Episode 128: The Beast

For new lovely readers: You can catch up on the full story with The Naturalist mega document here. Enjoy!

For existing lovely readers: If you’d like a refresher, check out our last Remy episode, “Episode 125: Sunset.”

Now, please enjoy the kickoff to the final fight…

Remy

It’s time.

The wind beating against me, I push myself to my feet, the hilltop’s long grasses whipping my legs as I face the forest and fix my eyes on the darkened tree line.

I can hear him.

I can feel him.

The collar at my neck has become an insufferable itch, like needles pricking at my skin. I set my teeth against that, against the weakness in my legs, against the sound of rending wood clawing nearer.

Against the fear tearing at my heart.

Joy is suddenly there, and I reach a trembling hand out to her as we watch unicorns pour from the forest. They’ve held him back as long as they could.

A long figure breaks from the herd and comes hurtling toward us. It’s the same stallion as before, only this time he’s striped in wounds.

All but five of the hunters are dead, he says, barely coming to a stop. We lost four of our own.

Joy’s flank quivers beneath my hand. You have fought well, she says. Go. Hide.

With a final look at me, the stallion rears onto his back legs and flees.

Four unicorns dead.

Four who protected me when I was brought here to protect.

“I’m sorry,” comes quavering out of me. “I’m so sorry.”

You are not to blame, Joy says, touching me with her nose. The Hunter has chosen this. Now is not the time to—

She cuts her words short as the distant trees split like an open wound and Donato—the monster, the beast—stalks out from within.

He’s even bigger than before. Legs as wide as tree trunks. Eyes like twin furnaces. A great hulking body of flame, and frost, and frond churning and writhing into a grotesque shape bristling with spikes and spines, all of them bursting from the makeshift skin haphazardly, only to be sucked back in and erupt elsewhere.

The storm brewing to the south, the sun’s warmth disappearing to the west, I stare at the thing I’m meant to face, and terror chills me to my core.

I’m not ready, my mind cries. I can’t fight that. I can’t. I only just received the frost, and the frond is nothing but a little green twig in me.

I can’t win. I can’t even breathe.

A savage wind flings his smell over us, a smell like spoiled meat smashed together with fresh-cut greens, and I can’t help bringing my shirt up over my nose so not to gag. Joy doesn’t so much as flinch.

I will fight him, Speaker, she says.

“What?”

Her gaze is fixed on the Donato beast as it angles toward us, the flaming eyes flickering. Assessing. I said I will fight him, she says. We—I have made a mistake. I should never have brought you here. You are a child.

My hand drops. “I’m not a child.”

She doesn’t seem to hear me. Go, she says, tossing her mane back. Take refuge with the others.

“You can’t win,” I say without an ounce of unkindness.

She doesn’t say, You can’t either, but the truth is there, crouching between us.

I still have power left in me, is what she answers instead.

I glance down and see that her own legs are trembling.

She steps out from beneath my hand and starts down the hill without another word, and for a moment, I’m struck still by the sight of her, the stark white coat set against the storm beyond and the monster ahead, all of it darkness but her. Never have I seen anything so beautifully defiant.

My mouth quirks.

Yes, I have.

Ameliana couldn’t have known how many times I would see her in my mind’s eye flinging her parents’ letter into that fire, staring death right in the face and daring it to make her afraid. She won’t know how I’ve clung to that image, how I cling to it now. A mad laugh bursts out of me.

Where does Joy think I would go?

Where could I possibly hide from my shame if I left now?

I start after the unicorn, and when she lowers her horn in warning, I lift a shaking hand lined in ice.

“If there are still hunters out there, you have to protect those foals, Joy.”

My herd is strong, she says.

“I know.”

And The Braider is with them.

My gaze sweeps the forest’s edge. All but five, the stallion said. I don’t see any of them. Not Lilith either. There’s only the beast staring back at me. “The Braider can’t fight off five hunters. He’ll try, but he won’t be able to.”

I snuff out the magic in my palm and ignoring Joy’s threats, reach my fingertips out to touch her cheek.

“Will you do me a favor?”

She startles, her eyes leaping about for some sort of rebuttal, but I guess she can’t think of anything because after a few seconds of this, she looks at me head-on, her expression pained.

Yes. Anything I am able.

“If Celia comes—” I swallow the sudden ache that seizes my chest. “If the phoenix comes back, tell her to stay away from here. Please.”

Joy presses into my touch. I will, Speaker.

Satisfied, I drop the hand. “Piedmont.”

A squeak answers me from the grass. He was likely hoping I wouldn’t think of him, but I knew he’d be nearby. The little creature creeps up to set a paw on the toe of my shoe.

Yes, Speaker?

“How well can you swim?”

