by M. D. Elster
“Shall we begin, Your Highness?” he says to the Raven King, once he has collected all the responses.
“On with it!” the Raven King declares, then abruptly halts. “WAIT!” he shouts. Everyone in the room freezes. “I know how we can include the human! She can tell us what the answer is to be!”
Several creatures shoot me dubious looks, but all nod their heads in agreement.
“Very clever, Your Highness,” Squire Cook compliments the king.
“I know. And now — out with it, girl! What’s to be the answer? Whoever guesses closest shall be our winner.”
“Beg your pardon?” I say, not comprehending.
“The riddle,” the Raven King says impatiently. “YOU have to decide what the answer is.”
“Surely you have an answer in mind, don’t you… Your Majesty?” I ask.
“Ugh! Humans are ever so slow — I don’t know why I bother! Now… I say give us an answer, girl! Every riddle has an answer… simply find it in your brain!”
I am stymied, and can’t think straight, put on the spot. I can see the king growing angrier with me by the minute. “Well, uh… let’s see now…” I say, trying to think. What is a king’s favorite number… I contemplate. What is a king’s favorite number… a king… numbers… The four suits of the playing cards pop back into my brain. “Well,” I say cautiously, trying to reason it out, “I can’t remember if jacks, queens, and kings are all worth the same amount… I think perhaps they are…”
“What?” the Raven King quips, looking insulted. “What is this nonsense? Worth the same? In what sense? How dare you! Of course they’re not!”
I realize my mistake. “Of course,” I say. I think to myself. “Well, then, to assign them all different numbers, if ten is ten, and a jack is eleven, and a queen is twelve… I’d say… thirteen?”
“Thirteen?”
“Thirteen.”
“Hmph,” says the Raven King. “Curiously reasoned. “Does anybody know what this human is babbling about? Jacks are eleven and queens are twelve?”
“No, Sire.”
“Her logic is a mystery, Sire.”
The Raven King sighs and shakes his feathers. “Fine, then! Tonight we abide by the backwards logic of a human! Thirteen it is! To tell the truth… I rather like the number thirteen myself…perhaps the girl is onto something!” He turns to Squire Cook.
“Squire Cook!” the Raven King caws. “Read off the answers! Let us see if we have a winner among them!”
Squire Cook reaches into the pile of papers and begins unfolding them and reading them off, one by one. “Four… Nine… oh, dear — someone said one-hundred and ninety-three — how crafty! Eight… Twenty-one… oh, here we have it on the nose, Sire: THIRTEEN!”
“Excellent!” the Raven King lights up. “Who wrote that one?”
“Lord Rigby did, Your Highness.”
All heads turn in the direction of Lord Rigby. For a creature who has been declared the guest of honor, he immediately looks stricken.
“But, Sire…” he pleads. “I’d already forgotten that was what I’d written. I had no reason for it; it wasn’t even very clever. I wasn’t thinking!”
“Oh, on the contrary, Lord Rigby!” the Raven King cries. “You were thinking! You got the answer on the nose! I hereby declare you the winner of tonight’s battle of wits! Now drink up the remainder of your sharpberry wine; we’ll want to send you on your way!”
Everyone applauds. Lord Rigby looks at though he is going to be sick.
“Well? Lord Rigby?” the Raven King proceeds to nudge him. “You are our glorious winner. If I don’t happen to have the chance again, may I say? — I have appreciated your service over these years. And now… off with you! I’ll make certain you get your full hour’s head-start…”
Lord Rigby stands and looks around the room for a moment, as though to seek out a friendly face. No one meets his eye. His mouth flutters open for a beat. Gathering himself, he closes it. Realizing it is time to face the music, he lifts his glass as though to toast everyone in the room, and downs the last of the black liquid remaining there. He gives me a murderous look — for picking the number that sealed his fate, I suppose — then he turns, and hurries out the door.
I am unsure what I have just witnessed, but I have a feeling it has everything to do with the hunt.
