by Kate Elliott
This quest would have daunted a veteran knight. Yet here they were, the ones who had discovered what had happened to the missing High King. And here Garruk was, healed by a cauldron that had been missing for generations.
A desperate, hysterical humor bubbled inside her. She added, “Does this mean you have to marry Queen Ayara?”
“Ro!” He began laughing wildly, and so did she, not even understanding what was funny except that laughter made it easier to bear.
“You two talk too much,” said Garruk. “I hunt Oko. Are you coming?”
They both stopped laughing. Will struggled to his feet. Claw marks from an undine’s attack had raked through his leggings and torn three parallel gashes into his right leg. “Ah! Ouch! I don’t even remember getting these. And I let go of my sword in the river. How did you get it back?”
“No time to waste,” said Garruk.
The nervous horses had fled to the edge of the meadow, but when the hunter whistled they trotted over at once. He approached them gently, blew air toward their nostrils, let them sniff his breath and hands.
“The hunt didn’t even leave hoof-prints or broken branches,” Rowan said. “No sign of its passage at all.”
“I can follow the hunt easily, Rowan Kenrith.”
“The midwinter hunt rides all night,” said Will.
“And kills its prey at dawn,” added Rowan in a hoarse whisper.
“I can run all night,” Garruk said. “You two can’t keep up. But I will lend strength to your horses.”
Again Rowan exchanged a glance with Will. She would walk into anything if it meant they could rescue their father from certain death. He nodded. She nodded back.
They mounted and followed the hunter onto the bridge. He picked up his axe and stalked the rest of the way across the span, sniffing the air. The tentacled nightmare creature lay dead in a stinking heap on the far shore. Elegant rats wearing stovepipe hats and swallowtail coats spread handkerchiefs on the ground around the oozing corpse. Laying out plates and utensils, they readied themselves for a sumptuous meal. They eyed the newcomers suspiciously but once they realized the humans did not intend to fight them over the flesh they went back to carving out their celebratory feast.
Garruk indicated a silvery ribbon-like trail that wound into the trees. “The hunt has left a magical path in its wake. Let the horses run with me. Don’t fall off.”
Rowan wanted to retort that she had never fallen off a horse in her life except during training ten or twelve times, but before she could speak, Garruk leaped onto the path. The horses raced after him. Their hooves did not touch the ground, as if a wind bore them aloft. The magic of the Wilds sang in her ears. It hummed in her bones. She tasted it on her tongue, first salty, then honey-sweet and thick, then bitter as regrets. Sights and landmarks loomed up before them out of the gloom and fell away behind to be lost in darkness: a towering oak hung with eyes; a mushroom the size of a house grown in the middle of a swamp out of the decaying corpse of a giant; a death-pale knight with starved lips kneeling in front of the closed gates of a flower-draped grotto; a lost waif in a ragged nightshirt whispering “help me, help me” as three-headed snakes curled around emaciated legs, flicking their forked tongues.
Garruk ran in silence, looking neither to the right nor to the left. The horses’ galloping made no sound upon the silver road. They raced with the speed of eagles, covering days’ and weeks’ distance of ordinary travel as the moon made its slow rise to zenith and steady decline at its usual stately pace. Even so, how could they possibly catch the hunt in time? They were so far behind they couldn’t even hear its passage.
The moon turned a ghastly orange-red as it sank toward the horizon.
“Faster,” Rowan whispered, fear choking in her throat.
What if they were too late?
At last she heard the horns winding and calling, the belling of the hounds, a rat-a-tat-tat of drums. As the horses came over a ridge-top’s stony outcropping, she saw the land laid out below. They had reached the fringe of the Wilds, where unbroken forest turned to woodland broken up by meadows and ponds. Below, the hunt streamed in and out of view amid groves of old-growth trees surrounded by thickets of scrub brush and tall grass. Hounds raced eagerly in the lead. Behind them coursed packs of riders, all intent on the prey they could see under the light of the full moon.
The stag ran with powerful strides, head high, but the foremost hounds nipped at its heels. For all its heart it could not outrun the hunt, not on Midwinter’s Night.
