Chapter 45: Seasonal Culling
Adaptability was a requirement to be a knight, Irene reminded herself.
From where she sat atop Sorrel, the frozen steam she breathed out of her nose poured out into the air around her. She breathed heavier, wishing she was as warm as a chimney.
It was night and freezing cold. The moon peeking between the thick clouds was their only light.
"You look like a dragon," Felix commented as he squeezed his knees and forced his horse to walk a bit faster. "Now keep up or I'm going to get mad if we fall behind."
She huffed at him and shook her head. Her hair blew into her face and she was reminded that she needed to chop off her hair again but it was keeping her warm at that moment so she decided to look past it for the time being. She pulled her scarves over her mouth so her lips wouldn't feel like they were going to crack any longer.
What luck for her to have been assigned as Felix's partner as they were sent into the mountains for winterization.
Unlike the duchy's winterization—which her father was overseeing as he went through the townships along the border and ensured the people would survive the snow that threatened to blanket the lands at any moment—the knighthood's winterization was more about monster culling.
Half of their forces would clear the mountains. The other half was brushing through the valley and sparsely distributed forests in the opposite direction, ensuring that whatever ran from the knights in the mountains would be sliced down either way.
That was the decision made by Sir Gunnar and Sir Arthur who communicated using the Duke's young messenger hawk.
They had been out for an entire night and had seen so many goblins. The knights and apprentices were becoming nocturnal creatures like the goblins, relying on the full moon overhead to guide their path forward. The culling had been planned around the phase of the moon. The clouds, however, were out of their control.
The one silver lining was that goblins were becoming much easier for Irene to handle. She hardly trembled at the sight of their mere corpses. How could she not get used to it when, for the past day, she had seen so many carcasses?