“Where did he go?” I ask Mr. Fletcher. I’m fairly certain I know the answer, but I hope I’ve misunderstood.
“What was that? What did the young human ask?” the Raven King bellows. “Speak up, girl, if you have a question for my court!”
“I only asked… where did Lord Rigby go, Sire?”
“Why, as the guest of honor, he is to be our prey tonight, and so has run into the woods to hide, just as I willed it! Don’t be daft!”
“You hunt… your fellow creatures?” I ask, still in disbelief.
“Of course. A hunt is only as interesting as the prey is clever! So we have a little game, a winner is picked, and he is given an hour-long head start and a rucksack stocked with supplies. Which I feel is more than fair. Is it not?” He looks around at his subjects, all of them lounging about the room, all of them desperately glad he or she has not been chosen.
“More than fair, Your Majesty!”
“Long live the Raven King and his hunt!”
“Now it is Lord Rigby’s ingenuity against our own.” The Raven King clears his throat and continues. “If our prey eludes the hunters until the clock strikes midnight, he may return to the palace and live to hunt another day.” He sniffs and looks at me with irritation. “It is a very reasonable game, I assure you, young human. We enjoy a great deal of pleasure in this sport, prey and hunter alike.”
“I see,” I murmur, feeling distinctly horrified.
“Now!” the Raven King shouts, raising his voice again, “We shall wait one hour, out of respect and consideration for our dear Lord Rigby. Let us hope he is every bit as clever as he has presented himself to be this evening!”
“Huzzah!” cheer the courtiers.
I glance around the room. There is a clock on the mantle over the fireplace, and another — a grandfather clock — ticking at the far side of the room. With a jolt, I notice something odd.
“Are the clocks ticking backwards?”
“Of course they are,” the Raven King snorts. “As I decreed, that is the proper direction. I grew bored with forward. Forward is so dull.”
I have stopped trying to make sense out of the Raven’s tyrannical decrees. The hour hand points to just left of the five… which means we are meant to begin our hunt when it reaches the four, and then Lord Rigby has four hours to keep himself alive.
“Why don’t we pass the time by asking the human to tell us about herself?” Lady Albin recommends.
“Ah, yes,” the Raven King replies. “Do tell us something about yourself, young lady,” he says to me. “For instance, what is your rank in your world? Are you a queen, or perhaps a lady of the court back in the land of Loozy-Anna?”
“Oh.” I am too horrified and nervous to make small talk, but I understand I must make an effort anyway. “No, Your Highness. I am not a queen, or even a lady. We don’t… have so many grand royal courts such as you have here.” I pause, remembering certain details about my stepfather that have somehow slipped my mind. “However, my stepfather is descended from a noble family in France. He has a title, as a matter of fact.”
“Hmm… I see. But you — you are a mere commoner in your land?”
“I suppose so, yes.”
“Are you apprenticed to any craft?”
“Your Highness? I beg your pardon?”
“As a commoner, don’t you have to make yourself useful somehow by adopting an occupation of some variety? That is how it works amongst the commoners of this land.”
“Oh! Yes — of course,” I say, flustered. I do believe the king is asking me what I want to be when I grow up. “I am not yet at th
e age of apprenticeship,” I answer him, “but I will be soon.”
“And you will have to choose a craft to study?”
“Yes,” I say. “I guess so.”
“And what do human girls tend to study as their craft?”
“Some become nurses or maids or teachers. A few become artists. Quite a lot get married and become mothers,” I say.
“Is that what you will do, Anaïs?”
“I…” I stammer. “I have always wanted to become a doctor,” I blurt out, a bit surprised by my own naked honesty. “I have wanted to be a doctor ever since I was a very little girl.”
“Most intriguing,” Chancellor Overton comments. He blinks at me with a fresh wave of inspection. “From what I understand, doctors have to be quite clever in your world.”
“Yes, they do,” I say. “They go through rigorous studies. And some might say a female doctor has to be even more clever still.”
