It’s like when your parents wanted to take you on a really long car trip, and they woke you up with a rousing “Rise and shine, sweety, we have to drive all the way to Gas Station City by lunchtime, and if we don’t get started now we won’t get to the fleabag motel until 3 AM, and you *know* how carsick you’ll be by then. Did you pack enough underwear? Oh, and don’t forget your homework, we don’t want you to fall behind in school just because you’re spending the next two weeks in the back of a car immobilized between piles of luggage and feeling the blood pool in your feet.”
A better version of the above might be “Hey guess what! we’re going on an adventure today! There’s this special gift shop that (probably) sells model cars! Do you want some cheetos for breakfast? What music do you think we should listen too, huh? Wow, isn’t that a neat looking sports car over there?”
I guess what I’m trying to say is that this story needs less homework and more cheetos.

Or to put it even more succinctly: shoot the sheriff on the first page.

There’s another issue here, although it’s one that might be more applicable to other of your stories than to this one, but since I’m typing here anyway I’ll lay it out. There’s frequently a clash between storyteller-style first-and-a-half person narrative (i.e. “…but you know, dear child, that a King’s advisor is not so easily fooled. The King himself can afford to be gullible on occasion-indeed the crown requires it!-but an advisor, whose position is more precarious even than the throne, must be far more cynical. Now, as to the hedgehog, about whom I know you have been worrying, for the last ten years he had been working at Wal-Mart, and…”) and more modern-ish impersonal block-of-prose narrative (i.e. “Vronsky finished the meal hurriedly, using the silverware all out of proper order and staining his sleeve with egg yolk even as he brushed lint off his collar. He absent-mindedly thanked the charwoman as he left the house, a process which took longer than usual as he tried simultaneously to lace his boots while setting his hat in a way which would not disarrange his hair, combed that morning into what he hoped was the latest fashion. A gust of cold autumn air greeted him outside, and he hugged his coat around him and so on and so on for ten or so pages until he reaches the scene of the next plot point, which is actually part of a sub-plot.”)
The problem with alternating use of storytelling style and massed prose style is that the two go at such different speeds that they can derail each other, and steer so differently that the the switch can make one seasick (yes, I’m addicted to metaphors; deal with it).
The sections here in storytelling style keep running ahead of the massed prose sections. The tempo is disordered and temperments of the two styles don’t always match each other. Readers more interested in plot will get annoyed that the descriptions of wet cloaks being hung on pegs are interfering with learning just what the heck happens with the magic apocalypse thing that we all know is coming, and that we know will take several hundred pages to get to in prose style when storytelling style could do it in two. Meanwhile readers interested in the characters and setting will get annoyed that in the middle of a slow-burn character development scene in a restaurant, the storytelling style will suddenly rush in, jump on top of the table, drop its trousers, piss foreshadowing all over the buffet table, smear its philosophical anecdotes all over the couch’s decorative scrollwork, laugh obscenely, and then leap out of the window with a promise to return next chapter.
Finally, there’s the issue that in storytelling style the narrator is a character with a purpose in telling the story. If you alternate storytelling style with massed prose style, it’s like the narrator has some debilitating hormonal imbalance which causes him/her to start telling you something important, then get sidetracked by details for weeks at a time, with only occasional paragraphs of lucidity. Alternately, it sometimes seems like an Ingmar Bergman film about man’s place in existence, with occasional celebrity routines by Robin Williams and Bugs Bunny.
I apologize is this comment falls more under the category of recrimination rather than constructive criticism. I tried to reach for the latter, but in writing, as in life, I have an awful sense of direction.

The reader isn’t supposed to know about these yet, that’s the point, it’s foreshadowing. But foreshadowing exists in delicate balance, and it’s really easy to tip from fascinating into frustrating. There’s a lot less of it in this chapter, and I think it strikes a better balance.

The change from your more typical voice works quite well (in my opinion), and gives the story a lot of its atmosphere just from the language alone.

I’m also curious about these coyotes. This is a very English tale (references to Christianity, -shires and the like), so why are there coyotes?