At First Sight Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Avenged Fairy Tales Series

  Megala Preview

  At First Sight

  Avenged Fairy Tales

  Daria Doshrelli

  Copyright © 2019 by Daria Doshrelli

  All rights reserved.

  Cover by 100Covers

  Chapter 1

  There was in the village of Little Farthington a certain Hameus Cornelius who whittled away his days on his front porch. No wife.

  His grandmother prevailed as the area’s oldest and most determined gossip, a lady of about sixty-three who could never be bothered to know her own age, though she daily reminded Hameus of his. This lady, who admitted to sixty-two and no more, spent her waking hours endeavoring to cure Hameus’s peculiar condition of apathy over his unwed status.

  For the fourth day in a row she walked out onto her front porch, and indeed the cabin was hers by right—modest, unadorned, ordinary as it was—and her ears met with the creak of plank against the runners of a rocking chair. This was enough to send any female into a fit of outrage.

  But Gram was an expert at dealing with creatures such as Hameus.

  She huffed at her grandson, once again sitting and whittling instead of getting himself a wife. “You are nearly forty, sir, and you must settle yourself down respectably with a good woman, one who knows a thing or two about knitting.”

  “By my reckoning I am only slightly nearer to forty than you are,” Hameus replied, scraping his pocket knife across a spruce branch freshly stripped of its bark. “As you round down when speaking of your own years in this world, I don’t see why you trouble yourself rounding up a decade or two when you calculate mine.”

  “I am speaking of your future.” She wagged a gnarled finger at his back.

  “Good to know I still have a few more years.”

  “Ugh. Shameful son.”

  “Grandson.”

  Gram clomped across the porch in her most humble, heeled shoes and set her slight frame directly in front of his. “You have no sympathy for my many ailments resulting from your lack of ambition.”

  Hameus did not bother to look up. “Last week it was my lack of a wife that caused your many ailments.”

  “One and the same cause which you would know if you ever did the proper thing and took a wife. A single man of your advanced age sitting around whittling instead of courting a lady…” She lifted her chin and bequeathed him a wiser-than-thou look. “Highly improper.”

  Advanced age? He was not yet twenty-six. “Take a wife, you say? And destroy a perfectly peaceful existence?” He smiled a very charming smile and turned his eyes to the field in front of him where the sun cast its glittering rays over a small herd of goats, a fair forest just beyond this idyllic setup. “Quit troubling yourself and come sit out here and enjoy this fine day.” His hand gestured to the rocking chair next to the one he sat in, vacant since the passing of his grandfather. “We might as well settle one thing right now. I will never marry.”

  The old lady gasped and fixed a pair of dark peepers on him. Hameus at last lifted his chin to see a growl in one eye, a snarl in the other. As usual, a dash of mischief flickered behind those ancient lenses. “You will very well change your tune…when you fall in love.”

  The wayward grandson heaved a throaty laugh. “Gram, you are a treasure. Your romantic sensibilities have run away with you.”

  “What are you saying? Do you think there is no lady out there who might catch your eye?”

  Hameus grunted his denial of romantic sentiment. He had no intention of becoming some woman’s rightful property just because of his gender. His goats, pigs, and chickens all did as they were told. Wives did otherwise. Besides this undeniable truth, he had long suspected he would make a terrible husband. When it came to wood, he knew his work. When it came to women, all he knew was, he was a confirmed bachelor.

  Then he had been sent to Gram’s house.

  Hameus could not be certain how a woman such as Gram had given birth to a sweet lady like his mother or why Mother had exiled him to Little Farthington. The old lady was as spry as a spring sprig and had no need of a caretaker. Sometimes he suspected one or both of them was ill, very ill, and his mother simply could not bear to watch them waste away. Quite a lot had not made sense over the past few years, so he retreated to his woodworking and decided to await his demise with dignity right there on the porch he had built with his own two hands, and the cabin, too, after Gram’s old place had burned to the ground. He and Gram got on well until a couple of months ago, when she abruptly decided he must have a wife.

  “Is this conversation really necessary?” He gave the bark and enthusiastic scrape, sending a long curl of wood tumbling at his feet. “I sit on this here porch each and every day. I don’t court and I never let my eyes rest on any woman but you.”

  “Precisely. You need to get off this porch and get busy finding your ladylove.”

  Another laugh from Hameus had his elder scowling. He didn’t care for the grin that peeked out of the corners of her mouth and lingered in her eyes. She kept staring at him until he understood the game. “Oh, is that what this is about, then? Gram, that’s just a tale you old biddies repeat to amuse yourselves while you knit.” She raised her eyebrows at him, but he knew how to handle a specimen such as Gram. “Speaking of which, I’m a grown man, not an infant. I don’t require new clothes every few weeks.”

  The old lady pushed a sigh out through her nostrils and swept a lock of long, white hair from her forehead. “You have no idea what you require.”

  Hameus dug his knife into the wood. To his dismay, this particular conversation with his grandmother produced its usual effect on his work. The branch he intended to coax into a wolf had begun to take on the appearance of a weapon. He pointed the sharp end of the stick at her. “You ladies should take up another hobby, one that doesn’t leave you so idle you gossip and moan and fill each other’s heads with nonsense.”

