Page 19 of Kill the Beast
“It helps her see the future or something,” Lyssa said, and Nadia rolled her eyes.
“Maybe don’t try to explain things you don’t understand yourself,” the little witch said curtly, before turning to Alderic. “Thebones help guide a witch’s path. They suggest outcomes, alternatives, courses of action. They can nudge her in one direction or another. They donot,” she said, glaring at Lyssa, “tell the future. The future is constantly changing, and cannot be pinned down.”
Finally, Rags ambled back into the kitchen, one of her massive leather tomes in her arms. She took a seat at the head of the table, setting the book down with exaggerated care, and ran one gnarled hand over the cover in a gentle caress while the other clutched the woven bag of bones hanging from a cord around her neck.
“Well?” Lyssa prompted when the witch made no move to speak. “What did they say?”
“What do you know of faeries?” Rags asked Alderic instead of answering. Her gaze was distant, her head cocked slightly, as if she were listening to the whispers of some unseen entity and having trouble hearing it.
He frowned. “Not much, I suppose. A few cautionary tales my grandmother told me when I was a child. They seemed… far-fetched… and I admit I paid them little heed.”
“A city-boy through and through,” Ragnhild said. “We’ll start with the basics, then.”
“Do we really need a history lesson?” Lyssa groaned.
Rags eyed her. “He should understand what we are doing and why we are doing it.”
“None of my other employers have understood thewhatorwhy.” They wouldn’t have cared, anyway. For them, the “what” wasjust get rid of that thing.The “why” was even easier: either the monster they wanted her to kill had slaughtered someone, or it was holding up construction on a new road or bridge.
The witch clucked her tongue. “You never dragged any of your other employers into the Wood, either,” she said. “He is involved now, and you have only yourself to blame for that.”
Nadia snickered, and Lyssa glared at her. “The Hound-wardens were about to—”
Rags clapped her hands together, making them all flinch. “All right, then, let us begin,” she said, addressing Alderic like she washis schoolmarm. “The creatures we call ‘faeries’ have names for themselves that cannot be pronounced by human tongues, and they are as varied in type as mushrooms or trees. For our purposes, I am referring to the ones our ancestors called the ‘aelfs.’ They were humanlike in appearance, and were what we would think of as royalty. They separated themselves into two courts—again, the actual words are unpronounceable, but humans dubbed them the Blessed Ones, or good faeries, and the Wicked Ones, or bad faeries.”
“There are no good faeries,” Lyssa muttered.
Ragnhild ignored her. “The Blessed Ones didn’t harm humans outright. They would sometimes even provide assistance, though the cost of a faerie’s favor was high, and anything they perceived as a slight—however small or accidental—could prove dangerous. The Wicked Ones, however, hated humans, and delighted in hunting them. When we began to cage ourselves in iron cities, the Wicked Ones could no longer capture us so easily. Iron makes faeries sick, you see, and saps their power. So, the Wicked Ones created monsters to kill us instead—Hounds, we call them. But over time, the cities expanded. Inch by inch, humans tamed the wilds, poisoning the land with our industry, and as powerful as they were, the aelfs could not survive it. Blessed Ones and Wicked Ones alike withered and died. The doorways they used to cross between their realm and the realm of the humans began to collapse as well, trapping most of what was left of the faeries on the wrong side. All that remains now are a pitiful number of goblins and trolls and such, hidden away in the last bastions of nature on this isle—and the Hounds the Wicked Ones created, which are nearly impossible to kill.”
“And we have made it our mission to kill them, until the world is rid of the foul things,” Lyssa said. “Regardless of who or what might stand in our way.”
“Like those people at my manor,” Alderic said, looking between them. “The Hound-wardens. Why don’t they want you to kill the monsters?”
“We don’t know,” Lyssa admitted with a grimace. Honoria had tried to tell her once, but the geas was already on her, and she hadn’t been able to string more than two words together.The spell won’t let me explain,she’d said after stammering and stuttering for a moment,but if you’ll just come with me…She’d held out her faerie-blighted hand as if she expected Lyssa to take it. Instead, Lyssa had stabbed straight through her palm.
“There are those who think the aelfs were gods,” Ragnhild told Alderic. “Maybe the Hound-wardens think of the creatures the Wicked Ones created as a tool of divine justice. Or maybe they just think the Hounds are sacred, having been made by the aelfs they revere.”
“It doesn’t matter what their misguided, delusional reasons are,” Lyssa said. “The Hounds are evil. Their only purpose is to slaughter innocents and ruin lives, and anyone who thinks they deserve anything but a violent death is an idiot.”
Ragnhild pursed her lips and Nadia sighed in frustration, as though they were bracing themselves for one of Lyssa’s rants, but Alderic came to their rescue.
“You said the Hounds are nearly impossible to kill. And yet you managed to kill one.”
“We’ve killed a lot more than one,” Lyssa told him.
“Seven since you came to the Wood, I think?” Ragnhild said, glancing at her sidelong.
“Seven,” Lyssa agreed. She’d had Honoria’s help for three of them, but Alderic didn’t need to know that.
“Seven?” He looked shocked. “But… I thought… Why weren’t any ofthosein the papers?”
“They were,” Lyssa said. “At least, a few of them were. But there weren’t any photographs, and the articles kept referring to them as ‘faerie creatures,’ because none of the reporters know what a Hound is.” The only reason someone had gotten a photo of the Serpent of Ire was because Lyssa happened to kill it in the middle of a market square. Usually, she preferred to lure the Houndsawayfrom towns and people, in order to reduce the risk of collateral damage—which meant there was never anything but rumors and conjecture for the papers to print—but it just hadn’t worked out that way in Ire. She had gotten several lucrative jobs from that article alone, though, so it had been worth it in the end.
“I had no idea,” Alderic said. “I’ve heard tales of your exploits, of course, even living under my metaphorical rock out in Bleakhaven, but I thought it was all trolls and ogres and whatnot.”
“Those are my bread and butter,” Lyssa said, “but while I am always willing to turn any faerie into a dead faerie, destroying Hounds is what I live for.”
“So, you have killedsevenunkillable monsters,” he said, looking between Lyssa and the witches. “How?”
