Ch 16: THE GORING

Her second blow split the trunk and Marten’s next shot went wide as his branch veered from under him, the stone barely glancing off her, though he threw it with force. The tree fell slowly, lower branches cushioning the impact, and he hit the boughs before he hit the ground, saving him from broken bones. The boar watched him go down, her dark eyes glinting with awful calculations before she advanced. The pine boughs snapped under her hooves like matchsticks.

Tangled in the branches, sticky with sap, Marten barely had time to find his feet, never mind map an escape. He raised his hands, a show of surrender, just in case she really was something more than a common boar. His few remaining rocks he left in his pockets, not bothering to insult her or embarrass himself by pretending they could do her any harm. He supposed being gored by Bretenlande's mightiest boar made for a better death than being ripped apart by bloodghasts, succumbing to fever, or being crushed in a wyrm’s coils. Straightening up, he tried to meet the boar with dignity. Death had been chasing him for days. Perhaps it was time to admit there was no outrunning her.

With a clank of metal on metal, Fionnobhar got to his feet and approached from behind the boar.

“Hey, doc. You still alive?”

Marten didn’t answer, his eyes locked on the boar’s, who stared back at him with uncanny intelligence, like she contained all the wisdom of the woods, and Marten was nothing at all, like an insect that had outlived its brief season. He just hoped that when she killed him, it would be quick.

He heard something from the knight, but didn’t catch the words before Fionnobhar made a running leap for the boar and landed on her back, straddling her haunches, his sword raised high. With a yell, his sword in both hands, he angled the blade straight down and drove it into her back, just above the hip. The blade got stuck barely a handspan in, and she shook him off like shedding water. Fionnobhar was thrown sideways from her back, crashing through a willowy sapling before hitting the trunk of a larger tree and falling to the ground in a crunch of metal. She shook again, irritably, and the blade dislodged like it was nothing more than a thorn sticking her.

When she turned towards the knight with an expression of great contempt on her bristly face, Marten’s knees buckled as he was spared death yet again, as insensibly as the last three times. Weak-kneed, he tripped over the pine boughs as he untangled himself from the fallen tree, stumbling in his hurry to retrieve Fionnobhar’s sword.

The knight groaned and swore, but before he could pick himself up again, the boar reached him. With a snort, she bowed her head, sniffing him like an enormous dog. Fionnobhar grabbed her by one great tusk, and she jerked her head up and back, catching him against her snout. For an instant, the knight hung cradled by her tusks, and then, with a twist of her thick neck, she threw him aside. The metal of his armor screamed in protest as her tusks scored through it, and then he screamed in turn as they met flesh and bone. This time, when he hit the ground, there was no trying to get up again.

Marten stood frozen, holding a sword he hardly knew how to use. If Fionnobhar died, his curse could break. The witch’s dire warnings could be averted, if they’d been true at all. Marten could bury the heads from Fionnobhar’s bag of holding, return what little dignity they had, and put them to rest. He wouldn’t have to witness another murder.

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But this was the fourth time Fionnobhar had intervened to save Marten’s life.

“Fuck,” Marten breathed, and stumbled forward on legs that felt like liquid to put himself in between Fionnobhar and the boar.

“Please don’t kill him,” he whispered.

He held the sword in both hands, the tip resting on the ground as the boar stared him down. She was close enough that he could feel every gust of her breath, hot and damp against his sweaty skin, ruffling his shirt and hair.

“We meant no harm in your woods. We’ll leave immediately. I’ll make an offering to you or any deity that resides here. Let us go, and we won’t bother you again.”

Her tusks were streaked dark red with Fionnobhar’s blood. When she moved her head, the curve of one of them scraped against Marten’s chest. An ounce more pressure, and it would cut straight through his shirt to carve open his sternum. He bit his lip and held his breath to keep from moving and cutting himself against it.

Whatever the boar’s true nature, whether she could smell the witch’s curse on him when she sucked in a breath through those huge, round nostrils, Marten couldn’t say. The boar kept her secrets. She turned and walked away, casting Fionnobhar—crumpled, unmoving—one last contemptuous glance before disappearing back through the trees the way she had come. Marten was left holding the sword, gripped by the unshakeable conviction that she knew who they were, and everything about their encounter with the Wickshaw witch. He didn’t know why, or how, but he was sure of it.

When the boar was gone and he couldn’t hear her footsteps crunching over the forest floor anymore, he walked over to where Fionnobhar lay at the base of the tree where he’d been thrown.

He couldn’t immediately tell whether the knight was alive or dead. After a long minute, there came a scrape of metal as Fionnobhar turned his head ever so slightly to look up at Marten through his visor. One finger twitched weakly against the grass. Blood pooled under him from out of the ragged gashes in his armor, soaking into the soil.

“Hey,” Fionnobhar croaked. “You survived.”

“You barely did,” Marten replied, looking down at him.

“How bad is it?” Fionnobhar asked, sounding like he was fighting to keep his tone light.

Marten’s first instinct, his doctor’s instinct, was to fetch his tools and peel the knight out of that armor to see the extent of the damage. Time was of the essence when it came to surgical intervention. He had operated on soldiers in the battlefield before, and farmers caught in equipment accidents. They shared more similarities than not. He wasn’t squeamish, and didn’t shy away from injury, or performing his duties in a crisis.

“Are you going to help, or what?”

Something held him back. For the first time, all was quiet, and Marten had an advantage over the knight.

“We need to talk.”

“Okay. Let’s talk about how bad I just got gored, and what you can do about it,” Fionnobhar suggested, pain creeping into his voice. He tried to push himself to a seated position, and failed before he got one elbow under him.

Marten set the sword aside in the grass and crouched down before the knight, investigating the plates of his armor to see how they interlocked, and how badly they’d been damaged. Fionnobhar hissed in a breath at first contact, freezing under Marten’s fingertips.

“I have questions I want you to answer,” Marten said quietly, finding the edges of Fionnobhar’s breastplate and deftly unfastening them, like shelling a crab.

“Can they wait?” Fionnobhar asked weakly.

The narrower plates that covered his abdomen went next, peeling away from the thick leather tunic he wore underneath, like pulling back individual sections of rib one at a time. With the plates off, Marten could clearly see where the leather had been scored, and even without stripping Fionnobhar of his garments, he could make an accurate guess as to the depth and severity of those wounds. Fetching the knight’s cloak from where it lay by the fire, Marten put the fabric in Fionnobhar’s hands and pressed it over the gashes.

“Keep pressure on that,” he instructed, sitting back on his heels. “And no, they will not wait.”

“You’re seriously going to let me lie here and bleed out from a gut wound until you get what you want?” Fionnobhar asked incredulously, fingers clenched in his cloak as he struggled to staunch the bleeding. “That’s some torture-interrogation bullshit. I didn’t peg you for the type.”

“I'm not,” Marten replied. “But I’ve had a very trying few days.”