He pops up onto his back legs. Very well. I can hold my breath underwater for almost three minutes.

Even now, he continues to amaze me.

“Can you free the beasts trapped on the ship and tell them to get as far from here as they can?” I’m not sure it’ll do any good in the end, but this may be the best chance we get at freeing the unicorn and the wildcat cub, not to mention the dragon chained to the bow.

I can, Speaker, he squeaks before bounding away, leaving only Joy and her dark, anguished eyes.

Let me stay with you, she pleads.

The first drops of rain spatter my face. Across the glen, the beast watches and waits.

“Please go,” I say and walk past her.

The rain starts in earnest as I trudge my way through the grass, the blades shivering beneath the downpour. The beast, eerily still even as the magic that makes it continues to seethe, traces every step. A kind of detached panic takes hold of me as I near it, like I’m drifting deeper into a nightmare, like this can’t possibly be real.

I freeze in place as the beast’s great maw of a mouth gapes open and continues to expand until it’s as wide and tall as a man.

It’s going to eat me, I think stupidly.

Instead, Donato steps out.

He comes like some terrible ghoul, gray-skinned and bright-eyed and fixing on me with smiling interest. The beast collapses around him into a pool of black, tarry fluid that splashes up onto his boots. He doesn’t seem to notice. He just smiles at me and tsks.

“You’ve caused me some trouble, nephew.”

I say nothing. I can’t. I stare at his tattered clothes, at the lifeless skin and the shadowy veins crawling down his left arm as if his heart is pumping bitumen instead of blood.

You’re dying, is all I can think, but the words won’t come out.

Donato cocks his head at me. The neck bends too far, like a wilted stem. “Come now,” he says. “Let’s finish our business here so you can go home.”

Home. That word opens a pit within me, and I flinch at the depth of it, at the longing. I can smell the cedar of the Drawers, feel the smooth wood beneath my hands.

I do want to go home.

“I don’t want to kill you,” comes rattling out of me.

I expect him to laugh.

“Of course not,” he says as I stand there wet and shaking and seeing Alvaro burn before my eyes.

I was ready for this when I faced my uncle on the beach. I had Celia by my side. I had my anger.

I hadn’t yet killed a man.

“All we need,” Donato says, taking a step closer, “is to find the unicorns and fix this, Remy. Heal Cameir. Heal our home.”

Above him, lightning slices through the sky, painting everything in stark whites and blacks, like an illustration from one of the Logs, nothing but ink and paper.

Donato’s eyes travel behind me.

“Is that the head mare?”

I throw a look back. Joy still stands where I left her.

“We’ll command her to call her herd,” Donato says. “Bring them here. We’ll do this together and go home.”

He lifts a hand in her direction.

My mouth is sealed and all my words locked tight inside of me again. I’m staring at him like I’m looking out the shop’s front windows and watching this happen to someone else.

Except I’m the only one here.

I snap from my stupor just in time, when some fetid, dark vine with threads of fire and ice bursts from Donato’s palm and races toward Joy. A flaming pike comes easily to my hand, and I thrust it into the vine and pin it, writhing, to the ground.

“Go!” I cry, and behind me comes a squeal and the sound of hooves flying over wet earth. Donato watches her go with a sigh of disappointment.

“Just like your father. You choose some beast over your own family.”

I finally find myself with those words. “You can’t have her,” I say, hardening my quivering jaw. “You can’t have any of them.”

All his mildness falls away. Which part of what I said enraged him, I don’t know, but a crazed fury blazes up in his eyes.

“Can’t have her…?” he repeats, his voice warbling through the rain.

I shorten my weapon into a spear and level it at him.

He lunges.

My hands act for me, thrusting the spear up to shield me as Donato’s dark blade strikes with enough force to send my feet squelching back through the mud. I fight to brace myself, to find purchase, but he drives me back, the spear hissing against his sword’s knotted magic.

“We'll kill her first,” Donato says, his eyes wide, wild. “We’ll kill them all, but I’ll have her first just for you.”

I want my anger then whether it spends me and leaves me or not, but the spear is sparking in my face, shrinking down, shriveling away in my hands. Desperate, I call a dagger of ice to my left hand and swing wide for Donato’s ribs.

The attack is sloppy, but he has to dodge. He jerks to the side, giving me the hairsbreadth of leverage I need to push back and spring away.

I stare at the spear. It’s no bigger than a baton.

“I’d ask,” Donato heaves through his teeth, “I’d ask what dragon you killed for that power, but you don’t have that in you, do you, boy?”

Like a whip he lashes out, only this time, I dodge, whirling back as our weapons graze. Again he charges, snarling in frustration when I sidestep him.

