#weaponnotachild

@weaponnotachild

Warren was finally starting to cool off. He’d stormed out of the palace hours ago in a rage. He’d been avoiding the topic of marriage as long as he could, but the king and queen were putting their collective royal foot down. They’d told him they’d already arranged a marriage and she would be here before the month was out.

Just the thought of it made his blood boil. 

He figured he’d head into the lower circles of the capital and get a cheap drink in a dirty tavern. That seemed like the least royal thing to do. Hopefully he’d be seen by everyone and be a proper embarrassment. But even when he reached the lowest circle, he kept walking, the tips of his wings dragging slightly in the dirt. 

He didn’t stop until he saw The Fowler sitting on her roof. There were plenty of fowlers in the kingdom, and the capital. But she was The Fowler. Some said she was raised by the Assassin’s guild. Others swore she’d been raised by wolves. Most agreed she was a murderer. Warren didn’t care about any of those things, however. He just smirked a little, seeing a rather elegant solution to his problem. 

The damn scouts could quiet their heartbeats. He hated it when anybody knew that trick. It felt like running blind, losing one of his main means of tracking. Even so, he still had their scent, and the odd track in the earth though even those were scarce. 

And then all at once there was blood. It looked like black ink in the shade of the deep woods, covering the ground and splashed over tree trunks... Maybe they didn’t know how to quiet their heartbeats after all. Maybe somebody’d done it for them.

Overhead, branches creaked under the weight of something moving through them, and he looked up in time to see a smaller figure dart out of sight. A ratty old sweater, a flicker of long dark hair. Recognition registered in his memory but he fielded that to one side with doubt. Building up that old hope over and over again didn’t do much except bring all the guilt back tenfold.