Chapter 82: Move First
Darion’s heart rate jumped.
He stood completely still and looked at the man behind the tree.
His first thought was that he had believed everyone was inside.
He had examined the barracks before starting and had seen the guards at their posts, the night watch doing their rotations in and out of the building.
He had tracked the exterior guards through the perspective glass for an hour and accounted for all of them.
There had been no one moving in the treeline, no one between the barracks and the tree line, nothing to suggest anyone was out here.
And yet here was a man with a full beard like a viking warrior, pressed against a tree fifteen feet away, staring at him.
Darion hadn’t expected that he would be caught. He had just expected to climb down from the tree, find his horse and zoom off to Percvale.
He hadn’t known that someone had been watching him.
How long had he been there, he thought.
Darion ran it back quickly. The man could have arrived during the operation. Perhaps he had come back through the treeline from whatever he had been doing and found a hooded figure sitting in a tree in the dark, and stayed quiet and still trying to work out what he was looking at before doing anything.
That was possible. It meant he had seen the end of it, the bats returning, landing on Darion’s arm, being unsummoned one by one.
That was the part that was difficult to explain as anything innocent.
A man sitting in a tree at night was strange but not impossible. He could be a lookout, a scout or someone just trying to be one with nature.
But a man sitting in a tree at night with small creatures landing on his arm and then vanishing was something different.
The shock on the bearded man’s face said he had arrived at his conclusion. The expression was visible even at fifteen feet in low moonlight, the specific widening of eyes that came when disparate pieces of information connected into a picture that made terrible sense.
This is the reason our men were dying!
Darion could see the thought forming. He could see the man’s body doing what bodies did when a decision was being made, the slight shift in weight, the adjustment of the grip on the spear in his right hand.
The man was holding a spear.
And a small animal hanging by its legs from his left hand, dripping blood. Late night hunting, apparently. Bad timing. Possibly the worst timing of the man’s life, which was about to become significantly shorter.
He didn’t know knights went for hunting in valdenmoor at this time of the might. Infact, a normal human being wouldn’t go for hunting at this time of the night.
Night hunting was considered dangerous, especially in this part of Valvanos where different deadly creatures roamed the woods. You wouldn’t know when some creature would attack you from any angle since it would be all dark.
But then, from the look of things, this man was a good night hunter, courtesy of the animal he was holding in his hand.
They looked at each other in the dark. Both still. Both calculating..., doing deep calculations.
In Darion’s experience, which had expanded considerably in the last month, the person who moved second in a situation like this was usually the person who lost it. He needed to do something before the man’s decision finished forming.
"Hey," Darion said, quietly. "Calm down."
The man came a half-step out from behind the tree.
Full armor. Spear. The dead animal swinging slightly from his left hand. He was big, not unusual height but built wide, the kind of soldier who had probably been told his whole career that size was an advantage and had taken that seriously because now he made that shown to Darion.
Maybe for intimidation or he wasn’t doing it intentionally.
He was looking at Darion’s hands now, which were empty, and doing the same calculation Darion was doing from the other side.
He’s unarmed. If I move fast enough.
Darion saw the decision land in the man’s face before the body acted on it, the fraction of a second where intention became commitment. He had already started the summoning thought when the arm came back.
The spear left the man’s hand fast. Properly fast, the throw of someone who had been trained to throw rather than someone who had just grabbed the nearest thing.
The throw was just not normal, it wasn’t what someone without a training would do. It was very fast and very precise.
It was on a line directly for Darion’s chest and the distance between them was fifteen feet and the time available was nothing.
The wolf materialized.
Not on the ground, but rather in the air between them, the summoning completing at the exact moment the spear would have completed its travel, the green light of the revival collapsing instantly as the wolf’s solid form took the hit instead. The spear struck the wolf’s flank and stuck, the impact rocking it sideways by half a step.
The wolf took the half step back toward center.
The bearded man’s mouth opened. The shout was forming, Darion could see it, the intake of breath, the shape of the alarm about to leave the man’s throat and carry across the open ground to the barracks.
The wolf was faster and it wasn’t even close.
It crossed fifteen feet in the time the breath took to become sound.
The jaws opened and closed once.
The sound stopped before it started.
The man’s body went one way and his head went another, the wolf holding the latter in its mouth with casualness.
The body dropped straight down, the dead hunting animal still swinging from the hand as it hit the ground.
The wolf turned and looked at Darion.
The head was still in its mouth.
Darion stood in the dark and looked at what had just happened and took one slow breath.