Chapter 21
“A fisherman of Saint-Jacut-de-la-Mer, walking home to his cottage from his boat one evening along the wet sands, came, unawares, upon a number of fairies in a houle. They were talking and laughing gaily, and the fisherman observed that while they made merry they rubbed their bodies with a kind of ointment or pomade. All at once, to the old salt’s surprise, they turned into ordinary women. ”
“Gab! Up!” I wake to my sister rattling my door at the Goose. I had a mug or two of mead as I discussed the Beast of Brimmond, the cursed duke, and the very real possibility that the faery murdering people was something that ought not have slipped from their world into ours.
Morning is here now, and my eyes feel rather like I have ground sawdust into my face. My throat is no better. I untangle myself from the covers and jerk open the door. “Why are you here?”
“I brought your horse. There’s need of the Hunter today.” Rylan takes one look at me, crinkles her nose, and sighs. She drops the bundle in her arms onto the floor. “You need to wash. You smell like hearth fire and wet horse.”
I do what any reasonable sibling would in that moment. I tackle her in a hold that has her face in my armpit. “Are you sure?”
“Ugh.” Rylan twists away, breaking my grip with agility if not brute strength. “You are the least ladylike person I have ever met, and that includes the farrier, the soldiers, the stable—”
“Fine.” I walk over to a washstand with an ewer of cold water and wash up.
“Clean things.” Rylan points at the bundle. “A guard was told there’s a body and went to summon the squadron. They will join us in the wood.”
“Did they escort you here?” I ask, realizing as sleep fades that she ought not be here at all.
The peril of travel through Alveus as a young, unmarried woman is often the most obvious of my worries, but now that the beast has attacked me—and possibly Emma—I must worry about my sister being a target. Women are not safe from the monster.
I glare at her. “You are to be safely at the manor and—”
“I was surrounded by soldiers, and others are at the house.” Rylan huffs. “We are like prisoners at home.”
“Good.” Before she can reply, I prompt, “Details?”
“Not much. Beast of Brimmond, most likely. One of the young ones found it, told patrol, and is waiting downstairs.” Rylan shakes her head. “They ought to stay out of the forest. Just because it hasn’t killed a child—”
“I know. I told them that.”
“They don’t need the coins Father used to pay them,” Rylan continues. “What if we give them tasks at the manor, instead? Safer, but they still have money for sweets.”
“Excellent. I’ll leave you to figure that out,” I suggest before I unroll the things she brought for me. “I want to wear trousers in the forest going forward. I know Father disapproved, but there’s no reason I should be hampered by dresses.”
“I can have a seamstress come to the manor.” Rylan watches me, as if inviting me to tell her she’s overstepping.
Instead I grab her hand. “Thank you. I am overwhelmed, and all that you are offering helps ease my burden.”
“I am the Hunter-in-Training now,” she gently reminds me.
“You are still not to be outside the manor without guards—or me—at your side.”
“Yes, Hunter,” she murmurs as she assists me into my layers, and we leave the room. After a quick stop at the tavern to ask that our things be delivered to the manor, we take our horses and are off toward Brimmond Wood with a young man from the village.
“After this, you will stay out of the wood,” Rylan tells him. “I have tasks at the manor, and if the lot of you come to the manor together or with the soldiers, you’ll have coins aplenty.”
The boy’s initial frown transforms into a wide grin. “Yes, m’lady.”
He’s perhaps twelve or thirteen years old, but he belongs to one of the tenants on the Fleuriste estate. He’s well dressed, although the rips on the boy’s jacket tell me that either he’s been wandering where he shouldn’t or we are headed into the brambles that lie near the gate to Faerie.
Shortly after, we are back in the thick of Brimmond Wood.
Rylan is perched atop her horse, looking for all the world like a lady.
I slide to the ground and dart between two saplings, weaving through them as surely as the shuttle of my mother’s loom.
Clatterbuck is not a fan of the narrow opening but trails after me still.
Maybe she can smell where we are headed. Maybe she’s just in a mood.
“Over here!” The boy’s voice rises from the scrub and brambles where he has vanished.
I scan our surroundings for telltale marks of violence. A few broken branches are all I can see so far. We are not at the same site where Hugh’s body was found, the site where my father died and I was attacked.
Rylan follows my gestures with her gaze, but she moves no closer. “Anything?”
