Climbing up the cliff while trying to pretend her cousin isn’t an absolute wreck, passed out on the gravel shore below, is exhausting.

Deirdre hates him.

She really, completely truly, hates that man.

She despises everything he is and everything he stands for.

But she has let no one die before. And it really feels like that’s what she’s doing by continuing this climb without even checking to make sure he isn’t bleeding out down there. Deirdre has let no one die, and she’s killed no one personally.

And isn’t this similar to what he did to her brother?

She places the wriggling little dog on the next boulder up. What must it have been like for Trey? What did he think about while he was dying in that well? Did he wonder if someone was going to come find him? Did he hope for salvation?

The stone is warm under her fingers. Sunlight has filled it with its own heat despite the cool air and colder water. She pulls herself up onto the stone. The effort burns the injury in her chest and she winces with the movement.

There is only one more to go. She could just walk away and never have to see him again.

He let her brother die. He tried to kill her. Why shouldn’t she?

Deirdre helps Derek up onto this stone and then moves the hound. It seems odd to be assisting him, but if she’s going to change the world around her as penance for the mountains of harm she’s already accomplished in the past, then she might as well start with him. She could never hate Bootsie, anyway. Even if she made a break for it and escape Derek’s authority, she wouldn’t hurt Bootsie.

It would be wrong.

She’s a good dog, Deirdre.

Deirdre pulls herself up onto the very top of the high, stony cliff on her elbows. She rotates as she stands to look down upon the space she has somehow traversed, with multiple injuries to her rib and leg. The achievement fills her with confidence.

Down on the ground below, Sigismund opens his eyes and runs his hand through his hair.

She looks upon her achievement and fakes a grin. Below her, Derek’s head pops up over the ledge.

Behind her there is a horrible, vicious growl.

Deirdre nearly takes an automatic step forward, but mentally staples her feet to the ground before she accidentally flings herself off a cliff. She turns slowly to look, and there is a creature on the opposite side of the river.

The creature appears to be an enormous hound. And she has seen drawings of things like this in her grandmother’s book of stories. There are things older than memory that should not be disturbed. This terrible thing - this hound, out of the imagination of the most demented of people who write descriptions of Hell itself - is most definitely among them. Her nose itches ominously.

“It’s magic,” she finds the strength to inform Derek of the obvious. “It cannot cross the river.”

At least that encounter with the fairy circle was useful.

The creature ignores her completely. It focuses too closely on something at the bottom of the waterfall.

It continues that horrible snarl and descends from the cliff.

Deirdre knows exactly what it is headed toward. And the arrow that flies upward and slams into its furry neck confirms it. The monster is after her cousin.

She doesn’t even stop to think.

Deirdre sprints as fast as her injuries permit onto the dry portion of the wide, slippery rock.

“Run you fool!” she shouts with all the force her injured rib permits of her lungs. It hurts. Everything hurts.

A second arrow catches the monster directly in the eye. It tumbles faster down the flimsy soil steps. Bootsie barks as if that would affect anything at all.

Deirdre does not realize that her feet have freed themselves from her mental restraints until after she realizes she has run down the edge of the rock. The enormous slide gives her an adequate ramp for her descent.

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Her feet fly quickly enough that though each step hurts like fire in her leg, she does not even limp. The last edge gives her a perfect launching point.

The dive off the edge has perfect form. She knew to avoid jumping too far out. She’s heard about how people have hurt themselves in these falls.

The icy cold water shocks her when she hits it. It feels like knives under her skin. But she cannot let that stop her. Not now. She is so close.

Just ahead, her cousin struggles in the water. His face emerges level with the surface and sinks below it repeatedly. He stares with glassy eyes up at the uncaring sky overhead. He cannot see her. His arms flail about with no regular cadence.

This is what drowning looks like.

One of his hands still clings to that horrible bow. The wood of it is something that Deirdre is intimately familiar with in ways she truly wishes she was not.

