Male satyr x female reader - (Kieran) Part Two (sfw) (Patreon)

Well, this story is getting properly out of hand now. As it stands, the whole thing is 13,824 words. That's longer than my masters thesis (almost). Haha. It's definitely going to be at least 4 parts, maybe even 5, so that's one heck of a bonus, given that all my monthly stories are usually between 2000-4000 words. As I announced earlier, I will be releasing this one in parts on Tumblr, but not for a good month or so. Anyway, enough waffle - here we go. 

Last time we left off with Kieran showing us he does have a heart, having given us his own, body-warmed blanket while we lay damp and shivering on our bed roll, with very sore feet after a long, hard march with the herd towards the wintering grounds. In this part, there's some action and drama, and a serious injury, but it's not overly gory or graphic, and it moves on quickly. 

Dawn washed over you without waking you, and it wasn’t until a gentle touch on your shoulder and a soft nudge that you stirred from your deep sleep. 

“What…?” you grumbled. You were so warm and comfortable, and everything was safe and still for once. The most comforting scent filled your lungs, and you surfaced from sleep with great reluctance. 

“Breakfast,” a gruff and now familiar voice said, and a plate was plonked unceremoniously down beside you. 

“Kieran, wait,” you said, sitting up and rubbing the sleep from your bleary eyes. Covering you was a rough, thick, homespun blanket in deep, moss green wool. 

Kieran paused, expression blank yet hard as always, and you saw he was wearing his dark green jerkin again. His hair was tied back in a loose bun, and you could see the nape of his neck. For some reason your eyes lingered there. The line of it was delicate as a marble carving, and you wanted to touch it. Instead, you regarded him, your eyes wide as a puppy’s, and his fierce expression softened noticeably. 

“Thank you for this,” you said, pulling the blanket off you. “I… I think that was one of the best night’s sleep I’ve ever had, all things considered,” you said. 

Unbidden, his lips quirked up into a lopsided smile, and though the gesture was brief, it touched his dark eyes too, and his ears pulled sharply back against his head, as if embarrassed. He turned and stalked away then, the strange gait of his goat-like legs now seeming familiar after spending so much time with the fauns and satyrs of the herd. 

Elder Hawthorn made his way over to you not long after you’d finished your breakfast - a delicious fried egg on a piece of soft, fragrant flatbread - and asked how you were, and when you said that your feet were better after a night’s rest and Robin’s healing ointment, he smiled, but informed you that he’d decided to take a break that day. “I’ve been pushing everyone hard,” he said when you tried to protest, “And it’s not fair of me. We deserve a rest. All of us,” he said. “Including me and my creaking old bones.”

You bit back the flare of roiling guilt, knowing that if it weren’t for you and your shredded feet, the herd would be making progress towards their wintering grounds today. They were staying for you, no matter what Hawthorn said. 

You stayed where you were as the day wore on, not wanting to add to the blisters on your feet. You sketched and made a few notes on the herbs that Robin had used, and after lunch, Rose came over to you to show you some knew knots she’d been learning from the scouts. She got stuck on a couple, but you helped her out, and she seemed delighted that you knew them too. 

“Do you know any more?” she asked enthusiastically, white ears sticking straight out in her eagerness. 

“Alright,” you said. “This one isn’t a useful knot so I bet they didn’t show you this trick,” you said conspiratorially, holding your hand out for the piece of twine she’d been using. 

Her eyes lit up and you looped the twine around her index finger, twisting the other end around your fingers, before bringing your own middle finger up to touch hers. Both your fingers were surrounded by the twine now. Her eyes were wide and glittering with wonder and anticipation.

“Doesn’t look like we can undo this knot without separating our fingers, right?” you said, and she nodded earnestly. “Don’t move,” you said theatrically. “Don’t move a muscle,” and you tugged the end and it slithered free of your touching fingers to a delighted squeal from Rose. 

“How do you do that?” she squeaked, clapping her hands. Her bad lungs made her wheezy in her excitement, but you surmised it wasn’t enough excitement to bring on an attack just yet. You’d seen Robin have to give her an inhalation just the evening before. “Do it again!” 

“Alright,” you said, repeating the trick with a chuckle. 

“No way!” she breathed, absolutely none the wiser for having seen it a second time. “Once more!”

“Only once,” you said. “Last time, are you ready?”

It was only as she capered away, her little white tail waggling furiously, that you looked up and saw the scout party all staring at you. Unnerved, you smiled awkwardly, but all other thought was pushed from your mind by the arrival of Merill in the midst of the herd. 

“Humans,” she said in an urgent voice that carried without being a shout. Everyone was immediately wary, ears twitching, most rising and calling children to their sides. Ulfric and Kieran were on their feet in a heartbeat, reaching for weapons.

