5. Renard
Renard
By the time the sun sets on the third day on the road to Hollowmire, I am certain I’m being followed.
Magnar is skittish, dancing in and out of the long, slanting shadows that dapple the forest floor, his breath coming sharp and visible in the chill of early autumn. Despite my layers of wool, leather, and armor, the cold seeps into my bones as deeply as if it were already winter.
We are already deep within the Verge. There is no moment of crossing, no ruined archway or standing stone to mark the place where sensible land gives way to this slow, watching wood.
Instead the change seems to happen unnoticed, until one looks up and realizes the birds have gone quiet and the leaves underfoot do not crisp so much as sigh—and it’s far from a comforting sound.
The canopy here is a riot of dying color—gold gone bruise-dark at the edges, red deepening toward the brown-black of dried blood—yet nothing about it feels like the satisfying end to harvest season or the calm, restfulness of winter setting in.
The crisp leaves above shift in the sweeping breezes, whispering against each other that there is more to this forest than meets the eye.
Suddenly, Magnar’s ears pin flat. He shies sideways so abruptly that pain shoots from my left hip down to my knee.
It’s an aching reminder that I’m much more used to walking alongside his plow these days, and I no longer ride as easily as I once did.
The years of hard armor and harder ground have taken their due from my body in small, persistent tolls.
I grit my teeth against the discomfort and steady him with a hand that is not as unshakable as it used to be.
“Easy,” I murmur, throat tightening around the words. It would be useless to ignore the fear needling me—a thousand tiny threads of wariness and unease, weaving together to form a tapestry of memory from the last time I was this deep inside the Verge.
Memories of what hides in these woods are more terrifying than anything I might now face down.
I could endure wolves, bandits, even a ravenous bear packing on weight for hibernation.
But I know that’s not all that lurks here, and the things that my mind has fought to purge from my memories—from my nightmares—wait just beyond my awareness.
Is it worth it to carry on with the fate of Valehar resting on my fatigued shoulders now?
Of course. Yet my unease persists all the same, swirling the nausea in my gut, leaving me with a headache and a mouth sucked dry of moisture.
It is nigh impossible to shake the sense that whatever tracks us does so without haste, mayhap even without hunger, as though my progress is merely an interesting diversion in a long and patient afternoon.
The ground is carpeted with fallen leaves, but they are riddled with damp and quiet beneath Magnar’s hooves.
There are dry-looking puddles of earth that would swallow us whole if we were to step into them, and more than once I have to dismount to lead him across the patches that look solid but shiver and shift under his weight.
My back protests every time I swing down, and worse when I climb up again.
When I was younger, I could ride from dawn to dusk, gut and slash with my heaviest broadsword, and sleep on bare earth without complaint.
Now, however, after three nights of broken rest and a diet of simple rations that are far from satisfying, my joints scream with every sudden movement and my hands tremble faintly as I grip the reins.
I miss, with a shame that sits particularly sour in my chest, my lumpy but comfortable mattress, the worn quilts sewn by my wife’s nimble fingers.
I miss waking to the sound of hens and the cow’s familiar lowing rather than to silence so complete it presses against the ears.
It feels like a cliché to admit it, but my exile suits me better than court ever did.
The farm is almost easy in its hard work, devoid of the constant anxieties of whether or not my blade enacted the right violence against the right people—the moral complications of court swirling around in my gut like sour ale.
My farm is honest, even if the roof on the manor house leaks when the spring rains arrive in a deluge, or the kitchen garden becomes overrun with aphids or white mold and the cabbages are riddled with worms every other year.
The aches at the end of the day are earned, not inherited from old battles or political miscalculations.
I feed who I can. I hitch my impressive warhorse up to a humble plow for wheat and oats and peas.
I muck stables, I repair fences. But gods, I sleep.
That is, when the nightmares give me a bit of respite. Still, even those aren’t as visceral as they used to be, and half the time I wonder if the terrors are actual memories or figments of a guilt-thick imagination.
Incredibly, I am still here, riding back in service to a kingdom that has already taken more from me than I’ve had to give.