Garruk had already raced on, Will at his heels, and the ribbon of the road was withering up behind her. She spurred forward in wild abandon down the slope, past ancient oaks standing sentinel and across shining pools of glassy water. She could no longer see the hunt, but the belling of the hounds exploded in volume to become a cacophonous storm of barking. They had cornered their prey.
The road dissolved beneath them in a jolt as the horses dropped a hand’s span to run on dirt. Garruk crashed through the trees toward a half-seen light. They burst out of the forest into a clearing.
Before anything else, Rowan took in the massed hunt seething as it filled half the glade. Restless mounts roared or trumpeted or growled. A trio of slender elvish youths pounded their drums with delicate arm bones. Riders spread out to encircle the clearing, closing off all routes of escape.
The stag had retreated to stand beside a tumbledown well. A weed-grown cobblestone path led from the well past an overgrown garden to an abandoned cottage, its shutters and door gaping like empty eye sockets.
Aelfra rode out of the packed crowd of the hunt. She raised her spear once, twice, and a third time. The drummers rolled a final call on the drums. As the riders calmed their beasts, an anticipatory silence spread across the clearing. Even the hounds ceased their noise.
No birds sang to welcome slow-arriving dawn. No branches snapped in the forest even though surely night-ranging animals should be scurrying for the safety of their burrows. The only sound left in the whole wide world was the creaking of a pulley attached to the fraying rope of the old well. Unseen hands, an invisible presence, turned the crank as an eerie dark smoke oozed up from the well’s shaft. Slowly the rope rose. A bucket rocked into view, filled not with water but with a human skull punctured through one eye socket by a sword.
Rowan’s mouth went dry. Beside her, Will choked out a word as if he were strangling and begging for air.
The sword was identical to the questing sword that hung behind the throne in Castle Ardenvale. The sword her father had hung up the day he was crowned High King, when he’d said that ruling well needed not ostentatious gilding and vainglorious pageantry but hard work and an honest heart.
It was identical in all ways except one: The gold lacing of the sword’s hilt and inlaid along the incised blade gleamed with a glorious, radiant luster, the mark of a sublime and resplendent enchantment wrapped into the essence of the sword. A blessed weapon still imbued with whatever protective spell the Questing Beast had forged into it years ago.
The bucket swayed back and forth with the pendulum weight of its burden, mesmerizing the assembled hunters. Even Aelfra held her spear aloft as if frozen by the unexpected sight of the magical sword and its gruesome resting place. The smoke rising out of the well congealed into the immaterial shape of a woman. Tendrils of ash dripped from her body. She had no head, just smoke swirling where a head should be. A crow landed on the roof of the cottage. It cawed, drawing everyone’s attention before it glided down to land on the stone rim of the well, facing the stag.
“Murderer,” it croaked in a ghostly voice.
The stag lowered his head and charged into the smoke, shaking his antlers back and forth until he tore the smoke into tatters. The ashy mist spun as if weighted by an invisible spindle, twisting into a dark yarn that slithered down the beak of the crow. The bird cawed once and then stiffened on the well’s rim as if stricken by rigor mortis. In swift stages its feathers dried up and flaked away, its flesh decayed
and was eaten by maggots, the tendons that held its bones in place withered and curled up. The skeletal remains collapsed, falling into the well.
Rowan held her breath, waiting to hear the patter of bones hitting water, but she heard no impact. It was a spell, an evil vision anchored to the well.
“This is a witch’s haunted glade,” whispered Will. “Do you think the elves knew what it was when they drove the stag here?”
“They were following the stag, not driving it,” said Rowan. “Will, that’s got to be the other questing sword. Why is it here?”
Something far worse than the midwinter hunt and a witch’s haunt was about to pop up in this very bad place. She looked around, dread nagging at her heart, but nothing had changed. The riders and their mounts stirred restlessly, reluctant to trample on cursed ground. Even elves feared the vengeful magic of witches.
Only Garruk had not been distracted by the skull, the smoke, and the dead crow’s accusation. His gaze lifted to focus on an oak tree at the edge of the clearing where a murder of crows and one big raven from the hunt had settled in the branches. “There.”
