We watched for a while, from the safety of the trees, as the creatures came out to feed. Agis couldn’t watch and went into the bushes to throw up. One by one, the others joined him except for Mirthal and Zeno. Mirthal refused to watch, but he sat there, holding my hand. Zeno buried his face in my hair to block out the view and wrapped an arm around me. “You shouldn’t watch this alone.”

  Even with what’s happening in the pens out of sight, it’s hardly out of mind. We could still hear what was happening, the tearing of flesh and the crunch of bone.

  We could still smell it, too. Every breeze drifting our way reeked with the coppery scent of blood and the smell of opened bowels. When it was over and I was sure everything had left, we went down to examine the pens. I wanted to understand why I couldn’t break, cut, or even melt them. One of my affinities is with fire, and I can heat metal to the point of melting in seconds—just not this metal. None of us could, even with magic or without it. We tried to get one of the panels loose to take back with us so we could experiment on it.

  We couldn’t do that either. That was when we realized we had to rescue them before they were herded into the pens. We spent some time walking around, observing how everything was arranged. I passed the pen where the girls were and noticed a glint of metal near the fence. I reached in and retrieved my dagger. I took a few steps away to clean it on some grass. Keryth saw me cleaning it. “What’s that you’ve found?” he asked. Once I had it cleaned, I stood up, turned to face him, and sheathed my dagger. Keryth looked at the dagger, then at me, and turned pale as moonlight. He swallowed hard and nodded. “That’s how you knew, eh?”

  I nodded. “I promised them that I’d find the ones responsible for this.”

  Keryth rubbed his face with a hand. “We need you. You shouldn’t take such risks.”

  Calarel walked up and looked at both of us curiously. “What’s wrong?”

  Keryth waved a hand at me. “She was here. Earlier. When they were all still alive. She gave them one of her daggers.”

  Calarel sighed as she turned to face the pen. “It’s a goddamned miracle you didn’t end up in there with them.”

  She poked me in the shoulder. “Keryth’s right. We need you. Don’t be stupid.”

  The rest of my war band headed toward us. Keryth growled at me, expressing his anger and distress. “She made an Oath to those girls to get the ones responsible. If she’s to keep her magic, I guess we’re all hunting Lawless scum now.”

  Nieven smirked and shook his head. “Leave it to you, but I’ll help however I can.”

  I looked around at them, and they all nodded in agreement. Many of them made some choice comments about what they saw as my impetuous decision, but they’re still overall supportive. Besides, done is done. It’s too late to try to take back my oath to those girls.

  Nithalor nods. “We’ll have our families start looking into it.”

  I had forgotten he was there. It probably wasn’t long after all this happened that we lost him. Agis bumped my shoulder. “Let’s go back to camp. We can swim in the river and wash all the acid off.”

  We got back to our base camp, shivering and dripping wet from our swim. Agis, who was our healer at the time, started treating everyone’s acid burns. We were sitting around, while Agis treated us, eating and talking. Some understood why I did it, while others didn’t.

  Venali got the idea of passing all this along to the other war bands to see if they knew anything and to be on the lookout for any information that might be helpful. Keryth put it in the stack of things to get passed along, along with our descriptions of the bat things and how best to hunt them. A few days later, we spotted some colored smoke from the war band north of us. We headed out to meet up with them. It was always something of an occasion to meet up with another group. We traded with each other, swapping stories, skills, and even things we’d made.

  Once we were all in the oversized border base camp, Keryth swapped reports with Gaelin, their group's recordkeeper. I didn’t know that Keryth had put all that in the swap. Gaelin starts reading, and his head snaps up. Gaelin glares at me. “Why in the names of all the gods did you promise them that?”

  It took me a moment to realize what he’s referring to. “What was I to do, Gaelin? Tell them that their death was worse than meaningless? Leave them there, knowing what’s coming for them, and their death will only fuel the nightmares that hunt us? Or give them some shred of purpose? Some honor? Some dignity?”

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  Gaelin sighed heavily, “No, I don’t suppose you’d be able to do that. When you put it that way, I see why you did it.”

  Pelleas rarely speaks, but this time she chose to. “If it had been your sister in that pen, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. You’d be asking how you can help.”

  Before Gaelin could get angry, I leaped into the discussion. “I took the one thing I could for them, since I couldn’t break through the fencing to free them. They may be gone, but they will not be forgotten. They will have their vengeance. There will be retribution.”

  “How do you plan to do that?”

  Nieven asked me. “First, I’ll write to my father. I have leave coming soon. I’ll get an audience with the king.”

  That was back when I thought that the king would help us. I was a naive fool who still thought the world was mostly good. I found out later this wasn’t the case. In the end, none of us got any help from the king. I ended up dueling them, one by one. I still remember the first duel. Nieven had come with me as my second because I wanted someone I trusted to watch my back.

