there too. His mouth was on my neck and my ear, nipping at my skin. I moaned and bucked, helpless in the grip of a pleasure that was almost a torment. But he could do what he liked with me. One of his hands moved implacably from one breast to the other as the other continued to work at my most sensitive place. Then he was -- not flicking, but tugging, pinching, in both spots -- a thing that I had always found almost unendurable, and yet in that moment it brought only a crashing peak of ecstasy through my entire body. I cried out sharply, again and again, as I was rocked by spasms of delight. His hands stilled and he held me tightly against him as I slowly recovered.
When I’d caught my breath I shifted enough in his arms that I could look into his face. “You are,” I said wonderingly, “…very different from other men.”
It didn’t seem to please him. His jaw tightened and he looked away. I might have tried to amend what I’d said, but I noticed then: his eyes. They no longer shone with that flat silver light. They looked -- normal. Just gray human eyes.
“Your eyes!” I breathed, and he looked back at me, face still impassive.
“I needed you,” he said simply.
I studied him. “You mean that,” I said.
“Yes. It’s a part of my Order.”
I only waited. He would explain, or not, and it wasn’t my place to push him. At last he said: “We pay a price for our powers. The shadows obey us, but they draw from us as well. They can draw...too much. We have means of keeping them bound, various rituals. It differs from Hunter to Hunter. For me, it’s always been...this kind of magic that works best.”
I was awed. “That was magic?”
His mouth crooked in the hint of a smile. “Yes. Didn’t you know? Old, old magic. Skin to skin, breath to breath, the spear and the chalice, the seed and the dark earth.” He curled his hand lightly, running the back of his fingers down my bare arm. It was a simple, tender gesture, and I found myself so moved by it that I was suddenly blinking back tears. I turned my head so he wouldn’t see.
“What’s your name?” I asked, to distract him.
“Feran,” he said. “Or Dead-Eye, they call me.” His voice went flat as he said the last part.
“You don’t like it,” I guessed.
He shrugged; I felt the ripple of muscle beneath my head, where it lay on his shoulder. “It’s fine. They can call me worse.”
“I’m Ary,” I said.
“I know. I remember.”
We lay in silence for a bit, as the candles burned down. I studied the shadows cast on the wall, but they looked as they should. “Feran,” I said. “There’s never been a shadowhunter come through Torverde.”
“We come every seven years,” he said, “to check the bindings. I imagine the others didn’t let themselves be seen.”
“Bindings?”
He brushed a stray lock of hair back from my face. “Do they not talk about it, then, your townsfolk? It would have been before you were born, but the older ones here, they must remember.”
I shook my head. "Talk -- about what? Nothing ever happens here. We're at a crossroads, that's all, so we get travelers."
"A crossroads is always a place of power," he said, "and more roads than you know pass through Torverde. Twenty-eight years ago your burgomaster died and walked again. As I understand it, he killed a score of men -- and not only men, women and children too -- before we were called. A brother of the Order came, a contract was made, the price was paid, and the Walker Again was laid and bound. And as part of the contract we come back every seven years, to renew the bindings."
It was the longest speech I had heard from him, but all I had to say in response was "Oh," and then -- "oh." A number of things suddenly made sense to me: the corner of the graveyard that was left untended, grown over with brambles. The silent tension that came over the older folk when the town gathered to sit a wake. The way Torverde alone among its neighboring towns had no burgomaster. We dispensed justice through assembly alone, even though it could take us days or even weeks to reach a decision, and hard feelings were often left behind. A chill went through me. "Is it...safe?" I asked at last.
He touched my chin, turning my face to meet his. "Ary," he said, "you've never been safer than you are this night."
I didn't think he was answering the question I'd been asking, but I believed him nonetheless. Everyone knew the shadowmen were dangerous. That they followed ill omens, carried dark magic, and that plague winds blew in their wake. But still, as I lay in his arms, I knew in my bones I was safe.
We lay in silence for a bit, until I opened my eyes and realized I'd been asleep for a moment. In the aftermath of the responses he'd provoked from me, my body felt loose and heavy, wanting nothing but to lie still against his warmth. He was still awake, though, his eyes half-lidded. "Should I snuff the candles?" I asked meekly.
"No need," he said. And then he breathed another word that I did not catch, and very quickly, each of the candle flames dwindled and was gone. I held my breath, but the darkness seemed ordinary, still. Feran's arms were warm around me. I could hear the laughter of the men downstairs. From the darkness, very close, Feran rumbled: "I might wake you, later. If I may."
"All right," I yawned, and closed my eyes again.
