Page 8 of Hunting for her Heart
“We must hurry,” he says as we wave goodbye and start running down the path toward our home.
As soon as we get there, we strap on every weapon we have without saying a single word to each other. We don’t need to. We’ve been training for this for half our lives, ever since the seer first told us the prophecy at age fifteen.
We may not be blood-related, but having the island’s seer tell us a prophecy that foretold a way for the three of us to save our dying island, bonded us as clansmen.
If there had been any available female of interest in Redmere, we would have pursued her as a unit. But with a dwindling population, the available females here were extremely limited, not to mention they always chose to marry a unit of brothers, anyway.
“We must get Ronan, quickly,” Hawk says as he grabs his spear and I sheath my second sword to my back.
Running along the path, it doesn’t take long to find him in the center oftown.
“Ronan!” I yell, interrupting his conversation with a couple of the local farmers.
When he takes in our appearance, he dismisses the men and takes a few steps in our direction as we come to a stop.
“It’s time,” I tell him, nodding when his eyes meet mine.
“The seer said we must leave immediately,” Hawk adds.
As usual, Ronan is already fully decked out in his gear. He almost never leaves home without his weapons.
“Have you said goodbye to Miryam?” he asks me, knowing my mother would be a wreck if she didn’t know where I was going.
I smile and nod as we turn and head toward the cliffs. “Yeah, and Torran said he’d fill in for you while we’re gone.”
“Good,” he says as we run single file out of the village and through the narrow path. “Did Florentina say anything else?”
“She said she had a vision, telling her we must leave immediately,” Hawk explains. “And that everything we need to know is in the prophecy.”
We move silently through the forest to the narrow path that leads up the hill to the cliffs. We’ve taken this path hundreds of times, possibly even thousands. Once a week since we were fifteen, we’ve practiced this route to the skyreacher’s cliff, knowing it’s the fastest way off this island.
And it finally pays off today, reaching the top in what must be record time. The second Ronan steps out onto the large open rock platform, he lets out a long whistle, and we wait with bated breath.
I search the surrounding cliffs, ones that reach higher than the one we’re on and are home to the giant birds. Movement catches my eye, and when I see a large brown skyreacher emerge from a cave, followed by two more, oneall white and one a combination of the two colors, I smile as some of my tension releases.
We’ve been training these birds to come when called and let us ride them for over a decade, but they were still free animals and had every right to refuse us. Let’s just hope they actually let us ride them all the way to the mainland this time—a journey we’ve never taken before.
After attaching the saddles, we each climb on our own bird and hang onto the reins, not hesitating to have the skyreacher’s leap from the cliff and soar over the sea. Their wingspan is almost twenty feet wide, which seems more than enough to keep our large bodies from hindering them as they sail smoothly toward the mainland.
The prophecy tells us where we need to go to find the charm that will save our land. Not that we know it’s a charm, per se, but that’s what we started calling it years ago, since the prophecy doesn’t specify what sort of object it would be. I knew it had to be a magically infused one, though. Nothing else could help our dying island.
Half the vegetation has died out in the past twenty years. At this rate, there soon wouldn’t be enough healthy land for food, let alone us.
Go beyond the world you know,
It will be found where love does grow.
I recitethose specific lines of the prophecy that tell us where we need to go.A place where love grows.The Mating Hunt. It annoyed us that the mainlanders thought we were the primitive ones because of the way we dressed, but theywere the ones who still partook in such ancient, barbaric rituals.
Chasing a woman through the woods to force her to be your bride? I shake my head at the thought. Why would any level-headed woman ever choose to participate when she could simply just pick who she wants? Even on the mainland, men outnumber women twenty-to-one, so they have plenty of options for husbands.
It takes us well over an hour before the mainland starts to line the horizon. It reaches as far as I can see to the north and south, making it far bigger than I ever imagined.
It starts to get larger and larger until tall peaks in the South start to take shape. Ronan steers his skyreacher toward them, and Hawk and I follow. We know that the Mating Hunt takes place on the highest forest in the kingdom, and hopefully it’s somewhere near those mountains, as there is nothing else at even half the height anywhere else in sight.
It takes us another forty minutes or so to get close enough to spot what we hope is our target destination. There is a large, flat area before a massive forest spans out for miles and miles.
“How are we going to find the charm in there?” I yell to the others, as worry fills me.
