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The highborn scoundrel ought to have done his research. My heart is not near my ribs, as with humans—it would scarcely fit!—but deep in my belly, and his thirsty blade had not come close. Nevertheless I found myself in great extremity, stuck with his grotesquery of a sword and him ready to hack off my head.
But in the moment of his triumph, which must have been so sweet in his young mouth, an arrow shot from the trees with the speed of a heron which has sighted a fish, and buried itself in his shoulder, the force of it flinging him from my writhing body. A radiant thing leapt from the oaks, clad in mangy, marvelously lice-ridden furs, her hair a violent briar. Her thighs were strong and smooth enough, I suppose, but her face was beautifully destroyed, hacked to pieces by some master artist, and painted over with thick black marks. Her smell would have killed a herd of antelope, had they happened by—rancid sweat and stringy meat and starvation, metallic and sharp. I inhaled her delicious perfume like the steam from cooling cakes.
The fabulous apparition sprang onto the offensive Duke’s Son, pinning him to the mossy earth. She landed astride him, panting harshly while she sniffed at his armor like an animal. I imagined the stink of her breath longingly—I was sure it would have that peculiar combination of rotted spinach and boiled egg underlaid with maggoty wood that I so often dreamed of.
“What are you doing?” she rasped, baring her teeth. “No animal is killed in my wood. It is my law—all men of this kingdom know it.”
I was surprised to hear her speak so well—perhaps I had hoped for too much in imagining yellow teeth and a language of grunts and hisses. Nevertheless it
gave me enormous pleasure to see the Prince squirm in fear like an infant pig.
“I—I apologize! I’m sorry! I didn’t know—I… I am not from this country!” he protested to no avail, as she ground her body further into his, causing his pretty armor to pierce his skin. He howled in a most satisfactory way.
“Ignorant,” she whispered, pain lacing her voice like a dress, “an animal has a soul. It might even, on the inside, be something quite other than a monster. Who are you to kill it before you even know what it is?”
“No one! No one! I’m no one!” He began to cry in earnest, now, huge tears dribbling out of his feeble face. Strange, he felt no fear of me, but beneath this human woman he was weak, and blubbering so loudly as to shame even a plain piglet.
She rolled her eyes. “Even nobodies shall not be killed here. But swear to me that you will give up Questing and devote your life to the Princess you no doubt have left at home with nothing to do.”
“I swear, I swear!” And at this concession the woman stood up, leaving the Duke’s Son inconsolably weeping, the grass beginning to wet his tunic.
“Oh, mightn’t you kill him a little?” I suggested with my best and most courteous voice. Her eyes turned towards me, caves the depths of which could not be sounded.
“It is my law,” she answered tonelessly. “I do not know you. Why are you in my forest?”
“What, precisely, makes it your forest? Have you a Deed?”
“No. I have simply claimed it. Men have learned better than to question that.”
I wriggled with excitement at the gravelly abrasion of her voice. “I am not a man, as you can see. I am Beast, Leucrotta Furialis by species. I was called out by this whelp here. I thank you for your help; it was most kind.”
“No more than I would have given any animal in need.” She slung her bow, a fine ash one she had obviously hewn herself from some lucky sapling, over her shoulder. “I am the Witch of the Glen. All things that breathe within my wood are under my protection. Don’t take it as a personal favor. If you both understand me, I’ll leave you.”
“Wait!” I trotted closer to her, so as to give her full view of my color and height. “I must repay your brave deed. I shall perform any task for you, fair, fair lady.”
Ignoring the wails of the Duke’s Son, who had not risen, but sat swatting miserably at the arrow in his shoulder, she looked appraisingly at me, raising one shaggy eyebrow.
“Would you kill a King for me?” she asked quietly.
“Certainly, my lamb.” I bowed slightly, extending my forelegs. “But I am not precisely inconspicuous, so as to enter a Castle unnoticed, nor equipped with weapons so as to do much damage other than to, well, eat him, which I surmise would be less than satisfactory for you, as it results in the shocking lack of a body. I think I am perhaps not the monster for that task.” I looked meaningfully at the wretched Prince, who by now had seen his own blood, and appeared to be about to faint.
A smile curled across her face like a rapier whipping against the side of an opponent. It was wonderfully hideous.
“Well, boy, what do you think? Would you like to kill a King in exchange for my sparing your life?”
“Oh, yes,” he sobbed feebly, “if it would please you, only don’t shoot any more of your arrows into me! I have a horror of sharp things! I only Quested at all because my father called me a coward and sent me off after the famous Leucrotta! He wants the skin, you see. For assassinating.”
I agreed heartily. “It is possible, my sweet peach, to make a great many vile things with and from my skin. I hear it fetches high prices on the black market in all the best sorts of places.”
“But you will do this for me?” She would not veer from her course. “You will go to the Palace and put a knife in the King?”
“Yes! Yes!” The Duke’s Son had staggered to one knee, to make the traditional gesture of fealty to the Witch. “Only, which one?”
“The King, boy. Who else? In the Palace.”
She was impatient, of course. For witches, there is but one King and one Palace—the one who has wronged them, and the house in which he lives.
In fairness, Kings are often quite as dense, calling themselves sacred vessels and masters of all things above and below when in fact they command a few patches of lonely dirt with even lonelier houses sitting upon them.
