Huge Ajax's Arc

Chapter 327 of 619

They rode out at first light and reached the burned grove by the second dusk. Past it the trees stood dead and gray. Rowan led, reading the ground where no one else could. He had grown up among the dryads and knew their woods as other men knew a road home. He pointed at a track pressed into the frost. "Pale beast fed here. Two hours back." He touched a patch of white fur snagged on bark. "Warm. Still soft." He said no more. He did not need to. Chalam knelt and opened his satchel. He rubbed sound-muffling oil on each man's boots, then his own. "Their kind hunts by heat and sound," he said. "The oil buys us silence. It does not buy us time." He crushed the dryad's pale flowers and smeared the paste across their coats. The scent cut through the rot. Ajax held his father's blade low and watched the dead trees. The fur beast came first. It broke from a stand of gray pines, low and fast on four legs, its pale coat rippling. It made no sound at all. Rowan loosed one arrow into its shoulder. The beast turned toward the strike, not the men, and Ajax understood then how it saw the world. He circled wide while it clawed at the shaft. He drove the blade up under its jaw and through the mouth. It dropped and did not rise. Rowan pulled his arrow free and cleaned it. "One," he said. "The shell-back is slower. It waits." He found it by the stream, half-buried in cold mud. Its shell was the color of wet stone and taller than a man's knee. When Ajax struck the shell, his father's blade skidded off and rang. The beast pulled its head in. Rowan circled to the far side. "It will show its neck when it feeds," he said. "Strike then. Not before." Chalam scattered crushed flowers upwind. The beast smelled the grove-scent and stretched its head out to graze the roots. Rowan raised his hand, then dropped it. Ajax drove the blade into the exposed neck. The shell-back thrashed once and went still. The four hired hunters came down from the ridge. No man was hurt. Ajax knelt by the two carcasses and ran his hand over the pale fur and the hard shell. Both were whole. Both would fill his shelves. "Bleed the fur beast where it lies," he told the hunters. "Keep the shell clean. Aldric wants it dry." He wiped the blade on his coat and stood. "We ride at dawn." Rowan looked north, past the dead trees, and said nothing. Chalam packed his satchel. Ajax had come for two beasts and had two. The problem that emptied his vault was answered. But the far woods held more than the dryad had named, and Rowan's silence told him the grove was not done with them.