Mick Charming
It was Night when he picked up the arrow shaft from the ground, praising his luck when it turned out to be a fully working arrow. It was fresh, maybe new. 'Look, Mara, we have a battle ground.'
Mara didn't speak, simply plucked the arrow from his hands and set it in his quiver. He knew she wouldn't have talked even if he'd tried. The Queen had done so much when she'd killed her brothers in cold cruelty: Mara would not speak until twelve years had passed, in repentance for not being able to save her brothers. It had only been eleven. What was more; she was cursed to be a Nightingale each day.
Hm, they'd been on the run for eleven years.
'Father!' his child ran up to him, a stocky, healthy lad of six. He and his sister had found five more. While both curses had passed onto his daughter, his son made up for her and his mother's silence all too easily.
'Well done, Lily, Jamie. Good work.' He smiled, noticing a broken off arrow head in his wife's hands. She held it up to the stars for them to see it better and they saw an inscription on the side, crudely drawn but easy to spot: 'J+F', it read.
'J and F?' Mick wondered. 'I wonder who it was meant for.'
Mara's eyes were sad-she'd already figured it out. Using the bottom of her makeshift bow-she'd had to leave her heavier, ornate palace bow behind- she cleared a space to write in the mud: 'Fabian'.
Ah, Fabian. Mara's best friend and stable hand when they'd been young. He'd led a quiet life, always starving really, and then one day he'd gone away and miraculously come back two years later as King of the Golden Mountain. He'd asked Mara to marry him, but she'd declined, back when she could talk. Mara drew the bow head through the mud like it troubled her. 'Joy' soon read right next to 'Fabian'.
The Queen. The Queen who had nearly had Mick burn Mara and who killed her brothers. She'd taken Mara's childhood friend.
'It's probably not them, Mum.' Jamie piped up, consolingly. 'I mean, how did the arrow shaft survive all that time? It's been eleven years. This thing is older than me!'
Mara's eyes met Mick's. 'Let's go before they follow us any further. Remember, she holds the Invisibility cloak.' He shifted. Already he could hear the distant clank of the Soldier's chainmail…his worst nightmare.
They flew into the distance. As Mick soared over a broken log, he wondered if his wife's friend, as much as Mara had written for him in their long days in a safe house while she was pregnant, was still alive, wherever he was.