“Where?” Hawthorn and Ulfric barked at the same time. Ulfric immediately deferred to their leader.

“On the road - they’ll be upon us in twenty minutes.”

“Are they armed? What kind of people are they?” Adder asked, coming up to stand beside his husband and laying a quiet hand on the small of his back. It was a touching gesture that made you smile despite the tension in the glen. You knew non-humans were wary of humans, but this was the first time you’d experienced their fear, and it made you feel sick to know that the attitude and actions of your kind had, over centuries, instilled this reaction in these good folk. 

Merill shook her head, her brassy gold girls waving. “They’re trying to look like a small group of merchants I think,” she said hesitantly. “They’ve got one big wagon pulled by two big horses. There’s a driver, the lead guy, and six armed guards.”

You frowned and stood up too, wincing as your battered, bandaged feet took your weight. Something definitely wasn’t right about this. You looked across at Kieran and found him watching you intently. Not wanting to spook the others, he crossed to you and hissed in your ear, “What is it?” His scowl was deeper and harder than you’d ever seen it, and his eyes were black and unyielding. 

“I’m not sure,” you said. “But…”

“Spit it out, mage,” he snarled, voice rising in obvious agitation, and you glanced around to find Hawthorn and the others staring at you too now. 

With a sigh, you turned to face them a little more and said, “It may have no bearing on this at all, but when I was back at Riverkeep, the minotaur guard I spoke to said that he’d already seen the last caravan of the season make its way through the forest. It had left two weeks before I got there. I’d hoped to travel with one of them, you see…” you added. 

“Maralin’s caravan,” Adder supplied, and you nodded in acknowledgement. “We know of her. We trade with her sometimes, and we did this year.” He scratched at his chin thoughtfully. “What the girl says may well be true - Maralin is always the last one to move through the Wychwood before winter sets in.” He looked at the scouts and then turned his hazel eyes to you. “Go and keep an eye on them. We will pack up quietly here and prepare to move on.”

You set out with Ulfric, Merill, and Kieran, sticking closer to Kieran than to the others. He shot out a hand as you neared the road and raised his lip in a silent snarl of warning. “Stay behind me,” he whispered. “And stop making so much noise!” 

You nodded, cheeks flushing hot with indignant embarrassment. You bit back the urge to snap ‘you try being quiet when your feet are as raw as mine are!’ at him, deciding that it would do no good, and might in fact do the opposite. 

Ulfric and Merril split from you and headed a little way up the road, lingering in the bushes while you and Kieran stayed put. The heavy wagon drew into view along the hard-packed road through the forest, and all was as Merill had said, but something about it was all wrong. It didn’t give off the same vibes as the other merchant wagons you’d seen. It was too thick and heavy a wagon for that, and the guards wore plate and mail armour…

The rumbling of the wagon died as it drew to a sudden stop, horses snorting and pawing the ground, the leader, riding a dark bay gelding beside it, drawing up his hand for a halt. A hound was baying from the back of the wagon, and as it howled that it had caught the scent, Kieran’s ears went stiff against his head with horror. 

You knew exactly what these folk were. And so did he. 

“Kieran, they’re not traders,” you hissed, unable to stop yourself. “They’re -” The word ‘slavers’ died on your tongue as the door of the wagon was opened and a vicious looking hound was released. The men suddenly pointed directly at the bushes to your right. 

“There!” the leader cried. “Round them up!”

Ulfric launched himself from the underbrush with a wild, ululating cry, twin knives raised and whirling, and Merril drew her bow from her back. 

But Kieran had frozen. He was shaking from head to toe, his skin white and sweaty with remembered horror. 

“That one!” one of the slavers suddenly cried, pointing a club at Kieran. “Horns and looks like that’ll fetch a pretty price in the slave market!” 

Kieran didn’t have time to draw his own bow before they were advancing. 

Seeing that he was too paralysed by the trauma of his youth to act, you stood in a rush, which caught the slavers off balance. They hadn’t seen you, and they hadn’t been expecting a human to pop up from behind him, nor for that human to be a mage either. Using those few seconds of stunned stillness to your advantage, you raised your hands and drew in as much magic as you could safely hold, releasing it as a torrent of chain lightning. Without your staff to act as a focus it was harder, but you were powerful enough for this. 

The lightning revelled in the metal of their armour, dancing and leaping from one slaver to the next, and you sustained it for as long as you could, guiding it, charging the air so that it would follow the path you dictated, and not its own course. 

Whether it was the drama of the moment, or the surprise of your huge shock of lightning filling the road, or whether he shook himself out of it on his own, Kieran moving again in a flash, bow drawn, loosing arrows as quickly as he could manage to free Ulfric, who had been caught in a barbed net, his hooves hobbled together already. The poor, semi-rabid hound fell to an arrow, dead before it hit the ground, but one of the slavers had a crossbow and, when it became apparent that the tables were turning, with the help of a mage, and armed and violently angry satyrs, the leader turned and bellowed at the other slavers to kill them. Their horns would fetch enough of a price, he said. 

