She hunts the boar as she might hunt a man.

In the moment of realizing that this whole tale makes a dark and terrible sense. Her first taste of combat was against a monstrous bear, and she has since faced trials of dragon, fox, and deer. And none of the sacred, wicked, enchanted creatures she faced ever seemed entirely animal. The intelligence that had gleamed in each eye, the inveterate deceptions of the fox, the pride of the dragon, the rage of the bear, the passive fatalism of the deer... 

Had they all been knights, once?

She feels the fur of her bearskin rustle against her back.

It was a dark thought. But, in this dark age, to be a knight was a dark business. The world from here to Jerusalem rotated around the dark decisions of those with strength of arms. In the absence of Roman law things fell to strength alone. The cities of stone had overgrown and sunk and returned to the jungle. Palaces were squat and warlike things. Even in the shadow of Jerusalem strength was the only measure of justice, strength the only measure of wisdom. And here in England it was strength again the only law, the strength of Uther, the strength of Robena, the strength and struggle of beasts.

Unless the Devil herself was to wait upon her at the coming crossroads then she would never know. This could have all been her imagination, trying to affix meaning onto the lives of the beasts who alone remained to her. But she did not think it so. She thought of knights carrying lion-painted shields. She thought of knights wearing horse-crested helms. She thought of knights collecting the pagan signs of their destined animals all about them, how they came to seem more and more like the beasts they idolized. She thought of a continent of beasts, squatting in their lairs of stone, feasting and fighting and fucking and calling themselves noble.

She is riding fast now, galloping towards that coming crossroads. She is not slowing down. She does not need to scent spoor or trace lines of broken trees. All the craft of the hunt she puts aside and for the first time in a long time her horse's hooves start to fly. She does not need to track this creature. She knows where it will be. It will be where the worst of knights will be, on the border of life and death - on the precipice of Hell itself.

As she rides she reaches up and tears the clasp of her bearskin cloak. That magnificent, accursed hide catches the wind and blows free right as she gallops through the crossroads, and for the first time in her life she feels the wind on her shoulders as she rides. It is not a boar spear she carries now, it is a lance. She will face this final challenge not as a bear, not as a hunter, not as a liminal part-human spirit creature. She will face it as a human. 

For the first time her armour shines beneath the sun.