“Quite so, quite so…” mutters the Raven King. Our chatter continues in this vein, until finally the clock strikes four. When that happens, I am instantly forgotten and everyone jumps to his or her feet, excited and bubbly and feeling very alert from all the sharpberry wine.
“Ladies and gentlemen!” the Raven King booms, “I bid you: To the hunt!”
And with that, everyone hustles out of the cozy library towards the stables, where, one by one, we are helped onto our steeds, the hounds are released, and we set out, galloping into the dark woods… in pursuit, I can only presume, of a very terrified Lord Rigby.
CHAPTER 12.
There is a full moon out. I don’t know much about hunting so I cannot say whether this lunar phase is to Lord Rigby’s advantage (I assume it is not), but it is a large, luminous moon and under it the snow glitters brilliantly. We gallop through the trees, the chilly night air making my nose and cheeks tingle. The snowy woods are enchanting, and we cross back and forth over this stream and that. I can feel my heart thundering in my chest, keeping frantic time with my horse’s hoof-beats. I think — unless it’s my imagination — the sharpberry wine is beginning to have a strange effect on me. The shapes and scents and sounds around me seem incredibly pronounced and vivid.
The whole experience would be beautiful and exhilarating — if only I weren’t so worried for Lord Rigby’s sake. I cannot escape the fact that we are hunting an individual with whom we’d been congenially sipping wine, only an hour ago. And judging by the snarling hounds, I can only imagine Lord Rigby’s fate if we catch him. More unsettling still is the shrill blast of the hunting trumpet and the Raven King’s bloodthirsty, maniacal cackling as we ride along.
“Why do we keep crossing back and forth over this brook?” I ask Mr. Fletcher, trying to convince my horse to follow the pack into the icy water and to the other bank yet again.
“We’re tracking him!” the Raven King answers, overhearing me. “He’s very clever to keep crossing; it confuses the hounds. Lord Rigby makes for excellent prey indeed! The hunt is boring if it is too easy.”
I don’t reply. My horse — a beautiful black stallion — is proving difficult to control. He is too powerful for me, has a wild streak, and spooks at every little sound.
“Aha!” cries the Raven King. “Everybody! Over here! The clever wretch tried to set a trap to deter us!”
“Careful,” cautions Mr. Fletcher. We ride over to where the king has paused. My horse stops so abruptly I almost go flying over his neck. Raven slides down from his own tall steed and examines the makeshift snare. Several pliable branches have been bent backwards and tied with twine, creating a kind of mousetrap hinge. Attached to them are stronger pieces of wood that have been hastily whittled into sharp daggers.
“Had we ridden through the underbrush here, the branches would have released for certain!” Lady Albin marvels, touching a finger to one of the sharpened spears.
“Indeed,” the Raven King says, his voice trembling with eager enthusiasm. He rubs his human hands together. “Ooo! Isn’t it marvelous! I love it when the prey tries to outsmart the hunter! Who knew Rigby would make such an artful adversary?”
“No doubt he is acting on fear,” I murmur to myself. But the Raven King, with his acute sense of hearing — a sense that has no doubt grown even more powerful with the sharpberry wine he has ingested — overhears me.
“Yes!” he says. “Fear is an excellent motivator! I find it really brings out the true ingenuity of a creature.”
“So true, My Lord,” Lady Albin agrees in a sultry, delighted voice.
They climb back on their horses and the hunt carries on. Now that Lord Rigby’s trail has been positively identified, he becomes far easier to pursue and my sense of dread thickens. Rigby’s attempts to cover up his own tracks in the snow become sloppier and sloppier. I can only imagine he has grown tired. Thankfully, he knows enough to run away from the castle, down the mountain, and below the snow line, and — most significantly of all — down to where the snow dries up and his footprints become much more difficult to detect. The pine trees and barren white birches begin to give way oaks and elms. I cannot tell how far we have ridden; for all I know we’ve nearly gone the entire distance back to the Glade of Commoners.
