Osla had a contract she'd been saving, the way some people save a bottle for a guest they don't much like.
[Contract: Cull the Grey Stag of Hollowmere.]Reward: 8 silver.]Note: has displaced three prior hunting parties. Aggressive. Territorial. Not, strictly, a deer.]
"Three parties," Bruno repeated, hefting his sword with open delight. "It beat three parties. It sounds strong. I like it already."
"You like everything that could kill you," said Vera.
"That is what makes me an excellent tank," Bruno said, and honestly, he had a point.
The Grey Stag of Hollowmere was not, as the contract had warned, strictly a deer. It was a nightmare that had once, distantly, been one — twice the size of a warhorse, its hide gone the weathered grey of old gravestones, its rack of antlers grown into a thicket of jagged points, its eyes the flat dull gold of coins pressed onto a dead man's lids. It had claimed a stretch of misty fen called Hollowmere and gored anything that dared to step into its water.
We found it at the mere's edge in the low morning fog. And that was where I learned my curse had a use even in a fair fight — because the instant the Stag caught my scent, it didn't charge. It balked. Some deep, old, animal instinct in it recognized the thing standing at the top of the whole food chain, and for one long heartbeat the monster that had killed three parties wanted to kneel.
Then rage won out over instinct, the way it always seemed to in the big ones, and it came at us anyway, a grey avalanche with a crown of spears.
The fight was long and ugly and gloriously, grindingly human. Because Vera had made me swear off the Mantle out here — "That much shadow in the open, Adrian? Someone with the right training feels it from miles off. And 'miles off' is exactly where our bounty lives now. We hunt quiet, or we don't hunt." So I fought like a person. Broom-tier. I baited and I dodged and I used the one weapon the Stag couldn't ignore: my own presence, that flicker of kneel buried in its skull, so that every time it wheeled to gore Bruno, it hesitated a half-beat too long, its gold eyes flicking to me, torn between fury and worship.
That half-beat was everything. Bruno met the antlers head-on and got thrown into the mud twice, roaring with joy both times. Lila's fire barely singed that stone-grey hide. Vera flowed low and quiet along the flanks, opening the tendons stroke by patient stroke. And I danced at the front like the world's worst matador, pulling the Stag's attention, making it hesitate, until finally its legs buckled from Vera's work and Bruno drove his blade up through its throat.
We won because we fought together — four people and a shared plan — and not because I was a legend. And somehow that felt better than any Mantle ever had.
Afterward, sitting in the churned mud getting his breath back, Bruno told me — quietly, for once, all the bluster gone — why he fought the way he did. "A beast like this came through my village when I was small," he said, watching the fog. "Not this one. One like it. I was too little to stop it, and I watched people I loved not be there anymore, after." He wiped his blade on the grass. "So I got big. I got big so that nothing walks into a village of mine ever again." Then the grin came back, unstoppable, the moment folded away and put in a drawer. "Also, fighting is extremely fun. Both things are true."
[Contract complete. +8 silver. Rank E: progress 24%.]
We ate well that week, off the coin and off the Stag both. And I started — dangerously, foolishly — to feel like maybe I could just do this forever. Be a hunter. Be nobody. Be happy.