He shifted his grip on the bag of stones that he had made Sain haul out to the forest. Whatever else went wrong today, at least the bag had arrived. He intended to deliver it personally.
A few minutes into the ride, the black horse stopped dead.
Ran blinked at the back of its head, then tried to persuade the smug animal to keep moving. Nothing. He wondered whether it had smelled a beast somewhere ahead, or whether the bag of stones on his back was simply too much weight for it.
He got no response of any kind, so he lost his temper and barked at the horse for being lazy, and threatened to starve it when they got home.
The horse bolted, and left him standing in the leaf litter with a sack of rocks.
Watching it gallop away between the trees, Ran understood that he might be truly finished.
Elsewhere in the forest, Agoni and Talin continued on, searching for prey and finding none, until Talin declared that luck was clearly not on their side today.
"It may be that I am simply getting old," Agoni said. "I have lived my entire life as a sword and a shield, and nothing else."
Talin comforted him, reassuring him that his achievements as Imperial Knight Commander were already great, greater than any man could ask for.
"I am a retired old man," Agoni said. Then, after a moment: "Have you ever seen the royal family up close?"
Talin answered that he had not. Only from a distance, like today.
"You will understand one day, when you meet them," Agoni said, "and truly see the so-called magnificent beings of this empire."
For a thousand years the Feitus family had protected this empire of gods. Saying it aloud reminded Agoni of the conversation he had had with his young son, the boy who was supposed to take his place one day.
He had told the child that he must always be the loyal dog of the imperial family. He had been showing him the family's business at the time, the warehouses and ledgers of goods they supplied to the palace, and they were about to move on to the temple when the carriage came to a sudden stop.
Agoni stepped out to see what had happened. The servant told him something had caught on the wheel and urged him to get back inside.
As he was stepping back up into the carriage, Agoni saw what the wheel had caught. There was a corpse lying in the street where they had rolled over it. He decided it must belong to a thief who had tried to steal imperial tributes from the temple. Things like this were a common enough sight in this so-called beautiful empire.
His son tried to climb down to look, and Agoni yelled at him to stay back, because he did not want his innocent boy to see such a horrifying thing.
Back in the present, Agoni could not stop thinking about his son, who was not yet ten years old. The corpse on the ground that day had looked younger than his son. By now it would have been incinerated with the rest of the week's dead.
Was there darkness, he wondered, in an empire as noble as this one?
Realizing that they were running out of time, Talin urged him to at least take something, to save face for the duke's family even if they did not place first.
Agoni apologized for getting carried away with his own thoughts, and assured Talin that he knew exactly where to find a golden fox.
Elsewhere, the prince who had been ditched by his horse was still struggling through the undergrowth with a bag of stones on his back. He cursed the animal under his breath and swore to barbecue it the moment the royal hunting competition was over.
Carrying the bag meant he could not transform into a crow, which meant he was going to lose track of Agoni. It also meant that if a wild animal decided to jump him, he would be jumped, and although this was only the small animal zone, that thought did not comfort him as much as it should have.
Then the bush behind him began to rustle.
Ran froze. Something was about to come out of that bush. He racked his brain for a solution and came up with the fact that he had not brought a single weapon into an imperial forest.
He burst out of his hiding place with his mind made up to run if it turned dangerous, and without paying the slightest attention to what was actually in front of him, he hurled a stone at the bush.
Talin raised his head at exactly that moment.
The stone struck him square on the head, and as he went down, Ran recognized him from his hair colour. Agoni's aide. Agoni came crashing through the brush a heartbeat later to check on him, and Ran darted behind a tree, already regretting the throw and everything that was going to follow it.
He had not expected to run into them here at all, and now the plan he had built so carefully was about to go up in flames.
He had targeted the former Imperial Knight Commander for one reason. According to the original story, Agoni Feitus became the teacher of the main protagonist, the man who would one day turn the empire upside down.
Ran's plan had been to catch the golden fox himself. Then, when Agoni arrived to hunt it, he would insist that the old man had been trying to steal his prey, and as punishment he would hand him the bag of black stones and force him to carry it around for the rest of the competition.
Hitting Talin in the head had ruined all of it, and Ran crouched behind his tree with no idea how to proceed.
On the other side of the clearing, Agoni scanned their surroundings, trying to work out why anyone would attack his aide. The stone had certainly been thrown on purpose. His conclusion was that the thrower had been aiming for him and had mistakenly hit Talin instead.
A few minutes later Talin regained consciousness, and Agoni urged him to speak up if he remembered anything at all about the assailant.
Behind the tree, Ran grew genuinely uneasy. If a rumour spread that the seventh prince had tried to kill the head of one of the most powerful families in the empire, it would not end well for him. As Talin struggled to recall what he had seen, Ran's brain went into overdrive looking for a way out.
Fortunately, Talin remembered nothing.
Unfortunately, at that exact moment, Agoni sensed someone lurking nearby.
Ran had chosen that instant to slip away, and the movement gave him up. Agoni was after him at once, calling over his shoulder for Talin to stay where he was.
Ran ran. After a while he was completely exhausted, especially with that heavy bag banging against his spine, and believing he had put enough distance between them he slowed down, on the theory that an old geezer would never keep pace with him.
Agoni caught up almost immediately, running as swiftly as a stallion.
"Reveal your identity," Agoni called from behind him.
Ran had no attention to spare for the question. He was trying to work out how to get away before the man's hand closed on his collar. He thought about ditching the bag, since only then could he transform in peace. He thought, with real longing, that he wished he still had that naughty black horse.
He wished he could run as fast as it could.
That wish had force behind it. He felt himself begin to change, and he slipped out of Agoni's reach and was gone.
Agoni came to a halt, baffled, finding no trace of the assailant he had all but caught. He could have sworn he had seen the figure change shape as it ran. He dismissed the thought, telling himself it was his old eyes playing tricks. Then he drew his sword and cut cleanly through several trees in the surrounding area to be sure, and still found no sign of the intruder, and was left wondering whether they had already escaped.
Meanwhile, Ran had not quite grasped what had happened to him. His body felt lighter. He wondered whether he had turned into a crow, then dismissed it, because it felt as though he was still running rather than flying. Just then he heard hooves nearby and wondered whether the stubborn horse had decided to grace him with its presence again.
At that very moment, he realized that the horse had not come back at all. He had transformed into the same black horse himself.