Arden’s voice dogs me more persistently than whatever moves in these trees. You owe Valehar more than a single field, Renard. As though I haven’t already given it enough blood. As though he has not taken everything else.
As though the king—my king—did not die with my name still on his lips, not as an accusation but as a trusted friend. Something dull and heavy pulses in my chest, threatening to distract me from one of the more dangerous rides of my life.
I tighten my grip on the reins, the leather creaking softly in protest. Arden—the Regent—had worn his grief like a suit of glittering armor, convincing in its splendor, if not in its authenticity.
He spoke of curses and failing borders, of the starvation shambling along Valehar’s long-neglected edges, of villages thinning like hair on an old man’s crown.
He spoke, too, of redemption, though he dressed it in his palatable, yet false, language.
An end to exile. A restoration of title. A chance to do real good, Renard!
Bah! I don’t want his restoration. All I want is the small life I’ve carved out of my exile.
I want to watch the early morning mists drift over my fields, spend my afternoons with my knuckles deep in the soil, and build my community with the neighbors who see me not as a disgraced First Knight, but as a man who can be relied upon to show up when the well runs dry, or the pigs break out of the pen and need to be rounded up again.
But there’s no telling how long I have until the blight makes its way to my exiled land, and begins to touch even my fields.
More will die—especially the old and the young, the least deserving of nature’s cruelty.
Arden’s words haunt me as much as the damned specters in this cursed forest. What happens when my wheat comes up thick and glossy and completely indigestible?
When my apple trees bear fruit that won’t yield juice or cider?
What good will an abundant farm of inedible crops be, then?
After all the blood I’ve spilled, after swearing my oath to spill no more needlessly, how could I live with myself if I didn’t do all I could?
I won’t watch any more children stagger up to my gate, bearing the grayish cast from this curse that hollows from within, leaving the eyes dull and the pulse too quick before it gutters out entirely.
The only woman I’ve ever loved died with her bright green eyes dulled by hunger—her fingers locked around mine as though I could anchor her to a body that had already found passage to the spirit realm.
I was young enough, foolish enough then, that I believed my strength would suffice—that if I fought hard enough, rode far enough, found the right healer or herb or hidden court of magic, spent enough time on my knees begging the lofty gods for more time, I could wrest her back from whatever shadow claimed her.
Yet my strength did not—could not—suffice, and I have never been the same man since it failed so spectacularly.
The memories echo in my hollow chest like a stone dropped in a dry well, and for a moment the forest tilts unpleasantly.
A branch snaps behind us, startling me out of my sour manner and my melancholy.
It wasn’t the light crack of settling wood, but a deliberate break, close enough that Magnar surges forward without waiting for command. I barely manage to stay seated, my knee throbbing in protest where the old wound pulls against badly mended bone and stiffened muscle.
“Stand,” I bark, hauling him in with more force than is kind. He dances beneath me, foam flecking his bit, and my soft burn of guilt is quickly swallowed by irritation. We are both twitchy, and I have no right to expect him to be steadier than I am.
The undergrowth to our right shivers, branches bending on the saplings and ferns dancing with the movement as something reasonably large approaches.
It is too late for us to bolt, I think—neither of us wants to excite the instincts of something that desires chase.
Resigned, I draw my sword slowly, the blade whispering free in a sound that still sets my heart racing—only now, it is from dread rather than the thrill of battle.
The thing that steps onto the path is… is like looking into a mirror.
It looks like me, but a poor approximation of me, as if it is a portrait of me rendered by a child.
Its limbs are too long, its joints occasionally bending backwards in uneven rhythms as it slowly stands and staggers forward.
Its face—my face—is unsettlingly similar, from the yellow gold hair shot through with gray, to the thick brown and silver beard.
Its eyes are not my blue, however—they are cavernous black hollows that swallow the meager light around us.
The me-shaped thing’s mouth twitches, uncertain, before splitting open unnaturally wide to reveal a wet, red interior lined not with teeth but with something like pale, questing tendrils.