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the-lonelybarricade · 8 months

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In From the Snow - Chapter 1

Summary: With her sisters missing and her father dead, Nesta is forced to brave the coming winter and the contempt of her fellow villagers on her own. That is, until a mysterious dog appears and refuses to leave her side.

My contribution to @nessianweek Day 4: AU.

This is the Nessian installation to my They Are the Hunters series. While I would recommend reading the Elucien/Feysand stories, I did my best to give this story enough context to stand on its own. I really hope you enjoy!

Also shout out to Mr. LB for letting me borrow his computer to post this!

Read on AO3・Series Masterlist

The first snowfall of the year had always been a terrible omen.

Every year, as it laid siege to their poorly insulated cottage, Nesta’s family would wonder if they would live to see the snow melt in the spring.

This year, Nesta had known before the first snow arrived that their father would not survive the winter. His health had been deteriorating for a long time, and the news of Elain’s disappearance had devastated him, accelerating his decline until he could do little more than sleep beside the fire. She was a wretch for thinking it, but Nesta had long decided the day he didn’t wake up would be a relief. It was one less mouth to feed, especially when that mouth was hardly capable of swallowing for itself.

The firewood was dwindling. Nesta had used up so much of the excess in the days she had refused to leave the house, expecting the authorities to be waiting just beyond the front door, ready to carry Nesta and her father away to certain death. It didn’t matter if Feyre had been the one to steal the traveler’s horse or that Elain had allegedly been the one to murder her own husband. Neither were here to show for their crimes.

But the authorities never came. And her sisters never returned.

Surely, if either of them had been caught, the authorities would have come for the remainder of the Archerons? Nesta hadn’t yet braved the village to confirm, which meant that she and her father were on the brink of starvation, too.

Given that Nesta’s own constitution was rapidly weakening with the cold, it was no surprise at all that when the first snowfall visited in the night, it took their father with it. She didn’t feel relief when he didn’t open his eyes the next morning. She felt… numb.

Like her face when she opened the cottage door to a blast of frozen air. Like her fingers as she gripped the splintering shovel. Like her palms, rubbed raw from the repetitive motion of digging the metal into the cold, solid earth, then depositing it into a pile at her side.

Nesta had never had a good relationship with her father. She had always assumed that when he died, Elain would be there to express whatever sweet sentiment she felt he was owed at his burial. Unlike Elain, Nesta buried him in silence—just as he had been on the day Elain set down on a path to be married to a Lord’s son against her will.

Elain had never blamed him. Had always insisted it was out of his hands, just like their mother’s death. Just like their family’s fall from fortune when they were children. Elain was quick to forgive, always focused on what lay ahead. But Elain had never looked at their father’s ledger. Nesta had.

Not that any of it mattered now. Their father was dead, and Nesta likely wouldn’t be far behind. At least there had been someone to bury him in the ground, which was more than she could say for herself.

That night, she drank a cup of boiled water and fell asleep curled up beneath a thin blanket in front of the hearth. The fire crackled, close enough to coat her face and hair in soot as the snow continued mercilessly falling outside. Nesta knew that if she didn’t go to the village in the morning to find something to eat, soon she would be too weak to make the trip. And she would die.

By the time she fell asleep, she hadn’t decided which she would prefer.

She woke to sunlight filtering through the frosted window pane and the sound of scratching at her door. Nesta stilled, reaching for the fireplace poker as she wondered if this was it. Someone from the village had finally come for her. The authorities? Or was it just someone taking advantage of a lone, defenseless woman?

A creature sniffed at the small gap between the rickety door and the cold cottage floor. Gods, had someone brought their dog to chase her down? Nesta held her breath, watching the shadow pass in front of her door. Once, twice, three times, like it was moving in slow circles. And then it laid down, effectively barricading her in. She listened carefully for any sound of someone commanding the creature. There was only howling wind.

Fine, Nesta thought, creeping carefully into the room she had once shared with her sisters. The bed felt so empty without them—so much colder than sleeping in front of the fire. The room had a single window, just big enough for her to crawl through to make her escape. She pushed the latch open as quietly as she could and pulled herself through the gap.