Will slapped Rowan’s arm. “Ro, wake up! We have to protect Father.”
He rode out of the shadows and toward the well. Rowan absolutely knew he intended to place his own body between the stag and the hunt because that was such a Will thing to do. She hurried after, calling out in a loud voice so all the hunt, and therefore Queen Ayara somewhere among them, could hear.
“Stay back! Stand down! This stag is the High King Algenus Kenrith, under an enchantment. If you kill him, you’ll start a war with the Realm.”
“A war we should started long ago!” The young elf named Ilidon pushed out of the crowd with bow raised.
Rowan grabbed a javelin out of her bow case, pushed lightning into the weapon, and hefted it just as the elf loosed an arrow toward the well, although it was impossible to know whether it was aimed at the stag or at Will.
The flying arrow burst into flame. Its ashes drifted away on an angry gust of wind.
“Stand down, you young fool!” shouted Aelfra. “These two are the High King’s children. If you harm them we will have a war in truth and the midwinter blood spilled will be yours. I promise you, Ilidon, for I’ll spill it myself.”
“Who in the Realm would ever know if these two brats die in the forest, if you don’t tell them?” he spat back.
“Are you so heated by your half-formed grievances you cannot see and hear that we are no longer alone?”
Rowan looked around, thinking Aelfra meant Garruk, but the big hunter had vanished in the uncanny way he had. Will tugged on her arm and pointed toward the sky. The moon sank beneath the surrounding trees although the sun hadn’t quite yet risen in the east. All but the brightest stars were fading as the lightening sky shaded to a subtle rose-gray.
Griffins swept down from the heavens and landed in a neat defensive pattern around the abandoned cottage. All but one were Ardenvale griffins, ridden by Ardenvale knights and led by Ardenvale’s queen. The last was a Vantress owl-griffin, ridden—impossibly—by Loremage Elowen, who was no longer a crested eagle but a human woman again.
As her griffin furled its wings, Linden called out in a voice that carried effortlessly across the clearing. “Well met, Lady Aelfra. We are come in peace to fetch what is ours.”
“Queen Linden! How is it you enter our territory, on this night of all nights?”
“I was warned by a loremage who barely escaped the Wilds.”
“What do you want?” asked Aelfra with a warning frown. “Fight the beasts of the forest however you wish. You know better than to interfere with us.”
Ilidon still held his bow, and at these words he nocked a new arrow to the string.
“I’m not looking for trouble,” said Linden. “Although it appears to me you are threatening my children.”
“I do not threaten them.” Aelfra snapped her fingers, and Ilidon’s arrow caught fire and burned to nothing in a flash. “The two young people rode into the clearing after we arrived. They must have quested into the Wilds of their own accord. So let me ask you a question in my turn, Queen Linden. Why do you set foot in the Wilds on Midwinter’s Night when you know the risk? The midwinter hunt cannot disperse until a life is claimed and its blood offered to the earth and to the heavens. It would be best if you remove your children at once and leave us with our prey.”
“The stag is not yours to take,” said Linden.
“It is an animal in the Wilds, and thus fair game.”
“This stag is not an animal,” said Linden. “The loremage assures me the stag is High King Algenus Kenrith, under a spell. If you kill him, I promise you I will not rest until every tree in the Wilds is burned to ashes.”
Aelfra stared at the queen with angry arrogance and then shifted her ferocious gaze toward the owl-griffin and its rider. “How can the loremage know?”
Without waiting for Linden’s permission, Elowen swung down with graceless haste and strode forward with a grin quite at odds with the grim seriousness of the confrontation. “That was quite an exhilarating adventure!”
“How did you get here?” Rowan cried. She meant the question for her mother but the loremage replied as she walked across the overgrown garden toward the imposing Lady Aelfra.
“I reached Ardenvale in good time to alert the queen so she could assemble a company of griffin knights to fly into the Wilds. I had no notion eagles could fly so fast. But now I do! Too bad I’ll never be able to do that again!”