“Nothing yet. No corpse or monster tracks or scent or . . .”
A rustle of branch and leaf has me holding a hand up to my sister. Some creatures wait in trees. I listen and watch for others in the area—everything is so much more vivid since Father died—but the moment passes. No birds scatter. No rodents scurry away.
Everything has already scattered, experience reminds me.
Whatever is awaiting us in the brush is such that the creatures of the forest have no interest in being here. The silence is only broken by the crackling of dry leaves under foot.
Then the boy’s head pops up again out of the thick underbrush of the forest. “This way.”
He leads us deeper into the maze of twisted trunks.
“Are you certain?” Rylan asks in a voice that shouldn’t be audible, but this, too, has changed.
“Found him!” the boy calls again.
The ground is trampled down in the center of the brush, as if wild boar had decided to frolic in ever-widening circles.
The branches are cracked, and the undergrowth is flattened.
The clearing looks almost idyllic at first glance, a picnic spot suitable for ladies, but a bitter scent wafts up from the ground: death and fear.
Human death.
Clatterbuck refuses to go any deeper into the shadows.
“Stand here,” I attempt to order my horse.
Clatterbuck snorts. The odds of the mare’s obedience are low. Honestly, I rather like the surly beast’s personality. Mostly.
Stepping in front of Rylan again, I lift the edge of my skirt and underskirt, trying to avoid collecting the leaves and thorns that are ubiquitous this deep in the Brimmond Wood. “Trousers,” I mutter again. “I shred more gowns in these brambles than any sensible person should.”
“Ladies Fleuriste! Here!” The boy waves at us. “He’s here.”
“Is this one like the others?”
“Eh. Probably?” The boy shrugs. “Poked him with a stick . . .”
Rylan winces.
The boy gestures at the body as we close the final distance. “He seems like them other bodies your father was asking after a few weeks ago.”
Rylan twists her hands together, still not looking at the body only a few steps away. I realize that this might be her first fresh dead body, and again, I want to send her away. “You’re sure he is . . .”
“Dead? Couldn’t be alive without his head, now, could he?” The boy grins at us.
“Stay far from here,” I order, passing a handful of coins to him. “Report to the manor and only do so in a group.”
Before I can say anything else, ask him to wait so we can escort him, he darts into the forest with a cry of, “Yes, Hunter!”
Rylan stares into the shadows, ostensibly watching him leave, but she’s covering her mouth and nose with a lavender-scented cloth.
“Gabri?” Rylan says my name softly. “What do you need?”
“Notes, sister. I need you to write things down about this dead man that I might think on them later.” I found talking to the group at the Dancing Goose helpful last night.
Solving puzzles is not simply about gathering evidence to study under my microscope or compare at the archive.
The biggest tool I have is my mind, and talking helps me think about the evidence in new ways.
As I begin to catalog the injuries—lacerations and bruises mostly—Rylan’s quill scratches across the paper she brought for this reason. The man has minimal bruising, probably due to a lack of blood. However, his skin looks like torn chicken or fish. Jagged. Angry.
I squat down, wishing yet again my sister weren’t watching this examination. Casually, I take a deep inhalation. No musky or salty scents. No flowers. No perfumes. Nothing but the slightly gamy smell of death.
The awkward crouching position makes me fear falling onto the body, but I need to examine the dead man. Bending isn’t an option between stays and layers and my heavy dress. One of these days, I’ll be already dressed for death when the summons comes. Today is not such a day.
A brief thought passes that the last body before Father was one where he was at my side. I push that and all other thoughts of him away. “Meat torn. Skin bruised, but he’s bloodless now. He was still alive when this happened. That’s new. The bruising indicates—”
“That poor man!” Rylan claps her hand to her mouth.
Not Father, I remind myself. I have grown used to speaking to him about the dead, and I forgot briefly that others may find the topic more emotional.
“The head was completely severed. No blood on the surrounding ground.” I nudge the body slightly, rolling him to his side to see the ground under him. “The traveler wasn’t killed here.”
Rylan scratches out a note, not looking at the dead man.
I straighten to stand between her and the body. I can hear horses breaking through the wood. “The W?chter are nearly here.”
“Do we want them to handle . . . the body?”
“No.” I can’t focus on them, even though the sound of their approach seems louder than reality says it is. “I need to finish the examination.”