Chapter Twelve Dirantas, of the Darkest Night and the Tricksters #3
She cursed her thriftiness; her lousy pair of damaged boots with the tractionless hobnails had made her slip. Heaving herself up, she steadied herself, wrapping her legs around the pole until it stabilized.
A terrified shriek tore from her as the bugbear smashed its paw against the bamboo, sending a ripple through it.
It did not break, but Lythlet couldn’t risk it further.
She may have had an inkling of mercy for the bugbear, but the feeling was decidedly not mutual.
She hoisted herself upwards in a surge of adrenaline until the top.
Planting her feet on the flat surface, she perched her weight with delicate balance. She plucked one of the sparse leaves at the top, pressing it against her lips. She blew once, and nothing but wind came out.
Out of practice, she cursed herself. Fortunately, Desil began distracting the bugbear, shouting and making a racket from his end.
She had a few more seconds to spare, recollecting the techniques Uncle Bezil had taught her.
She sealed her lips with the leaf, took a deep breath, and hummed against it.
A loud, eerie, high-pitched vibration sounded, like a mass of mosquitoes were swarming around her head.
The effects were instantaneous: the bugbear paused, then set its paw down mid-lope and yawned. Desil raised his head and stared at Lythlet with an incredulous grin.
She ran out of breath and inhaled.
In that brief second, the bugbear reared back to life, and it turned back to the bamboo ring, letting out a savage yowl as it bashed its paw against the pole Lythlet was on.
She lost her breath to a shriek as she nearly fell over, the bamboo wobbling. She clapped her lips to the leaf and hummed again, returning the bugbear to its trance. But she couldn’t risk it returning to its senses the next time she took a breath.
Eight seconds from the moment I leave the top , she reminded herself, ready to invoke the divine touchstone.
Lythlet rose to her feet, spear ready, tip down, leaf still vibrating against her mouth.
She shut her eyes momentarily to pray: May Desil always find happiness in this world , and with the map of the cosmoscape unfurling in her mind once again, she leaped off the bamboo, riding her spear to the ground, wind rushing past her ears.
Music with a cosmic resonance roared in her eardrums, a bacchanalia of euphoric strings vibrating all over her body.
She drilled the polearm into the back of the bugbear, and with a single thought, she molded the laws of gravity around her, slowing her descent in the nick of time to fall cushioned in the bugbear’s massive furry form.
Crying out in pain, the bugbear reared on its hind legs, and Lythlet clung on to her spear.
Her yutrela leaf was accomplishing nothing now, so she let it flutter away, fading simultaneously with the cosmoscape’s golden melody as the eighth second came to pass.
The world whirled around as the bugbear trampled the ground, but she held tight.
Her hand shot forth to the bugbear’s horn, a massive rough thing, and holding onto that as leverage, she ripped her spear out and plunged it into the neck of the beast several times, ripping its throat apart.
The cries turned garbled, gasping, melting into a choked whimper.
Almost!
Once more: a hand on the horn, a spear pulled free, and its bloodied tip thrust in one final blow.
At long last, the bugbear collapsed on the ground, bloodied and breathless. Lythlet yanked her spear free and slid off, boots touching the sands as the spectators burst into loud applause.
“Desil?” The beast was so large, she could not see around the corpse.
He came toward her, sword resting in its sheath, arms cradling the tiny bugbear cub to his chest.
She started. “What are you doing?”
The spectators’ cheers nearly drowned her voice out.
“I didn’t want a child to witness its mother’s death, the poor babe.” His guilty look pressed heavily on her.
“The mother came first for us,” she reminded. “She would have eaten us in a heartbeat, if not gored us into pieces. We killed her to protect ourselves.”
“I know,” he said grimly. The cub took to playfully gnawing his hand with its toothless gums, and he yelped, prying his hand free, a ring reddening on the back of his hand.
“Be careful,” she tried. “It’s still a sun-cursed beast.”
“I will. It didn’t mean to, I’m sure. Unless it truly is in their nature to turn violent, predestined by the great unknown to always walk down a path with no redemption.
Or is there a way for it to rise beyond its making, to triumph over the temptation to fall prey to its base instincts?
” He sounded oddly solemn, genuinely contemplating the question with a troubled expression.
He rubbed behind its ear, smiling bitterly as it let out a growly purr.
“Rare, is it not?” Master Dothilos interrupted.
“That the conquessor leads by slaying the mother. In the past, most struck the cub first, and learned only too late the terror they’ve brought upon themselves when the mother arrives.
Rarer yet to see one conquessor alone defeat the bugbear while the other cuddles the cub!
But conquessors, don’t forget! Two beasts were sent to you, and two beasts are meant to be slain. ”
“ Two to be slain! ” the spectators roared in agreement.
Blood drained from Desil’s face, and Lythlet grimaced.
“Give it a quick death,” she said quietly.
“I can’t,” he said.
“ Two to be slain! ” the spectators demanded.
“We won’t get our jackpot if we don’t. All our efforts will be for naught if we let that cub go. And Master Dothilos will only have his servants slaughter it afterwards anyway.”
“Lytha,” he said, apologetically.
“Then I’ll do it,” she said with great reluctance. “Look away.”
Desil gripped the little thing tightly, but loosened his hold with a resigned look, letting her take it.
The cub squirmed in her hands, letting out an uncomfortable growl.
Sun-cursed beast. Sun-cursed beast. Sun-cursed beast. She had to convince herself of this.
