The stag nodded. "Here." His voice was rasping, half choked.
As the draconians arrived in the clearing, he half-fell off the trail and sank down on the grass a few lengths away.
A draconian saw him and called, "Captain."
The lead draconian shouted in triumph and leaped off the trail. The others followed.
The draconian cried, "Pride of kill belongs to Captain Zerkaz."
The stag reared up. "Pride, it seems, is universal, Captain. So is kill."
He punched forward with a hoof. Zerkaz had time to screech with pain before his heart ruptured and his body turned to stone. It wavered once, but remained standing.
While the soldiers gaped, the stag charged another, head lowered.
He had forgotten that he had but a single horn, not antlers. As he pierced the draconian, the dying soldier brought his sword down as hard as he could at close quarters. The horn cracked all the way into the stag's skull.
He staggered back with closed eyes, barely noticing as the second soldier turned to stone. A third, sword out, was facing him, but the others had closed behind him and stood almost touching each other, staring into the field. Their blades wavered, almost trembled.
Around them, dead human warriors, Darken Wood's best guard, were rising, at last ready to fulfill an old promise. Beside them stood King Peris in full battle gear a thousand years old.
The king's armor was white silver over steel, decorated in rubies, for the blood of enemies, and emeralds and sapphires, for an archer's clear eyes. It was, as the stag had often noted, largely ornamental. Perhaps that was why the king and his body of men had once failed to guard against a real menace.
The soldiers of the dead king writhed up from the grass, unbraiding from it as though their bodies were recomposing. Swords in hand and no shields, they fell into a battle line; their empty eyes showed no mercy, no hatred, and no hope.
The stag cried in what voice it had, "Forward!" It leaped awkwardly and took a sword full in the chest as it punched a third draconian. As the sword withdrew, the stag made no sound at all.
Peris the King leaped over the falling animal. "I, not you, lead my men, beast. Forward!" The troops of the dead advanced, and the draconian ranks, weakened already, wavered.
The battle was like some deadly mime. The dead's weapons made no noise — yet their attackers fell, bleeding green liquid and turning stony in anguished poses. Blows against the dead passed through — yet many dead spiraled back into the carrion-tainted earth, and their lightless eyes glowed with an odd relief as they sank.
Forces were in disorder, yet few commands were needed; the dead fought as they had for so long, and the draconians fought for their lives. Except for a few cries of anger and pain from the draconians, the only other sound was the slow fall of stone bodies as, one by one, thedraconians fell to earth clutching unseen wounds and half twisting scaley faces in agony. Starlight flickered off real and ghostly weapons; bodies twisted or toppled into grassy shadows and were bodies no longer.
To an onlooker it might have seemed some strange dance without music. It was a war with little sound and no corpses, a battle for nightmares.
Through it all walked the king, his sword flashing right and left at arm's length. By himself, in the brief fight, he accounted for three draconians, and his heart seemed to beat again with his own pride as they dropped to the right and left. His arms felt, not the endless weariness of the accursed dead, but the growing soreness and strain of a living warrior. His eyes flicked back and forth alertly, noting even how a sweet night wind ruffled the grass into which allies and enemies were falling.
Ahead of him a draconian crouched over the prone stag, bringing a sword down with all the force he could above the near-motionless neck. The stag had not even looked up, dust and chaff barely moving in its nostrils.
The king dove forward, sword aimed at the draconian's heart. He made no attempt to parry the descending sword as it passed through his ornamental armor and into him.
His own blow took effect a moment later; the draconian doubled over, gasping, and froze that way, a corpse carved from a boulder. The king, carried by his own momentum, rolled against the stone body and winced with the pain. "I'll have a bruise tomorrow," he thought vaguely, unsure after all these years what a bruise felt or looked like.
He lay still and listened, hearing nothing but the stag's labored breathing. He struggled to his feet, barely able to hold his sword but aware of triumph and of great pain.
The stag opened his eyes. "Peris. The draconians?" "Dead." Never, in Darken Wood, had the word been said with such satisfaction.
"An unusual way to end a hunt, with dead hunters." "You have said so before." The king knelt, taking the stag's head on his lap. The stag's chest wound, pulled free of the ground, re-opened, but the king paid no attention. "You have often said that at a hunt's end the hunter should be alive, the quarry dead."
"I have often been insulting." His eyes blurred; with great effort he shook his head and cleared them angrily. "What will happen now?"
"If I know soldiers, the commanders who ordered the search of Darken Wood will decide to delay another search until they feel they can risk further loss. They will also hope that their quarry, the questing party of the other night, appears elsewhere, as someone else's responsibility." He shuddered. "At any rate, we will have saved this part of the world for a while — if, as they say, I know soldiers."
"You know soldiers well. You lead them still better."
"Thank you." The king sat down heavily by the bleeding stag. "A satisfying night, but not an easy one. I have been wounded."
"Recently?" The stag grunted as its forehead horn, cracked by the sword-blow, split all the way to the skull.
"Tonight, in fact."
"At any other time, I enjoy a joke — »
"Seriously." Red leaked through the holes in the king's armor, as though the rubies were melting. "I had forgotten how painful this was."
"You could have asked me." The stag raised its pain wracked head. Now the split horn sagged apart, its cleft gaping, and exposed bone at its root.
"I could have," the king agreed. "It seemed rude." He spoke with difficulty. "It seems I have fulfilled a pledge and will die in service."
The stag said, "I also." He added, "Could you help me over to the last standing draconian? I would not mind dying with such memorial."
The king, gasping, carried the shuddering body of the stag to the foot of the standing draconian. "He has — " He coughed.
"Can you speak no more clearly than that? I seem not to hear well just now." The rumble of the moving horns covered all sound.
The king braced himself and said distinctly, "This one has a hoof-print on his chest. Yours?"
"I would nod, but I have a headache." Blood ran from his split forehead. As though watered, the twin horn-shards sprouted buds of antlers.
"Then he will wear my marks as well." Holding the stag with one arm, the king removed his own crown and placed it on the stone figure before sliding wetly down its side to the grass.
The stag rasped, "Either I am overly sensitive by nature, or this seems harder than usual." Blood was flowing darkly around the dust in his chest wound. "Could you not distract me?"
"I could try." The king tilted his head back in pain as he inhaled, and sang in a quavering voice:
"For every wraith who breaks his faith
must wander without cease
and, cold, perform what he did, warm,
and never rest in peace.
He coughed, and a hairline of blood ran from the corner of his mouth. The stag, looking up through filmy eyes, took up the song for him:
so, every night the stag betrays
the love he could not keep