…or, Then We’ll Run From The Shade
I’ve never been the sort of person to feel ashamed for doing something that felt good.
I didn’t even feel ashamed for doing something because it felt good. If you’re not stomping on somebody else’s feet or breaking their shit, I figured you don’t need a better reason than that.
Maybe that came from discovering masturbation and sex and all that fun stuff from the elven side of the family instead of the human side. Maybe it’s just the way I was. Maybe that was why I appreciated my elven summers. I couldn’t tell you. I’ve never really cared enough to figure it out.
Turning into a stag was weird. Letting Iason ride around on my back, in complete control of me, was a little complicated. It had some other issues tied up in it, obviously.
But it felt good.
As soon as I was stripped, Iason touched me and it began. The stretching, the growing, the bending. The becoming, changing into something that I wasn’t.
What felt good about it? There was the novelty, but it wasn’t just that. There was the sharpness of senses, the heightening of hearing and smell, the shifting of my vision. There was also the sense of power. Muscular power, magical power. Power that Iason could bend to his will, but power that resided inside me. Whether he used it or I used it, I felt it in my new body and I liked it.
There was also the new awareness of Iason that came when he vaulted up onto my back, the sense that we fit together like a key and a lock. Rider and mount. His mind, my body. Maybe I should have resented that. I did have a perfectly good mind even as a stag. But when I was a stag, I didn’t care about that. When I wasn’t? Okay, then it bugged me, but when I wasn’t a stag, he couldn’t direct me the way he could as my rider.
We waited at the tunnel exit, looking out in the brightly starlit field. We couldn’t see much as the ground sloped up from the mouth of the tunnel. The fire was still burning; that much was obvious.
The coach came to us a few minutes later. He spoke to Iason. His words didn’t mean anything to me. He stepped back, and Iason leaned forward and whispered.
“The Hydras are massing for a charge at sun up,” he said, leaning on my neck. The act was intimate and deliberate. He didn’t need to move closer to whisper in my ear. “They are trying to rally the remnants of the seventh squad to hold them off but it will go better if we can achieve victory sooner rather than later. We will run out into the darkness and charge through the fire to achieve maximum effect. If we are quick enough, we will escape that way, too, though the darkness and the fire will both soon be gone. Your instinct will be to run from the flames rather than through them, but between your human mind and my superior will, we should be able to succeed, provided you let yourself be ridden.”
I tried to nod. I had full control over my head and neck, but the gesture came with difficulty. It was a different neck, on a body that wasn’t built for communicating in that way. Deer don’t nod. Just as my memory of how my human legs ran didn’t trip me up when I tried to gallop or whatever stags do, my knowledge of nodding and other human communication didn’t translate well.
Iason seemed to get the idea—or more likely, he assumed I understood his intentions and agreed.
Or possibly even more likely, he assumed it wouldn’t matter if I didn’t.
He gripped tightly with his legs and spurred me forward, out into the night. We streaked up the slope, out of the depression at the edge of the field. Iason steered me to the left, heading around the near side of the hilly ground instead of over it to keep a low profile until we were even with the burning woods. He gave a cry and wheeled me around almost ninety degrees, and then we began our charge.
The field was more than five hundred yards across, but that distance was nothing to me. Why did I love being a stag? That’s why. The power, the rush. Watching the landscape disappear before my eyes, just as quickly as it could come into focus. Looming ahead of me, the tiny forest was a curtain of flames.
Illusionary flames, I reminded myself, though I could feel the primal panic rattling around inside my deer skull. Not even a real forest, just a miniature version for the mock battle. Barely more than a stand of trees. I could clear it like it wasn’t there. I’d be through it in a second. I just had to keep up speed, keep my heading, keep my head.
I knew that. I told myself it. But my eyes were growing wider and my breath was coming faster and faster. I could feel my massive heart pounding in my chest.
Fire. It really did separate beasts from men. It was the primal destroyer that every lower animal runs from while every higher one depends on it.
I was a higher animal wearing a lower one. “Conflicted” would be the word that describes how I felt about it. One part of me was shouting to keep running forward and the other part was screaming back that we had to turn around. I couldn’t even see any more. My mind was so full of the fire that there was no room for whatever my eyes were saying.
Iason wasn’t conflicted. It was his legs squeezing around me, his hands gripping my ruff, that kept me moving forward, swift and straight as an arrow. His will. With him holding me steady, we thundered through the burning woods and were out before my animal brain had registered we were in.
That probably sounds great, but it meant my heart was still thumping a million beats a second and my eyes were still full of flames.
At least it made me run faster. I had no choice but to trust in Iason’s guidance. It felt like we were looping around quite a bit. I couldn’t tell if he was zigging and zagging around enemy lines or if he was just trying desperately to get me under control. I felt hot lines scratch down my flank, sudden stinging pain. That spurred me on, but it also cleared my head.
We were out of the fire. There was new danger to run from.
My vision cleared. Arrows were raining down around us. Iason’s erratic guidance was his attempts to get out from under the descending cloud of them. He jerked sharply to the side and I jumped sideways, doing a parallel shift that narrowly avoided the edge of another volley.
It also put my head in line with the banner flying from the top of the hill.
That was why we were being pinned in by arrows. We were so close. If we got our hands on the standard, they would not be able to stop us from returning to our side with it. They’d seen our approach. They knew this. They’d have a better chance of shooting down an arrow in flight than they would of shooting me down when I was in a dead run getting farther away with every moment.
They must have been loosing arrows at us since we came out of the woods, but Iason had been able to defeat those volleys with a simple change of direction while still avoiding the armored defenders. Now our options had narrowed. There was the banner. There was the rest of the field. Victory, or retreat.
The arrows were coming in smaller spurts now; the archers firing in shifts to keep us on our toes. If they were smart—and they probably were—there had to be some holding themselves in reserve with their bows angled to protect the standard.
I could both hear and smell the metaled forms closing in down the hill from us. I wouldn’t have worried about them once we were in motion; I was sure even if we were completely surrounded that I could leap clear. But the archers were keeping us from advancing towards the banner, keeping us immobilized as long as we didn’t retreat. We darted around to stop from presenting a motionless target, but we didn’t make any progress, either.
The light was changing around us. The second period was ending. We might have succeeded in pulling some of the armored fighters away from their massed charge, but they weren’t counted as part of Blackwater’s offensive strategy to begin with. If we were still dancing on the hillside when they came back with our standard, we wouldn’t be able to stop them from uniting the two at their base.
It seemed like a now-or-never moment. I couldn’t communicate what I was thinking to Iason, but I tensed beneath him and hoped he could feel my readiness and would know what it meant. I would brave the arrows the same as I’d braved the fire. We would, as he had said, either win or go out gloriously.
Iason pulled me to a stop, facing towards the top of the hill. He waited. I heard the twang of bowstrings and the whistle of arrows. We streaked up the hill, arrows coming down around us. Not all the archers had gone for the easy shot; some of them had anticipated Iason’s plan. Some of those even scored hits. My fur and hide were too thick to be seriously injured by most indirect arrow shots, but they hurt.
From the way Iason stiffened and cried out, he must have been hit, too. It didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was the black banner flapping atop the pole on the crest of the hill. We were set to race right past it on the left, but Iason made me veer sharply to the right and grabbed it with his left arm, holding on to me and steering with only his legs.
We had it. Victory was literally within our grasp.
We just had to take it home.
