Chapter Twenty-Two
CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWO
THEY BEGAN WITH Lyssa’s blood.
The smithy table was now cluttered with the tools of Ragnhild’s spellcraft—twine and candles, bundles of dried herbs, feathers from crow and owl tied into fans.
It was dark inside, the forge cold and quiet, though Ragnhild began lighting a few stubby candles carved with strange symbols.
Her apprentice was conspicuously absent.
“Where’s Nadia?” Lyssa asked as she watched the old witch set up the ritual they were about to perform. It had a dual purpose—to cleanse the smithy to prepare it for what was to come, and to drain some of Lyssa’s blood to use for the forging itself.
“She said that she wants nothing to do with this,” Rags told her as she finished lighting the candles. “She feels a great deal of fondness for Alderic and wants no hand in slaying him.”
“Why does she care so much about him? Because he bought her a stupid present?” Lyssa’s nerves were frayed, and Nadia’s attitude was bothering her more than it should.
Ragnhild looked at her reproachfully. “Because she feels a kinship with him.”
“Why?” she demanded, rankled by the idea.
“You’ll have to ask Nadia that later. Now, we have work to do.” She gestured to the ritual space she had consecrated. “Sit within the circle, cross-legged, facing north.”
Lyssa stepped over the rough chalk circle the old witch had drawn on the smithy floor, settling herself as instructed while Rags donned her ritual robe and pine-bough crown.
She lit a stick of incense, wafting the heady smoke with the crow-feather fan.
Then, from the smithy table, the witch selected a broom she had made herself under the light of a waning moon, and whacked Lyssa across the shoulders with it.
“Ow!”
“Hush,” Rags said. “I’m cleansing you.”
That was new. “Of what?”
“Hush.”
She began chanting, and the air in the room shifted. Lyssa could feel the sudden thrum of magic pressing in on her, and when she squinted she could almost see it, like the undulating heat belching from the forge when she was working on a weapon.
“There is a powerful oath in your blood,” Ragnhild said, her voice somehow different.
Gone was the warbling rasp of the old woman Lyssa knew, replaced with something rich and clear and steady.
“A vow to kill the faerie-made creature they call the Beast of Buxton Fields. If this is true, speak it aloud.”
“It is true,” Lyssa said, her own voice sounding small and hesitant in comparison. She squared her shoulders, straightened her spine, and tried to summon some of the certainty she had felt only a few days ago. Breathed in deep and let the scent of the incense ground her.
Ragnhild raised both arms, holding the broom aloft. “Would you give your lifeblood to see the Beast slain?”
“I would,” she said, satisfied with the steel in her reply.
Ragnhild placed the broom on the floor to the south, at a particular angle.
Next, she fetched an old ceramic bowl from the table, the bottom crusted with old blood.
Most of it was Lyssa’s—they had done this spell before, binding her hatred and anger into something Rags could use, but never had it been so personal before.
This time, it wasn’t simply righteous anger over the innocents slaughtered by the Hound in question, but something Lyssa hated with her whole heart.
It was, once.
She shook her head to clear it of the unwanted thought, trying to force herself back into the proper mindset. This is your purpose. You have been working towards this for a long time. You are finally going to fulfill your oath.
Ragnhild frowned. “Focus,” she warned, and bent to set the bowl on the floor in front of Lyssa, careful not to smear the chalk circle. “Roll up your sleeves.”
Lyssa obeyed, hitching up both sleeves and resting her wrists on her knees. She gazed down at the tattoos on her forearms—Ungharad’s flaming sword on her right, and a butcher’s cleaver crossed with a blacksmith’s hammer on the left.
Rags handed a ritual knife to her, hilt first. “I am going to build power, while you focus on your intention to kill the Beast,” she said.
Lyssa had done this before, but the routine explanation was a comfort, a reminder that as unstable as things felt, some things would always be the same.
“Let the emotions build to a crescendo within you. Let them overpower you. The stronger the emotion, the stronger our spell will be. When you can no longer contain what is within you, speak your reason for wanting the creature dead—the reason for your oath—and cut into your arm, letting your blood run into the bowl. Do you understand?”
Lyssa nodded.
