Chapter 107: First Hunt

The time for the hunt was a little after the meal, and by the time it was to be repeated, the five of us were already walking out of the palace gates.

Charolette led. Camila and Hazel flanked her, and the three of them moved with the loose, practiced rhythm of people who had done this many times before.

Theodore and I trailed several paces behind, shoulders hunched, eyes darting at every shadow. We had agreed on it the night before, in whispers. Peter and Rudy were not the sort of boys who walked at the front. Peter and Rudy were the sort who kept a safe distance from anything that could bite.

’It is a good role,’ I thought. ’Nobody guards against a coward.’

"Peter," Theodore murmured, in a voice pitched just loud enough for the girls to overhear. "Is it too late to become a baker?"

"You cannot bake."

"I could learn."

"You burned water once."

"That was a misunderstanding between me and the kettle."

Up ahead, Camila snorted, and I saw Hazel’s braid shake with silent laughter. Good. A harmless pair of idiots was exactly what I was selling.

The road beneath our boots was not natural.

That much was obvious within the first hundred steps. Somebody had paved it with flat, grey slabs, fitted so tightly that not even a blade of corrupted grass had managed to push through the seams.

It curved down the flank of the mountain in a smooth, deliberate ribbon, wide enough for six men to walk abreast. Torch brackets stood at regular intervals, empty now, their iron mouths blackened by old smoke.

’Culex’s people built this,’ I realized. ’Not for travel. For hunting.’

It was efficient, in a grim way. A single road, safe and guarded, leading the herd out to the pasture and back again, so that none of the workers would wander and none of the beasts would wander in. A shepherd’s path.

After about half an hour, the road came to an end.

Not truly an end, but a division. The grey slabs opened into a wide circular plaza, and from its edge, five narrower roads fanned out like the fingers of a hand.

A weathered stone post stood at the center, carved with five crude arrows. One pointed north, one south, one east, one west, and the fifth, slightly crooked, toward the northwest.

I slowed, as a nervous boy would, and let my eyes drift over the arrows.

’The south road.’

Before we left for the castle, I had told Sera and the others to meet us south of the mountain. However, Mary had other plans.

If so, they had abandoned the safety of their old shore and made camp somewhere on the slopes below, in the open, only a few miles from a palace full of hungry fighters.

My stomach tightened.

’That is dangerous. Very dangerous.’

Then I remembered, and the tension eased.

Before I had climbed the mountain, I had given them one of the most precious things I owned, the honorific name of Ouroboros.

If they prayed to him, he would draw a veil over a person’s spiritual presence, hiding it from anyone who did not already know where to look. If they had settled to the south, then Culex’s soldiers or unorthodox creatures could pass a hundred paces from their fire and see nothing but dark stone.

’They are hidden. Probably. Hopefully.’

I resolved not to think about it any more.

"Which road today?" Theodore asked, with the studied innocence of a man who had memorized the answer.

"The northwest," Charolette said without turning. "The northern roads are picked clean, and the east is claimed by the captains’ parties. The northwest is long, but nobody fights us for it."

"Long?" Theodore echoed, with a tragic whimper that was only half an act.

"Two hours."

"Two hours there. And back."

"Four hours, if we are lucky," she agreed cheerfully.

He turned to me with the despairing face of a man watching his own funeral procession. I patted his shoulder.

"At least it is not the bathroom duty," I whispered.

He nodded gravely. "That comes next."

The northwest road was rougher than the main one, though still laid with the same flat slabs for the first mile. Then the paving thinned, broke into scattered stones, and finally gave way to packed earth. The land began to climb, and the air grew sharper and colder with every step.

We came to a steep stretch where the path narrowed to a ledge, and the slope fell away into a gully on our right. Camila went first, nimble and surefooted, then Hazel.

Charolette waited at the top with one hand outstretched, lazily hauling each of us up as we came.

When she took my hand, her grip was warm and firm, and her eyes lingered on mine for a beat.

"You climb well, for someone who is terrified," she said softly.

"I... I am only holding on very tightly," I stammered.

"Mm."

She released me without another word.

I stared at her back as she strode on.

’She is counting.’

Not out loud, not with any hostility. Only a quiet, steady watching, the way a careful merchant tests a coin between her teeth. And yet she said nothing. She had said nothing the night before, either, when my story had plainly sprung leaks. If anything, she had been smoothing the road.

We met three Ferals on the next hill.

They were lean, hairless things with too many knees, loping down the slope toward us with that mindless, drooling hunger I was already tired of. I had my hand halfway to my sleeve, ready to produce some convenient accident that Peter could take credit for.

I never needed it.

Charolette’s sword left its scabbard with a hiss. She did not run or shout. She simply stepped forward, once, twice, and three thin lines of silver flickered through the air. The Ferals collapsed in a heap before they had finished their first howl, their heads rolling quietly to a stop at her boots.

She flicked the blood from her blade and sheathed it without looking.

"Ugh," Theodore said weakly, for the benefit of the audience.

"They are only Ferals," Hazel said kindly. "You will get used to it."

"I doubt it."

Charolette glanced back at me over her shoulder, and I could have sworn there was a flicker of approval in her eyes.

’She could have asked us to help. She did not. She took every kill so that Peter and Rudy would never have to show anything.’

It was a small thing, almost invisible.

But I felt the weight of it. She was cooperating with us, tacitly, without ever acknowledging it, shielding the story she had pretended to half believe. It made me feel safe, and it made me feel something very close to fear, in equal measure. A woman who did that was either a friend or the most dangerous person in this entire mountain.

Perhaps both...

’Her intelligence is real. I must never forget that.’

We walked on.

The land flattened into a stretch of wiry grass and scattered boulders, and the sky overhead had turned the dull red of a sunset that never quite arrived. Three gnarled trees stood on our left, bent and bare, their branches twisted into shapes like clutching fingers. Ahead of us, more trees gathered in a loose, sparse grove, their trunks pale and their crowns bare.

"This is the usual place," Camila said, stretching her arms over her head. "Usually something wanders by within an hour. Last time we caught a Beast near those stones."

"A big one?" I asked in a small voice.

"Big enough," Hazel said.

"Does it... bite?"

"Everything here bites, Peter," Camila laughed.

"That is not very comforting."

"It is not meant to be."

Theodore sidled up to me, speaking from the corner of his mouth. "I want to go home."

"..."

"You will have to take that up with the King." Charolette said.

His lips pressed tightly together, and I knew he was about to laugh. I looked quickly at the horizon to avoid joining him.

That was when I saw it.

At first, I thought it was a trick of the light. A shape among the pale trunks, hopping in slow, ungainly bounds across the rocks. It was big, bigger than a man, with thick, powerful hind legs and a long tail that dragged a furrow through the dust. Its body was golden-brown, covered in short, coarse fur, and it moved with the awkward, bouncing gait of a kangaroo.

’A kangaroo.’

Then the shape turned toward us, and my smile froze.

It had no head.

Where the neck should have been, there was only a ragged stump of fur and flesh. The arms hung loose and long, ending in clawed hands. And from the pouch on its belly, a wide, stretched pocket of skin gaping open like a mouth, something looked out at us.

A head. Small and round, nestled deep in the pocket like a joey, with two wide, unblinking eyes and a grin that stretched far too wide.

It blinked.

Slowly, it rose out of the pouch on a long, wet stalk of neck, tilting from side to side as though listening to something none of us could hear.

The familiar voice rang in my mind, flat and cold.

[You Are Looking At A Beast Fiend: Rorozi]