Hunting was both easier and harder than Finn expected. The last time Finn had to rely on her hunting abilities was when she was a child, learning the basics of survival from her father over a backbreaking summer in some wild and nearly uninhabited woods far from the Seelie Court. Finn had been small and relatively weak back then. The draw of the bow was physically difficult, remembering how to tie a slip knot for traps was a daunting task, but the most difficult part of it all was the loneliness she felt without her brother by her side. He had been her constant shadow up until that point. The experience had been trying in the extreme.

Compared to that, Finn found some aspects of hunting easy that were once extremely challenging. Her shoulders and arms were full sized and developed compared to her child self, so instead of struggling to draw the bow, she had to be careful not to draw it too hard and snap the string. And, she was no longer alone. Adi was waiting patiently for her at the small camp they had set up just a short ways from the trickling waterfall, where they had spent a torrid moment in each other's embrace.

It was still embarrassing to think about it, but it didn't seem to have changed anything. Adi wasn't treating her any differently than she had before. Finn wasn't sure if she felt happy about that or crushed. For her own sake, she tried to focus on being happy about it.

Saying that hunting was easy would have been a lie, though. Because, it absolutely wasn't.

Finn hadn't had much of an education in survival, back when she was a child. Her father had given her a book that he assured her would teach her how to survive in the woods. Then he had abandoned her for a month to fend for herself in an unknown stretch of woodland. At the time, Finn thought that her father had some kind of spell on her, or maybe he had sent one of the sneakier species of fae to keep an eye on her. After years working under her father, Finn no longer thought that was the case.

Over a decade later, Finn hardly remembered anything from that beaten up little paper book. After she had finally returned to the barracks after a month of hard living, she had shoved it to the bottom of her footlocker and done her best to forget it existed. That being the case, it took her over an hour to reconstruct the most basic of rabbit snares. Afterward, she felt a dawning recognition about how much she didn't know. It was becoming clear just how hard becoming a hunter, even a shitty hunter, was going to be.

Still, Finn was determined. Luckily for her, her own species was especially well-built for hunting. Elves, even untrained ones who lived lives of luxury, could hear the latent magic of any woodland if they listened well enough. When Finn climbed up high into a swaying birch tree and let her mind go quiet, she could sense the gentle undulation of natural magic within the forest. An ancient weave of plants, animals and earth energy that had been persisting in the same place since time immemorial. It was in Finn's blood to be able to feel and taste the life essence of the forest itself, so she let herself sink into it.

Finn wasn't much of a tracker. But, after honing in on her own natural sense for the forest, she was able to find the paths through the underbrush that certain animals favored relatively easily.

This wasn't a skill she had when she was a child. Belatedly, Finn felt a lot of respect for her younger self for not starving to death in the middle of those woods. She must have been a lot tougher than she remembered.

The first thing she managed to shoot was a fat pigeon. In truth, she had loosed an arrow at it just to see if she could hit it as it bobbed along under a big sprawling maple tree. It would have been a waste of an arrow if it had broken, but luckily it didn't. It skewered the bird cleanly from one wing through its body to the other. When Finn had bashfully presented it to Adi, expecting some cutting words about returning to camp with so little meat, Finn had instead been pleasantly surprised by Adi's enthusiasm.

She had been more than happy to pluck the little bird and skewer it over a stick to roast over the tiny fire she had started. It wasn't a lot of meat, but it was practically divine after days of dried fruit.

The next animal Finn managed to catch was a rabbit, kicking and fighting in the snare she had set for it along one of the many rabbit tracks she had found crisscrossing the forest floor. It was a terrified little thing, it's fur so soft, and it's so eyes huge. As Finn approached, its eyes rolled in its head, the whites of its eyes staring up at Finn in abject fear.

Finn grimaced. She had only a tiny fold out knife in her pocket she could use to end the little creature's life. She didn't even need it, though. Finn could reach down and snap the rabbit's neck easily and end its suffering. She knew that. She had done it before when she was just a child and starving in the woods.

But, she wasn't starving just then. They still had provisions in the backpack. There were plenty of pigeons and starlings singing away through the forest canopy that Finn could shoot if she was desperate. Even if the little rabbit's soft fur would have been prized in the human settlement, did she really need it to justify going into town?

Before she could think about it too much, Finn reached down and quickly pulled the loops of thread off the rabbit's foot and stepped back.

