Page 85 of Kill the Beast
She shook her head, trying to dislodge the image of him from her mind. He had betrayed her. He didn’t deserve her sympathy, her understanding.
Ragnhild patted her shoulder. “My old knees can’t bear this a moment longer. Let’s get out of the dirt if you want to keep talking. Here—help me up.”
The three of them walked back to the cottage, Nadia trailing far behind. Ragnhild leaned heavily on Lyssa, though Lyssa was barely steady enough on her own feet to support her.
It felt like her entire world was tilting wildly beneath her, trying to shake her off of it.
Everything she had ever believed was a lie.
Everyone she had thought she could trust had betrayed her.
And for some reason, her anger sputtered, struggling to remain alight, instead of building into a wall of flame that could raze an entire army to the ground. It confused her—she was so used to giving in to it, so used to letting it consume her and wipe out everything else inside her, that she didn’t know what to do with all of the thoughts in her head.
When they got to the cottage, Brandy nearly knocked Lyssa over with the force of his welcome. She sank to her knees and wrapped her arms around his neck, nuzzling his fur until he got impatient with her and squirmed away to lick her face. Then he barked and ran to the door, his tail wagging like he expected someone else to come in after her.
Alderic. He was looking for Alderic.
Her heart ached at the realization, and she pressed her hand to her chest as if it could ease her pain. Nadia and Ragnhild watched her warily for a moment, before Ragnhild suggested that maybe a chair would be more comfortable than the floor. Lyssa obeyed wordlessly, and sat at the kitchen table in a daze, staring into space until Rags pressed a hot mug into her hands.
She forced herself to take a sip of the coffee. It lifted the fog from her mind a little, and she found herself back inside her body all at once, back in the present moment. Nadia was perched on her usual chair, and she and Rags were both looking at Lyssa like they were more afraid of her despair than they had ever been of her anger.
“I want to know everything,” Lyssa croaked.
Ragnhild inclined her head. “You have but to ask, and I will do my best to answer.”
“No more lies?”
“No more lies.”
“Why did you take it upon yourself to kill the Hounds to begin with?”
“Because my mother was a Hound,” Ragnhild said softly. “And because I am half-aelf, and have the power to do it.”
Lyssa choked on the sip of coffee she had just taken, spraying her mouthful across the table while Nadia wrinkled her nose. “You’re half-aelf?”
So that was why Rags never used enough salt. Why her head hurt whenever she was in the smithy, around all that iron. Lyssa was a fool for not seeing it sooner.
She was a fool for a lot of reasons.
Ragnhild nodded, her rheumy gaze suddenly very far away. “My father was an aelf, my mother human. He… took her against her will, as the Fae often did. Brought her to his court, where she lived as a captive until she became pregnant with me. I don’t know if it was maternal instinct or love or whether she just wanted to take something away from my father the way he had taken her away, but she finally grew a spine and fled.” The old witch took a sip of her tea, swallowing noisily before she continued. “She cloaked us in iron and salt. Wed a blacksmith that made us talismans to wear to keep the faeries away. I was sick all the time, slowly being poisoned by the very things my mother was using to protect us. One day, I could stand it no longer—I left. I never expected my mother to come after me, but she did. My father found us on the road.” She blinked, looking up at the ceiling as if she might find some hidden strength there to finish the story. “He turned her into a monster right in front of me. Sometimes, if the night is too quiet, I can still hear her bones cracking into their new form. I don’t know what he cursed her with—it was in the language of the Fae, and my mother didn’t know enough of it to teach me. Or maybe she just couldn’t bear to hear the sound of it. But after years of trying to undo what my father had done, I found an old witch who had been a slave to the aelfs for long enough to learn how to decipher their glyphs. She taught me how to undo them with the magic in my blood. And she taught me about the mercy of death.”
“Lady Bright,” Lyssa muttered, shaking her head. She had never known. Had never even bothered to ask. She had been so consumed by her own lust for revenge that she had never wondered why Rags was helping her get it.
“Did Alderic say why he got cursed?” Nadia asked into the silence that followed Ragnhild’s confession.
Lyssa’s gaze darted to the young apprentice before returning to Rags. “He said that he broke a woman’s heart—a faerie’s heart, I guess. But it can’t be something so…stupid,can it?”
“Is a broken heart stupid?” Ragnhild mused. “I told you, love is powerful, and when it sours into hatred, it is more dangerous than any blade. Alderic broke a woman’s heart, and she wanted to hurt him in return. It is a tale as old as time itself. Unfortunately for Alderic, it was not a human heart he broke, and the scorned woman had the power to turn him into the monster she saw within him.”
“But…”But that’s not fair.
Whatever Alderic had done to that faerie, did he really deserve three hundred years of heartbreak in return?
Does he really deserve a sword through the chest?an insidious voice within her whispered.
She shoved the thought away. There was no room for forgiveness, no matter how unfair the reason for Alderic’s curse. He had killed her brother—killed many more people, besides. That wasn’t a slate she could simply wipe clean.
“What are the terms of his curse?” Nadia asked.
