“We don’t get paid to take chances, Your Arch-Reverence.” A guard spoke up before the king could.
A stag bounded past. Ortalis had his bow drawn and an arrow hissing through the air before Lanius even began to raise his bow. I am a hopeless dub at this, Lanius thought. I will always be a hopeless dub at this. Ortalis, meanwhile, whooped. “That’s a hit!” he called, and loped after the deer.
In the palace, Grus’ legitimate son seemed as useless a mortal as any Lanius had ever seen. Here in the field, he proved to know what he was doing. Following in his wake, Lanius saw blood splashed on leaves and bushes. He did not care for the pursuit of wounded animals. Killing beasts cleanly was one thing. Inflicting such suffering as this on them struck him as something else again.
It was something else for Ortalis, too—something he relished, as his excited chatter showed. Lanius would have sneered at his bloodlust— Lanius had sneered at his bloodlust in the past—but he’d also seen Anser get excited in the chase. The arch-hallow was mild as milk when he wasn’t hunting. The king didn’t understand the transformation. Understand it or not, though, he couldn’t deny it was real.
“Nice shot, Your Highness,” one of the beaters told Ortalis. “He went down right quick there.” It hadn’t seemed quick to Lanius, who brushed a twig from his hair as he came up. He didn’t think it had seemed quick to the stag, either.
Ortalis’ eyes glowed. He knelt beside the fallen deer. Its sides still heaved feebly as it fought to suck in air. Bloody froth showed at each nostril; Ortalis’ arrow must have punctured a lung. Drawing a belt knife, Ortalis cut the stag’s throat. More blood yet poured out onto his hands and the ground. “Ah,” he said softly, as he might have after a woman. Lanius’ stomach lurched. He turned away, hoping breakfast would stay down.
It did. When he looked back, Ortalis was plunging the knife into the deer’s belly to butcher it. The animal’s eyes were opaque and lusterless now. That obvious proof of death helped ease the king’s conscience along with his nausea. Ortalis went right on with the butchering. He seemed to enjoy it as much as the killing.
Looking up from the work, he remarked, “It’s a bloody job, but somebody’s got to do it.”
Lanius managed to nod. It wasn’t that Ortalis was wrong. But did a butcher have to do his work with such fiendish gusto? Lanius doubted that. He’d doubted it for years.
Getting back on the trail was a relief for him, if not for Ortalis. Anser had the first shot at the next stag they saw, had it and missed. He cursed good-naturedly, but with enough pointed comments to startle anyone who, after hearing him, might suddenly learn he was Arch-Hallow of Avornis.
Nodding to Lanius, Anser said, “Next one we see, Your Majesty, you can let fly first.”
“That’s all right,” Lanius said; the honor was one he would gladly have done without. But both the arch-hallow and Prince Ortalis sent him looks full of horror. Even his own guardsmen clucked disapprovingly. Without even knowing it, he’d broken some hunt custom. He did his best to repair things, adding, “I just don’t want a deer to get away—I’m not much of a shot.” The last part of that was true, the first part one of the bigger lies he’d ever told.
But, because he had a reputation for sticking to the truth no matter what, both Anser and Ortalis accepted his words. “Don’t worry, Your Majesty,” Anser said. “I missed, and the world won’t end if you do, too, as long as you try your best.”
“Of course,” said the king, who still couldn’t stomach the idea of shooting at an animal for the sport of it.
But, before long, he had to try. A magnificent stag stood at the edge of a clearing twenty or thirty yards away. The wind blew from the stag to the hunters; the beast, which depended so much on its sensitive nose, had not the slightest notion they were there. Reluctantly, Lanius drew his bow and let fly. The arrow flew alarmingly straight. For a bad heartbeat, he feared he’d actually hit what he aimed at. The shaft zipped over the deer’s back and thudded into the pale, parchment-barked trunk of a birch behind it.
The stag bounded away. But Anser and Ortalis’ bowstrings twanged in the same instant. One of those shafts struck home. The stag crashed to the ground in the middle of a leap. The arch-hallow and the prince both cried out in triumph.
And they both turned to Lanius. “Well shot!” Ortalis told him. “You spooked it perfectly. Now Anser and I have to see who got the kill.”
By the time they reached the carcass, the deer, mercifully, was already dead. It had two arrows in it—one in the throat, the other through the ribs. Ortalis had loosed the first, Anser the second. They began arguing over who deserved credit for bringing down the stag. “Perhaps,” Lanius said diffidently, “you should share the—” He broke off. He’d almost said blame. That was what he thought of the whole business, but he knew it wouldn’t do.
Even though he’d stopped, prince and arch-hallow both stared at him as though he’d started spouting the Chernagors’ throaty language. Then they went back to their argument. He wondered if he’d violated some other unwritten rule of the hunt.
Thinking of unwritten rules made him wonder if there were written ones. Poking through the archives trying to find out would be more fun than looking at flies beginning to settle in the blood that had spilled from the stag, and to walk across the eyeballs that could no longer blink them away.
Again, Ortalis got the privilege—if that was what it was—of butchering the deer. He made the gory job as neat as he could. Even so, Lanius saw, or thought he saw, a gleam of satisfaction in his brother-in-law’s eyes. It could be worse, the king thought. If he were hunting women, the way he’d wanted to, he’d butcher them after he made the kill.
He shivered. No, he didn’t think Ortalis had been joking about that, not at all. And he was anything but reassured when Grus’ legitimate son, after wiping his gory hands on the grass, licked the last of the stag’s blood from his fingers. Ortalis smacked his lips, too, as though at fine wine.
Anser and the beaters seemed to find nothing wrong with that. Lanius told himself he was worrying too much. He also told himself he would be glad to eat the venison the hunt was bringing home. He believed that. Try as he would, though, he couldn’t make himself believe the other.
Sestus lay by the Arzus River. When Grus’ army reached the city, the Menteshe had had it under siege for some little while. Their idea of besieging a town was different from Grus’ at Nishevatz. They didn’t aim to storm the walls. They had no catapults or battering rams to knock down its towers. But that didn’t mean they’d had no chance of forcing the place to yield. If the royal army hadn’t come when it did, they probably would have done just that.
They’d ravaged the farms around Sestus. Not a cow, not a sheep, not a pig survived. Not many farmers did, either. The Menteshe had trampled or burned most of the wheatfields within a day’s ride of the town. Vineyards and olive groves and almond orchards also went under the ax or the torch. The Arzus was not a wide stream. Menteshe on the banks had peppered with arrows the ships that tried to bring grain into Sestus. They hadn’t stopped all of them, but they had made skippers most reluctant to run their gauntlet. Little by little, Sestus had started starving.
Prince Ulash’s men didn’t put up much of a fight when the Avornan army thundered down on them. The nomads simply rode away. Why not? They could afflict some other city, and the devastation they’d left behind remained. Sestus would have a hard and hungry time of it now, regardless of whether it had opened its gates to the Menteshe.