“I will then soak a cord in your blood, and we will use it to wrap the hilt of the sword once it is forged. Are you ready?”
“I’m ready,” Lyssa said.
“Then let us begin.”
Ragnhild lit another stick of pungent, earthy incense, and began chanting again, wafting the smoke with the owl-feather fan this time.
The air seemed to pulse with power, quiet at first but building quickly.
Lyssa unscrewed the lid from her rage, letting it fill her as she thought of her brother’s mangled body, his entrails spilling out of him into the dirt.
The Beast towering over them, roaring as it burst from its cage.
Understanding slammed into her so hard she flinched.
The cage broke. Alderic didn’t want it opened. He wanted to see if someone in the crowd could kill him, but he tried to do it without hurting anyone.
The thought wrestled its way into her mind out of nowhere, but once it was there, she couldn’t get it out. She shook her head, trying to nurse the hatred she had felt for the Beast over the last thirteen years.
He didn’t want to hurt anyone, the thought persisted, so she tried to bury it with anger instead.
But he did. He hurt the one person you loved most. He hurt Eddie. Killed him, tore his insides out, left you with your brother’s blood on your hands and a hatred in your heart that you will never truly be free from.
He ruined you.
Finally, the fury crawled over her skin, giving her goose bumps, and she clenched her teeth as she let it consume her. When it was about to boil over, to explode out of her in a flurry of fist and teeth, she opened her eyes. Grabbed the knife and sank its edge into the crook of her arm.
“The Beast killed my brother,” she said, and for a moment she heard it in Alderic’s voice, not her own. The Beast killed my brother at Bellgaard, the place we were happiest as children.
She blinked, her anger faltering. Alderic had killed his own brother. Why had she not realized that until now? He had killed his own brother, and then his father had trapped him inside their summer home and tried to burn it down.
Did Alderic’s father know that the Beast was his son when he did that?
“Focus!” Ragnhild screamed between chants, and Lyssa quickly set the knife down next to her and grabbed the ceramic bowl, letting her blood drip into it. As it leeched out of her, her head spun with its loss, and she felt unmoored for a moment, unreal.
With a jolt, she remembered Alderic slapping her awake while she bled out, choking on a sob as he begged the Door to open.
He saved your life and you will end his.
She blinked, her mind sludgy and slow. The bowl was full now.
Rags knelt—slowly, her knees popping with the effort—to dip the cord she had prepared into the blood. “Send your emotions into the cord. Focus them there.”
But it was a struggle to maintain her anger. Her mind would not cooperate—she kept thinking of the anguish on Alderic’s face when he told her the truth, and how happy he had looked when he finally won Brandy over, and …
Lyssa gritted her teeth. Fine. If hating him wasn’t working, she could use the hatred she felt toward herself, instead.
You are such a fucking idiot, she seethed, and felt the rage ratchet back up to a level Ragnhild could use.
How could you not have known he was the Beast?
You let this happen, and now you might lose everything you’ve worked towards.
You absolute fool. The first time you’ve felt this way about someone in years, and you chose the fucking monster who killed your brother.
“Good! Good!” the old witch cried, as Lyssa pushed her guilt and self-loathing into the cord. It began to glow faintly, and after a moment, Rags plucked the cord out of the bowl and shoved it into a special jar she had prepared for it, stoppering it up with a cork carved with spells.
And then it was done. The power in the air seemed to fade, and Ragnhild’s shoulders sagged with the loss of it, as if it had been propping her up. She put a gnarled hand on Lyssa’s shoulder.
“Go punch something,” she whispered, her voice once again wobbly with age, and Lyssa shot to her feet, storming out of the smithy and into the woods.
But this wasn’t like any of the other blood-rituals they had done.
She had no urge to punch something, no desire to stalk through the Gate to the nearest town and beat the ever-loving shit out of the first asshole she came across.
No—the moment she was enveloped in trees, the cottage out of sight, she let out the scream she had been holding in during the ritual.
She screamed until her throat burned with it, her heart and blood on fire with it.
And when the scream died, the sobs began, and she cried until she had nothing left within her.
It took days to forge the sword. Over a week in the mortal world.