“Just one?” Zak asked, eyes wide. “Ser, there’s enough there to feed Highmarsh for a month.”

  “We aren’t Highmarsh,” Maxwell said. “We’re four men with four horses, one pot, and a pack of linen already full. Take more than you can carry and the wild notices.”

  Reece swallowed. “And if we spook them? That’s a lot of hooves.”

  Maxwell nodded toward the herd. “Then you ride hard and listen when I say turn. If they break toward us instead of away, you give them room. Being trampled isn’t on the menu today.”

  Zak let out a low whistle. “A shame. I’d heard it pairs well with despair and oats.”

  Maxwell swung down from Piper with the kind of ease that made Toby’s joints ache in sympathy. He unstrapped the old bow from his saddle, fingers checking the wood and string in a motion so practiced it was half prayer.

  “Stay mounted,” he said. “We’ll need the speed if this goes poorly.”

  Toby tightened his grip on Oak’s reins. The horse’s ears pricked forward, nostrils flaring at the scent of distant water and animal. He shifted his weight, eager and wary.

  “Downwind,” Maxwell murmured, more to himself than them. He walked a few paces along the basin’s lip, boots whispering through the reed-grass, then stopped. From there, the wind tugged gently at Toby’s hair, carrying the heavy musk of the herd to his nose.

  Maxwell planted his feet, braced the bow along his calf, and strung it in one smooth, practiced motion. The stave bent with a low, rich creak—the sound of old wood remembering work. He reached for his quiver and drew an arrow.

  The shaft was as long as Toby’s arm, fletched in dark feathers, tipped with steel hammered narrow and mean. It looked like it could punch through more than hide.

  When Maxwell set the nock and raised the bow, something in the air shifted.

  Toby felt it before he saw it—that same subtle thickening that had come around Reece and Zak at the stone yard. The Art, waking and empowering. It gathered along Maxwell’s drawing arm, from hand to shoulder, a faint shimmer in the air around tensed muscle and corded veins. It bled into his back, settling between his shoulder blades as he pulled.

  The bow came to full draw with a low, taut hum, the string a dark line beside the knight’s jaw. Maxwell’s eyes narrowed, not in strain but in focus. His breathing didn’t change. His stance didn’t waver.

  The world felt suddenly smaller to Toby—narrowed to the arc of that bow, the line of the arrow, the distant curve of a single massive shoulder in the herd below.

  “Saints,” Zak whispered. “Look at that.”

  Reece didn’t speak. His hands were white on Daisy’s reins.

  Maxwell loosed.

  The sound wasn’t the sharp twang Toby expected. It was deeper, more contained—a short, hard thrum, like a plucked harp string muted by a hand. The arrow left without drama, a flash of motion that the eye barely caught.

  Toby saw it only in glimpses: a streak of darker against the bright, the brief flick of fletching, the way it seemed to slip through the air rather than fight it.

  It struck one of the bison low in the flank with a sound like someone punching wet leather. The animal bawled—a deep, wrenching bellow that churned the air in Toby’s lungs.

  The herd moved as if someone had kicked a nest.

  Bodies lurched. Heads tossed. Calves bolted. The great, shaggy mass surged from the loud order—right toward the rim where the knights waited.

  “Ah,” Zak said faintly. “So that’s the direction we didn’t want.”

  Maxwell was already moving. He spun, bow in one hand, grabbed Piper’s reins with the other, and hauled himself into the saddle in a single, practiced motion that would have broken another man’s back.

  “Ride!” he shouted. “With me. Match my pace.”

  Oak leapt forward before Toby’s knees told him to. The world became movement—the jolt of hooves, the whip of reed-grass against his boots, the sudden thunder of a hundred panicked animals churning up the basin behind them.

  Reece and Zak kicked their mounts on either side, Daisy and Flint lunging into a gallop. The ground vibrated under them now, a low, rolling drumbeat that shook the air in his ears.

  Toby risked a glance back.

  This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

  The herd was a wall—a roiling front of horns and shoulders and flying clods of earth, brown and black shapes pounding up the slight rise, trampling the reed-grass flat. Dust boiled above them in a thick, rising cloud.

  “Maxwell!” Zak’s voice cracked over the thunder. “I vote faster!”

  “Hold the line!” Maxwell called back without turning. “With me, not ahead. Give them room to run.”

  It went against every instinct Toby had. Fear clawed up his spine, a clear, cold spike. His mind sketched, with vicious efficiency, the image of Oak stumbling—of himself thrown, of weight slamming into him from behind, of horn and hoof and no space to breathe.

  The Art flared in response, hot and eager—a sudden, dangerous rush in his chest, in his legs, in his hands on the reins. It wanted to move. To drag him sideways, to shove him faster, to seize control from thought.

