Chapter Six #2
“I want him to stay here with you while I gather the ingredients for the weapon,” she added. “The Hound-wardens know what I’m after, and that Alderic is involved. It isn’t safe for him to return home.”
Rags stood from the porch swing with a grunt. “Let’s see what the bones have to say.”
Nadia was perched on one of the kitchen chairs, her gaze fixed on Alderic, who was sitting across from her.
Alderic, meanwhile, kept glancing at Lyssa as if she could rescue him from the little witch’s scrutiny, and Lyssa was clenching her teeth against the unbearably loud sound of Brandy licking his paws.
“What is she doing in there?” Alderic asked finally in a hushed voice, nodding his head toward the doorway. Ragnhild had disappeared through it not long ago, leaving the rest of them to wait in the kitchen, and now they could hear her muttering faintly to herself in the other room.
“Consulting the bones,” Lyssa and Nadia said at the same time.
“But what does that mean?”
“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.
“The bones help guide a witch’s path. They suggest outcomes, alternatives, courses of action.
They can nudge her in one direction or another.
They do not,” 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 the what or why.” They wouldn’t have cared, anyway.
For them, the “what” was just 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 was his 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 of those in 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 Hounds away from 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 killed seven unkillable monsters,” he said, looking between Lyssa and the witches. “How?”
“Magic,” Rags told him. “The Hounds’ glyphs hold a key to destroying the creatures, if you know what you’re looking for.”
“What are you looking for?”
Rags hesitated, as though trying to figure out how best to explain it. “The lines that make up a glyph are characters in the Fae language. They represent the intentions or emotions surrounding the creation of a Hound. Revenge, joy—”
“Joy?”
“The joy of the hunt,” Ragnhild said, with a touch of bitterness in her voice. “As I said, the Wicked Ones delighted in killing humans, and many of the Hounds were fashioned out of nothing more than sheer exhilaration for the chase.”
“And once you know what intention or emotions surround the creation of a Hound…?”
“I can then cast the spell that will decipher its magic.”
“And the Beast’s glyph?” he asked. “What was the intention behind its creation?”
“I’m not entirely sure, yet.” Rags opened her book, the leather cover stiff and creaking, and rifled through page after page of notes and glyphs scribbled in faded walnut ink until she found the one she was looking for: the page with the Beast’s glyph drawn in spidery lines across the crinkled paper.
Lyssa sucked in a breath. It didn’t matter how many times she saw it—in her nightmares or memories or in Ragnhild’s book—it always made her stomach clench.
“It appears to be a type of revenge glyph,” Rags told him, running her hand over the page, “which means that this Hound was created to punish humans for a transgression of some kind. However, there are aspects of it that are unfamiliar to me. I hope to understand it better now that we have your claw.” She stared at him for a moment, and he simply stared back, until Lyssa elbowed him.
“The claw,” she whispered.
“Oh. Right.” He produced the velvet pouch from an inner pocket of his waistcoat and withdrew the claw, setting it on the table with a soft click.
The witches leaned closer. Lyssa, on the other hand, wrapped her arms around herself as a wave of nausea washed over her.
Just as it had in the parlor, the sight of the claw brought the past back to her in a rush, the feel of the sticky summer air on her skin, her tongue grainy with sugar.
The piercing screams around her as everything turned into chaos.
Her breath hitched in her throat, her heartbeat unsteady, and she rubbed the scar of her oath underneath the table.
This was it. They finally had what they needed.
“It reeks,” Nadia complained, but her expression was one of grim fascination.
“What will you use it for?” Alderic asked.
“A piece of a Hound holds an echo of the magic that made it,” Ragnhild told him.
“By using the deciphering spell on the claw, I’ll be able to see into the heart of that magic, to understand the essence of its making so that I can figure out what, exactly, we will need in order to unmake it.
What type of weapon to forge, for example, and which of our usual ingredients must come from a specific source.
Lyssa will also use the claw in the forging of the weapon itself, binding the magic of the Beast’s creation to its destruction. ”
“I see,” Alderic said, and Lyssa almost laughed out loud at the bewildered expression that belied his words.
“Come on, then, into the smithy,” the old witch said, getting out of her chair with a gentle popping of knees and spine. “It’s time we figure out how to kill the Beast.”