  “Nonsense? You did not always think so.”

  “It’s true, the yarns you spin were entertaining when I was a mere boy, but you can’t expect a grown man to believe a word of it.” He flicked a peel of wood her way.

  “In that case, you were a mere boy only last year.”

  “And to think, now I’m nearly forty.”

  Gram would not be deterred from her mission by this pup. “Then you have no objection to saying it?”

  Hameus swallowed a little too loudly but covered his blunder with a masculine grunt in the next moment. He was a man, after all. He didn’t believe in sewing circle myths. “Fine. I’ll say it, if it will get you off my case, woman.”

  He stood, set aside the naked branch and his pocket knife, and put his hand to his heart. Then he looked her dead in the eye. Slowly, solemnly, he cleared his throat to prepare the way for the words his elder demanded, the ones that were sure to get him set upon by a mythical creature.

  “I, Hameus Cornelius, am a confirmed bachelor. I will never fall in love.”

  Chapter 2

  Hameus’s fateful words fluttered along the breeze and deposited themselves in the ears of three souls perching on an obliging tree branch.

  “What was that?” the first asked, his
feathered face manufacturing an innocent expression.

  The second brushed his beak over his chest plumage. “I heard nothing.”

  “Lies. The matter is very clear,” the third replied.

  “Woe be unto us,” the first tweeted.

  “Why has he said thus?” the second chirped.

  The third whistled out a sigh. “I hope the Lady has found a replacement.”

  At that very moment the scent and swirl of rose petals filled the air. The three black birds lifted their wings in unison and swooped down to the lowest branch of the cherry tree where they met with the Lady herself.

  “Greetings, Lady,” the third bird twittered, a she-bird whose sleek feathers were tidily arranged about her plump frame.

  “Sev, Pip, Nan,” the Lady replied. Her silver bow she grasped in one hand. The other she turned up in front of her, a dome of sparkle and sand whirling in its palm. “I have chosen a new avenger. You will find him in Enoras.”

  “Enoras?” The she-bird turned a quizzical look on her patroness. “We’ve never had an avenger from there before.”

  “We’ve never even had a case there before,” the first bird said.

  “Nothing important ever happens in King Pumpernickel’s realm,” the second bird said. “Or is it Queen Sandrine’s realm?” He shook his beak very dramatically. “Impossible to keep it all straight.”

  A smile stretched the Lady’s lips. “But what may be most fascinating about an ordinary town in a very ordinary realm with equally ordinary citizens…is that things are never as they appear.”

  The sand settled and an image arose within the dome. The winged trio leaned forward on their branch.

  “Where is he?”

  “I don’t see anything.”

  “He is very small.”

  Lady Love did not answer.

  Each bird replied to her silence in turn.

  “Yes, Lady.”

  “Leave it to us.”

  “Might we know his name?”

  “He is known as Tad, but his true name is…” The syllables she uttered brought a snort from the second bird. He snapped his beak shut and pretended to smooth his unruly chest feathers as the Lady’s glittering eyes turned on him. “Bring him before the second dawn.”

  With this she turned and drifted off with the wind, leaving a flurried rainbow of rose petals in her wake.

  Chapter 3

  Nila arrived in Little Farthington that very afternoon, cloaked and hooded in scarlet. At her back a quiver of silver-tipped arrows hung, these purposed for use in three days’ time. She entered the mercantile store and reached the counter in five smooth strides.

  The balding clerk eyed her warily. “What can get for you?”

  “Dried whatever you’ve got that’s not meat and anything lightweight that doesn’t need cooking,” she replied in a tone that bespoke haste.

  “That’s a strange order, but I’ve got some fruit and—”

  “That will do, just whatever you’ve got.”

  Village folk were always a bore. Nila could not be bothered to explain things their simple minds entrenched in their simple ways could never comprehend. She would eat no meat until she had done what she came to do. Such fare would give her the scent of a carnivore and she needed to appear the prey. But the dull clerk needed none of that information to complete the transaction at hand.

  “Whatever you say, ma’am.” He moved into the room behind the counter.

  A clatter and squabble at the entrance had Nila’s hand tightening its grip on her bow. Her pulse quickened and her stance shifted from beleaguered consumer to ruthless exterminator. Clomping steps reached her ears just as the door flung open and three fat bodies squeezed themselves into the single-wide space. Two became wedged in the doorframe. The one behind them gave the littlest one a shove that sent him stumbling past the third.

  “I think she looked at me,” the smallest boy said, just recovering from his near tumble.

  The biggest boy smirked at the little guy, who was nearly as stout as he, though he stood two feet shorter. “She did not, John-John. Why would she look at you? You’re the littlest.”

  Six round eyes fixed on Nila. She jerked her attention away from the three boys and back to where the clerk was returning with a load in both arms. He set it down on the counter and leaned toward her. The scent of sweat and dander that wafted in with him had her taking a step back.