“You think you can kill me?” he says. “When all you know how to do is run?”

He means for his words to hobble me, but my weapons master drove me harder, and it’s his voice, louder, that barks, Hold, Ignatius, from the mass of drills and sparring sessions

I know, I snap back.

Yet I continue my retreat as Donato rages. I let him hack at me and the spear’s dwindling shaft like a man cutting through brambles, let him flail and rage until my reflexes begin to overrule my reluctance, hands and feet twisting and rotating of their own accord. Relief seeps through me. This is good.

I don’t want to think.

I don’t want to feel.

I sink deeper into myself as Donato unravels, as rain lashes my face and I convince myself I can do this.

Ignatius…I hear again.

I know. I see it.

The opening is there every time he lifts both arms to bring the sword down like a hulking battle-axe. All I need to do is take it.

Even if I have to see another face rising up at me every time I shut my eyes, I need to take it.

Donato bellows something I don’t hear. It doesn’t matter what he says now. He bellows and heaves his sword high while I cross my hands beneath the pitiful remains of my nocked and pitted spear and lift it to meet his blow.

Except I don’t run this time.

Right before the dark sword strikes, I release the flamed spear. I call fresh blades of frost—twins, like Roren’s—to each hand, and when Donato’s cursed weapon falls on my crossed blades, I allow the weight of his strike to bear me down and drop me to one knee. I give nearly all my strength to holding that upper blade in place so Donato doesn’t cleave my head in two.

The lower blade I plunge into the soft flesh of his belly.

His body seizes and stills, and holding onto my upper blade, I roll aside through mud and trampled grass to launch myself to my feet. There, panting and blinking against the rain streaming over my face, I crouch and look back at my uncle.

His arms sag at his sides, the dark blade held loose and then not at all as it leaks through his fingers to form a black stain on the ground. My blade remains, jutting from his abdomen in all its glittering glory.

The flame within seethes. It wanted the kill I gave to the frost. Called for it as I fought.

I didn’t want any of this.

A swell of nausea surges up my throat. I’ve killed my uncle. Killed him. I turn my face aside.

“So—” I hear, and the sound of that simple word, the calm in it, grips my chest in a crushing hold, “—you do have it in you.”

Donato lifts his head, and I don’t see pain or a man in the throes of death.

All I see is disappointment.

“You have it in you to kill a man,” he says, “but not a glorified horse.”

He grasps the frost blade’s hilt, and with a jerk, rips the blade loose. I edge back as he turns to face me.

The wound that should have ended him squirms with darkness like worms in rotted fruit.

“I told you, didn’t I?” Donato says as I stare. “There’s only my way, and we will follow it until the end.”

He lifts a hand. The outstretched fingers curl inward.

I’m still trying to piece together what I’m seeing when those fingers squeeze into a white-knuckled fist.

Pain sears through my neck, a blinding pain that strips me of all voice or thought or reason. There’s only pain, stabbing, needling its way into my skin, sealing my lungs off. I’m on my knees—both knees this time—gasping, choking, my fingers working desperately at my throat.

“I’ve had enough.”

Donato. He stands above me, fist shaking with the force of his grip. I try to push a foot beneath myself, to rise, to call the flame, the frost, the frond.

“Yield to me, Ignatius.”

My head jerks to the side and back again.

No.

Somehow, there’s agony beyond this, and I fall to my side, thrashing in the mud and rain as every nerve within me screams. Darkness snakes across my vision, pain is consuming me, burning away all else. I claw at my neck, at the collar sawing into my flesh.

“However strong you think you are,” Donato says, kneeling beside me, “you aren’t stronger than an exchange.”

He watches me writhe. He watches me suffer, waits for me to bend.

I won’t.

I won’t.

The collar loosens. It’s the barest of loosenings, but I drag in a great, grating breath, my eyes jerking to Donato. When I call a flimsy dagger to my hand and make a swipe for him, he easily swats the weapon away.

“Will you yield?” he asks.

I spit on him.

“I guess your blood will have to be enough then.”

Sighing, his other hand curves around the hilt of the dark weapon he forms. It’s shaped like one of Roren’s blades.

“This seemed to mean something to you,” he says and reaches out to push the hair back from my face.

My stomach rolls.

I clench a handful of mud in one twitching hand. I’ll sling the muck in his eyes, blind him, buy myself a few seconds more. Anything to keep fighting.

A blast of wind, strong enough to stay Donato’s hand sweeps over us. When another gust strikes and even more follow, he’s forced to stand and face the source.

A dragon, I realize as I catch sight of great wings slicing through the downpour. My muddled brain fights to make sense of it.

Then the beast is rising, returning to the sky, and I’m staring in disbelief at the slight figure shuffling our way.

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