And what, Wren wondered but didn’t dare ask aloud, was their prey?
A guttural, gurgling shriek rent the air. Wren whipped his head towards the sound—a horrible singular noise that echoed over the general cacophony of the wild hunt and seemed to come not from somewhere ahead of them, but from beside.
Butcher’s thighs clenched atop Wren’s. The stag darted off to the left, away from the pack and deeper into the forest.
Towards the dreadful cry.
Some other hunters seemed to have similar ideas, but the stag outstripped them all, darting nimbly through the dark, leaping over fallen logs and slipping under overhanging limbs. Wren, unable to see the path ahead, kept his narrow chest flush to Butcher’s broad back, ducking when he ducked and dodging where he dodged. The hoots and horns of the hunt faded. Snapping twigs and rustling pine needles resounded in their stead. Then the babbling of running water, at first so faint that Wren assumed he imagined it, rose up louder and louder with every stride. Rapid tilts and plunges sent his heart into his throat and his stomach into knots. He tightened his arms around Butcher’s lithe waist and tried to ignore how every leap brought his hips up against Butcher’s backside.
A sudden stop almost sent Wren sprawling from the stag’s back. He clung to his perch and found himself on the edge of a riverbank. The forest broke away, allowing the moonlight to illuminate a sheer drop-off carved out by the water in its spring swells. Now, with the first frost well past, the mountain springs had frozen up, and the river they fed had dwindled to a mere stream that wound its way through the wood some twelve feet below the rim of its flood-bank.
Wren smelled the reason for the stag’s halting before he saw it, the scent of woodsmoke musk leaving him as he raised his head from the nape of Butcher’s neck, replaced by a rank stench of stale urine, spoiled meat, and rotted blood. A glimpse down the steep bank into the riverbed destroyed any remaining doubt as to the source of the odour.
There, in a curved hollow of frozen mud beside the river’s bend, stood a boar.
Until that moment, Wren had considered the wolves and steeds running in the wild hunt as the largest living creatures he’d ever seen. The boar dwarfed them. Indeed, it would have dwarfed any omnibus now rattling through London. A thick coat of stiff, wiry hair covered its mountainous bulk. Its natural colour Wren could not now discern; its lower half had turned grey with brackish filth, and its enormous hump and head looked as if bathed in pitch—but for the stench from which Wren felt forced to the sickening conclusion that the beast had wallowed in blood. Rivulets of fresher stuff spilled forth from its mouth between clusters of tusks—three to each side, the smallest as long as Wren’s fore-arm and the largest half as long as his entire body, with the left-most one broken off at its tip and cracked down to its base in the festering gum-line. Deep furrows of black rot stained with blood-red rust ran through the yellow ivory. And as he gazed on the monstrosity, Wren knew little of that blood was its own.
Butcher laid his hands on Wren’s wrists and gently broke their embrace of his waist. Wren withdrew to give him freedom of movement. Butcher dismounted from the stag, a move which Wren thought foolish at best, until he realized they stood downwind of the horrible beast—and furthermore, the sound of the rushing water, diminished as it might be, proved enough to cover the sound of Butcher’s boots landing on the blanket of dried pine needles.
“Stay mounted,” he whispered to Wren. “The stag will bolt if the boar charges too near.”
Wren nodded, though while he supposed the nimble stag would prove faster than the boar, he didn’t feel entirely comfortable with leaving Butcher to his fate.
As Butcher crept towards the edge of the tree-line, Wren beheld his silhouette. Wrapping his cloak around Wren’s shoulders had left him clothed in just tunic and hose. Belted around the waist, the tunic didn’t fall far past Butcher’s hips. At another time Wren might have appreciated the view; at present he fixated on the scabbards hanging on either side of Butcher’s gyrdel. One held a dagger. The other appeared not quite so long as a sword and far more slender.
Neither seemed an adequate weapon against a beast of such monstrous size.
No sooner had Wren thought this than Butcher raised his arm into the lower reaches of the pine tree they sheltered beneath—dead, its branches stretched out like skeletal fingers in the moonlight—and seized a stout limb. A single wrench broke it off in his fist. His dagger flashed out of its sheath, and within the minute he’d trimmed off all vestigial twigs and whittled a point onto his own makeshift spear. Then, silent as a shadow, he slipped off beyond Wren’s sight.
The boar, meanwhile, had pricked its ears at the echoing snap of the breaking branch and now snorted into the air, seeking the scent of what had made the sound. Its plough-share trotters carved deep furrows into the mud as it spun ‘round in its search. Its ears swivelled in all directions. Yet it seemed it could not perceive Butcher—much as Wren had lost him in the shadows beneath the trees. He held his breath and tangled his fists in the stag’s thick mane as he waited.
All at once the boar’s nostrils flared. It reared, whirled, and charged the tree-line with a guttural roar.
Wren’s heart leapt into his throat as he glimpsed a familiar silhouette darting behind the pines. The boar smashed into them a fraction of a second after. Wood cracked against tusks with a sound like cannon-fire. The trees swayed.
The stag shifted its stance beneath Wren but did not bolt. Wren’s gaze flitted across the tree-line in a frantic search for any sign of Butcher. He’d almost given up hope when at last he spied him, limned in moonlight and crouching with makeshift spear in hand, a mere stone’s throw in front of the boar. Only the tusks caught on half-shattered trunks prevented the boar from charging him. It yanked its head backward with violence and tore up the ground with its trotters in its efforts to break free, but its initial blow had embedded itself deep with the trees, and it stuck fast between two pines. All it could do was throw open its jaws and bellow in impotent rage.
And as it did so, Butcher sprang up and flung his spear down its throat.
A piercing shriek tore through the night. A horrible gurgling swallowed it up, but not before it set the hair of Wren’s nape on end. The boar reared and, with a thunderous crash, succeeded, too late, in wrenching itself out of the trees.
The stag likewise reared at the sound. Wren seized it by the antlers to keep himself mounted. It snorted and dug its hooves into the dried needles but settled within the moment.
By then, Butcher had vanished again into the shadows of the forest.
The boar—still not dead, and not even dying, Wren realized with growing horror—staggered backward into the river-bed, taking the makeshift spear with it. One of the pines toppled into the mud in the boar’s wake. The broken tip of a tusk gleamed amidst the shattered wood.
Beady black eyes rolled to whites Wren hadn’t known the beast possessed. Blood dark as ichor dripped between tusks and the broken-off branch caught in the boar’s throat.
The howl of the hunting horn echoed through the forest, so faint at first Wren thought it was the wind, but growing louder with every passing moment and bringing with it the thundering of a hundred hooves.
Whether it would arrive soon enough to finish off the boar, Wren knew not.
All he knew was the familiar snap of Butcher breaking another dead branch and the silver flash of his dagger not twelve yards distant.
With a gurgling bellow, the boar launched itself into the woods again—straight at where Wren had just espied Butcher.
Wren’s warning shout died in his throat as an arrow pierced the boar’s eye.
