He’d miss Ratbiter, but he would not burden the army with a lame horse. Klaus Papenheim was, in the end, Lycaonese. “And if there is a place for you on the other side, I will find you there.” “Rest, old friend,” the Prince of Hannoven murmured in Reitz.
Wiping the bloodspray off his cheek, the prince knelt by his old friend’s corpse and laid a hand on the unmoving flank. Klaus Papenheim had ridden that horse through death and doom too long to let someone else swing the axe. Some would have said that the Prince of Hannoven should have ceded the duty to another, that the arm he’d lost in the fall of Hainaut would make a clean kill harder, but he’d refused. Messy thing killing a horse, even when done right.
The Bremen stampfen dropped, mercifully, but the spray of blood still went high and hot. The axe-blade bit deep into the skull, killing Ratbiter before the horse realized what was happening. Klaus breathed out, quashing all hesitation, and struck. “Seventy-four: if your lover does not have martial training have a rescue plan ready and waiting, as the eventual abduction by your nemesis is essentially inevitable.” – ‘Two Hundred Heroic Axioms’, author unknown
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