The next morning, on the Northroad, just south of Crossington, Duke Fairchild found a farmer who had heard, but hadn’t seen, two horses galloping towards the crossroads two nights previous in the pre-dawn hours. The Duke split his men then, and sent them to all of the farmhouses that were close enough to the road to hear a passerby. By midday, the first man’s story had been confirmed by a man who claimed he had seen a post rider, with a pack horse, galloping eastward on the cutoff road away from Crossington. It was no post rider Fairchild knew, and for the first time on this new hunt, he felt like he had the true scent of his prey.
Duke Fairchild didn’t believe in luck, he believed he was a favorite of the gods, so he credited them as the cause of his recent good fortune. When one of the two extra men he had hired in Crossington was relieving himself at the side of the Midway Passage Road, and heard the distant sound of a man groaning, the Duke’s faith in his gods was confirmed.
They found a trail leading north into the Reyhall Forest that was as obvious as a cobbled road. They found a dying bandit there, who confirmed that it had been a King’s man who had pig stuck his inner thigh and left him for dead. After torturing the man for all the information he was worth, Duke Fairchild slit his throat, and ordered Garth, Tully, and the two extra men he hired to get rid of the two bodies. He then lit a fire and camped in the same place Mikahl had only nights before.
The Duke started growing confident then: the gods had smiled upon him again. They continually led him in the right direction. It was like Coldfrost, he mused, when all those feral half breed giants had confessed to the things he needed them to confess to. Lord Brach and old Lord Finn had praised him. His victims always told him what he needed them to say when he pressured them properly. It never occurred to him then, or even now, that the tortured almost always end up saying what the torturer wanted to hear, if only to quicken their own death.
Sitting there in the woods at Mikahl’s camp, the Duke had become so confident, that he never even questioned how a lowly squire could’ve killed two hardened road bandits all by himself. Garth, Tully, and the other two men wondered about that though. In their mind’s eye, their prey suddenly seemed a little more formidable than merely a simple spoiled castle boy.
The next afternoon, when they came into the clearing where the half eaten carcass of the giant skinless lizard lay, they were attacked by a greedy pack of wolves. One of the men’s horses was dragged down, and while he was pinned beneath it, the wolves set upon him. Tully killed two of them with his well placed arrows. The Duke killed two more with his sword, while trying to save the pinned man. He rode into the fray, fearlessly hacking and slashing, with little or no concern for his own safety, but it was wasted bravado. The hungry wolves tore the man to pieces. Garth had to run down the other hired man when he tried to flee, but he still managed to trample a wolf under his horse’s hooves as he did so. The dozen or so wolves that remained, reluctantly scattered, and skulked away. One wolf turned and growled at them, as if to rally his pack-mates for another attack, but one of Tully’s arrows nipped it, and sent them all darting back into the forest.
Duke Fairchild wiped the blood from his blade, and sheathed it. He dismounted his horse, dragged the hired man out of his saddle, and knocked him to his knees, with a brutal blow to the temple. He almost killed the man then and there, but to Garth and Tully’s disappointment, he made the man gather up all of the arrows from the area around his half eaten comrade.
Tully went with him, and filched the dead man’s pockets and pouches. The man’s saddle bags were next. Tully stopped pilfering only long enough to waggle one of the corpse’s severed hands at the craven man.
Garth and Tully had been reminded of their liege lord’s strength and fearlessness, when he rode into the pack of wolves without a care. They were then reminded quite brutally of his ruthlessness, when, after the craven man handed Tully back his arrows, the Duke ran his sword through his stomach and rode away, leaving him to die slowly in the field. He would still be bleeding out when the wolves returned. Garth and Tully would’ve had full confidence in the Duke’s plan to catch up to, and overtake, their prey, had they not found the old sword protruding proudly up out of the huge, dead lizard’s throat. It shone in the sun like a cross rising out of a sea of reddish brown death. After confirming that it was standard Westland issue, they decided that the lowly squire they were after might be more of a predator than Duke Fairchild himself.