Knight of the Wolf

6: The Wanning Moon

As enticing as it would be to find the princess now and relay her whereabouts, Dev and Zoyla were in a far more dire situation than the princess would be for some time now.

They slept restlessly that night. The wolves had scattered during the full moon and were now calling out to one another far, far away. The howls still reached them, though.

Upon surviving the night, which was for Zoyla the first night ever spent under the stars, Dev offered a congratulatory (and partially apologetic) piece of jerky. Declining wasn't an option considering Dev's strict ration regimen.

Zoyla took a hardy bite and a vicious tear of her serving and said, "When we are back in civilization for good, I will marry the first chef that cooks me a meal with seasoning on it."

Dev offered her hand out, which Zoyla took. She rose from the floor with a grunt as her skeleton was forcibly cracked back into alignment. Zoyla rubbed at her neck with her free hand until Dev passed along their divvied supplies. Out of politeness, Dev tasked herself with carrying the heavier equipment, but even so, she offered to carry Zoyla's half somewhere between Xesnein and the neighboring town of Nanvin.

There was a forest wider and wilder than any local wood near the imperial city. The city, after all, was surrounded by a quilt of farmlands stitched together by deep gulleys and thin stretches of cypress. The woods they did have were ashy and tangled until the low sunlight pushed all foliage skyward.

Thus was the forest they dealt with now as the tracks carried them deeper and away from underbrush to clear, shaded fields divided by narrow tree trunks. A wolf wouldn't find its meal in such an area with no room to hide—unless its plan was to travel fast and far without barriers or borders.

With no place to hide in a forest such as this, their pursuer traveled at a distance greater than Dev's eyesight. Still, the sensation that crawled up both their spines brought their eyes back the way they came more than once since entering the forest.

"Is it just me or do you feel like we're being watched?" Zoyla asked.

Dev scanned the horizon on their left and right. "Could be. There could be other hellhounds in these areas," she said. When traveling solo, her father always said the wolves wouldn't attack an unarmed man. To a distant wolf, then, Dev and Zoyla now were as unarmed as unarmed gets.

Zoyla's interest piqued. "Have you hunted here before?"

"No. Bad hunting grounds," she said and gave a flippant wave at what was essentially a desert masquerading as a forest. "You won't find anything but small prey out here. One that size would be looking for fawn in meadows or glens."

"Oh," Zoyla said, and to the princess, she would have sound disappointed.

To Dev, her dry tone and curled lip translated as disgusted and judgmental. Dev's subtle digs at Princess Morrow's traveling tactics were starting to convince Zoyla that the princess wouldn't survive much longer on her own.

Dev tsked a little, hitching Zoyla's bag a bit higher on her shoulder. "Hellhounds can travel over 150 kilometers a day, so it could have reached the border by now, but it seems to me it's heading west. It might know about the Eastern Keep and is avoiding the patrols."

Since leaving Xesnein, they had taken an almost perfect perpendicular redirect more inland. They left the salty sea air behind, and were far from any of the major trade routes around the rivers. The princess was avoiding all cities, towns, and villages and had thus far been successful.

It confirmed for Dev that the beast's escape had been panic-stricken, which left for messy, obvious tracks. It had gone immediately north and only banked once seeing Xesnein, which would have suggested the beast was unfamiliar with the area. As a pseudo-human, the werewolf was probably a traveling stranger to the area—maybe to the entire Empire.