  His aged hand slapped the top of a canister. “This here’s the best we’ve got. Now it’ll keep for a week if you—”

  “I’ll take it.” Nila plunked down a piece of gold the size of her thumb.

  The clerk raised his eyebrows at the loot on the counter. No doubt he was trying to decide what sort of woman carried around that kind of money, a bow, a bunch of arrows, and a sour look. She stared at him without blinking until he looked away.

  Nila waited for him to figure what he owed her in change and drop each silver coin one by one into her palm, counting each clink until she was ready to reach over the counter and strangle the rest out of him.

  Six round eyes in front of the door continued to stare at her above three wide-open mouths.

  Finally the last coin fell and she snatched her hand away, shoved the contents into her money pouch, and cinched it down tight. Her arms scooped her purchases into her pack. The clerk’s brow turned quizzical. Before he could poke his nose into Nila’s business, her feet turned her toward the door and the three boys who stood blocking her escape. She spread her feet apart as she stormed toward them with a scowl. But they didn’t move out of the way. Rather than shove them aside as every instinct demanded, she stopped and inspected these specimens.

  “You eyeballin’ me, boy?” she asked the one called John-John.

  He turned a pair of calf eyes up at her. “Ma’am, I couldn’t help but notice you don’t have a knife to go with that bow.”

  Nila did happen to have a knife, though not anywhere the child might notice it. Only fools paraded themselves around declaring all of their affairs for the world to see. Her throat emitted a growl but the sound failed to produce a flicker of fear on any of the little faces in front of her. Strange. Diabolical, even.

  She bent over and put her face right in John-John’s. Her eyes and ears detected no signs that he was anything other than a little human boy. Definitely not a carnivore. But she didn’t trust him. “What are you?”

  “Only the finest purveyors of wares this side of the realm,” the middle boy said.

  Nila shifted her eyes his way and noted two horseshoes hanging from his belt, among other forged items. She straightened and loosened her grip on her bow. “Blacksmiths?”

  “Blacksmiths?” the oldest said. “Bah! We are so much more than that.”

  “No, thank you.” Nila gently picked up the smallest obstacle in her path and set him aside. The items dangling from his body jingled and clanked. He was a heavy little guy, and from the scent of him he ate far too much bread and sugar. She spun to the door, ignoring the adorable twinkle in his big, brown eyes.

  Her nostrils met with fresh air and she launched herself into the dusty street. Three little piglets followed her out. This was unmistakable as their thunderous steps and clattering increased even as she picked up her pace.

  “She’s so pretty,” one of them said.

  A groan arose in Nila’s chest. She hated her looks. People called her beautiful, but all that had ever gotten her was besotted boys chasing her around and betrothal to a man she did not love. Everybody thought she should swoon over the hulking brute just because he had broad shoulders, a triangular jaw, and a full head of hair. She had not swooned. Not once.

  And now she was sworn to avenge his murder.

  “Yoo-hoo,” a voice called out behind her.

  She pretended not to hear. Even far from her own kind and wearing nothing that might attract any male person, she still managed to have herd of boys after her. Not that it mattered. Her case was a hopeless one. Men who wanted a bride from a warrio
r tribe were in laughable supply. What were the chances of finding one she wanted and of him wanting to marry the likes of her, all coarse and unrefined, stubborn to a fault? They pursued her for her beauty, overlooking her masculine attire, but always abandoned the effort once they discovered she was no princess.

  Relentlessly pursued yet never really loved. The whole thing brought a string of near-curses to her lips.

  She spared a small glance at the male figures she passed in the streets, still ignoring the little pig voices gaining on her. The men in this village were the same as all the others, no doubt. Her heart was her problem. Why couldn’t she just want what the other women of her tribe wanted, a pair of muscular arms and skill with a blade or a bow?

  A huddle of fine ladies passed by on her left, their eyes widening at her fierce expression. That was another one of her problems, one real ladies didn’t have. No matter how hard Nila tried, she couldn’t hide her feelings. She decided not to notice their frilly dresses, their delicate laughs, their painted lashes. Everything about these creatures begged for protection and comfort. Everything about Nila begged to be gawked at.

  “What do you say about purchasing some fine cutlery?” one of the piglets called out behind her.

  Nila slowed her pace. There was no way to outstrip them without breaking into a run and their rattling and clanging scraped at her every last nerve. She was in no mood to flee from a bunch of children so she’d have to scare them off. That was one thing she was good at without even trying.

  The smallest one ran up beside her and dashed her a dimpled grin. “We have knives and—”

  “John-John, you have no style,” the largest boy panted out at the little one’s side. “Did you ever think a pretty lady might want a necklace or a—”

  “I don’t want any of your trinkets,” Nila barked.

  The middle porker appeared on Nila’s other side dangling a bracelet as high as his three-and-a-half-foot stature would allow. “Freddie Mayes, ma’am.” He lifted his straw hat and smiled at her through the huffing and puffing of his lips. “Forgive my brothers for being so unperceptive. Perhaps a charm to lure your true love?”