Fell Beasts and Fair

by C. J. Brightley

  “What?” asked the kid, its voice quick and indignant. “What did you just figure out?”

  “I know why your humans have been disappearing.” Now, just how much could I tell it without it figuring out I’d been sent to kill it? “Someone Behind is stealing humans to sell.”

  “We’ll see about that!” said the kid, with a martial light to its eyes. “Just wait until I tell Zero about this! Someone is going to be really sorry!”

  “No one is going to be sorry,” I snapped, “except us! They’re going to get away scott free because we’re going to die. There are still dropbears out there and we’re still in here. They only have to wait. Or break the tree down.”

  The kid made a piffle kind of noise, which was annoying because this wasn’t the situation where anyone should be making a piffle noise.

  “We’re properly Between now,” it said. It was grinning; a tough, sideways sort of grin that was directly at odds with the usual trustful look to its face. “The dropbears brought it with them; can’t you feel it?”

  I scowled at it, because now that it had said so, I could sense it. “What’s it to you whether we’re Between, Behind, or human world?”

  “That’s the thing.” It was still grinning. “Between likes me.”

  “It likes—Between doesn’t like people.”

  “Yeah, well, I can do stuff here.”

  That settled it; the kid was wrong in the head. Humans couldn’t access Between, and they certainly couldn’t do things Between.

  “Don’t believe me?”

  “Nope,” I said, and looked out the window again. One of the dropbears slapped a paw against the tree house and the whole thing shuddered, us with it.

  “Okay,” said the kid, and pulled a sword out of thin air. No, it was an umbrella that looked like a sword. And now it looked like a sword again.

  I blinked hard. It was a sword, but it hadn’t always been a sword—no, in the human world it wasn’t a sword. Behind, it had always been a sword. Between, depending on how you saw it, it could be a sword or it could be an umbrella.

  I was definitely having trouble seeing. “Gold perish it!” I snarled. “Who taught you how to do that?”

  “JinYeong,” said the kid, admiring the sword. It looked pretty pleased with itself, and I didn’t much blame it; pulling something out of Between is meant to be impossible for a human. Even for a Behinder, pulling a sword Between isn’t the easiest thing in the world. “But Zero was the one who showed me how to see it properly. I’ve been practising pretty hard lately. Lucky, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” I said, with a dry throat.

  “Want something?”

  “Yeah.”

  The kid looked around doubtfully. There wasn’t a lot to choose from in the tree house; the umbrella was the biggest, sharpest thing in there. Apart from that, there were crumpled little canisters of what looked like thin metal, a few woolly bits of string, something whippy and wooden that could have been for supporting plants, and an assortment of sharp little things that were a mix of glass, metal, and wood.

  The kid didn’t look worried. “You have this one,” it said, passing me the sword.

  Kill the kid, said the words burned across my mind, and you can come back.

  “I don’t want it!” I snapped. “Gold perish it, do I look like my arms are long enough for that thing?”

  “And there’s your leg,” the kid said. It was a bit pinker than it had been, though I wasn’t sure why. “I didn’t think about that. Sorry. How are you at archery?”

  “All right,” I said, hunching my shoulders. “And I’ll thank you to remember that I can still cut a pretty pace with my peg leg!”

  “Oh good!” the kid said, and picked up the whippy piece of wood and the longest piece of string. By the time the light of the window fell on them, they weren’t plain wood and string any longer; they were a neat little recurve bow and bowstring. “Can you string it? I can’t ever get them to bend back enough.”

  I took it and strung it in two seconds flat. I might have been trying to prove my mettle, but it was a good thing; the whole tree house shook again a moment after. The kid, who was reaching out to snap off old, dried twigs from the outside of the treehouse, nearly fell out the window. I grabbed it by the belt—why did I do that? I didn’t have to do that—and after a furious bout of wriggling it came back in, brandishing six arrows at me.

  “Enough?”

  “Maybe,” I said. That left me one bad shot, which in normal circumstances would be enough. This wasn’t normal—but then, nothing in war was ever normal, either, and I’d survived that. “Not if they get in here first.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought,” said the kid. “You all right by yourself?”

