Huge Ajax's Arc

Chapter 417 of 619

The iron hafts stood ready beside the seam. Chalam knelt with his chalk and lodestone. Rowan drove the first spear into the split rock with the flat of his axe. Ajax pressed his cut palm to the cold stone and let his blood run into the crack. "Now the words," Chalam said. He spoke them low, one line at a time. The staff glowed at the tip. The lodestone hummed under his hand. Elara stood over him, her band bright, ready to blind the thing if it broke loose. The ground shook once. Then it went still. Chalam laid the last iron across the seam and pressed it down. The cold under Ajax's palm faded. The rot smell thinned. "It's sealed," Chalam said. He sat back and gripped the staff. "Six rings now, not three. It sleeps. It won't wake in our lifetime." He looked at the staff for a crack and found none. "The wood held." Rowan crouched and pressed his palm to the soil again. "The cold's gone," he said. "The trees are dead, but the rot stopped spreading." He stood and looked north. "Nothing else moves out here. This was the last of it." Ajax wrapped a strip of cloth around his cut hand. The threat that drove the beasts south was buried again, far from his walls. He had come to end it, and it was ended. "We ride home," Ajax said. "But not the way we came." He looked at the dead grove, then at Rowan. "We came in empty-handed. We're not riding back that way. Find us game on the return road." Rowan nodded. He knew the eastern route, greener, with living trees and running water. "Deer feed there in the mornings," he said. "We swing east and cross the low creek. I'll take two by dusk." Elara let her band dim. Her shoulders eased. "Good," she said. "I've spent enough magic on death. I'd rather help skin something we eat." They mounted and turned east. Rowan led them off the burned ground onto a trail that smelled of pine instead of rot. By late afternoon he raised a hand and slid from his saddle. He crept ahead, bow drawn, and dropped a buck at the water's edge. A second came to the sound and he took it too. Ajax helped haul both deer to the creek bank. They gutted and bled them there, then lashed the carcasses across the spare horse. The men filled their skins from the cold creek. Chalam washed the chalk from his hands. Ajax looked at the meat, the full skins, the quiet woods. The ritual was done. The north was sealed. And he was riding home with food for his table, not just a story of a hole in the ground. "Home," Ajax said. "We eat well tonight." He turned his horse south and led them back toward Black Oak.