“No!” you shrieked, feeling dizzy with horror and from expending so much magic so quickly.

The slavers you had shocked lay stunned and motionless to the floor, but others were still free. The click and whir of a crossbow was all the warning you got before a distant scream sounded between the trees. The quarrel had missed Kieran by a fraction of an inch, but it had whizzed away through the trees and found another target. 

Enraged but determined to stay focused, you concentrated all your efforts on the remaining slavers. Images of slaughtered satyrs, your travelling companions and tentative friends, filled your imagination, and you drew more magic than you knew you had in you. You repeated the electrical strikes until they had all fallen, unconscious and probably burned too. 

“Stuff them in their own slave wagon,” Kieran barked hoarsely, as a few members of the herd came out once the fighting had stopped. “And throw away the key.”

Those whom you saw emerging from the trees were ashen-faced, a number of them weeping. You turned to Gilly, the satyr who usually did the cooking in the evening, and demanded quietly, “What is it? What’s wrong?”

“Rose,” came her dolorous reply. “Rose was hit… She… She’s not going to make it.”

Kieran saw the horror dawn on your face and you forgot your own fatigue in an instant, turning and sprinting through the underbrush to return to the glade only ten yards or so behind the cover of the bushes which lined the road. Your feet stabbed and hurt, but that was an easy pain to push down. You burst back into the clearing and skidded to a halt, hand going to your mouth in giddy horror. 

It was ugly. Robin was sobbing over her, and the bolt was embedded in her chest. 

“Move,” you urged, rushing over to her. Rose was still alive, but she was terribly pale. The healer didn’t budge. “Robin, please let me. I have my magic. Let me help her.” 

Someone stooped beside Robin and led her a few paces back with a gentle hand, though you didn’t see who. You were focused solely on the young faun. 

“Rose?” you murmured, brushing her hair back tenderly. “Rose, can you hear me?” Receiving the faintest of nods, you were dimly aware of many sets of eyes watching you, and of a collectively held breath in the clearing, but you had to concentrate on your task. “Rose, sweetie, this is going to hurt,” you said. “But it won’t last long, I promise.” You stroked her white-blonde hair back off her face again and her eyelids fluttered. “I need you to be really, really brave for me.” 

The little faun was clinging to life by barely a thread. If you worked your magic too quickly, you could kill her in your haste to heal her, but you were fast running out of time. 

Working your magic took everything you had left in you, and more, but first you dissolved the bolt, drawing it out as powder so as not to tear or do any more damage, and discarding the dust to the wind, already forgotten as you wove her body back together again. She was young and the wound proved surprisingly willing to close over. Delving further on a whim, you found the cause of her breathing problems and, knowing you really shouldn’t push yourself so hard when you had so little left, you began to address that too. 

You bent over her and worked, the atmosphere in the glen growing more and more charged with every particle of ambient magic you used up to heal the girl. Eventually, when all the blood was back where it was supposed to be, and the little girl was breathing normally, your own vision began to blur and warp. Dark and bright spots blossomed across the image in front of you, and you swayed where you knelt. Then, as Rose opened her big blue eyes, clearly exhausted but fully healed, your mind went blank and you pitched sideways with a smile of relief, landing in a dead faint. 

You didn’t feel strong arms pick you up and take you somewhere comfortable, but when you awoke, you were on a warm bedroll under a canvas which was strung between two trees. You could smell something familiar, something safe, and you drew deeply on that scent for strength and comfort. Your body was utterly drained. You could barely muster the energy to open your eyes, but when you did, you saw a shape stir suddenly in your peripheral vision. 

“You’re awake!” a hoarse, male voice cried, and the figure nearby scrambled to be closer to you. “Oh thank the gods. Can you hear me? Are you alright?”

“Kieran?” you croaked, or tried to. It came out more like a little grunt than anything else. 

“Here,” he said, cradling your head in his strong, callused palm and lifting it slightly. He held a horn cup to your mouth, and cool liquid touched your lips a moment later. He held you so gently that you had to smile. The drink was sweet and refreshing, and when he set you back down, he sat back on his haunches, his whole body thrumming with apprehension. “Are you alright?” he asked again. 

“Just weak,” you smiled. “I… I need to sleep…”

You heard him murmur something about a day and a night already, but you didn’t catch anything else before you drifted off again.

Stay tuned for Part Three (which is written) in the next few days, as well as some more character aesthetics and ideas. If you liked this, don't forget to leave me a like and/or a comment. I do work very hard to produce this content for you, and I really enjoy hearing your feedback. It makes it all utterly worthwhile.