  “What?”

  “Don’t want to waste the sword.”

  “Do you know how to use it?”

  “A bit,” said the kid. “Ish. Zero hasn’t finished my training yet.”

  “If you can’t string a recurve, you can’t hack down that lot with a sword,” I said. It had been a while since I’d seen combat, but I still knew that much.

  “Just as well you’re gonna be up here shooting them, then; isn’t it?”

  “What?”

  “Just make sure you shoot all of ’em so I don’t have to do too much work.” This time, it sounded like the kid was trying to be cheerful. “I mean, someone’s gotta get ’em away from the base; it’s not like you can shoot them at this angle. And maybe Zero will come soon. I don’t think he’ll leave me here.”

  “No use thinking about someone who isn’t here,” I said. “We’re alone until we kill those bears and get over the spell.”

  “If I get ’em away from the base, reckon you’ve got a good shot?”

  “Get ’em away from the base of the tree and I’ll shoot every gold-perishing son of ’em,” I said grimly. The kid was right: close range was good, but that angle was too tight.

  “All right,” said the kid, and vanished.

  “Green and gold!” I swore. I hadn’t expected it to go that quickly. I’d expected a bit more hesitation, a bit more whining—maybe a few tears.

  I poked my head out the window just in time to see the kid streak from the door, right between two of the dropbears. It was howling at the top of its lungs, which surprised the dropbears so much that they just stood where they were for a moment before they lunged into the chase.

  The kid was quick on its feet, I’ll give it that. It wasn’t even trying to fight, it was just running around yelling, waving its sword. I grinned a bit before I realised what I was doing and scowled instead. The dropbears lumbered after the kid, and I saw my shot clearing up. I edged the bow through the window, no longer afraid to have it knocked out of my hands by a high-swiping dropbear, and shuffled my upper body after it.

  Just in time, too. They were in range, and at just the right angle. I lifted the bow—hesitated for a fraction of a second. Kill the kid and you can come back. The kid was still running in circles, but it couldn’t do that for too long in this kind of heat. I didn’t even have to kill it. All I had to do was wait, and the dropbears would do the job. It wasn’t like the kid could make it back into the tree house now.

  It was just a fraction of a second’s hesitation, but in that time, one of them reached out faster than the kid could run and slapped it into the ground. I didn’t hesitate again. My bow came up and I shot; twice at the one hanging over the kid, then at the next, then again, and again. The kid scrambled to its feet, bloody and staggering, and waved at me.

  I nocked the last arrow and roared, “Get down!”

  The kid dropped right to its stomach—who had trained it to do that?—and I snatched back the string on my last shot. I was too quick; my elbow hit the side of the tree house and the shot went wide. Flat on its stomach, the kid grimaced. It looked back at the dropbear and then over at its sword. There was no way it would make it to the sword before the dropbear got to it.

  What else could I throw? What else was
there to throw? The kid was going to die, and then I could go home, but what else was there to throw?

  I furiously unscrewed my peg leg and hurled it at the kid. Stupid trustful little thing, it was still looking up at me. It caught the peg leg in its right hand and curled around in the same movement to flick it in the dropbear’s face. The peg leg flickered, grew, shrank again—and hit the dropbear between the eyes. It bounced off, but before it hit the ground the kid was sprinting toward the treehouse.

  What in the green and gold did that kid just do to my peg leg? And why didn’t it hold?

  “Shove over!” said the kid’s voice.

  I shoved over. It climbed through the hole in the floor, panting, and waved a crooked twig at me.

  “Got another one!”

  “What do you expect me to hit with this?” I grumbled. The stick had been crooked, and as an arrow, it was still crooked. “Clean your face up.”

  The kid swiped one hand below its nose, smearing blood. “It’s not broken,” it said cheerfully. “Reckon your leg is toast, though. Sorry about that. I tried to make it be something else, but it was really sure about being a peg leg.”

