Page 41 of Kill the Beast
The whole forest was wild and abandoned, a far cry from the manicured hunting-wood she had been expecting. Even the loggers seemed to have forsaken this place, by the look of the rusted handsaws and rotted wood-carts lying in the ditches on either side of what was left of the trail. They wouldn’t have done so lightly; the forest was the only source of lumber around. Lyssa could think of very few reasons—none of which she liked—why people would prefer to pay to import raw materials that they could collect themselves for less than half the cost.
It was clear, now, why it had taken them an entire day and a ridiculous sum of money to find a farm-wife willing to take them up the mountain in the back of her horse-drawn cart once thestorm had passed, Lyssa, Alderic, and Brandy all shoved in together atop a mound of damp straw and molding turnips. Even so, the woman had refused to go farther than a crude, carved-wood marker staked into the dirt road. There were bad things beyond that marker, she’d said. Things that killed their livestock and stole their children in the night. Alderic had tried to plead with her—they still had so far to go, would she please reconsider for double the price they had already paid?—to no avail. He’d even hopped out of the horse-cart and tried to press a pouch fat with coins into her hands, but returned to Lyssa defeated after less than a minute.
“She says no amount of money in the world would be enough to get her into those woods,” he’d said, raking his fingers through his hair in frustration.
“Oh, look. You finally found a problem that being rich couldn’t solve,” Lyssa had replied, prying a turnip out of Brandy’s mouth and tossing it aside.
“Don’t look so amused—it’ll take us hours on foot.”
“Then we’d better stop chatting and start walking.” She climbed out of the cart and helped Brandy down. His expression said that he didn’t need help, he neededturnips,but Lyssa ignored him. “I’d like to get there before nightfall, so that we aren’t blundering around in the dark. I know you bought lanterns,” she snapped at Alderic before he could start prattling on again about all of his gear.
They’d thanked the woman, who made the sign of Ungharad’s sword on her brow—a protective gesture meant to ward off evil—and muttered something about a lack of common sense before turning her horses around on the narrow, muddy road.
Now, Lyssa caught up with Alderic and leaned in close enough to whisper in his ear, her breath fogging in the cold air. “The farm-wife was right. There are faeries in these woods—carnivorous ones.”
“No, there aren’t,” he said. “I told you, it’s local superstition and nothing more. I came here every summer as a child, and nothing tried to gobble me up.”
“Until the Beast showed up.”
“That’s different,” he insisted.
But Lyssa earned her bread and butter by going where the locals warned her not to, and she had learned long ago that there were almost always faeries in the gulches and gullies where village children disappeared.
“When was the last time you were here?” she asked him.
A shadow of pain passed over his face. “A while ago.”
“Something could have moved in since then,” she whispered. “Stay close to me, and be ready for anything.”
He nodded, resting one hand on the hilt of the sword she had given him, the other on his new pistol.
As they walked along the overgrown path, the silence pressed in on them, heavy and suffocating.
“Maybe we’re the reason everything is quiet,” Alderic suggested after a time. “It seems like the locals have been avoiding this place for years. Long enough for the birds to have forgotten what we are.”
“Maybe,” Lyssa said, but she kept her hand on her pistol all the same, and quickened her pace. The sooner they got to Alderic’s family estate, the better. They could collect the water as soon as night fell, and then draw a Door on one of the walls to get back to the Wood.
Eventually, they broke free of the trees and found themselves on a flat, grass-covered cliffside overlooking a vast lake. More forest ringed the far side of the water, and mountains loomed beyond that, purplish-blue with distance.
A sprawling mansion perched near the edge of the cliff not far from where they stood. That had to be it—the de Laurent family summer estate. But the sight of their destination didn’t ease the knot in Lyssa’s stomach. The mansion looked as sinister as the woods had felt, with its collapsed roof and crumbled columns, its once-grand façade now overtaken by rot.
Maybe they could find something inside to use as their ironitem. Lady Bright, it’d probably be just as powerful as coffin nails—the place certainly seemed like a tomb.
Brandy whined as they picked their way carefully through the long grasses toward the estate, his ears pinned back against his head. The ground was muddy and riddled with bits of broken stone—remnants of long-destroyed statuary, cracked tiles with sun-bleached glaze that might once have made up a painted walkway.
“It’s okay,” Lyssa reassured the bullmastiff, stepping over a severed marble head with half the nose broken off. “I won’t let anything hurt you.”
When they got closer, she realized that the walls of the building weren’t black with rot. They had been burned, the paint blistered and peeling around the scorch marks.
She whistled. “What happened here?” she asked, before she remembered that she had scolded Alderic for his questions about her own painful past.
He had a faraway look in his eyes, his brows pinched together. “After my brother was killed, my father trapped the Beast inside and tried to burn the whole place down.”
“I’m surprised it’s still standing at all.”
“Most of it is made of stone.” Alderic turned away from the destroyed mansion of his youth and gazed out over the lake. He was quiet for a long time, the only sound the whisper of the wind through the long grasses.
If the mere sight of this place upset him that much, there was no way he would be able to wade through the ruins of his past for a scrap of iron. She couldn’t do it for him, either—Ragnhild had said that he needed to accompany her in order to gather his items with his own hands.
