Huge Ajax's Arc

Chapter 315 of 619

They moved north with the first hide lashed to the pack horse. The oil still held their steps quiet. Ahead, the ground rose and fell where the pair fed on live oaks. Ajax stopped the men behind a ridge of stumps. He knelt and laid out the plan again with his hand in the dirt. Smoke wide and to the left. Rowan on the neck. Ajax on the mouth, twice. The hired man with the broken arm stayed back with the horses. But the hurt man had gone gray. His arm swelled tight against the cloth. He shivered though the night was mild. Chalam crouched over him and pressed two fingers to his throat. "Bone's shifted," Chalam said flat. "He'll fever before dawn. We fight two beasts short a man, or we lose him." Ajax looked at the swollen arm, then at Rowan. Elara was two days south behind the walls. There was no healer here. He had brought a hunter with a broken bone into a fight he could not win. Chalam opened his satchel. He drew a small stoppered flask, not one of his numbered vials. "The keeper's cache," he said. "The healing draught. One use." He held it up. "I've carried it since the last seat." Ajax remembered it. Taken from the underground cell with the iron cuff. He had meant to save it for himself, or for Grayson at the gate. He looked at the hired man's face. "Give it to him." Chalam tipped the flask to the man's lips. The man swallowed. The change came fast. The swelling sank. Color returned to his cheeks. He flexed the fingers of his broken arm and stared at them, whole. "Set the bone straight while it's soft," Chalam said. Rowan pulled the arm true. It knit clean. The hunter stood. He picked up his spear. "I fight," he said. Now they were seven again. Ajax lit the flowers and set them wide to the left, downwind. The smoke drifted. He waved the men into position. Rowan climbed a leaning stump with his bow. Chalam poured the last of the oil across their boots. The ground split near the smoke. The first beast rose, blind, swinging toward the burn. Rowan's two arrows took the neck. The swing slowed. Ajax drove his father's blade into the mouth, pulled it free, struck the same wound again. The beast dropped without touching a man. The second rose behind it, drawn by the first one's thrashing. Rowan shot the neck. Ajax hit the mouth twice. It fell across the roots of a dead oak. They stood over two carcasses. No one bled. Ajax wiped his blade and looked at the healed hunter, spear still in his fist. He had spent the last draught to keep the man, and the plan had held. "Skin them," Ajax said. "Three hides ride home tonight."