Page 7 of Valdemar

“From your mouth t’the gods’ ears,” Lesley said piously. “I’d’a sent for a mage or two, but I knew ’twas Midweek Day, and you were due by, so I set Chip to be watchin’ for you.” He cast an eye over his young child. “Job well done, Chip. Now back in house; boar’d make less than a mouthful out of ye.”

“Yes, Da!” the child chirped. But Restil was pleased to see that the mite didn’t just run off and leave the pony; the beast got its tack taken off, a quick rubdown, and was put in its stall before the child scampered out. Meanwhile the hands all assembled in neat ranks behind their master; this had happened often enough in the last ten years that everyone knew their job and their strategy, and they were as well-drilled as any of Kordas’s Guard. The last rank in the rear had the Squire’s boarhounds, one to a man, and all on a tight leash.

It was a far cry from the first two years. People had gotten hurt and even killed by these magic-touched beasts before they worked out an effective strategy.

“So,” Kordas asked. “The usual?”

Squire Lesley nodded. “Surround the thicket, use the dogs to scare it out of cover, and then as the gods decree.”

Kordas laughed. “A good way to say ‘no strategy survives contact with the enemy,’ eh, my friend?”

The Squire barely cracked something like a smile, then turned to his men. “Go get in place, lads, and be quiet about it. We don’t want the damned thing getting wind of you and rushing you afore we’re all set to deal with him.”

The men went out on the trot, their faces grim. Despite having done just this kind of hunt on a regular basis, the danger was still very high. A normal-sized boar could easily kill and main several men during the course of a hunt. A boar the size of a horse could do a lot worse than that.

“Afoot or a-horse?” Restil asked his father.

Kordas knitted his brows. “You’d be safer on a trained mount, but Stanzia is green. Afoot for both of us. Remember the contingencies.”

Restil nodded, and dismounted. He took Stanzia over to a clean farrowing pen in one corner of the barn and tied him up there, leaving him with a bucket of water and some straw to play with, slipping his bit, and removing his saddle. His father was doing the same in the opposite corner with Aura. Restil thought for a moment, then, deciding that it would do no worse to Stanzia than hurt his feelings, took leather straps out of a pocket on the saddle and hobbled his front feet. If the stallion decided to get up to mischief and chew himself loose or break the reins, he’d soon discover he wouldn’t be moving fast or far.

The Squire led the way, followed by Kordas, Restil, and four of the biggest men Restil knew. These men had boar spears of a size that might prove useful against a pig that size. Might. If the thing charged, even if the head could pierce that tough hide, it still might run up on that spear and kill the man.

But they weren’t there to attack the boar. They were there to help defend Restil and his father.

It wasn’t far to the thicket—more like virgin forest, actually—right at the edge of the Squire’s fallow fields. Well, “not far” by their current standards—his father’s protestations to the contrary, the current Barony covered about twice as much territory as the old Duchy of Valdemar because everyone had crop rotation in place, so there were “extra” fields. The hike wasn’t onerous, but it did involve going over the hedges around each field in the only way possible: stiles. A ladder up, a platform across the top, a ladder down. The stiles couldn’t be used by anything but a fox—foxes climbed very well—or the bigger hunting cats like pards. Fortunately, pards didn’t much like people. They liked briars even less, and not even the smell of delicious pig would tempt them into trying to negotiate a ladder meant for human hands and feet over the thorns.

But as soon as they came within earshot of the “thicket,” Restil heard something he didn’t like. Yes, there was the snuffling and grunting of a boar at rest . . . but there was a lot more snuffling and grunting than there should be for just a single boar.

Alarmed, he was about to say something, when the Squire rang the cowbell he was carrying as the signal to the men on the other side of this thicket to let the dogs loose.

A thunderous roar of barking erupted, followed by squealing bellows of anger and breaking branches, and something Restil knew he would be seeing in his nightmares for the next year came crashing out of the thicket into the cleared space between the forest and the hedge.

A boar the size of the largest workhorse he’d ever seen, two sows nearly the same size, and a mess of piglets the size of mastiffs.

A combination of terror and the strange exaltation that fighting always brought him ran through his nerves like a lightning bolt. He braced himself, and gathered his personal mage-energies. They would get only a single try at this.

“Over the hedge!” his father shrieked—though Restil knew Kordas didn’t include him in that. He was a Valdemar; he would stand beside his father and fight until everyone else was safe.

He heard the men making for the stile, but all his attention was on the monstrous pigs. “One! Two!” his father shouted, which was his signal for what to do, and on “Three!” they both threw up their hands, barked two words, and looked away, closing their eyes to save their sight as light exploded all around them.

Restil immediately looked back up and saw the sows and boar reeling back in confusion, partly stunned. He didn’t waste any time. He screamed another word of power and threw his hand forward as if he was throwing a spear. A lance of fire shot from his hand right into the nearest sow’s eye. She threw up her head in a squealing scream, then dropped dead as the fire burned its way into her brain.

His father had done the same with the boar; the boar’s skull was thicker, and it screamed and shook its head wildly. Restil made a casting, looping motion with his hands at the creature’s front feet, magically binding them together before it could charge. It tried to anyway, tripped, and fell to the ground with the impact of a toppling tree. Then he and Kordas attacked the wounded eye together, and between the two of them, they penetrated the skull and the beast died with a final screech.

Restil looked for the third pig, but she had decided this was too much for her, and fled, with quite a number of the piglets—the ones that weren’t stunned and blinded—pelting after her, as fast as they all could run.

He and his father sagged against each other while the Squire’s men scrambled back over the hedge and made short work of the piglets. They might be the size of full-grown natural boars, but they had none of the aggression and didn’t yet know how to defend themselves.

He had just gotten his breath back when the rest of the men and the mastiffs made their way back to them. “Send for the butchers, lads,” the Squire said with grim satisfaction, and then everyone looked expectantly at Kordas.

His father smothered a sigh, and managed to mostly hide his pained expression. “Tonight,” he said, with a false heartiness, “we eat pork!”

There was a cheer, and an answering cry of “Tonight we eat pork!” Kordas just shook his head a little. That line had become an ongoing thing across the entire settlement, and there was nothing Father could do to stop it.

“That must have taken the wind out of ye,” the Squire observed, as the spearmen lashed piglet hooves together and slid the spears between them to carry them out, while the mastiffs and their handlers made the climb over the stile to get back to the Hall and summon the butchers for the boar and sow. “Reckon you ought to head back, and not press your luck today. I’ll send a piglet or two up to the Palace.”

“Manor,” Kordas corrected, weakly.