She had to mentally transpose herself back up to the spectator seats, to capture the alienating distance that rendered the violence of the arena entertaining rather than savage, to shear away the empathy induced by proximity and dissociate herself from what she was being called to do.
“ Two to be slain! ” the spectators demanded. “ Two to be slain! ”
“I’m sorry, little bear,” she started, feeling awful nonetheless.
I’ll do it quickly , she promised herself. It will be merciful. The way Madame Millidin kills chickens—one swift strike to the head. It’s a cub without a mother, it has little future anyway.
It whined, and she struggled to keep her grip on its fidgeting sides.
It flailed its paws at her, and a claw cut through her arm, making her cry out in pain.
The cub fell to the ground, her grip weakened.
With remarkable dexterity, it sprang up from its bottom and scaled her legs like she was a tree, claws ripping holes into her clothes.
She raised her spear high over her head defensively, alarmed at what was happening.
Big black eyes loomed close as it neared her head, jaws spreading wide in obvious threat—and its gums closed in on her hair, yanking it hard by the roots.
She screamed, the familiar pain thrusting her backward in time.
The bugbear vanished and it was her alone, her of the long distant past. Her little self at age six, new to the schoolhouse, tongue still fat and limp behind teeth just beginning to loosen from pink gums.
A miserable day of feeling like an otherworldly creature forced into mimicking her schoolmates to get by had thankfully come to an end, and all she wanted was to go home.
She knew the path herself; she knew her parents couldn’t come to fetch her.
She’d stepped out of the schoolhouse, out onto the unpaved dirt road it sat on, and headed toward home.
Then someone had bumped her shoulder. An older schoolmate, one who sat a few rows behind her in the one-roomed schoolhouse that serviced a dozen of the slum wards. He was only two, three years older than her, but he seemed gigantic then.
“Why don’t you talk normally?” he demanded. “Why do you just stare at us? It’s very rude.”
She pushed past him, pressing on for home.
He yanked on her hair, pulling her back. She had screamed—the same scream she was hearing now, a shrill high-pitched wail.
“So you can make some noise.” He let go for a moment, but only to sink his hand deeper into her hair to grab the roots. He pulled again, and she screamed louder. “I heard your mother has some demons in her. Is that why you can’t talk?”
He had kept at it for much longer. Pulling her hair, yanking her lips apart, ramming his fingers inside her mouth to feel her tongue—“You have a tongue, so why don’t you use it?”—playing with her like she were an insect he wanted to dissect.
“Tell me to stop, and I will,” he said after a while, as if he were doing her a favor. “Just use your mouth and say stop and I will.”
“S-s-s—” was all she managed to get out, tongue not obeying her mind.
He frowned. “Why are you like this? It’s just one word, it’s not difficult.” He shook her small head by the roots of her hair, forcing another incoherent scream out of her.
The boy had paused then for a moment, his grip on her hair turning still. She thought he was about to let go, but he was staring at something. She turned her eyes to follow his gaze.
There was another boy watching them. Also from the schoolhouse, also from a few rows behind Lythlet, where the older children sat.
He met her eyes. Saw her hair in disarray, a rough hand submerged in it.
Noticed her tearstained cheeks. Heard her stuttering, incoherent plea, filled with clumsy but desperate hope, “S-s-s—”
And he walked away.
She watched him leave with a sinking heart.
The first boy went back to pulling her hair, then her lips, squeezing them into shapes, trying to train her to say ‘stop’, acting as though he were performing an act of charity. Eventually, he gave up, dropping her to the ground and walking away.
She had cried on that unpaved road for hours, rubbing her sore scalp, spitting out the taste of the boy’s unwashed fingers. Back in her empty home with the rotting floorboards, she had cried some more. But when her parents came home, she had said nothing to them. She couldn’t.
Screams flooded her ears, those of distant memories, those of the present, those of a bugbear.
Lythlet plunged her spear in and out, in and out, trying to get the deafening noise to stop.
And then it was no longer the bugbear screaming, nor her as a child, nor her in the present.
The bully was kneeling before her, and she pierced him through the face over and over again.
She was returning the favor, targeting his tongue, tearing out the back of his throat, rendering him the one incapable of saying a simple word.
Then it was the second boy’s turn, the one who had seen her and abandoned her, who had within the span of five seconds told her without speaking a single word that she had not been worth his time.
Her little self killed them swiftly, killed them brutally.
“Lythlet.” A hand rested on her shoulder.
She froze, spear halting midair. Her eyes were wide open, mind returned to reality. It was Desil, his face concerned, frightened.
The bugbear cub was silent now. It had no choice but to be; there was not very much of it left intact. A smear of bloody flesh was heaped before her like some grotesque offering.
Stunned, she reached forth. There had been a beast here just moments ago—where had it gone?
Her fingers came into contact with a bloodied patch of serrated fur, and then something hard.
She pulled it out. It was stained pink from the gore, but it was a little white stump—the would-be horn of the bugbear cub.
She stared at it, horrified at what she had done. Horrified at the blinding rage that had consumed her.
“ Hoo-rah! Hoo-rah! Hoo-rah! ” She looked up, stunned. Her mind had somehow erased the presence of the thousands of people with her for those brief moments she’d regressed into memories. The audience cheered all around them, feet stamping, hands clapping, hoo-rahs erupting.
Master Dothilos looked approvingly down at her. “Well done.”
She bowed in response, the smoothness of the action surprising her.