“What time is it?” I call to Mr. Fletcher.
He hangs onto his horse’s reins as best he can while also reaching into his waistcoat and producing a pocket watch. “Well, that’s interesting…” he says, jostling along. “It seems my own watch knows to obey Raven’s rules here; it’s running backwards! In any case, we have a little less than an hour until the clock strikes midnight.
Good, I think. If only Lord Rigby can manage a little while longer…
But almost as soon as this thought crosses my mind, the hounds begin to bark and wail — and point. They circle an enormous tree thick with foliage.
“Perhaps he is up that tree!”
The excitement of the hunt reaches a fever pitch as everyone gathers round and squints into the leaves, trying to discern some sign of a ringtail-headed man. I remain on my horse, nervously squinting along with them. Suddenly — far at the top of the enormous tree — I see two yellow eyes ringed with black looking out at me.
“Oh…” I murmur before I can stop myself.
“What?” Lady Albin turns to look at me, as though I have just spilled a juicy secret. “I think the human has spotted something!”
The other hunters begin to shout, egging me on.
“Do you see our prey?”
“Point to where you see him!”
“Treed! Like a common raccoon!”
“He has nowhere to go! We will drive him down!”
“Are you certain he’s up there? I don’t see him anywhere…”
“Point, human, point!”
I look up at the tree and Lord Rigby peers back down at me, terrified and sad. He gives his head a tight shake, pleading for my silence. I try to think of what to do; I know whatever I do, I must make a decision, and make it quickly. I look around, and then I see it. The tree branches are dry and brittle. They dip quite low, some of them so low I have to bow my head while upon my horse to avoid getting scratched.
Then… all at once, with automatic arm, I reach for a branch near my elbow, and surreptitiously snap it near my horse’s ear. My excitable, undisciplined stallion does not disappoint. The horse screeches, rears up, and true to form, tears out of the glen, galloping at a breakneck pace. I grip on for dear life, twining my fingers in both the reins and his mane.
The next several moments are tumultuous. My stallion and I run through thickets and over hills and rocks and jumping obstacles. Branches tear at my clothes and nick my cheeks. I feel the curious tickling of warm blood mingling with the frosty air. The sharpberry wine has kicked in by now in full effect and I experience every tiny quiver and jolt as though it is a small earthquake. I almost vomit from the overwhelming sensation of it all. He runs back in the direction of the castle (and, by extension, his familiar warm stable — for all his
wildness, he’s no fool) and I find myself clinging to him, both arms wrapped around his neck. Finally, when my arms have squeezed too tightly and he can no longer bear my presence on his back, he halts and bucks and throws me with all his might.
I go flying through the air, and — lucky for me — land in a snow bank. The stallion hustles away, done with me.
It takes me a few moments to wipe the snow from my hair and eyes, to spit out the ice chips, and to figure out precisely what has just occurred. Feeling terribly unbalanced, I rise to my feet and stagger about a few paces, looking this way and that. My horse has utterly vanished; I cannot even hear him anymore, not even with the benefit of the sharpberry wine pumping through my veins. He is gone. There is no one around — no one I can see — and I realize that I have, in a sense, stranded myself.
It is white and snowy and the light of the moon shines silver on the trees. I stand still and listen for anything I can hear — anything at all. All I can discern is the wind sighing gently in the trees, the snow pack creaking with a thick, low-pitched squeak and groan.
But then I feel something watching me. I turn around and peer into the dense tree line behind me. To my horror, there are eyes — not just one yellow pair, but several, all of them advancing towards me. Wolves. Not men with the heads of wolves — actual savage animals.
They move closer, and I begin to back away on trembling legs. After a few moments, they have drawn near enough for me to make out their muzzles, their shoulders, their hulking shapes. A sick dread grabs hold of my stomach. I will not last very long if these wolves decide to pounce. My ears are hot; they begin to ring. I can barely breathe, my heart is drumming so fast and loud I feel there is no room in my chest for my lungs.