Now Wren had no choice but to hold on for dear life to Butcher’s shoulders, to clench his own thighs against Butcher’s, and to roll his hips back and forth against Butcher’s backside with every rise and plunge of the stag’s galloping strides. He heard rather than saw the foliage flying past his face, a twig or two catching his cheek on the way. The cloak unfurled behind him like a banner in the wind.
Wren had just caught enough of his breath to consider asking where the Devil the stag was taking them when he glimpsed something at last on the path ahead.
A ring of pale mushrooms loomed stark against the black earth. They almost seemed to glow.
A fairy ring, Wren thought to himself. He had no time to think much else. In three bounding leaps, the stag had reached the ring.
Then it reared.
Wren lost his grip on Butcher’s shoulders and seized his waist instead. Butcher, nothing daunted, took hold of the stag’s antlers.
The stag sprang from its hind legs and charged down as if it meant to gore the earth headfirst.
Wren cried out and wrapped his arms tight around Butcher’s waist, bracing for the impact.
None came.
~
Chapter Five
It felt as if all three of them—Butcher, Wren, and the stag—had plunged off the edge of a cliff. Not dashed against the earth but falling through it.
Wren had screwed his eyes shut in anticipation of the landing jolt. Cold wind struck his face like a crashing wave, and the shock of it forced his eyes open.
The fog of London had vanished. The full moon hung overhead in a crisp night sky full to bursting with twinkling stars, framed by the dark green points of enormous pines looming all around them. Wren could see the colour, truly, for the moon shone brighter than any gaslight, and it illuminated everything down to the lowest branches that still hung high above Wren’s perch on the stag. Beneath these sat trunks wider than Wren was tall, surrounded by a carpet of ferns.
The stag, mid-leap when Wren had opened his eyes, now landed delicately on its fore-hooves and trotted to a halt.
“Where are we?” Wren whispered. His breath plumed in clouds of dragon smoke. He felt renewed gratitude for Butcher’s cloak, warm and snug about his shoulders.
Butcher turned to catch Wren’s eye. He put his finger to his lips, then cupped his hand behind his ear.
His pointed ear.
In the moonlight, and without his hood, Wren could see Butcher’s ears quite clearly. Now there was no mistaking them for waxwork. He could see, as well, the black woollen tunic Butcher wore and how it clung to his muscular frame, tied off with a belted leather gyrdel at the waist and hanging down not much farther than that. Nothing covered Butcher’s thighs save medieval hose, likewise black, and his black cavalier boots came up to his knees; a motley assortment of costuming eras in a monochromatic assembly.
Wren shut his mouth but kept on staring in wide-eyed wonder at his new surroundings. He’d never seen so many stars in his life. Had seen none, in fact, since he’d moved to London. The silence was new to him as well. Moreso than the muffled angles of Staple Inn, the forest had no wagons rattling endlessly over cobblestones, no people shouting, no bells ringing, none of the millions of incidental human sounds that tumbled all on top of each other every minute in the city. Just the rustling of pine needles in the wind.
Then he heard it.
An eerie sound, a howl that began low and swooped upward to end in a triumphant blast that echoed throughout the forest as if from miles off. A hunting horn.
Butcher took hold of the stag’s antlers and dug his knees into its flanks. The stag leapt off once more, darting to and fro between the trees at harrowing speed, along no path Wren could perceive. He clung to Butcher’s waist, his chest flush with Butcher’s spine, the closest embrace he’d known in more years than he cared to count.
The horn resounded again. In its wake, Wren heard the thunder of beating hooves rumbling ever nearer. He thought he glimpsed shadows between the pines, mounted riders, as if their own reflection chased them.
Then the stag burst through the trees and into the throng.
A horde of hundreds surrounded them. Like leaping off a waterfall into flood-swollen torrents, the current of the pack swept up and swallowed the stag and its riders. Wren whirled his head ‘round to glimpse them all—a grand host of elves in a staggering variety of costume, from Hellenic chitons to medieval armour, garments of rough hide and bloodstained fur, Tudor velvets and slashed doublets, bark and bone. Some rode, some ran, and some seemed to fly. A raven-haired elf-maiden’s tunic looked half iridescent feathers and half torn leaves, her face smeared blue with woad and her white grin gleaming through it with wolfish fangs as she readied her twice-curved bow. Astride a grey horse rode a lady in a moon-white gown. Her hem trailed down past her steed’s hooves and had dragged through enough muck and gore to rend it into lace-work tatters that flowed from white to pink to crimson-black. Another rider in sea-foam satin breeches and silk stockings would not have looked out of place in the court of George III—save for the spiderweb mask that obscured all but the knife-point tips of their blue ears. One hunter flitted along in a woollen cloak of mottled grey, storm-cloud on the left side and moonlight on the right, with a thick fur ruff. Grey tresses fluttered in the wind behind them, though their smooth face bespoke youth.
Wolf-hounds bayed and darted between hooves and boots. No, Wren realized, not just wolf-hounds, but true wolves the size of horses, their long maws snapping the air and their thick fur rippling in the wind. The smaller and more wiry frames of the wolf-hounds dashed about their larger friends with wagging tails. The crimson coat of a fox slipped amongst them, quick as a minnow in the overwhelming current. And some wolves… Wren blinked, but his vision remained unchanged, and so he felt forced to concede that some of the wolves had the shape of men and leapt up on two legs to throw back their heads and howl.
The werewolves were not the only hunters to straddle the worlds of men and beasts. Not every hoof belonged to a horse or hart. Merry fauns and sinister satyrs danced amidst the thundering hordes. Milk-white women with calf’s ears and hollow backs ran on cloven hooves of gold. An immense broad-shouldered man with his blood bay coat descending into iridescent black at his hands, hooves, horns, and the tip of his tufted whip-cord tail, Wren knew in an instant for an incubus, though he’d never before seen his like or encountered his description. And, as Wren shot a second glance over his shoulder, he realized one figure he’d taken for a bearded archer on horseback was, in fact, a centaur.
All this wild abandon worthy of Hieronymus Bosch paled in comparison to the leader of the pack. At the helm of the hunt, astride the largest and fiercest wolf, rode a man who would have stood seven feet tall with both his heels on the ground. A pair of bear-skull pauldrons sat on his thick shoulders, while his grey beard, tinted green with moss, covered his thrice-broad chest like a pelt. Just as much hair trailed behind him, past his pointed ears and his antlers, which rivalled those of the stag Wren rode on even now. He gripped a cross-barbed spear in his right fist, and his left held a curling horn as long as a yardstick, from which he trumpeted the haunting howl that called the hunt to order.
It occurred to Wren, as he regarded that barbed spear and the sundry implements of the other hunters, that he didn’t carry a weapon. Unless one counted the pen-knife in his waistcoat pocket, which Wren himself did not, and he doubted Butcher would either.