  “That was a good leg,” I said glumly. The dropbear was out there gnawing on it, stupid beast. “You’ve got a black eye.”

  “I know. I can feel it swelling. What are we going to do about that last one? Can you shoot it through the window?”

  “Help me down to the door at the bottom,” I said. We were probably dead if I missed, anyway; at least out there we were closer to other sticks that might turn into better arrows. “I don’t want to try shooting this thing out of the window.”

  “Yeah,” said the kid, wriggling down through the hole in the floor first. It took the bow and arrow from me, then grabbed my whole leg as it came down and steadied my drop to the floor. A bit of training and this kid might make a good officer’s boy. “We want to give you the best chance.”

  “Best chance, my eye!” I grumbled, steadying my half leg on the kid’s bent knee. “Just get ready to run for another stick before the dropbear gets to us.”

  Then I took careful aim, steadied my wrist, and shot.

  I missed, of course. The arrow was crooked, for all that’s green and gold! But it hit the confinement spell across the playground, and where a straight arrow might have careened sideways due to the spell, this one turned sideways of its own accord for a bare instant before the spell pinged it back across the playground at twice the speed and a terrifying accuracy.

  It went through the dropbear’s head so fast that the bear probably never felt it. Something thunked into the treehouse with a bloody smack! and the bear collapsed into the brown grass, spilling blood.

  “Flaming heck!” said the kid.

  We stared at the dead bear in silence for a few minutes. I was ruminating on the certainty that I would never again in my life make a shot like that, whether or not there was a Fourth War. The kid must have been thinking of something else, because soon it said unexpectedly, “Oi. What happened to your pants?”

  I clutched at the back of my trousers. “What do you mean, what happened to my pants?”

  “Not there,” it said. “The pocket.”

  My hand slapped the charred bit of cloth that should have been my pocket, and something black and rectangular came away in my hand, shedding tendrils of fabric that floated away on the hot air.

  My card. My card was black as ink—black as hopeless death. Now it wasn’t just Red for Deportment, it was No Return Whatsoever and Kill on Sight.

  I looked down at it, and the kid looked down at it.

  “What’s that mean?” it asked. “That doesn’t look good.”

  “Nothing,” I said. I flicked the card away into the corpse-filled playground and it fluttered for a moment like black ash before it disintegrated. “Don’t need it any more, that’s all.”

  “Wait,” the kid said. Its brow was furrowed. “Black… Athelas said something about black-carding a Behinder—wait! They’re going to kill you?”

  “D’like to see ’em try,” I muttered. “I’ve still got one more leg.”

  “That thing you said you had to do,” the kid said unexpectedly. “The errand—it was to kill me, wasn’t it?”

  “What?”

  “You were meant to kill me, weren’t you?”

  “What—how did you know?”

  “Makes sense,” the kid said, shrugging. It wandered toward the most freshly dead dropbear and prodded it with one foot. “You remember I said people have been disappearing here and around Tassie?”

  “I remember.” I didn’t look at the kid; for a ridiculous reason I couldn’t pinpoint, I felt ashamed. Maybe it was because of how often I’d actually thought about killing it.

  “Yeah, well some of ’em came back. Dead. None of the dead ones disappeared around here, but they all came back here, dead. And then I was pulled here, and there you were, and the dropbears… so… Do they always send you?”

  “What?! No, they don’t always send me! I’m just a pay-cheque lep’! I haven’t drawn bow for twenty years, since the last war!”

  “Oh.” The kid seemed to accept that, which irritated me. Why was it still so trusting? “Then that was some flaming good shooting.”

  “Stop trusting people so quickly!” I snapped at it. “That’s how you end up dying!”

  “I’ve got good instincts about people,” said the kid blithely. “So your card is black because you didn’t kill me?”

  I shrugged. “Never did learn to do what I was told. I found something I shouldn’t have found, and someone sent me here because they wanted to make sure I didn’t bring it up somewhere inconvenient.”

  “Oh,” it said. Then, unexpectedly, “Want your leg back? It’s a bit chewed up, but it’ll still work.”