Her landing was not overly graceful but quiet enough that she thought she wouldn’t be heard over the wind. Yet, when she turned to make her break, there it was. A dog so large she could have mistaken it for a bear. It had come around the house to watch her sneak out the window, and now it sat directly in her path.

It cocked its head, hazel eyes curious. If she didn’t know better—and she did—Nesta would have thought it looked amused with her stunt. Keeping him in her periphery, Nesta turned her head to assess if its owner was nearby, but nobody was around.

He didn’t look vicious. But he also didn’t look like a stray. He looked too well-fed, and his coat was clean. Well-groomed.

“Go home,” she said, making a small, shooing motion. “I don’t have any food to give myself, let alone some overgrown mutt.”

He was blocking the only way to the village. Ang grinning like he knew it. Cautiously, Nesta took a small step forward, then another, weighing the animal’s reaction. His posture remained friendly enough that she kept moving, still giving him a wide berth once she was on the main path.

The dog swiveled to face her as she stepped around him. And when she started down the path towards the village, he followed. The entire shivering trudge there, Nesta tried to convince him to leave. She’d have enough trouble convincing someone to sell her bread on her own, let alone with a gigantic dog following at her heels. Feyre’s cat had been the exact same way, and Nesta wondered why animals seemed to adopt such strange fixations on their family.

“Go,” she tried one last miserable time on the outskirts of the village. When he still refused, she stomped the rest of the way to the baker’s shop, determined to pretend the stupid thing wasn’t there at all.

It was harder to do so when she saw the baker’s face. “Nesta,” he said warily. His attention flickered to the dog at her feet, then back to her face. She didn’t miss the way his nose curled with distaste. “Hello.”

Never mind all the hours she had spent tutoring his daughter, then. Years of fostering goodwill with his family in exchange for a stale loaf of bread, dismissed on rumor that Elain might have murdered her husband. The village acted like the Archerons had the plague, and even if Elain had murdered Graysen, the reaction was certainly overblown. As far as Nesta was concerned, the Nolan men had been insufferable, and Elain had done the village a favor.

“Hi.” She pressed three copper pieces to the counter. “I just need one loaf.”

He stared at the copper pieces, not moving to collect them.

“What’s wrong?” She asked hotly. “My family’s coin was perfectly fine a month ago.”

“I’ve increased the price,” he said stiffly, pushing the coin back with his arm. Like touching the same coin would somehow mark him as the next Archeron victim. “This is not enough.”

“You used to charge me a copper,” she seethed.

He gestured towards the window. “Winter has fallen. Times are growing harder.”

“And if I asked Claire Beddor how much you charged her family this morning, what would she say?”

The baker shrugged, calling her bluff. “Why don’t you ask her?”

Claire Beddor wouldn’t speak to her. No one would. Not since Tomas, and certainly not since Lord Graysen’s murder.

Gritting her teeth, Nesta pushed a copper onto the table. The baker stared blankly at her, until she slammed down another. He shook his head.

“This is all we have,” Nesta said desperately, even though it wasn’t true. Feyre had stolen enough from the passing traveler to feed them for months—or it would have been if the villagers weren’t raising their prices out of contempt.

The baker opened his mouth, and Nesta truly believed he was going to send her onto the street to starve when the dog at her side began growling. The baker took one look at the creature’s bared teeth and turned pale. He quickly grabbed the extortionate amount of money from the counter and tossed a loaf at Nesta with a strained, “Get out of my shop.”

She’d take it, even if her blood was boiling. The loaf would be enough to last her a week, at least. It would buy her time to figure out how to deal with the villagers. What to do with the remaining coin. If she could just find someone willing to sell her passage to Velaris, it would be enough to get to Elain. But no one from this village would be willing to help.

“Here,” Nesta said, pausing outside her cottage door. The dog stopped with her, watching curiously as she tore a piece from the loaf of bread and held it aloft. “You take this, and we’ll be even, okay? You’ll leave me alone. Deal?”

The dog nodded, though she was certain that had more to do with how she bobbed the piece of bread in the air.

