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other Hunters in the party laughed or grinned.
    “Ah, were I not mated…,” he began.
    “Leave off, Gwillim!” she exclaimed, restraining a grin.
    She was blushing. Again.
    Between the others, coin changed hands.
    Sighing with resignation, she guided her horse to Gwillim’s side.
    “Really Gwillim?” she said but he simply smiled and finally she had to laugh. “All right, are we about this?”
    With a quick glance at the others, he nodded, grinned unrepentantly, and led them out to the north and east, sobering somewhat as he got down to business.
    “The reports we have,” he said, “now speak of more than one boggin. So you know.”
    He would’ve briefed the others as they waited.
    Frowning a little, she nodded acknowledgement. “My father pointed out you were off after a boggart just last week.”
    She hadn’t ridden out with them then, having been busy in the town hearing a complaint between two merchants. It had been a tedious and foolish argument but difficult to find common ground between the two to settle. If she’d had to choose between the two, listening to the querulous people involved or hunting the notably vicious boggart, she’d have chosen the boggart over the boredom.
    Gwillim said grimly, “Aye and a nasty one it was. We chased it back into the borderlands but it gave us a difficult time all the same. It turned on us, going after Vi’s horse. She nearly went down.”
    Startled, Ailith said, “A boggart? That’s not like a boggart.”
    Mean and vicious, roughly man-shaped and going about on two legs, a boggart would attack a lone man with no fear but run from a group unless it was cornered or in a pack. Cornering a boggart was a highly dangerous thing to do, as they were quick, had nasty claws and even nastier teeth. Gwillim was too canny to corner a boggart in such a way it would turn on them without having everyone’s bows at ready. A dozen arrows would’ve pierced the thing before it could have turned on them. It had turned on them, then, during the chase.
    “Well I know it. Nothing’s like anything of late,” Gwillim said, worriedly. “Such things are becoming common. I don’t like it but I can put no name to it.”
    Ailith didn’t like it either but something about it made her uneasy.
    It seemed as though, lately, a great many things made her unsettled and she didn’t know why.
    Of a lighter and merrier nature than either of her parents, such disturbance wasn’t her nature. As with her misgivings over the man who’d ridden in that day. There was nothing overt to give her pause, yet she’d taken it. That bothered her. Still, there was little she could do about it, save wait to see if a reason presented itself. For now, she had boggins to consider.
    So she rode at Gwillim’s right and his second at his left and kept her eyes on the land around her for any sign of threat.
    Her worries, she kept to herself.
    There was enough for her mind to consider with her majority now so near at hand.
    Of an age then – a matter of being mature in more than merely years but of soul, heart, mind and body – to make her own decisions. To be named well and truly Geric’s Heir, for good and all. Then…
    A time of freedom for most of her peers and for herself if she chose it. Yet she’d been raised to rule as a servant of the people over whom she would someday reign. At her father’s knee she’d learned much of Kingship, of rule, of law, of war, strategy and battle – although it had been many years since such had been needed. The Agreement that had held together the Alliance between men, Elves and Dwarves had been drilled into her such that she knew it by heart. Each succeeding codicil and clause as well. One didn’t walk away from such lightly, nor did she even consider it. She was Heir to Riverford, Heir to Geric, that was what she’d been raised to be and that was what she was.
    Still, she would be free to take such time away from riding circuit as judge in her father’s stead to