The Vampire & Her Witch

Erling heard the elk before he saw it. There was a deep, percussive crash of something immensely heavy smashing through undergrowth, followed by the sharp crack of a sapling snapping like a dry twig under the weight of an animal that sounded like it could trample a horse without slowing down.

The ground seemed to shudder beneath the pounding of massive hooves, and the sound of the thing’s passage through the forest was so violent that for a moment, Erling’s mind didn’t register it as an animal at all. It sounded like a boulder breaking free from a clifftop and tearing its way downhill through the timber.

Then it burst from the treeline on the far side of the creek, and every thought in Erling’s head went still.

The bull elk was enormous.

Erling had seen elk before. The southern grasslands of Fayle hosted a few small herds that migrated through during the autumn, and he’d hunted cow elk on two occasions when his barony’s larders were dangerously low. He never pressed the hunt if he saw signs that there was a mature bull in the area. He needed food for the table, not a trophy for his hearth, and there was no reason to risk his life or the lives of his huntsmen over a pair of antlers.

He thought he understood how dangerous a bull elk could be, and how much larger the males were compared to their female counterparts. Looking at the imperial bull elk before him, however, he realized that he’d severely underestimated the power of these majestic beasts.

This animal dwarfed every elk he’d ever seen the way a warhorse dwarfed a pack pony. It stood nearly five feet at the shoulder, and its body was a mass of dark brown muscle and coarse winter fur that steamed with exertion as it crashed through the alders along the creek bank. Its neck was as thick as a man’s torso, and it carried its head high, nostrils flaring in explosive blasts of vapor that hung in the frigid air like storm clouds.

But it was the antlers that caught his gaze and held it.

Seven points on each side, exactly as Fabel had reported, rising from the bull’s skull in two sweeping main beams as thick as a man’s forearm that curved backward and upward before splitting into a crown of tines that spread wider than Erling could have reached with both arms extended. They were massive, bone-colored weapons, darkened at the tips with old stains that might have been sap or soil or the dried blood of rivals the bull had fought during the rut.

The rack alone must have weighed as much as a suit of chainmail, and yet the bull carried it as though it were nothing, swinging its great head from side to side as it searched for the source of the sounds that had driven it from its bed.

It wasn’t panicked. That was the thing that struck Erling hardest as the hunter in him assessed the animal with the calm, detached eye of a man who had spent his life reading the posture and intentions of his prey. A panicked animal ran blind, crashing through obstacles without thought, driven by pure terror. This bull wasn’t running blind.

It was angry.

”Holy Light protect us,” Tulori Leufroy whispered, clutching at a pendant beneath his heavy winter tunic.

”How?” Serge Otker asked, his voice cracking in panic as he backed his horse several steps back from the edge of the ridge. ”We didn’t bring any priests to deal with that... that... demon elk,” he cried.

”It’s not a demon,” Reynold hissed, glaring at the young lord. ”Demons come at you with armor, weapons, and dark witchcraft. It’s just a beast. If you’re a man, then face it. Stop acting like a frightened little girl, or you can ride home now to play with your dolls.”

They were on the ridge to block the Elk’s path of escape, but the last thing Reynold wanted to do was to fight the beast on such a narrow trail, especially with this pair of young fools getting in his way. Unfortunately, the portly Otker heir’s outburst seemed to have attracted the elk’s attention, and Reynold swore under his breath while his hand tightened around the shaft of the long spear he carried for the hunt.

The elk stood in the shallow creek for a span of three or four heartbeats, water surging around its legs, its dark eyes sweeping the slopes on either side of the creek bed with an intelligence that seemed far too sharp for a mere beast. Steam poured from its nostrils and its ears swiveled toward the sounds of the beaters on the ridge behind it, then forward toward the horns that were sounding from the south.

For one terrible moment, Erling thought the bull was going to charge uphill toward his position despite how steep the slope up to the ridge was. The animal’s body shifted, its massive hindquarters bunching as it prepared to lunge up the eastern slope, and Erling’s hand moved to the arrow at his hip without conscious thought.

Then, before he could fit an arrow to the string, the relay hounds were loosed.

The sound reached his ears before he spotted them, a sudden eruption of deep-chested baying that tore through the fog from somewhere upstream. Three hounds, lean and long-legged, came streaking down the creek bed like pale arrows fired from three different bows, their paws kicking up spray as they closed the distance toward the bull with a speed that would have matched the charge of a warhorse.

The elk’s head snapped toward the sound. Its ears flattened. And then it moved, not uphill toward Erling and the lords, but south, along the creek bed, exactly as Sir Gilander and Owain Lothian had planned.

The bull’s first stride covered more ground than a horse at full gallop, its hooves striking the creek bed with a force that sent sheets of water and gravel spraying into the air. By the second stride, it was already pulling away from the hounds, its massive body somehow moving with both power and grace as it thundered down the creek, crashing through the shallow water and the skeletal alders with a sound like a cavalry charge.

The horns erupted again, the cascading relay of calls rolling south through the forest as each handler signaled which direction the elk was running. The tracker’s hounds bayed while the chasing dogs stretched out in desperate pursuit, rapidly losing ground to an animal that had no business being that fast running through the water.

From somewhere ahead, Erling heard the second relay of hounds being loosed, adding their voices to a chorus that echoed off every ridge and hollow near the creek.

And then, as quickly as it had begun, the sound began to fade.

The bull was running south, exactly where they wanted it to go, and the drive was carrying the pursuit away from the eastern slope where the five young lords sat astride their horses with their hearts hammering and their breath forming clouds in the frigid air.

The thunder of hooves diminished into a distant rumble. The baying of the hounds grew faint, swallowed by the fog and the timber. The cascade of horn calls moved further and further south, each repetition a little softer than the last, until the sounds of the chase were no more than a ghostly echo rolling through the creek like the memory of a storm that had already passed.

Silence returned to the eastern slope, broken only by the rush of the creek below and the heavy breathing of horses that were still trembling with the desire to run.

The young lords looked at each other across the fog-draped slope, their expressions ranging from exhilaration to stunned awe, or quiet relief, and it took several long moments for anyone to think of breaking the quiet that had just returned to the ridge.

It was, naturally, Serge Otker who spoke first.