(eng) K. E. Mills - Rogue Agent 01 by The Accidental Sorcerer (v5.0)

Author:The Accidental Sorcerer (v5.0) [Sorcerer, The Accidental]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

It didn’t take long for the hounds to flush their first quarry. Lional and Demon pounded after them across the open fields that stretched towards the woodland on the west side of the palace. Gerald and Dorcas laboured doggedly in their wake. Despite his rapidly increasing physical discomfort and his distaste for the purpose of the outing, he had to admit it was good to be outside breathing clean, fresh air. He felt… released.

More swiftly than he could believe, the palace and its problems had become his whole world, swallowing him alive. He felt like a sailor whose ship had been shrunk and forced into a bottle, its confines so close he could reach out and touch them with his fingertips.

And with the wide world beyond the bottle unattainable, the narrow world within it became… everything.

Far ahead, Lional drew rein and beckoned impatiently. His voice floated back on the damp morning breeze. “Hurry up, Professor!”

“Aye, aye, Captain,” he muttered. Gritting his teeth, he clapped his heels to Dorcas’s unenthusiastic sides and hurried.

Seven rabbits and two foxes later, he swore he’d never go hunting again.

Lional had let the hounds devour the rabbits and the foxes but their latest prize, a deer, he forbade them. By this time they were plunged deep into the Crown Forest, according to Lional an exclusive royal hunting preserve. The mist had cleared and the sky was a patchwork of blue and green, with golden columns of sunlight shafting cathedral-like between the lacework branches overhead. The only sounds as they rode further and further in were the muffled thudding of the horses’ hooves, the panting and padding of the hounds, the jingling of harness, the occasional startled cries of invisible birds… and the last desperate gasps of the doomed creatures who could run no more.

Lional looked up from wiping his hunting knife on the flank of the slain doe. “Ah, Professor! There is nothing to match the taste of freshly roasted venison. Particularly when the kill is your own. We shall dine like kings tonight!”

The deer had been brought down in a small clearing littered with leaf mould and pocked with poisonous-looking mushrooms. Gerald, who couldn’t bear to watch Reg humanely despatch a fieldmouse, swallowed nausea. He’d be dreaming of dagger teeth snarling and brown eyes glazed crimson with terror for the rest of his life. He slid down from happily dozing Dorcas and tied her reins to the nearest tree branch. Demon, trained to a hairsbreadth, stood like a statue with his reins still trailing.

“Well, Your Majesty, one of us will, anyway.”

Lional laughed. “You’re a witty man, Professor. I like witty men.”

He nodded. I wonder if he also likes men who vomit at the sight of blood? He snuck a glance at his watch. Four hours they’d been out here, charging across the countryside, and all he had to show for it was blisters on his backside. In four hours the only thing he’d gotten Lional to discuss was how much he enjoyed killing things.

Good thing he wasn’t a government secret agent.

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