I studied the ground closely, trying to untangle the boar’s tracks from the huge imprints of my own boots that I had so stupidly left all over the place now.
“Which way did you go, boar? And how do I find you now?” I muttered to myself.
A high-pitched scream suddenly cut through the warm autumn air, and I froze in my crouch.
It sounded like a woman’s scream. A woman who was in fear for her life.
I leaped to my feet, grabbed my mace from my belt, and ran.
The woman screamed again—a high, terrified sound. I followed it, jumping over the fallen logs and splashing across the creeks on my way.
Alarm heightened all my senses, including my hearing. A grunt came from my right, and I pivoted in that direction with my mace raised and ready.
A boar charged me from behind a thick oak tree. The beast was huge and looked well-fed but moved fast as lightning. I barely managed to crash my mace down on its head, swerving away from its path at the last moment.
The boar snorted, spinning on its hooves, then charged at me again, blood dripping over his tusks that were longer and bigger than mine.
I roared, swinging my mace again, and lunged at him with a counterattack. My mace crashed against his skull, smashing it in. The boar blindly barreled past me. Tipping forward, it dug with its snout a deep groove in the moss, before coming to a stop and finally keeling over.
Coming closer, I dragged my mace over the wet grass to clean the boar’s blood. The beast’s head was smashed in, a complete bloody mess. There was no saving it for roasting now.
“Dammit.” I spat on the ground.
The best way to hunt a boar was with arrows or possibly a spear, to leave as much of the meat intact as possible. I chose the mace for protection, rushing to save the screaming woman. And, well…like Granny Magra often said, sometimes I really didn’t know my own strength. I’d hit to kill without thinking, and now, I’d have no roasted boar head for dinner.
But where was the woman I’d tried to save?
I looked around, searching for her.
“Hello? Is anyone here?” I asked loudly, walking around the tree, then searching through the bushes.
She hadn’t screamed again, and there was no trace of her anywhere around here. If the boar had killed her, there’d be a dead body. If she ran away, there’d be footprints. But I found nothing.
Maybe there was no woman? Or at least not one who needed any protection from me.
I remembered some old folks at the keep telling stories about the apemen from the southern parts of the Wetlands. They looked like the humans from across the valley but had the mind of an animal. My grandfather had told me that one hot summer, before I was born, the apemen came far north enough to reach our keep.
Bog orcs didn’t hunt apemen for food. Their human-like appearance made them unappetizing to us. But the apemen, or “wild things” like Grandpa used to call them, were a nuisance. The last time they came to these parts, they dug out the crops in our vegetable gardens and stole our goats. A pack of them even overran Grandpa’s cabin once, stealing lots of things they didn’t know how to use, then either scattering them in the bushes or tossing them into the creek.
The summer had been hot this year, hot enough for the wild things to possibly come up to these parts of the Wetlands. Except that it was too late in the year for them. Unless a lone woman had somehow strayed from her pack?
Or it could’ve been a banshee that had screamed. They weren’t uncommon in the Wetlands. Banshees would rise from the swamp, draped in reeds and muck. From a distance they often looked like a person wearing a cloak. They screamed like children or women in distress, luring their would-be rescuers into the swamp where they then drowned and ate them.
Nasty creatures.
I wasn’t in the mood to fight one of those. If there was a banshee around, it was best to get the fuck out of here.
A shudder crossed my shoulders at the thought of a banshee as I bent over the boar. This one was big and meaty, with lots of bacon on him too. Well, maybe my hunting luck had changed, and would I finally get a real chance to win my bet after all.
CHAPTER 2
KHALA
I’d been watching the orc for hours while hiding in the bushy black ash tree at the edge of the small clearing in front of his log cabin. I had watched him yesterday, too, when he killed the boar that I’d accidentally startled while it was digging for rodents and acorns between the roots of an old oak tree.
The boar would’ve most certainly killed me had the orc not showed up just in time. Thankfully, while the orc fought the beast, I got a chance to climb up the oak tree, hiding from sight. The orc ended up saving my life, even though he didn’t know it.
However, I hadn’t been stalking him to express my gratitude. The reason for my watching the orc was simple. I was hungry, and he had food.