“Ready?” She said, raising the piece over her head. He shuffled back, keeping his eyes on the piece of bread. “Go get it!”

Then Nesta launched it as far as she could towards the treeline, watching as the dog launched itself after it, disappearing in the shadow. She used the opportunity to quickly slip back inside the cottage, hoping that when he returned to see the door was closed and that she wasn’t going to let him in, he would move on to harass someone else.

Nesta woke the next morning to a strange, rhythmic thud cleaving through the forest.

She wasn’t certain if it was the sound or the vibrations that trembled through the old wooden floorboards of the cottage that eventually dragged her from sleep. She rose, blearily fixing her eyes on the hearth that had died at some point in the night, the soot now jostling loose with each powerful blow outside.

Her concern was delayed, seeping slowly through the cracks of the frost-fogged window as she slowly steadied herself in the waking world. It didn’t take long, though, for the ice to leak through and grip her chest tightly.

Then, she was crawling toward the window, careful to keep herself obscured as she slowly raised her face to the frozen glass. It wasn’t the villagers finally come to mob her, thankfully. Though she couldn’t say for certain that the strange man standing over her family’s splitting block was any less alarming.

He held a familiar long-handled axe in his large bare hands. Nesta couldn’t count how often Feyre had warned her not to leave the axe outside. Enough times for Nesta to leave it willingly, half in pettiness and half because she couldn’t stand the sight of the thing. And now it was in a stranger’s hand, lifted over his dark head of hair with discomforting ease before he let it fall onto the upright block of wood he’d placed atop the flared stump. A clean, precise cut.

The man didn’t even survey his perfect work before he chucked the two pieces aside into the pile of wood he’d accumulated over what looked to be hours. Or maybe not. He retrieved another block and split it beneath the axe so quickly that Nesta didn’t doubt he’d be able to clear the whole forest by nightfall. He didn’t even stop to wipe a broad hand across his brow before he was chopping the next block, then the next.

Drawing away from the window, Nesta quickly surveyed the kitchen for something—anything—she could use to defend herself against a man with an axe. A knife seemed useless, but… Feyre had left her bow and arrow behind when she’d fled the village. Nesta didn’t know how to use it, not as effectively as Feyre, but he didn’t know that.

Feyre tried to teach her once. A few winters ago, when the harsh conditions had brought Elain looking so close to death that Nesta had felt desperate enough to learn. But she’d barely caught so much as a rabbit mimicking Feyre’s techniques, and by the time spring rolled around, Nesta resigned the skill back to her sister and took to other avenues of ensuring their survival, like making friendly with the woodcutter’s son.

Not that any of it mattered anymore. All that was left of her family was the rotting cottage and Feyre’s abandoned bow. Her youngest sister might have laughed had she been there to witness Nesta kick the door open with the string pulled to the corner of her lip.

The man paused with the axe raised over his head. He looked over at her, blinking as he took in the notched arrow pointed towards him, then her dressing gown, her bare feet. He raised a dark, slitted brow and grinned slowly as he rested the axe casually over his broad shoulder.

“Careful, sweetheart.” A pair of unnervingly clever hazel eyes raked her over. There was an edge to them, a wildness that seemed well suited to the forest at his back. “You’re going to poke someone’s eye out with that thing.”

“Get off my property.” Her breath clouded in front of her face. So did his—steady puffs of air through his wide nose, a sharp contrast to her heavy exhale even though he had been the one chopping wood.

Did he notice her ragged breath, her trembling hands? Hopefully, he was too busy eying her nightgown, how it’d been sewn for a body a few years younger, tight in the chest and hips because they hadn’t been able to afford a replacement in years.

“Or you’ll what,” he said, with infuriating calm, “shoot me?”

She tightened her grip, pulled the string back further like she intended to release.

He laughed. “Go ahead.”

He believed she didn’t have it in her, the bastard. Nesta kept the bow trained on him, entertaining shooting him just for the crime of underestimating her. “Why are you chopping wood here?”

“I thought this house was abandoned.”

Lie. He’d have been able to see the smoke drifting from the chimney in the hatched roof. Though, Nesta had no way of knowing when the fire had died while she slept. She wished she could go back in and feel the stone to gauge how recently it had stopped burning.

