The hunt began.
Darion rode at the front on his horse, Garren beside him on the other. Behind them, one hundred and twenty-one knights on foot, weapons in hand, moving in a column through the streets of Percvale toward the tree line.
It was quite a sight.
The townspeople ca out to watch. They lined the sides of the road the way they had yesterday when Darion had ridden back in with the Bogoart, except this ti it wasn’t shock on their faces, it was sothing closer to hope, which in Percvale was a rarer and more fragile thing.
They watched the column pass and called out, so raising hands, so just standing and staring.
Yesterday their Baron had gone into those woods alone and co back with a kill. Today he was going back in with every single knight in the barony.
Darion nodded at the people as he rode past, smiling at a few of them.
It felt strange in a way he hadn’t anticipated: the hailing, the faces turned toward him with sothing like belief in them.
Not long ago he had been standing in the imperial palace being publicly handed a death sentence while his half-siblings tried not to smile too openly. The Empress had told him he wouldn’t last a week.
He was on day two and taking a hunting party into the woods.
He kept the thought brief and turned his eyes back to the road ahead.
The adjustnt had happened faster than he would have predicted, if he was being honest with himself.
That was probably the most surprising thing about all of this: not the system, not the undead, not even the Bogoart. Just how quickly he had settled into the role.
The boy who had sat in the back of a prison cart watching the imperial roads disappear behind him, wondering what he was supposed to do with a crumbling barony and a hundred starving knights, had been replaced sowhere in the last forty-eight hours by soone who was drawing up hunting tactics on a hand-sketched map and addressing a crowd without his voice wavering.
Adjustnt, he supposed. He had always been good at it, even if he hadn’t known that about himself before now.
He had adjusted to dying and waking up in a different world. He had adjusted to being a bastard in an emperor’s palace. He had adjusted to Percvale. Each ti there had been a mont of looking at his situation and deciding, more or less consciously, that there wasn’t much use in not adjusting.
The tree line appeared ahead. The column continued without breaking pace.
The forest swallowed them gradually, the canopy closing overhead as the road gave way to the narrow paths between the trees. The sound of the town faded. The light changed, dropping into the filtered grey-green of late morning under heavy cover.
Darion kept his eyes moving.
With one hundred and twenty-one n behind him, the forest felt different from yesterday, of course it would, there was company.
The sound alone was different, not just silence as yesterday and the sound of his footfalls but boots on dry ground, the occasional clink of equipnt and breathing that was visible in the cold air.
Yesterday he had been trying to be invisible. Today invisibility wasn’t available, which ant the entire strategy was different.
They weren’t trying not to be found. They were trying to control the terms of being found.
He recognised a particular arrangent of trees ahead, three of them close together, the middle one split partway up the trunk from what looked like an old lightning strike. He had stopped near here yesterday, just before the undead on his left had started waving.
Which ant they were getting close to where the Bogoart territory started.
He raised his hand.
His knights stopped.
"Stay alert," he said, keeping his voice low. "From here we move carefully. Nobody speaks unless they have to."
Garren unsheathed his sword quietly, holding it low at his side. Around the column, hands tightened on spears and axe handles. The five archers shifted their bows, checking strings out of habit.
Darion gripped his spear and nudged the horse forward slowly.
According to the map and everything the knights had contributed in the planning, the approach to the clearing they had selected ran left from this point, following a path that curved around the denser northeastern section rather than cutting through it, keeping them away from the worst of the Bogoart territory until they were in position to use it deliberately.
It added ti to the route but it ant arriving at the clearing without having announced themselves through the most dangerous part of the forest first.
He caught Garren’s eye and gestured left.
Garren nodded. He had seen it too, the path matching what they had sketched, the terrain opening slightly in that direction the way the map had suggested it would.
They turned.
The knights followed, reorganising from a single line into a slightly wider formation where the path allowed it. They moved with considerably more discipline than Darion had expected, quietly, spacing maintained, nobody pushing forward out of nerves or falling behind out of hesitation.
Whatever the soup and the night’s rest had done to their morale, it had apparently done sothing to their focus as well.
The clearing wasn’t far now. Another few minutes of careful movent and they would be at the edge of it, the point where the trees thinned and opened into the open ground they had identified on the map. From there it was a matter of getting the archers up into position, selecting the bait, and waiting.
Darion was already running through the sequence in his head when Garren, riding just slightly behind his left shoulder, made a quiet sound and pointed.
Through the trees ahead, visible between the trunks, the clearing opened up, a rough oval of open ground, pale and dry, the kind of space that felt exposed after the density of the forest around it.
Exactly as sketched. The trees surrounding it were tall and well-spaced, solid branches at good heights. The archers would have clear sightlines from above. The approach from the northeastern section ca in from the far right of the clearing, exactly where they wanted the Bogoart coming from.
Darion pulled the horse to a stop at the tree line and turned to signal the knights to halt.
They halted.
He was about to dismount and begin getting the archers into position when it happened.
A sound.
Eh...
What sound?
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