Cutter nodded beside her. “You see it now, don’t you?” he said. “The claw marks? The insides torn open, some of them missing? You asked me what I knew, Maeve. Now, I’ll tell you. Swords don’t leave those sorts of marks and soldiers don’t kill that way.”
Maeve’s breath caught in her throat and she stood, stunned, trying to understand. Cutter walked on, but she was barely aware of it. Instead, she stared at those corpses littering the field, seeing them with new eyes, making out, too, their weapons—pitchforks and shovels mostly, and several burned out brands that could only have been torches as well—lying near them. Cutter, damn him, was right. Swords did not make those sorts of wounds and soldiers cared nothing for digging through the entrails of their victims. But the Fey did.
She turned to look at Cutter’s wide back as he continued down the path. The Fey had been here, that was the truth he knew. The Fey who had been content to spend the last several years in the Black Woods, had chosen now, of all times, to renew their hostilities with the world of men. A time which had just so happened to coincide with Cutter’s entrance into and subsequent departure from the Black Woods. Coincidence? She wanted to believe that it was, but as much as she might wish to, she could not convince herself of that.
After all, it was well known that the Fey held no love for Cutter, the prince who, along with his brother, they had invited into their homes, with whom they had made peace only to have that peace shattered when Cutter had killed their king, tearing his head from his body with that great axe of his. She did not know what had transpired in the Wood with Cutter and the boy, did not know why they had been allowed to pass through the Fey’s domain without assault, but she did know, without knowing the how or why of it, that whatever fate Cutter and the boy had avoided at the hands of the Fey had been transferred to Ferrimore and its citizens instead.
She thought that she should feel surprised at this realization, perhaps even shocked. But what she felt, more than anything, was weary. After all, wherever Cutter, wherever her prince walked, death followed. It had always been thus, and while many things changed, some, unfortunately, did not.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Revenge is bloody, thirsty work, the results of which no one, including—perhaps especially—he who seeks it, cares to contemplate.
—Unknown Poet
Cutter could feel Maeve’s eyes on his back, could feel her disapproval like a weight on his shoulders. He did not doubt that she had come to some conclusions about why the Fey would have attacked Ferrimore and, as clever as he knew her to be, he did not doubt that they were the right ones. Which meant that her disapproval, her anger at him, was also right, and just as he could say nothing to address the boy’s sadness or Chall’s worry, neither could he say anything that might satisfy her anger. So instead he said nothing at all, only continued forward.
Shadelaresh had granted him his boon as he’d asked, for the Fey—as a general rule and despite the many illusions upon which their kind relied—never broke their oath. He was not even sure if they entirely understood the concept of such a thing, though now, he did not doubt that after their dealings with men, they were beginning to. And so, Shadelaresh, despite his fury at Cutter, fury engendered by the slaying of his king, had kept to the promise of that same king, resisting the no doubt powerful urge to do harm to Cutter and the boy with him.
Ferrimore, though, had been given no such boon to protect them and so it seemed that Shadelaresh had chosen to vent his rage upon the unfortunate villagers, men and women who’d had no part in Cutter’s past crimes. And had the Fey spirit somehow known that Cutter’s journeying would bring him this way, despite the fact that he himself, at the time of their meeting, had meant to go to Valaidra instead? Cutter thought that probably he had.
He did not know how the Fey had known that he would come here, to this place, for the Fey and their ways were largely inscrutable, but clearly they had, and they had left the shattered remnants of this village to serve as testimony for Cutter’s crimes.
How many? he thought.
How many had died because of his sins over the years? Far more than had ever been cut down by his axe, that much was sure, and that number was already one which weighed heavily upon him. He felt the urge to despair then, to quit, to toss down his axe and walk into the Black Woods, never looking back, only forward, searching for the death which had searched for him for so long. He thought, too, about the knife sheathed at his waist, about the game he had so often played with himself over the years. It was sharp, that knife, for he always kept it so, and he knew that it would be quick. Sure. The easiest thing in the world. The hardest thing in the world.
Yet he knew that he would not seek his death in the Black Woods just as he would not seek it at the end of his knife. In part this was because he knew that the dead feel no pain, and he deserved to feel far more, deserved to be crushed beneath his own guilt, to be ground beneath it into ash. More than that, though, there was the boy. Chall and Maeve and Valden—the man they had long since taken to calling Priest—would do their best to protect him, of course, should Cutter choose
