Ch 15: THE BOAR QUEEN

Marten leapt to his feet, shoving back from the fire in alarm as he reached for his satchel. He had no time to unroll his tools and take up his scalpel before the thing was on them, but luckily, Fionnobhar was faster to draw his weapon.

Two piglets darted out from the trees to stand at the edge of the clearing, jostling each other as their noses twitched, sniffing the fire smoke. They were light brown and rough-haired, with dark stripes running lengthways down their backs and along their sides, gradually breaking up into oblong spots.

Fionnobhar relaxed his stance. “You guys are lucky,” he informed them, lowering his sword. “We’ve already got enough meat to last for days, and I’m not hanging around long enough to smoke you dry.”

The piglets grunted and chirped in response to his address, bumping each other’s shoulders and switching their tails, as if daring the other one to approach and find out what would happen.

They were charming. Marten didn’t trust them.

“You should run them off,” he said to Fionnobhar in a low voice, “before their mother finds them here.”

“What’s she going to do?” Fionnobhar asked sarcastically. “Gore me to death?” But he raised his sword again, less to menace the little beasts than to direct them back, like a shepherd’s crook. “Go on, get out of here. You heard the doctor. Your mommy’s too big and scary for him, so you’ve got to go find some other campsite to crash.”

The piglets shuffled in place for a second until Fionnobhar actually advanced, at which point they immediately squealed and turned tail, scampering back towards the trees, though they seemed more playful than frightened. Marten didn’t care whether they were more afraid or entertained by the knight, as long as they did it somewhere far away from him.

As soon as they disappeared back into the undergrowth, Fionnobhar sat down heavily on the rock he’d claimed as his seat by the fire, sheathing his sword again. “Little pests just wanted to steal my mutton.”

That was probably true—the roast meat smelled delicious, if strangely fishy, given its original mauling from the wyrm—but it was closer to cannibalism than Marten was comfortable dwelling on, in light of recent events.

He was three bites into his own portion when something enormous crashed through the trees towards them. He flinched back, his body remembering every horror he’d been subjected to since leaving Easton. Beside him, Fionnobhar cursed as he dropped his meat in the ashes.

At the edge of the clearing, saplings snapped and bent underfoot, stood the full-grown mother boar. With heaving breaths, the bristles on her flanks caught the firelight to paint her red like a war machine, her tusks curved and glistening, and her beady eyes glinting like coals as she stared them down.

“Oh, she’s giant,” Fionnobhar breathed reverently, standing up and easing his blade from its sheath so slowly that it hardly looked like he was moving at all.

With equal care, Marten backed away, not rising from his crouch, to put the fire between himself and the boar.

The fire was pitifully small in comparison to the beast that stood glaring at them. She was monstrously huge, her two foremost tusks each as long as Fionnobhar’s sword, with shorter, secondary tusks curling out from behind them. If they stood side by side, her shoulder would reach Marten’s chest, and she was burly, packed dense with muscle, with her coat prickly and as thick as any armor. Marten felt far more afraid of her than he had the wyrm, which, for all its teeth and muscles, had been a pathetic thing, out of its element.

The boar, meanwhile, was a warrior queen of her forest. Fionnobhar and Marten had trespassed into her territory, and neither boars nor warrior queens were known to suffer intruders lightly, no matter how unintentional their intrusion had been.

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Marten had a fleeting, panicked thought that they should have apologized to the piglets before sending them away, begging the little brutes not to betray their location. He had just enough time to recognize the ridiculousness of that before the boar charged.

Fionnobhar met her with a roar, his sword at the ready, and they clashed together like they were jousting, his blade and her tusks. They passed by in opposite directions, each skidding to a halt against the tangled dry meadow grass and fallen leaves. Fionnobhar’s sword had glanced harmlessly off the boar’s mighty shoulder, unable to penetrate her thick hide to leave so much as a scratch. She whirled back around to face him, snorting gusts of hot air, and Fionnobhar mirrored her, holding his blade before him in both hands.

“Aim for the eyes and the snout,” Marten advised, keeping close to the fire as he inched his way towards the trees.