  He could almost feel it in his bones, the way he had in the yard. That same dense pressure, threatening to spill wild.

  No, he told himself. Breathe. Control it.

  He dragged in air slowly through his nose—in for three, hold one, out five—the way Maxwell had drilled into them until they’d cursed him. Breath is rhythm. Rhythm is control. He forced his jaw unclenched, loosened his knees, let Oak find the pace.

  They weren’t being chased, he realized a heartbeat later. They were running with the herd.

  Maxwell had set their line not straight away, but at an angle. The bison thundered up out of the basin and swept past them, close enough that Toby could see foam on their mouths, the roll of muscle under hide, the whites of their eyes. But the bulk of the herd ran parallel, not directly into their backs.

  The knights were a shadow on their flank, four dark shapes pacing the edge of a living storm.

  Dust whipped at Toby’s face, stinging his eyes, souring his tongue. The roar of hooves and breath and bellow swallowed everything else. Reed-grass flattened under the stampede in long, brutal swaths—gold turned to broken stalk and torn earth in the space of heartbeats.

  Through the chaos, Maxwell kept a steady, relentless speed. Piper moved like the ground itself had agreed to carry him, strides long and sure, no wasted motion.

  Twice, Toby saw the old knight shift course, threading between bison that had angled closer, using their momentum to slide Piper into a clearer lane. It was like watching someone read a river current—not fighting the flow, but belonging to it more than the water did.

  “What’s he doing?” Reece shouted, half choke, half laugh. Daisy’s eyes rolled white at the edges, but she held the line, legs eating the ground.

  Zak coughed dust. “Dying stylishly?”

  “Looking,” Toby called back, understanding hitting him like a jolt of cold. “He’s hunting in the middle of it.”

  He could see it—through the brown cloud and flying clods, Maxwell’s head kept flicking, eyes scanning the moving sea. Searching not for any beast, but the one.

  The bison that carried his first arrow.

  There—a darker blotch of blood on a shaggy flank, the arrow’s fletching jerking with each stride. The wounded animal ran a little off-center, its left hind leg not quite catching right, shoulder dipping.

  Maxwell nudged Piper closer, closing in from the side like a wolf on a stag. For a few heartbeats, man and herd moved together in a strange, terrible harmony.

  The Art shimmered again—Toby felt it even from behind. It gathered along Maxwell’s drawing arm as he let go the reins for a breath and pulled another arrow from the quiver. Bow came up, string drawn, horse still at full gallop.

  Toby’s chest tightened. Every instinct screamed that this was wrong—letting go of the reins at this speed was madness, not with this much death on every side. But Piper kept his footing, reading the weight on his back as if they’d been born strapped together.

  Maxwell loosed.

  The arrow flew low and fast, cutting through dust and heat. It sank into the wounded bison just behind the shoulder, burying to the fletching. The animal staggered, front legs faltering, then pitched forward with a sound halfway between a bellow and a gasp.

  Momentum carried it another three strides before it went down hard, plowing a furrow in the torn reed-grass. The herd split around the fall without thought, surging on, the stampede angling away, following the line of least resistance.

  “Pull wide!” Toby shouted, already leaning his weight, guiding Oak toward the outskirts of the running mass.

  Reece and Zak followed, kicking their mounts into a new angle. For a few tense moments they were still running with the herd—but with every stride, the distance grew. Hoof thunder became background instead of foreground. Dust thinned. The living wall blurred at the edges, then thinned into separate shapes, then into a distant, rumbling smear heading east.

  At last, the ground quieted beneath them.

  They slowed to a canter, then a trot, then a walk, circling back toward the patch of trampled plain and silence the herd had left behind.

  The reed-grass there was crushed flat, stalks broken, earth churned to a rough, uneven mess. In the middle of it lay the bison.

  It was bigger up close than Toby had expected, even after seeing it run—a mountain of muscle and hide and matted fur, sides still shuddering with the last echoes of movement. Both arrows jutted from its ribs, dark with blood. Flies were already investigating.

  Reece whistled low as Daisy picked her way closer. “That… is a lot of meat.”

  Zak slid down from Flint and planted his hands on his hips, chest heaving, hair full of dust and reed fragments. “That,” he said, “is not how my mother hunted dinner.”

  “She also didn’t have four hungry knights to feed in the middle of nowhere,” Toby said, patting Oak’s neck to calm his own thudding pulse.

  Piper approached at a measured walk, Maxwell sitting easy in the saddle as if he’d just taken a turn around the yard. The old knight looked down at the fallen beast, then at the trail of torn earth behind it, then at the three younger men.

  The corners of his mouth tugged upward, almost reluctantly.

  “Looks like I still got it,” he said.