Page 37 of Agor

“Who did it then?” Elder Artyom asked.

I shrugged. “No idea.”

Simon was here too already. With his hands on his knees, he peered at the dead animal from its ramp side.

“Well, someone must’ve put it here,” he determined. “It’s not like the boar came here all the way from the forest on its own, then—”

“Then slit its own throat on my doorsteps?” I finished for him, barely resisting an eye-roll. “You’re absolutely right, Simon. That would be highly unlikely.”

Elder Kazimir poked the boar with his walking stick, as if to make sure the creature was indeed dead.

“The orcs did it,” he stated grimly. “This is a warning sign to us. A threat.”

Martha gasped in horror. She came here along with her husband, Stephen, a tall, bearded man who had his arm in a sling after Agor broke it.

Pointing at the gaping wound in the boar’s throat, Martha shrieked, “They’re telling us they’ll slit all our throats too!”

“We need to burn it,” Elder Kazimir decided. “We’ll need to gather the highest wood pyre we can for the fire to be as big as our defiance.”

Quite a few in the growing crowd welcomed that plan.

“We’re not afraid of them!” they shouted.

“We’ve been through worse and survived.”

“We’ve traveled a long way to come here. They’re not pushing us back.”

Several men volunteered to run off into the forest to gather wood right now.

“Or maybe,” I raised my voice over all that noise. “Instead of wasting both the meat and the firewood, we’ll clean the kill, cook it, and feed the children a proper meal for once?”

Faeena lifted her head from Gleb’s chest, looking intrigued. “We can cook its heart, kidneys, and liver, then chop them up, mix with wild onions, and stuff the boar’s stomach like our mothers used to do back in the foothills, remember? It tasted amazing when baked in the oven. I always wished that my girls could try it.” She swept the crowd with a gaze filled with hope.

“Boiling the bones would make a great stock,” a woman chimed in from the crowd. “When was the last time our hunters brought back anything bigger than a weasel?”

I didn’t see who that was exactly, but another woman matched her enthusiasm with her own suggestion.

“And the boar’s hide we could—”

Kazimir didn’t let her finish, raising his stick in a call to attention.

“Once again, you’re letting your stomachs make an important decision, when you should use your brains to think,” he chastised. “The orcs have sent us a message. They left it at Becca’s door because she’s the one who killed some of them already.”

Elder Artyom tapped his chin in thought before speaking. “Even if you’re right, the message has been sent. We received it. We can deliberate about how to strengthen our defenses to protect us from the possible orc attack. Meanwhile, we can cook and eat this boar. Burning it on a pyre won’t make us any stronger, but eating it would.”

I stepped back, letting the elders argue. I’d voiced my idea and let it take root. From my experience, arguing any more wouldn’t help me drive my point in. Eventually, the men would just call me “a difficult woman” and start ignoring everything I said on this matter from that point on.

Thankfully, Elder Artyom seemed to share my point of view this time. He was one of the three village elders, and he was a man, which helped.

“What’s this?” Faeena leaned closer to the boar’s head.

Only now, I noticed a sparkling green bow tied around one of the animal’s long tusks. I bent over to snatch it quickly before anyone else saw it.

Faeena found my eyes with hers.

“Am I mistaken?” she whispered. “Or does it look more like a courting present than a declaration of war?”

My face flamed hot with blush.

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