  It brandished the mutilated peg leg at me—when did it find that?—and a gobbet of dropbear spit smacked into brown dirt.

  A rush of affection coursed through me. That was a good leg, that was. Lasted through the second half of a war and a dropbear attack. I’d polish up those bite marks nice and shiny and it’d be just as good as new.

  “Go on, then,” I said.

  The kid cheerfully tried to screw my mutilated wooden leg back on—all right for it to be cheerful, it was only sporting a black eye and bloody nose; no one was going to kill it on sight—and promptly knocked me over again.

  I glared at it and tried to get up, but something bigger sent me flying head-over-heels with one blow. When I managed to unscramble my limbs and my brains, there were three much larger figures in front of the kid. It wasn’t until I was upright that I realized who they were, and then I wished I’d stayed on the ground.

  I knew them all.

  Massive, silver, and icily furious, that one in the centre was Lord Sero, heir to half the Behind world. Zero…the kid had said Zero. If the kid’s Zero was Lord Sero, then—then that Athelas she’d spoken of—

  My stomach dropped even further. At Lord Sero’s left hand was Athelas, steward to Lord Sero; genteel, pleasant, and smiling politely. And if you don’t know better than to trust that, there’s no hope for you. On Lord Sero’s right was that vampire. Not everyone knows about him; I guess I’m just lucky. I’d never met him before—though I’d seen his tracks—didn’t want to meet him now. He was looking at me like he was curious about how long it would take to drain the blood from someone of my size as opposed to someone of a more average height.

  All three of them. All three of them together.

  I was going to die.

  Great. Twice in one day. If it came right down to a choice between Lord Sero and dropbears, I would have picked the dropbears. At least they were stupid enough to go for a wooden leg.

  I didn’t even have time to blink before Lord Sero had me by the throat. I gaped up at him, completely out of words. What could I say? I didn’t know what I’d done wrong. If he was angry at me for saving the kid, then why was he standing between me and it? If he was trying to protect it, why
was he scruffing me?

  So I just sort of choked at him for a moment or two until he said, in icy, fragmented words, “What. Are you doing. With. My. Pet?”

  I choked at him again. This time, it could have sounded like, “What?”

  “Ah, baegopa!” sighed the vampire, around Lord Sero’s shoulder. I didn’t know what he meant by the words, but the cold, sharp-edged grin he shot me was pretty clear. If Lord Sero didn’t choke me to death, the vampire would drain me.

  “Oi!” yelled a voice. I had the feeling it had been yelling for a while, but do excuse me if I was more concerned with the vampire and the fae. “Let go of him!”

  Lord Sero turned, taking me with him. The vampire did too, still showing that half, tooth-edged, and utterly humourless grin, and we all stared at the kid. It stared right back at us, bloody, defiant, and ready to die. It looked so small and helpless.

  Did that little human thing really just raise its voice at the Lord Sero?

  “Let go of him!” it demanded again. This time it kicked him in the shin, too.

  I winced and ducked my head, but Lord Sero only blinked. He looked down at the kid and said in an experimental sort of way, “Bad Pet!”

  “He saved my life!” the kid yelled. “What did you hit him for?”

  Athelas, alone of the four of them, looked amused. “We may have acted rashly,” he said. “Zero, perhaps we should put our good friend the leprechaun down to recover. He seems anxious.”

  “Ajig baegopa,” said the vampire, but he put his hands in his pockets and backed away leisurely as if that’s what he’d been going to do anyway.

  “We’ll get you something else to eat,” Athelas said to the vampire, as Lord Sero put me down on the ground very gently. “Pet will cook when we get home.”

  “I should put holy water in it,” grumbled the kid.

  The vampire looked startled. “Ya! Petteu—noh—”

  “Holy water won’t kill him,” Lord Sero pointed out.

  “No, but it makes him sneeze something flamin’ good,” said the kid vindictively.

  “’S’cuse me,” I said. “But if you’ve decided not to kill me, maybe I could just slip away sort of quietly—”