Chapter 4: Blood in the Village
The plan had been simple. Show force. Remind them of the monster they so desperately wished to paint her as. Alcina moved through the forest like a tectonic shift, her black cloak streaming behind her, leaving Harley to scramble in her wake over gnarled roots. The village square appeared through the trees, a jarring pocket of torchlight and murmured fear.
They had gathered, just as the letter implied. Two dozen souls, maybe more, clutching farm tools and a few antique rifles. Their faces, painted in the shuddering amber light, were a canvas of resentment and superstitious dread. At their center stood a man in a priest’s cassock, his hands raised not in blessing, but in frantic exhortation.
Alcina stopped at the tree line, a statue of wrath. The rain, a fine mist, beaded on her porcelain skin and the wide brim of her hat. Harley came up beside her, close enough to feel the furious heat radiating from her wife’s body.
“See?” Harley whispered, her voice tight. “The bishop’s man. Right in the middle. A performance.”
“Let us give them a better one,” Alcina murmured, her voice a low vibration Harley felt in her bones.
They stepped into the light.
The effect was instantaneous. A collective gasp rippled through the crowd. A child wailed and was hushed. The priest’s speech died in his throat, his mouth hanging open. They had expected a looming shape in the castle window, not the Lady in their midst, her sheer physicality making their sturdy homes look like dollhouses.
Alcina did not speak. She simply surveyed them, her golden eyes moving from face to terrified face, a predator assessing a flock. The silence was heavier than any shout.
It was Harley who broke it. She took a step forward, her hands open at her sides. “Evening,” she called, her voice carrying a deceptive lightness. “Bit late for a town meeting, isn’t it? The topic must be gripping.”
A man with a rusted scythe took a half-step forward. “Witch,” he spat, though the word trembled.
Harley laughed, a bright, sharp sound that seemed to startle the mist itself. “Witch? Please. If I had those kinds of skills, my hair would never be this frizzy in the damp.” She gestured to her own fiery curls. A few in the crowd shifted, confused by the casualness.
The priest found his voice. “You have trespassed against God’s natural order! You consort with a creature of blasphemy! She has enchanted you, child, can’t you see?”
“Enchanted?” Harley grinned. “Lady’s just got good taste, is all.”
The joke fell into a void. The villagers’ fear was curdling into something uglier, egged on by the priest’s rhetoric. They began to press forward, a step, then two, their tools held higher.
Alcina saw it. The minute shift from fear to mob courage. A red haze descended over her vision. The plan—the clever, controlled show of force— evaporated. All she saw were hands that might touch, weapons that might strike, faces that wanted to take what was hers.
“Enough,” Alcina’s voice rolled over the square, shattering the tension like glass. She moved, not towards the mob, but towards Harley. The instinct was pure, primal: retrieve, shield, protect.
Her hand shot out to grab Harley’s arm, to yank her back behind the wall of her body. But her fury had manifested physically. Her claws, like polished obsidian, were fully extended, a sign of lethal threat she had not consciously commanded.
There was no resistance. Just a terrible, smooth parting.
Harley felt a tug, then a searing line of ice that instantly combusted into agony. She gasped, a short, punched-out sound. Looking down, she saw the elegant slash across her forearm, from elbow to wrist. For a heartbeat, the skin just looked pale. Then the blood welled up in a perfect, horrifying line before overflowing, streaming down her fingers to patter onto the rain-darkened cobbles.
The world narrowed to that sight. Her blood. On the ground. Spilled by Alcina’s hand.
The villagers froze, their advancing rage stunned into a macabre, watchful silence. They saw the monster turn on its own. A hope, dark and terrible, flickered in their eyes.
Alcina stared at her own claws, at the crimson now staining them. The heat of her rage extinguished, replaced by a cold so profound it stole her breath. “Harley—” The name was a broken thing.
Harley stumbled back, clutching her arm. The pain was secondary, a distant echo. The look in her wide, emerald eyes was pure, undiluted betrayal. It was the look from the cellar the day they met, the look she had not seen in years.
“You promised,” she whispered, the words barely audible, but they hit Alcina like a physical blow. You promised not to be my cage. You promised I was your peace.
She backed up another step, shaking her head, her red hair catching the torchlight like a final, defiant flame. Then she turned.
And ran.
She didn’t head for the castle. She veered past the stunned crowd and plunged into the black maw of the forest opposite, disappearing between the trees as swiftly as the shadow of a fleeing animal.
Alcina took a step to follow, but the movement jolted the villagers from their trance. A rock sailed from the crowd, striking her shoulder. It was nothing. Less than nothing. But it anchored her to the spot.
She stood in the center of the square, the rain thickening, mingling with the blood on her hand. The blood on the stones. The mob, emboldened by the fracture they had witnessed, began to close in again, their mutters growing louder.
But Alcina did not see them. She saw only the forest where Harley had vanished. She felt the ghost of the touch that had cut, the exact pressure it would have taken to make such a clean wound. A craftsman’s wound.
The priest was speaking again, his voice triumphant. “See! The beast cannot help but devour its own! God has shown us the truth!”
Alcina slowly turned her head towards him. The movement was glacial. The chaos in her eyes had solidified into something absolute and lifeless.
“You,” she said, the single word cutting through the rain and the priest’s diatribe. “You called for a sacrifice.”
She looked at the blood on her hand, then back at the forest, empty and dark. A new plan, cold and utterly devoid of mercy, clicked into place in the void where her heart had been beating moments before.
The hunt was still on. But the quarry had just changed.