The rabbit laid on its side, it's chest heaving in panicked breaths, it's huge bulging eyes staring at Finn in disbelief.

Finn shifted awkwardly on her feet. She wondered if it had hurt itself in the snare. She didn't know how long it had been stuck. It wasn't out of the question that it might have hurt its leg or something else while it struggled.

Just as Finn started to step forward again to check the rabbit, it sprung to its feet and fled through the forest with a terrified squeak. Finn watched it go, feeling like a monster.

She dismantled the rest of the traps that morning. She would just have to find something bigger and better to take into town.

After the encounter with the rabbit, Finn went back to the same birch tree that had helped her hear the forest in the first place. She climbed up into its branches, let her eyes slip shut, and listened to the sound of the surrounding forest. She let herself sink down into the ebb and flow of its inherent magic and listened.

Finn tried to keep her thoughts loose and floating, something that felt right and seemed to let her sense more from her surroundings. But, it was hard to keep her own swirling thoughts at bay.

Finn was a soldier. She fought and killed people for a living. That had been her whole life. Someone more important than her pointed her at someone, and she killed them. That was her job.

But, she had just failed to kill a rabbit. A tiny creature who might have been pitiable, but wasn't about to be missed the way a father or a wife might have been. Finn had even stood to directly benefit from the rabbit's death, something she couldn't say for most of the battles she had been involved in. But, she still hadn't been able to kill it.

Smacking the back of her head against the tree trunk, Finn growled internally, "What the fuck is wrong with me?"

She tried to focus, but it was only with intermittent success.

Just as the sun was getting ready to come up, Finn finally felt something bigger than a pigeon wander past the farthest edge of her awareness. A big fat turkey, walking slowly down a well-worn path and watching the ground for bugs.

Finn swallowed down her feeling of elation and moved as silently as she possibly could through the forest to where she had felt the turkey strutting. She felled it with one well-placed shot right through its breast.

If Adi had been happy about the pigeon, she was ecstatic about the turkey.

"It's huge!" she exclaimed. "Way bigger than a chicken!"

"Do you think you can cook it?" Finn asked curiously. It was definitely too big to shove onto a stick and roast over the fire, she thought.

"Of course I can cook it," Adi grumbled and then immediately proved Finn wrong by plucking and cleaning the bird before shoving a stick through its empty carcass and balancing it on top of two other sticks, effectively creating a rotisserie over the fire.

"Your dad taught you to do this?" Finn asked, exceedingly impressed as she watched the bird cook. It released absolutely mouth watering smells as the fat seeped from the crackling skin to hit the fire with little hissing sounds.

"No. Cooking for fifty hungry miners taught me how to do this," Adi responded wryly.

That night, they gorged themselves on turkey, eating until grease ran down their chins and their stomachs swelled happily under the sudden windfall of delicious food.

They fell back into a bed of crunchy dried leaves that Adi had arranged under some kind of gnarled fruit tree with low, twisting branches that Finn couldn't identify. They were both uncomfortably full, a gratifying feeling after days of going without.

"I think I'm getting better," Finn muttered into the early morning air.

"You think?" Adi snorted. "It's only been two days, and you're already bringing back big game."

Finn laughed. "I don't think a turkey counts as 'big game'," she teased.

"Whatever," Adi grumbled. "I saved the feathers from both the pigeon and the turkey. You can try and trade for them in the town."

"We have to find the town first," Finn responded with a thoughtful tilt of her head. "I think I'll start scouting north," she said. "I can do that and still hunt. At least, I think I can. The town can't be too far. Once I know where it is for sure, we can start making a plan."

Adi rolled towards her, her eyes dark and searching in the shade of the tree. Finn turned her head to watch her.

"Please be careful out there," Adi whispered. "You need to make sure you always come back to me, okay?"

Finn felt something hot sting at her eyes, but refused to blink. She swallowed around a sudden blockage in her throat.

"I promise," Finn croaked.

Adi smiled fondly at Finn for a second before leaning forward and pressing a chaste kiss to the corner of her mouth. It sent Finn's skin tingling.

"Okay. Make sure you get some sleep, then, Miss Knight," Adi said with a smirk, before rolling over and wriggling deeper into the leaves.

Finn turned her head to stare back up into the trees. Her eyes burned and the corner of her mouth felt like every nerve ending had been turned up to eleven. She clenched her hands in the fabric of her shirt.

"Goodnight, princess," she whispered. But, Adi was already asleep.