Chapter 26 Gaspard
twenty-six
Gaspard
The forest’s edge reeked of death and rot, the stench of decay thick enough to coat my tongue with each breath. Perfect. I’d always found beauty in destruction, in the way nature yielded to greater forces.
These dying trees, their bark peeling like diseased skin, were nothing compared to what I’d become.
Power throbbed in the wound across my palm, a constant reminder of the pact I’d made.
Three days of hard riding, barely stopping to eat or piss, and now I stood exactly where the witch had directed, at the threshold where corruption had eaten the forest alive.
Where my transformation would begin in earnest.
Behind me, Alf shifted his weight from one foot to the other, the sound of his nervous breathing grating against my ears.
He’d been quiet most of our journey, a welcome change from his usual prattling, but the silence had its own accusation.
The way he looked at me when he thought I wasn’t watching—part fear, part disgust, all judgment—made me want to carve out his eyes with my hunting knife.
“Stay with the horses,” I said without turning, my voice rough from disuse. “This is not thy business.”
“Master Gaspard,” he began, then faltered as I turned just enough to fix him with a glare.
The scar on my palm pulsed in time with my irritation, sending tendrils of dark pleasure up my arm.
I’d noticed that happening more often since our visit to the bog witches.
My emotions physically manifesting through the mark of my bargain.
“Please,” he tried again, his round face flushed and sweating despite the chill in the air. “Reconsider this path. Nothing good ever comes from dealings with such darkness. Even for the one who seeks it.”
I almost laughed at the absurdity of it. Alf, with his soft hands and softer belly, presuming to lecture me on the consequences of power.
“Nothing good?” I echoed, turning fully to face him now.
“Tell me, Alf, what ‘good’ has come from playing by their rules? Following their laws? Respecting their boundaries?” My voice rose with each question, fueled by the rage I’d nursed since seeing Isabeau in that monster’s bed.
“The beast has what’s mine. My bride. My future. My right.”
“She ran from thee,” Alf whispered, the words barely audible but landing like blows nonetheless. “Perhaps that should tell thee something.”
My hand closed around his throat before I’d consciously decided to move. I squeezed just enough to feel his pulse hammering against my palm, to watch his eyes widen with the realization of his mistake.
“She ran because she’s confused,” I hissed, my face inches from his. “Because her power makes her think she’s above her station. Because that’s what scared rabbits do when they don’t understand their place in the natural order.”
I released him with a shove that sent him stumbling backward, nearly tripping over an exposed root.
His hand went to his throat, rubbing the red marks my fingers had left.
The fear in his eyes satisfied something dark inside me, something that had always been there but now grew stronger by the hour.
“Isabeau belongs to me,” I continued, each word deliberate and cold. “The beast that has her is already a dead thing walking. It simply doesn’t know it yet.”
Alf’s eyes dropped to my scarred palm, then back to my face. Whatever he saw there made him take another step back.
“I’ll... I’ll watch the horses,” he said, his voice small and defeated.
I turned back to the forest without acknowledging his surrender.
He didn’t matter. None of them did. Not the villagers with their simpering praise, not the tavern girls with their desperate attempts to catch my eye, not even Alf with his years of loyal service.
They were background noise in the symphony of my purpose.
Only Isabeau mattered. Only reclaiming what was mine.
The air shifted suddenly, growing colder, heavier. The hairs on the back of my neck stood at attention as a presence materialized among the dying trees. Not a physical arrival, but a gathering of shadow and malice that coalesced into Enid’s familiar form.
She rode a wave of darkness that seemed to devour what little life remained in the forest. Where it touched, the already diseased trees crumbled to ash, their decayed forms simply giving up the pretense of existence in her presence.
Birds fell dead from branches, their small bodies hitting the ground with soft thuds that somehow carried over the unnatural silence that had fallen.
“Coventry,” she greeted, her voice like glass dragged across stone. “Right on time. How... obedient.”
I refused to show the discomfort her presence inspired. Instead, I inclined my head in the barest acknowledgment, keeping my posture straight and proud.
“I’m a man of my word,” I replied evenly.
My hand went to the saddlebag I’d carried personally, unwilling to trust even Alf with its precious contents.
Inside, wrapped in black velvet, lay the unicorn horn.
I’d left the rest of the skeleton at my home, to be collected by the witches’ servants later, but the horn—the most powerful piece—I’d kept close.
Enid’s eyes, those pools of swirling purple, fixed on the bag with naked hunger. “A gift?” she breathed. “I can feel its power even through the leather.”
Before I could tell her that I brought my payment with me, an eery sensation swept over the area.
The darkness around her feet rippled and spread, climbing the trees around us like living ink.
As it rose, the already dim evening light faded completely, plunging us into a night that had nothing to do with the sun’s position.
This was a darkness beyond absence of light.
This was negation, a void that swallowed everything it touched.
“He comes,” Enid whispered, her voice suddenly reverent.
The shadows between the trees deepened, gathered, and took shape.
At first, I thought it was simply a trick of my eyes adjusting to the unnatural darkness.
Then I realized the blackness itself was moving with purpose, with intelligence, forming a silhouette that grew more solid with each passing heartbeat.
He stepped from between two trees that had been twenty paces apart, the laws of space apparently as meaningless to him as those of light. One moment there was nothing, and the next, he stood before me, real and impossible all at once.
The Dark Lord was not what I expected. Not some grotesque demon or horned devil from a church fresco.
He was beautiful in a way that made my chest hurt to look at him, like staring directly at a lightning strike.