She marched fearlessly up to Aelfra and her dappled deer, sweeping one arm out while the other pressed over her heart in a flamboyant bow. “Lady Aelfra, you and I have met before. We have conferred at length upon various fascinating subjects such as how best to splint the delicate finger bones of bats and how to control the spread of the brain-eating fungus that grows in Delirium Swamp. But I’m quite taken aback to hear that there really is a tradition of a midwinter hunt and has been for generations. I thought it was merely a delightful, if ignorant, village superstition! I thought you and I were friends, of a kind. How can you have concealed the existence of this fascinating and troubling ritual from me when you know I want to know everything!”
“Dawn arrives, Loremage Elowen. The magic of the Wilds requires us to kill before the sun rises. So if you don’t want to become our prey, speak quickly.”
“Hastiness is the enemy of knowledge, but I take your point. You and your council are the victims of a trickster. This imposter means to sow trouble and reap turmoil for reasons none of us know. Now that I’ve learned the truth of its existence, I have no argument with your hunt. I respect its purpose, and your ancient tradition, although I can see why the peaceful villagers of the Realm might huddle fearfully about their hearths on Midwinter’s Night! For the sake of us all, leave the stag to us and go in peace.”
Again Ilidon leaped forward, drawing his bow. This time Rowan was ready. She flung the javelin. The riders near him shouted a warning. He dodged right. Instead of striking him in the chest the javelin buried its head in the flesh of his hip. He screamed, toppling to the dirt as the magic-infused javelin poured lightning into his flesh.
The orderly ranks of griffin knights and the restrained riders of the hunt dissolved into chaos. Griffins leaped forward to swipe their foreclaws at snarling horned cats. Ardenvale knights slashed with swords at elvish riders, who countered with spear thrusts. A hundred-eyed snake wrapped its tail around one of the knights and dragged him off his mount. The knight’s nearest comrades cast a ring of protective light around the stricken man, forcing the snake to unwrap its constricting coils. Black hounds snapped at wings, trying to cripple the big eagle-lions. A griffin stabbed at a growling hound, closing its beak over the hound’s hindquarters and tossing it to one side. Linden shouted from griffin-back, trying to move her mount closer to Aelfra. The elf set a white horn to her lips and blew. The clamor of battle and the screams and growls of beasts drowned out the women’s commands.
> Above it all rang out a raven’s grating croak of mockery and triumph.
Beside Rowan, the stag stomped his hooves and with an aggressive grunt lowered his head, meaning to charge into the fray. Will tried to reach in to grab him, but the stag shook his antlers, forcing Will to lurch back.
“Ro, what are we going to do?” Will cried. “This is the war Oko wanted.”
Rowan yelled, “Ice and lightning!”
Will’s body tensed, his face a mask of concentration. They would only have one chance to stop the fighting.
The air grew hot as he sucked slowing cold out of it. This heat she gathered into her own hands. Her fingers hummed with coiled energy. Her arms tingled. Her lips went numb.
Will flung a net of magic larger than any casting he’d ever made. The crackling web spread through the clearing. He didn’t have the strength to freeze so many people and animals, but the icy net hindered them. Many stopped moving as the grim cold deadened their limbs. A few were slowed as if they dragged their weapons through sludge. In a moment, some would use their own magic to counteract the chill.
Rowan darted forward to press her sword’s lightning infused blade against the nearest individual caught in the net of ice.
The shock jolted through every person and creature touched by any crystal of ice. Linden and Aelfra staggered, their voices cut off mid-command. Arrows fell out of slackened bow strings. Swords and spears clattered to the ground as hands lost their grip.
“Now what?” said Will.
Before Rowan could answer, an individual clad all in black pushed out of the stalled battle. Queen Ayara raised her bow, sighted across the glade at the stag, and loosed. Her arrow flew straight and true, and buried itself deep in the stag’s chest.
16
Will could not move. A shock more numbing than ice paralyzed him as the stag took two trembling steps backward and, with a huff of misty breath, collapsed against the well.
Queen Ayara stood in triumph, bow held out for all to see. And everyone did see, since they were all still caught in the aftereffects of the commingled spell.