“And why would you be chopping wood at an abandoned house?”

He set down the axe. Her axe. And raised his palms as though in surrender. “I was planning to sell it.”

“You’re going to sell the wood,” she repeated.

“Yes,” he said proudly.

“At the village?”

“That is typically where one sells wood, is it not?”

“I’ve never seen you before,” Nesta said, examining his clothes. His winter cape, lined with wolf pelts she would have believed he’d hunted himself, had been discarded in the snow, leaving him in a belted fur-lined tunic of simple make. A pair of leather gloves was tucked into his belt, and his dark hair was tied off his face, though pieces of it hung loose at his temples, his neck. Better off than a common woodcutter, but certainly no lord’s son. “We already have a woodcutter in this village.”

“Is there not room for two?”

The Mandrays wouldn’t think so. It wasn’t Nesta’s problem, but it could be. If they knew he had been at this cottage first, chopping his wood here. Thomas was already looking for any excuse to throw her at the village’s mercy and with the rumors surrounding Elain and now Feyre… Nesta didn’t think she would survive whatever retribution Thomas would seek if he thought she had any association with this woodcutter.

“No,” she said, tipping her chin defiantly. Her fingers were growing numb, the string crooked round her finger cutting off whatever circulation was left. She gritted her teeth. “Go terrorize the next village over.”

As if he didn’t hear her, the man unlooped the belt around his waist and began gathering the wood into a pile.

“I said stop,” she hissed.

“What if I offer you a cut of my profits?”

Not good enough. The villagers wouldn’t take her money. They’d sooner accuse her of stealing it and hang her for the crime.

Besides, she didn’t trust a strange man threatened beneath a bow to return with any measure of good intentions. Particularly not once he discovered she was here alone, with no father or sisters or anyone to protect her, to hear her scream. It was better if this man forgot who she was. All she needed was to survive the winter, then she could attempt the journey to Velaris in the spring. And surviving meant keeping her head down, her mouth shut. Her bow unstrung.

“Leave a few pieces of wood,” she said. “And tell no one that you were here. That’s my price.”

There was something very dangerous about how his mouth quirked to the side. He began placing several logs in a new pile as he asked casually, “Afraid of making one of the boys in the village jealous?”

Nesta’s spine straightened. He might be asking out of ordinary interest, like any gentleman might inquire if a lady’s heart was taken. But from the predatory way he watched her, the way those eyes practically begged her to release her fingers on the drawstring, she thought it was more likely that he was probing for information, determining whether someone would come looking for her if he decided this cottage and its sole occupant were ripe for the taking.

“No one will buy from you if they knew where you chopped this wood,” she said, praying that alone would deter him.

His laughter rumbled through his chest. “Is that because you threaten all your guests with a bow?” Nesta thought it sounded oddly like a question and a compliment in one. She kept the arrow trained on him, kept her jaw clenched as he grinned. “Alright, alright. Understood.” He crouched to grab his cape, throwing it carelessly over his shoulder before lifting the stack of wood by the makeshift sling. He offered a nod of farewell as he set down the path towards the village, “See you around, then, sweetheart.”

Nesta waited until the sound of footsteps faded, and his large frame was eclipsed entirely by trees before she lowered the bow. He’d left the axe behind, embedded in the wood, and she cautiously ventured forward to retrieve it, as well as the generous pile of wood he’d left behind.

She hoped he was wrong. She hoped she never saw him again.

But she couldn’t get the sight of his eyes out of her mind. The way he’d watched her with a hunger that she knew intimately. Her heart was racing in fear, she told herself. If she’d learned anything from her sisters, it was that the desire of men was dangerous.

So when she heard something sniffing and scratching outside her door later that evening and peeked through the window to see the dog lying in front of the cottage, she let it inside.

Just in case the man returned and expected to find her alone.

#Nessian #Nessian fic #Nessian fanfic #Nessian fanfiction #Nesta x Cassian #Cassian x Nesta #They Are the Hunters #In From the Snow #Nessianweek2023

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