“Get up,” the driver snapped, jerking at his arm; but Florans only bowed his head, clasping his hands together. “Well, I for one am not sticking around; I don’t care if it has three tails and speaks Latin.” He hurried over to the horses, trying to coax them back into a line. “I’m going back to Sens; I’m not getting mauled for a few letters—”
A howl pierced the night air; the driver froze, listening.
And then a second, and a third.
Florans bent over more, his lips moving steadily in whispered prayer, eyes clenched shut.
The driver ran to the coach, gasping in pain as he swung himself up onto the seat, seizing the rifle; but even as he turned towards the two pairs of eyes gleaming in the woods a third leapt from the brush, flinging itself at the coach. The driver screamed as the mass of fur and fang and reddened eyes came hurtling towards him; it crashed sideways into the coach, sending the whole mass teetering and falling over in an explosion of wood and mail, wrenching the horses to the ground. The wolf tumbled past the wreckage, skidding onto the ground and righting itself; again the driver swung the rifle up, trying to prime it, but the wolf lurched forward and seized his torso, his ribs snapping beneath its jaws, stomach splitting open in a wet spray of rupturing intestines; still the driver screamed, beating at the wolf’s head until it whipped him first left, then right, and finally slapped him headfirst into the roof of the coach, snapping his neck.
The other two wolves came forward from the woods, leaping atop the horses, dodging the flailing hooves and snapping teeth of the animals as they bit and clawed and worried them into silence; and then all three looked at Florans.
He was praying, praying, as fast as he could get the words out. Everything smelled of blood now, blood and steaming flesh and his own piss, soaked into his breeches. He offered his soul up to God, he apologized to his wife and his mother alike, for being so foolish as to take this job, drive with these idiots, leave the farm behind, he should never have left their farm and their village, perhaps he hadn’t and God in His mercy had sent him this night as a dream, a warning, he was dreaming before he went out to their fields just before dawn and tried to marshal the tired earth into producing just that little bit of surplus they needed to survive . . .
The wolf’s muzzle grazed his neck, its wet nose icy against his skin; it snorted, a burst of hot, fetid breath, almost as if amused by the stream of words issuing from Florans’ lips. And then it reared back, opening its jaws wide, and seized Florans’ skull in its mouth, wrenching him backwards, shaking him into silence; the other two flung themselves hungrily on his body.