A trumpet blared from the blackness of the wood and was answered with a matching tone from a horn in the party. The group sprang into the trees, heading south. Beryl kicked her mount forward without comment, disappearing into the shadows.
Padraig followed.
They swerved between trees deeper into the wood, the echoing barks from the dogs rebounding off the trunks and confusing the direction. The group began to splinter as smaller parties decided their strategy, and Padraig heard a faint yelpingfrom his right.
He pulled his mount to the southwest. Hearing the answering hoof falls behind him, he glanced over his shoulder to see that Beryl and Lucan followed, along with Lord Hood and another pair of riders, one of whom Padraig was surprised to recognize as the obnoxious Lord Paget.
The faint sounds of barks seemed to be coming from ahead, and so Padraig leaned forward once more, eager to be proven right. He wanted this success, in front of Beryl, in front of Lord Paget and the others. He wanted to be the one to bring back the kill, proving to everyone that this land, this wood, these animals, were his, a part of him and in his blood, no matter that there were so many who were determined thathe should fail.
Mayhap he wished to prove it to himself most of all.
Over the next crest into an even darker hollow their party flowed, along a tiny ribbon of a stream into asmall clearing.
A strangled shout from behind him prompted him to glance back again, just in time to see Adolphus Paget sailing from the back of his horse. Lord Hood gave a cry of dismay, and the party drew upon their reins.
Padraig too slowed his mount with a curse. Leave it to one of the nobles to lose his seat. If the man cost Padraig this hunt—
A piercing heat burst forth in his shoulder, and Padraig swayed in the saddle with a cry. He struggled with the jerking reins of his startled horse to feel his arm, his palm coming away red.
“What the bloody—?”
“Padraig!”Beryl shouted.
Another slicing pain lit across his ribs on his left side, and Padraig saw the offending arrow hit solidly in the treeahead of him.
“Get down!” he shouted, sliding from his saddle and staggering out of danger of the stomping hooves. He slapped the courser’s rear and sent it galloping into the wood and then pressed his hand to his side while he crouched low and ran toward Beryl, who had disengaged from her saddle and was sliding down from her horse. He caught her beneath her arms, gritting against the pain in his shoulder and ribs, and then grabbed her hand, pulling her down onto the dry leaves at the baseof a wide oak.
Padraig saw Montague herding Lord Hood to safety behind another tree, but the other rider wheeled his horse and galloped hard to the east, and Adolphus Paget still lay in the open on the forest floor some distance away. The space between the trees was filled with only the rapidly dwindling rumbles of the escaping, panicked horses, and Paget’s anguished groans. The birds hadfallen silent.
“They’re shooting at us!” Beryl cried in a horrified voice. “They must think us game—we have to tell them it is us! Padraig, you’re bleeding!”
“Shh,” he warned her, and then continued in a whisper. “’Tis nae accident, lass.” He met Lucan’s eyes and then nodded toward Paget. The knight answered with an understandingnod of his own.
“Stay here,” Padraig said in a low voice. “Doona move. And keep quiet.”
“Where are you—Padraig!” Beryl hissed, her clutching hands falling away as Padraig rose in a crouch and began running toward Paget. He and Lucan both stooped low on the cold ground near the nobleman’s fine boots.
“Oh, God,” Paget sobbed. An arrow protruded from his rounded belly, so at odds with his spindly frame. It resembled a banner staked upon a hilltop. “Oh, God.”
“Grab his foot,” Padraig said to Lucan as he took hold of the boot nearest him. “Pull!”
Padraig and Lucan began dragging Adolphus Paget toward the nearest tree when two swift thunks to either side of them caused them to stop. An identical pair of arrows quivered in close proximity of Lord Paget’s narrow form.
“Stay right where you are,” a man’s voice warned from the shadows just out of Padraig’s sight. The crunching of many footfalls could be heard advancing toward them, and suddenly it seemed as though the forest itself had come alive as shapes emerged from the gloomy shadows to ring the small clearing.
They were dressed in the colors of the bark, the dead leaves; the myriad shades of stone and earthen bank that rimmed the clearing, disguising them as well as any game Padraig had set out to chase. There must have been at least a score of them, all bearing bows with arrows knocked. Some wore leather hoods, concealing the entirety of their features save their eyes.
“Bloody bandits,” Padraig heard Lord Hood growl behind him.
“Back away from his lordship,” the voice said again, and this time Padraig could see that it came from a tall man who continued stepping forward. No hood concealed his red hair and beard, but the face of his slighter companion was fully masked. “Slowly,” he added. “Any sudden movements and I’ll be pleased to put one in the both of you. That’s far enough,” he advised.
Padraig and Lucan stood with their palms raised, halfway between the groaning Lord Paget and the trees where Beryl and LordHood crouched.
“What do you want from us?” Padraig demanded. “This is an allowed hunt on Darlyrede land.”
“I know very well what you’re about, mate,” the man said with a chuckle. He carefully released the tension from his bowstring and laid the weapon on the ground as he knelt at Lord Paget’s side and reached for the man’s tooled leather purse. “Tsk-tsk. My, but that looks painful.” He cut the straps holding the purse with a knife Padraig hadn’t even seen emerge and opened the pouch as he rose.
He held it toward the smaller, masked villain. “Perhaps fifty,” he said. “Not enough for what we’ve likely stirred up.”
