She took up her spear and turned, left him there in his creek. She dawdled on her way back, knocking the fishscales off her spear through the brush, eyes barely focused, thinking. Because of this she lost the broken path back to the horse and suddenly she was alone with her spear in the bright green gloss of midday. But somehow the breath had made the wood– what was the word, not familiar, certainly not comforting; terrible still, yes, but known, as if they were conspirators together at some secret. It was now as if the great wall of bramble and silence trembled with her steps, and broke for her to enter. She could hear the creek behind her, she walked in a slow circle, looking for the path, pulling her fingers through her hair, humming.
It was in this way that she stepped directly into the path of the man that had been watching her from the brush.
He was before her, suddenly, her head jerking up, breath escaping her. A rangy young man loose-limbed in a doeskin shirt, quiver at his shoulder, a wide brown brow and wide-spaced brown eyes, and he was staring at her. He was far taller; she saw his nostrils flare, saw the quiver, saw the wiry hands. She stepped back from him; he stepped forward, the smallest step.
It was her septa's voice that came first, crackling through the green. "Promise me that you would run and hide from them, yes, thank you," and her septa's head, then, all small and tarred. And then she remembered that she held a spear, and it was the Hound's familiar growl, next, the plate of scar cool and hard against her warm cheek, "all you can learn from that is to expect it," and her hand tightened on the branch.
Later in her life she would occasionally stand by her window and think about the wide brown gaze of the man in the woods, and of the changeling she had been. She would wonder if the world hands out to each man his portion of trial, a line of lessons all in a straight row, or if it drops them unequally in scatters, laughing, little arrows hitting some men, watching them die, struck; or perhaps walking on, healing around the quills.
In any case, it was the scales and the trials and the thing that she was that loosed the grip on the spear, put her shoulders back, brought her eyes to his, set the small jaw–and then she nodded, a slight nod, human, and so devastatingly regal in its humanity.
The rangy man stood still, everything still, for a long moment; a long moment of their eyes meeting, and then nodded back, slight, and took a step back, then another, and then melted elegantly back into the wood.
It is possible that late in that night, as the huntsman sat at his bench at the inn with his cup and his plate, with the glow of the fire and the shouting men around him, he drank too much and told his stolid companions that while hunting he had stepped into the path of the elven, bespeared Queen of the Wood, beautiful and terrible as a warship with her red hair like a cape around her, and that she had, in her great mercy, let him go.