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Thadecus was a good king because he promoted peace while nevertheless maintaining a strong army, and Lucan was proud to serve him.
Lucan had been warned of some of the stranger customs the king was given to enforcing and considered himself prepared, though most of the warnings were delivered in hints and suggestions rather than outright explanations.
There was but one sight at the assembled hunt that could be considered to be more compelling than the king himself. This was the first time Lucan had ever been in the presence of Forcehunds, the traditional beast of the Kingdom of Force. Thadecus had taken the stag as his personal insignia, but it was the Forcehund that represented the kingdom itself.
There were only three of the beasts present, but each and every one of them was larger than a horse and rider combined, great, raven black, slavering creatures sniffing at the air and straining at the chains attached to their handlers. Three burly handlers per lunging, snarling beast were still barely enough to keep them under control.
Lucan could not take his eyes off them. Forcehunds were incredibly rare. The kennels at the castle used to burst with them, but Forcehunds only bred in battlefields among bodies of the fallen. The king was hoping the gore of the hunt would excite them into breeding, but the prevailing wisdom was that until a true battle took place, there would be no new pups.
The day had begun cold and was about to become a great deal colder. The hunt had not been scheduled for a warm, pleasant day. Thadecus liked his hunts to be a rite of passage. They were not designed to be easy, or pleasant. They were designed to make the men who took part stronger and manlier for the effort.
So it was that Lucan watched his monarch remove his gloves, rip his gambeson from his body, and hurl his undershirt after both of them. Having stripped naked to the waist, he stood defiant to the elements and donned his golden circlet crown, a simple band which marked him as king, but would not interfere with the business of the day.
“Shirts off, gentlemen! You need not declare your loyalty to me via tabard! I know who my boys are! The stag has the elements on his skin, and so shall we!”
One given to arguing might point out that a stag had a pelt and fur and natural grease which made him almost watertight, but nobody given to arguing had been invited to the hunt.
The gathered knights had no choice but to follow the king’s lead, including Lucan, who found himself shivering in the bitter cold, now dressed in nothing but leather breaches and boots.
“Cold!?” Thadecus laughed, knowing the answer was obviously yes. “Let us warm ourselves!”
He grabbed a flagon of mead from the nearest courtier and drank it down in what appeared to be one draught, simply opening his throat and consuming it in one long go. He cast the empty flagon aside, biceps rippling with the careless motion, sprang onto his horse, and urged it toward nearby dense forest at speed.
The rest of the knights were forced to follow suit in haste, the slower among them left tossing off tunics, tabards, and in some cases, mail, to follow their king into the wilds beyond.
The Forcehunds bayed with excitement, their handlers dragged behind them. Lucan had not noticed at first, for the beasts themselves were so magnificent that anything or anyone behind them paled into irrelevance, but the handlers were standing on sleds of a kind. As the Forcehunds lunged after the king, the chocks keeping the heavy wood panels in place were discarded and the sleds rocketed in the weight of the oversized canines, the handlers standing single file behind one another. The first had the reins in his hands, the second had the reins as a secondary grip, while the third wielded a bow.
Seeing a Forcehund sled in motion was the most astonishing sight of Lucan’s life. The agility of the riders was incredible as the polished wood undercarriage slid sideways a great deal of the time, quite literally anytime the Forcehund took a sharp turn, which was often.
Horses thundered in their wake, hooves pounding across the fresh green turf as the hunt began in earnest, horns blowing from shirtless outriders as the King’s contingent made absolutely certain that every animal within a hundred miles heard them coming.
The hunt concluded around lunchtime. Not because they had caught anything, but because they had reached the great clearing in the forest where King Thadecus liked to feast.
The Forcehunds were also content to rest, having run off much of their energy. Two of the riders on the sleds had broken limbs during the mad dash through the forest, in which the sleds would occasionally catch on a tree or root and the riders would become projectiles.
