The forest drew steadily closer on one side of the road as the column moved on.
Gareth and the Mowbray heir had fallen into conversation almost as soon as they left the city, and it was nothing like the careful greetings Owen had watched on the landing grounds. Without their fathers within earshot, they talked like two people who had known each other for years, complaining about officers, comparing how hard each of them had been worked since they last met, and disagreeing about very little of any importance.
Owen mostly listened. He was content to, until the Mowbray heir leaned back slightly and looked over at him.
"You’ve been quiet," he said. "Looking forward to your first hunt?"
Owen thought about how to answer that honestly. "I’ve wanted to know what real combat feels like for a while," he said. "But twelve people are dead. It’s hard to look forward to it the way I might have otherwise."
The heir nodded as though that was a reasonable answer. "Good. The ones who treat it like a game tend to make everyone else work harder."
"It’s the difference from training I keep thinking about," Owen added after a moment. "There won’t be anyone to stop it if something goes wrong."
"No," the heir agreed. "There won’t."
The village came into view in the early afternoon, sitting right at the forest’s edge.
It wasn’t ruined or abandoned. Smoke rose from the chimneys, carts moved between the houses, and people were going about their work. But the side facing the forest felt wrong. The hunting racks outside the houses there were nearly empty, several Mowbray soldiers stood guard where the road ran into the trees, and the people nearby paused to watch the combined force come in. A few older hunters stood together outside a lodge near the treeline, and none of them looked as though they were going anywhere.
The force stopped beside a Mowbray patrol building that had been turned into a temporary staging point. Edmund, Lord Mowbray, Edith, Mercer and the senior officers went straight toward the command area inside, while the soldiers and the younger members of the force stayed out in the open.
An officer began calling units and surnames from a deployment sheet. Voices answered from all over the gathering, and one group after another broke away toward its assigned sector. Straps were tightened, spear hafts knocked against one another, and boots shifted on the packed earth, while from the edges of the village came the low murmur of civilians talking among themselves.
"That’s the Ferrers crest, isn’t it?"
"Which one’s Lord Ferrers’ son?"
"Both of them, I think."
A Mowbray soldier somewhere behind Owen lowered his voice. "The younger one. Supposedly he made General Rooke use her armament during his assessment."
Owen heard enough to know the story had travelled even this far. He didn’t turn around.
The update, when it came, was short. A Mowbray officer stationed at the village came out of the patrol building and told them there had been no further civilian deaths since the hunting ban and the increased patrols. Fresh monster sightings were still coming in along several routes, and the scouts still hadn’t found a single species responsible.
The forest had been divided into search sectors. Most of the groups were mixed, with Mowbray soldiers who knew the terrain guiding those who had come from outside the territory.
Owen’s group was six people: Gareth, Owen, the Mowbray heir, an experienced Ferrers swordsman, and two experienced Mowbray spearmen. Gareth had final authority in combat because of his experience and strength, while the Mowbray heir and his soldiers would handle navigation and their knowledge of where each kind of monster ranged.
Before they set off, Gareth turned to Owen.
"One thing," he said. "If I tell you to move back, you move back. Immediately. Even if you think you see an opening."
"Understood."
Gareth didn’t tell him to stay behind everyone else. Edith had cleared him to take part, and all of them expected him to fight.
The road narrowed into a hunting trail almost as soon as they passed the soldiers guarding it.
Packed village earth gave way to damp ground that gave slightly under their boots. The canopy closed overhead and dimmed the light, and thick roots crossed the trail often enough that Owen had to watch where every step landed. Behind them, the smell of chimney smoke faded, replaced by damp bark and the heavy scent of leaf litter.
Owen noticed quickly that the forest favored some weapons over others. In places, the trees stood close enough that a wide swing would catch a trunk before it reached anything, while the Mowbray spearmen could still thread their points through the gaps. Low branches hung everywhere. A greatsword chosen carelessly in here would spend more time caught in the trees than doing anything useful.
He didn’t open his Status. There was no need to. His body handled the uneven ground without effort, and he was picking out small things almost before he looked for them: a bird shifting on a branch above, the creak of a trunk as the wind moved through the canopy, the faint drag of the Ferrers swordsman’s scabbard against a fern behind him.
The older of the two Mowbray spearmen stopped and crouched beside the trail. He touched a set of pawprints in the soft ground, then a patch of disturbed leaves, and pointed off to the right.
"Fresh," he said quietly. "This way."
They left the trail and spread out just enough to avoid bunching together while staying within sight of one another. Gareth’s easy manner disappeared entirely, and he stopped talking. The Mowbray heir lowered his spear and began watching the gaps between the trees rather than the ground. Owen felt the change come over all of them at once, and he summoned his longsword.
Something moved ahead. Three grey shapes were slipping between the trunks, low to the ground and far too large to be ordinary wolves. A low growl rolled out from between the trees, and a second one joined it.
Grrrrr...
"Giant Wolves," the spearman murmured. "Prowlers."
Prowler was the lowest rank of monster in Asteria. Any one of them could tear apart an ordinary hunter, but they were well beneath most of the people in this group.
Gareth started to call positions, but the wolves were already committed. The growling broke into snarls as they came, their paws thudding against the soft ground. One went for the Mowbray heir, another angled toward the Ferrers swordsman, and the third came straight at Owen.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
Owen saw it shift its weight before it jumped. Its shoulders dropped and its hind legs gathered beneath it, and he was already moving to the side before the leap had properly begun. The wolf lunged with a snarl and came through the space where he had been standing, and that carried it straight into the reach of his sword.
Grraaagh!
He cut. At the moment the blade met the wolf’s neck, he let a short flare of fire run along the edge, no more than he needed. The fire hissed against fur and flesh, and the longsword went through the neck and into the upper body in a single stroke, with a heavy, wet sound he felt through the grip.
Shhk!
The wolf hit the ground with a choked yelp and didn’t get up.
Owen held his guard for a heartbeat, waiting for it to come at him again, before he understood that it was already dead.
The rest of the encounter ended almost as quickly. Somewhere to his left, another wolf yelped and went silent. Gareth’s wolf lay at his feet, and the Mowbray heir had caught the third on his spear. It thrashed and whined against the shaft until one of the spearmen stepped in with a grunt and finished it.
Owen looked down at his sword. Blood ran off the tip and spattered across his boot, and he let out a short hiss without meaning to. The blood on the blade was warmer and heavier than anything he had ever seen in training, and its copper smell mixed with the scent of wet soil. Around him, the others were breathing hard. The wolf’s body gave one last involuntary twitch, then lay still.
His hands were steady. What struck him most was how fast it had all been. He had spent a month preparing himself for real combat, and his first monster had barely lasted one exchange.
Gareth came over. He didn’t look at the wolf or at Owen’s sword. He looked at Owen. When he seemed satisfied that his brother was uninjured and steady, he gave a small nod and turned his attention back to the trees.
Owen had assumed they would move on straight away, but the Ferrers swordsman and the older spearman were already kneeling beside the carcasses with knives drawn, while the younger spearman stood watch with his back to them. They worked quickly. They cut out each wolf’s core and took a few teeth and claws, the compact pieces worth carrying, and left everything else where it lay. Nobody was going to drag whole carcasses through the forest.
Gareth moved to cover the far side of the clearing. Owen stayed where he was and watched the Ferrers swordsman open his wolf’s chest and draw out the core.
He had half expected something to happen when it came out. Nothing did. There was no chime and no window, only an ordinary monster core that the swordsman wiped clean on the grass and dropped into a pouch.
Once the useful pieces had been packed away, they moved on.