A flash of light heading straight for you but unable to move from the coming doom, caught in the beauty.
His skin was the color of ash, not gray but a luminous pale that seemed to absorb and reflect light that wasn’t there.
His hair fell in midnight waves to broad shoulders, framing a face carved by someone who understood that perfection requires a single flaw—in his case, a small scar that bisected his left eyebrow.
He was massive. I’d always prided myself on my height and build, on the way I towered over other men in the village. Next to him, I felt like a child. His shoulders were twice the width of mine, his frame stretched inhumanly tall so that I had to crane my neck to meet his eyes.
Those eyes. My breath caught in my throat.
Where eyes should have been, there were twin pools of absolute blackness, not empty but filled with something worse than void—with conscious, hungry darkness.
Flames danced within that blackness, not metaphorical but actual fire that moved and shifted without consuming its impossible fuel.
Despite the absence of pupils or irises, I knew with bone-deep certainty when his gaze fixed on me.
“So,” he said, his voice like velvet dragged through gravel, impossibly deep yet crystal clear. “The latest Coventry to seek my favor.”
I meant to kneel. I’d planned to show proper deference to the power I was bargaining with. Instead, I found myself frozen, not with fear but with a kind of animal recognition. Prey before predator. Mortal before god.
His mouth curved into a smile that didn’t touch those burning eyes. “No need for kneeling, hunter. We are... old acquaintances, you and I. Or rather, your blood and mine.”
I found my voice, buried beneath layers of instinctive caution. “My lord. I’ve brought the payment as agreed.”
“Mmm.” He circled me slowly, his movements too fluid, too smooth to be human.
Though he appeared to walk, his feet didn’t quite match the rhythm of his progress, as if the ground itself was an afterthought to his movement.
“Enid has chosen well. You have the look of your grandfather. The same... hunger.”
The witch preened at his praise, her twisted features arranging themselves into something meant to be a smile. “He seeks the beast in the castle, my lord. The one who defies your corruption.”
“Yes.” Hades stopped directly before me, looming like a living shadow. “The last holdout in my forest. The thorns in my side. Tell me, hunter, why do you want him dead so badly? Is it truly for the girl?”
My hand tightened around the bag containing the unicorn horn. “She belongs to me,” I said simply, the words falling from my lips with the weight of absolute truth. “The beast has taken what’s mine. I want it destroyed and my property returned.”
Hades laughed then, a sound like breaking ice on a frozen river.
“Property! How delightfully primitive.” He leaned closer, and I smelled sulphur and something older, something that made my nose burn and my eyes water.
“Did you know, Gaspard Coventry, that half my Underworld is populated by your bloodline? Generations of Coventrys, all convinced of their right to possess, to own, to claim. All sent to me before their time by their own arrogance.”
I should have been insulted. Should have bristled at the implication that my family’s greatness was actually our downfall. Instead, a surge of pride washed through me. Of course the Coventrys dominated even in death. Of course we refused to fade meekly into old age.
“We take what we want,” I said, meeting those flame-filled eyes without flinching. “We always have.”
Something flickered in those depthless orbs—amusement, perhaps, or satisfaction. “Yes, you do. That’s what makes your line so... useful.”
There was something in his tone, something that tickled at the back of my mind.
A sense that he was playing a game whose rules I didn’t fully understand.
That mischievous glint behind the flames, the way his mouth curled around the word “useful”—he knew something I didn’t, something that apparently brought him no small measure of enjoyment.
“Come,” he said abruptly, turning toward the deepest part of the corrupted forest. “It’s time to begin your transformation, hunter. Time to give you the power to claim what you so desperately desire.”
Enid fell in beside him, her tattered dress floating around her ankles as if she walked through water rather than air. The darkness moved with them, a living canopy that continued to consume what little remained of the forest’s life.
I hesitated, just for a heartbeat. Alf’s words echoed in my mind: Nothing good ever comes from dealings with such darkness.
Even for the one who seeks it. For the first time since making my bargain with the witches, doubt flickered in my chest. Not about whether I would reclaim Isabeau.
That remained my unshakable purpose. But about the price I might truly be paying, beyond the unicorn horn and my service to the Dark Lord.
Behind me, I heard Alf shift nervously with the horses.
Ahead, Hades and Enid moved deeper into corruption so complete that the trees were nothing but black skeletal fingers clawing at an equally black sky.
I stood at the threshold between worlds.
The dying but still recognizable forest at my back, and the absolute negation of life before me.
The image of Isabeau flashed in my mind.
Her perfect face, crimson lips, amber eyes, her body that should have been carrying my child by now.
Then, overlaid like a second exposure on a photographic plate, the beast curled around her in that stolen castle bed, its massive form defiling what should have been mine alone.
Rage rose in me again, hot and familiar and clarifying.
Whatever doubts had begun to form evaporated in that heat.
Whatever game Hades might be playing, whatever secrets he kept behind those burning eyes…
none of it mattered. Only Isabeau mattered.
Only reclaiming her from the monster that had stolen her.
I stepped forward, following the Dark Lord into the consuming darkness. Behind me, I heard Alf’s quiet, broken sob, a sound so pathetic it didn’t even deserve my contempt.
The forest closed around me like a fist, branches reaching as if to hold me back.
But I was Gaspard Coventry, greatest hunter in ten provinces, future master of darkness itself.
And nothing—not forest, not beast, not even gods with eyes of flame and secrets in their smiles—would keep me from what was mine.