  I was going against Belodrath Yinlee. He was one of the first whom we were able to locate and confirm his participation in all that. He was also known for dueling. I’d been practicing for weeks before issuing the challenge. He was a nasty bit of work, and I suspected that he cheated to win his duels. We tracked him to Corvo. Corvo was a little berg that was a bit too close to the border and a bit too far from everything else. Corvo was one of those places that no one really had a reason to visit, yet it seemed like everyone came through it.

  It was never really a quiet place, but that night, Corvo had a thick, oppressive quiet. I stood outside The Gilded Crown and read out Belodrath’s list of crimes. Some of the patrons who’d wandered out watch snickered, but most looked appalled. I made a note of those who snickered so we could investigate them. I didn’t have Lantecari yet, but I had a sword that a smith we’d saved made for me. It was a far better blade than our standard-issue gear. Belodrath was a handsome man, but with a cruel cast to his features.

  His standard expression seemed to be a taunting smirk. Belodrath snorted. “So what if I did those things? What do you plan to do about it?”

  I smirked. “I’m calling you out, Belodrath. For a duel.” "You can read the list of my triumphs all you like, little Víl?,"

  Belodrath sneered, leaning against the tavern's stone wall. He made a show of dusting a speck of dirt from the crimson waistcoat beneath his black coat. "But the crimes on that page won't kill me. And I’m afraid you will only manage to add one more to it, your own death."

  He grinned at me, with all his teeth showing, and seemed a bit surprised when that didn’t intimidate me in the least. We hunt things that make a Fey’s grin look tame. The bat-things had teeth like daggers and drooled acid, so Belodrath’s toothy threat didn’t faze me at all. I grinned back, even wider, and growled at him. Not the high-pitched warning growl but the low rumbling growl, from deep in the chest, that signals impending violence among our kind. That seemed to unsettle him, but he shrugged it off.

  He pushed off the wall and drew his weapons, a thin, gleaming rapier and a needle-sharp dagger carried reversed in his off hand. He stood with casual arrogance as he demanded my sword. “Why don't you just surrender that lovely blade? I'd hate to ruin such a fine gift for my collection.”

  That’s when I knew I’d have to kill him. He was no different from the things we hunted. My oath to those girls felt like a stone, heavy with the weight of justice. I didn’t speak; I just moved.

  I came in hard and hot, swinging for his knees. I’m fast, and I meant to use that to my advantage in this fight. In a blink, I was out of the pool of light under the lantern, and my sword was screaming through the air. Belodrath, despite his bravado, was quicker than he appeared. He didn't block; he performed a twisting, sidestepping dance, letting my sword’s momentum carry it into the cobblestone, where it cracked against the cobblestones of the road like a hammer blow.

  He used the distraction of my wide swing to flick his rapier out, not at me, but at the lantern hanging from the sign, directing travelers to the tavern’s door. The oil lamp exploded, splashing down and plunging everything into darkness. He thought this would work to his advantage. We’d already spent a few years fighting at night, sometimes all night, with those things. Those monsters loved to swarm out of the darkness. I suppose for some that the night attacks increased the fear, but for us, we’d become accustomed to it.

  "A simple trick, dear," Belodrath’s voice purred from the darkness, a few feet from where I had been. "I always said, why fight fair when you can cheat? The fight was no longer about skill, but about survival in the dark.

  I roared out a challenge, shifting into hunter mode and spinning my sword before I called out. “I hunt in the dark every night. Dousing the lanterns isn’t going to save you.”

  I could see perfectly well in the starlight even without a moon. I could hear the click of his rapier, smell his cologne, and feel the shift of the air as he tried to close the distance.

  I moved into a pattern meant to keep him at bay. He planned to confuse me in the dark and try to get past my guard. I think he aimed to stab one of my hands with his dagger. I let him get close enough to lunge at me. He thought he’d hit my sword, but instead, I leaned into his attack. There was a loud clang as his rapier hit my shoulder pauldron. I braced myself, absorbing the blow. At the same time, I shifted my weight and swung my sword around. It wasn’t elegant, and my footwork was sloppy, but it was a powerful backhand slash meant to drive him back or cut him in half.

  Belodrath barely managed to pivot, his own rapier clattering harmlessly away as the flat of my sword slammed into his chest. The blow sent him reeling backward with a grunt of pain, skidding over the cracked cobblestones and scattering loose gravel. He dropped his dagger, which bounced and vanished into a dark puddle. The pain, sharp and immediate, brought him back to the stakes. I think he knew then that he had miscalculated. I wasn’t going to stop or surrender.

  What do you think of Grethe, Oskar's wife? Let me know in the comments...