A Surface of Pressure and Burden

Chapter 3: A Beast of Horns and Shouting

The growling beast was as big as a horse, his enormous body a golden blur of wolf, wildcat, and some kind of horrible horned creature. "Stay in the bedroom!" I yelled to the other girls as my father overcame his troubled back/arm/leg to dive behind the table. There wasn't even time to think about loading the ancient musket that hung above our fireplace, and even if there had been I was a terrible shot at the best of times. What had I always heard you should do if you met a bear in the forest?

"Get out! Go home!" I screamed, ridiculously, lifting my arms high to look as tall and scary as possible. "Go!"

"MURDERERS!" the beast yelled back. It could talk?

Elain and Feyre tumbled white-faced out of the bedroom. My father lifted his head from behind the table. "P-please," he began "Whatever we have done, we did so unknowingly, and - "

"We haven't killed anyone, I promise," I added, trying for a calm, de-escalating tone. Could this horrible monster be reasoned with?

Feyre, however, chose this moment to grab a dinner knife from the table, brandish it at the beast, then throw her hunting knife at its throat. It caught the knife easily and tossed it to the floor without missing a beat.

"Fae help us," I muttered.

"WHO KILLED HIM?" the beast demanded, stepping towards the table and clamping down on it with a giant, deadly claw.

"Killed who?" Elain stammered.

"The wolf," he replied with a snarl. "A large wolf with a gray coat. He was last seen in the woods near your cottage this afternoon."

The wild dog pelt. Oh, Feyre. Oh, my fae and cauldron, Feyre. What have you done?

"If it was mistakenly killed," Feyre piped up, "what payment could we offer in exchange?"

Good courts, why was she admitting to this? "Ixnay on the olfway," I hissed across the room, but she wasn't listening.

"The payment you must offer is the one demanded by the Treaty between our realms," he responded. Wait a minute, was this monstrous thing a faerie? They were real?

"For a wolf?" Feyre went on. Feyre. My hot simmering cauldron. I could have smacked her.

"Who killed the wolf?" the creature asked. Faerie or not, he wasn't the quickest on the uptake, was he?

My heart sank as Feyre replied, "I did."

"Surely you lie to save them," the creature said, gesturing at Dad, Elain, and me.

"There's been a mistake, sir," I said quickly, "We didn't kill anything. Feyre's confused, she's not quite right in the head, you see."

"I killed it," Feyre went on. "I was going to sell its hide at the market tomorrow. If I'd known it was a faerie, I wouldn't have touched it."

Who said anything about the wolf being a faerie too? Was she trying to get us all slaughtered?

Feyre brandished the dinner knife at the beast, as if that would be remotely intimidating. "What is the payment the Treaty requires?" She might as well have been asking how the cow jumped over the moon - all this talk of faeries and treaties was a children's bedtime story as far as I'd known. No one actually believed in the Fae these days except for those Children of the Blessed religious nutjobs in the village.

"A life for a life," the creature said. "Any unprovoked attacks on faerie-kind by humans are to be paid only by a human life in exchange. Most of you mortals have chosen to forget that part of the Treaty," he said, "which makes punishing you far more enjoyable."

What a creep. "Prythian must claim your life in some way, for the life you took from it," he went on. "So as a representative of the immortal realm, I can either gut you like swine, or ... you can cross the wall and live out the remainder of your days in Prythian."

Before any of us could say or do anything else, the beast scooped Feyre up unceremoniously and threw her over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. He turned in a flash of gold fur and teeth and bounded away into the night.

Feyre's voice faded away into the night air - the last thing I heard her say was "Nesta, whatever you do, don't marry Tomas Mandray!"

We all stood in absolute shock for a moment, then I rushed into my cloak and boots, grabbing the burlap sack we took to market, filling it with dried rabbit meat, white cheese, the last of the winter apples. A knife. Extra socks.

"What are you doing?" Elain cried.

"I'm going after her, obviously," I replied.

"Then I'm coming too," Elain said.

"Elain, you have to stay here," I said, holding her by the shoulders. "We don't have time to argue about this. Every moment is precious."

"Someone has to stay and take care of me," Dad put in. "My knee-"

"You can't do this alone," Elain sobbed.

"Elain, everything we own is here in the cottage. What if we both leave, and someone comes in and takes it all? Then we'll have absolutely nothing. I'll be back as soon as I can. Run to the village tonight, see if anybody else will help, if anyone knows what to do. Then get home, bar the door, and don't let anybody in we don't know."

She nodded, blinking away tears. I hugged her and Dad quickly and was off into the night.

The less said about that cold, long, miserable night the better. My only saving grace was that the gigantic faerie made enough noise crashing through the winter forest that it was easy to tell where he was. But oh, it was cold. Oh, my feet hurt. I thought I'd known what tiredness was, but this was a whole new level. Questions of where we were going and what I would do to help us get away when we got there started to fade away into a meaningless blur, like a single word on a page when you look at it too long.

It felt like we'd been walking for days when the faerie's crashing and Feyre's sobbing abruptly stopped, as if a blanket had been thrown over them. I had no time to wonder about this before I suddenly ran head-first into an invisible barrier, what felt like a massive stone wall, and landed in a lump of wet snow. What in the courts? I put my hand out and felt the stones beneath my fingers, although even with the moonlight I could see absolutely nothing there. What was going on?

Before I could wonder further, something heavy hit me from behind and everything went completely dark.