“Fucking genius,” Fionnobhar replied through gritted teeth. “I never would’ve thought of that. Thanks. You want to get in here and try it yourself?”

Marten didn’t have anything in his satchel he could remotely weaponize against the boar, but perhaps if he could find a fallen branch and light the end, it might work as a brand to keep her at bay.

Boars weren’t known for their willingness to back down from a fight once it was underway, no matter what weapons or firebrands were involved. If Fionnobhar didn’t kill her, she was almost certainly going to kill both of them. Marten’s only defence was escape, and the curse had hobbled him, forcing him to stay in danger’s reach.

“Can you drive her back far enough that we can get up a tree?” he suggested desperately.

The boar scraped her hooves against the ground, lowered her head, and charged again. This time, when they clashed, they didn't part. Fionnobhar caught her tusks against the edge of his sword like a duelist, and they held each other like that, locked in place.

But the boar outweighed Fionnobhar ten to one, and his bulk and his armor barely slowed her down as she shoved him back like he was nothing, tossing her head to dislodge him and throw him to one side. He hit the ground hard in a clatter of metal, his sword knocked from his grip to land a yard away from his outstretched hand.

Marten stared at the weapon, sweat from the fire prickling down the middle of his chest. The boar was between him and the sword, and even if he could reach it, he didn’t have the training to wield it. Going up against the boar was tantamount to suicide. The beast paused, looking from Fionnobhar over to Marten, gauging their respective threats. When Marten flinched back, she snorted and returned her attention to the knight, who was groaning as he tried to regain his feet.

He couldn’t win. Fighting a common boar without trained and armored hounds or specialty weapons had killed many accomplished hunters. To fight a boar of this enormous size, like some wild god of the forest—they didn’t stand a chance.

But maybe, Marten thought sickly, that wasn’t such a bad thing. He couldn’t kill the witch of Wickshaw a second time to break his curse, but perhaps killing the knight would do the job.

He had never wanted anyone to die on his account. He’d dedicated his life and studies to preserving and extending life. But, based on what little time they’d spent together, he wasn’t sure the world wouldn’t be a better place without Fionnobhar in it.

With a vicious grunt, the boar rocked up on top of Fionnobhar, pinning him to the grass with one split hoof. He lay trapped on his back like a beetle, flailing and shoving at the boar’s foreleg in an effort to shift her off, but she bore down with more weight until his armor creaked, and he gasped, ceasing his struggles. The boar could crack him like an egg, punching through his hard, outer shell to stamp down on the soft yolk within, and it would barely take her any effort. Marten certainly couldn’t stop her, but if she killed Fionnobhar—Fionnobhar, to whom Marten still owed his life—there would be no one to stand between her and Marten, next.

Swearing, Marten stooped to collect a handful of rocks from the fire’s edge, shoving them in the pockets of his borrowed trousers before making a dash for the nearest likely-looking tree. He aimed for a taller, older one than the saplings, one with enough branches low on the trunk that he could climb up. The first tree to meet his standards was a scrappy pine, and he launched himself into it like a cat, gracelessly scrambling up as he prayed the boar wouldn’t look his way. When he was a few yards up, he turned around, clinging to the trunk as he peered out through a gap in the branches. Fionnobhar was still alive; he hadn’t heard the metal crunch yet.

“Hey!” he shouted at the beast, and threw the first rock, striking her squarely in the temple. It hardly could have bothered her more than a fly. Shaking her head, she locked eyes on him, and steam blew from her nostrils as she glared.

“Leave him be, and we’ll go back to the road tonight,” Marten bargained. “We won’t set foot in your woods.”

Turning from the knight, the boar made her way towards the pine, her head low like a battering ram.

She couldn’t reach him, Marten assured himself, taking aim with a second stone. Even if she reared up, she couldn’t climb high enough to get him, and she was hardly built for standing on two legs in the first place.

But she wasn’t concerned with trying to reach him, high in the branches. Instead, she shouldered her full weight into the trunk and the pine groaned and swayed, its core creaking alarmingly. She meant to bring the tree down to her level, and Marten with it.