The men, though, paid him no attention, and Cutter didn’t have a moment to spare to explain it to the youth, not that he would have known what to say even if he had.
“Look, Cend,” the third man said, licking his lips, “maybe we ought to just leave off, eh? Might be better for everybody if we just—”
“Fuck that,” the big man growled, finally getting over his initial shock. “I’m owed, damnit. I don’t give a shit if he’s one of the gods himself, this fucker is responsible for what happened to Kira, he’s responsible for all of it.”
“Yeah, sure, sure, Cend,” the second said, “but it’s the Crimson Prince. Let’s just go, alright? There’s Kira’s arrangements to make and—”
Cend let out a bestial growl, one that, matched with the fury on his face, made it clear that he was past listening, long past. He lifted the blade over his head, and Cutter waited, trying to decide the best way to take it from him, trying to decide if he wanted to take it at all or let the blade finish its lethal arc.
That was when Matt got off his stool, stepping forward. “Please, just leave him alone. We don’t—” His words turned into a shout of surprised pain as the man, Cend, backhanded him with the blade holding the knife, hitting him in the face. The youth’s lip busted and blood splattered as he fell back, tumbling over his stool to hit the ground.
Some of that blood, of the boy’s blood, struck Cutter in the face. They had escaped a doomed village, had made their way through the Black Wood, without any harm—physical, at least—befalling the boy and now, here, this angry farmer had struck him for no reason, no reason at all. Cutter turned and looked at the boy lying there, a hand over his bloody mouth. The beast of his fury did not slowly come awake, not in a way that it might be soothed back down. Instead, it sprang awake, its teeth already bared, its claws out, as they always were. The man holding him was saying something, but he might as well have been speaking in a different language, for Cutter could not understand it, and he did not care to. Maeve also said something but her words, too, were drowned out by the storm inside him, the storm which was the beast’s growl, and he could not make it out.
And he did not try. The beast sprang forward, and Cutter, as ever, was carried along with it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Some likened him, in his wrath, to a storm, but he was not a storm.
Storms might be weathered, might be sheltered against, and there was no shelter, not from him.
Some others said he was like a beast in his rage but this, too, fell short of the mark.
Most beasts, after all, kill from necessity. The Crimson Prince, though, killed for no other reason than that he enjoyed it.
No, not a storm, then, and not a beast.
His wrath, his fury, was far worse than both.
—Exiled Historian to the Crown, Petran Quinn
Maeve saw it happening, that terrible transformation. Or perhaps transformation was not the right word, for it was not as if Cutter became something else. Instead, it was as if he were that thing all along, and the normal man, the man who spoke softly when he spoke at all, was only a mask he sometimes wore in the hopes that it might hide who he really was, even from himself.
She had seen it before, that change, that becoming, and now, like then, she found herself watching with a dreaded fascination as the man took in the boy lying bloody on the ground, as the dull, emotionlessness left his gaze to be replaced by a rage that seemed to threaten to burst its way free of him. “Cutter,” she said, knowing it would do no good but knowing, too, that she had to try. “It’s fine, the boy’s fine, okay? Just a bloody lip, that’s all, folks have suffered a lot worse and—”
But then she was out of time. Cutter let out a growl that sounded like it came from some wild, furious animal, and he moved with the devastating speed she had seen him display on multiple occasions, his hand coming up and striking the man, Cend, in his wrist. While his speed was shocking, his strength now, as it had been fifteen years ago, seemed almost superhuman, and as his hand struck the man’s wrist there was a loud, ear-splitting crack. The tavern tough screamed as his wrist bent at an unnatural angle, and the knife went hurtling through the air, nearly impaling one of the men and women who had moments before been busy at healing but who had now all turned to watch the proceedings.
When he’d struck the man’s wrist, the knife had scored Cutter on his hand, and Maeve saw that it was bleeding freely. Cutter, her prince, did not notice though, paying it no more attention than he did anyone else in the room—including the boy. There were only the three in front of him, the three who had dared to harm the boy, only the objects of his wrath.
The big man’s cries of pain suddenly cut off as Cutter lunged forward with his entire body, bringing his forehead into the man’s face and making of his nose and mouth a bloody, smashed ruin. The big man fell away, and then one of his companions was reaching into his tunic, likely trying to retrieve a knife or blade with which he might defend himself.
He never got the chance. Cutter was on him in an instant, sinking his bloody fist into the man’s stomach. The unfortunate man’s air exploded out of him in a whoosh, and he doubled over as if he were trying to kiss his shoes. Then Cutter growled and brought his elbow down on the back of the man’s head, and he collapsed at