She knows that if she tries to get close to him, he will pull her under and they will both die. It would not even truly be his fault. There is no intent behind a drowning person’s reflex to grab a hold on their intended rescuer and send them both to the bottom.

But the bow is within reach.

Deirdre grabs it and uses the wood rod to tow him in to shore. The muddy bank close to the reedy outlet where the river continues its journey to the sea is an easier climb. If she weren’t trying to avoid letting him spot her, she’d have definitely just gone around instead of crawling up the muddy bank previously.

Her cousin crawls on hands and knees, sputtering and coughing out river water.

He looks so helpless like this. It is hard to picture him murdering anyone in cold blood.

She still holds the wooden bow.

There are no arrows at hand save the one stabbed through her hair and it lacks its fletched end.

She removes the arrow from her hair and rolls it between the fingers of her free hand. She still holds the wooden bow. She presses the end of the bow against his neck. It feels fair.

“You deserve this,” she says, tightly controlling her voice, so that she does not cry.

The arrow falls from her hand and she steps on it. She needs him to see it. But she also definitely does not need him to pick it up and use it as a weapon against her a second time.

“Deirdre, I-” his words come out as little more than a mumble. It makes her feel sick to hear her name fall from her lips. She wishes it would crystallize in his throat so he could choke on it like she choked with the bow against her neck.

It doesn’t.

After a pause, in which she deliberately holds as still as possible.

“Yes. Yes, I deserve whatever you want to do.” His voice cracks in the strain. His breath comes in heavy gasps. It sounds as though every one of them is a struggle to survive.

That is the least expected single phrase she could imagine hearing from him.

A litany of things that she could desire as payment runs through her head.

She could strangle him with this bow.

She could just hit him with it and break it right over his head.

She could carry him up the fall and throw him right off to land on the gravel instead of the water.

She could cut him into tiny pieces and feed him to Bootsie.

But.

What would that even serve?

Revenge?

Taking out her personal anger on this man accomplishes nothing. It wouldn’t even make her feel better. It wouldn’t undo years of abuse. It wouldn’t change the things she did at his command.

“I can’t forgive you,” she says, finally. She uses the bow to direct his face to look up into hers. It is an angle she has not seen before. He looks so much younger when not towering over her with the unfair inches he grew and she did not.

She searches his eyes for any sign of remorse and finds none.

He really deserves to be given over to the monster.

But how is that any better? What would that serve?

Nothing.

“But I don’t have to kill you.” She plucks the arrow from the mud and stows it away safely.

“What will you do with me?” he asks, voice trembling with panic. “I’m begging you,” his fingers find her boot to hold on to her leg. They have no strength in them at all. “Please don’t leave me here. Have mercy.”

“You will owe me,” Deirdre says, trying to imbue the words with a sense of finality. “And I will owe you nothing, not ever again.”

His grasping fingers fall back into the mud, limp with something that might be relief.

“Do you understand?” she forces his head up again, resisting the dark temptation to drive her heel onto those murdering hands.

He cannot nod. She locks his chin in place by the wooden bow with which he thought he had murdered her with just yesterday. She will not let him escape actually speaking the words out loud.

“Yes,” he says, gulping air, “I understand completely.”

From the other side of the pool, the great giant monster lets out a terrible roar which is cut short abruptly. Deirdre looks up just in time to see Derek clinging to its snout as if he is holding it closed. The thing swallows and beneath it, the ground cracks violently open.

A great gaping wound appears in the earth. Water from the pool cascades down into it as enormous iron chains emerge. They move on their own, with nothing apparent directing them.

One of the massive chains grabs Derek and delicately places him on the ground away from the bottomless hole. He looks as surprised as anyone at this turn of events.

Other chains wrap themselves around the monstrous hound’s neck and muzzle. They hold on to it like a disobedient puppy and then yank it downward.

The monster vanishes into the ground, and the ground closes over it.

If the water level in the pool was not visibly and significantly lower than it had been before, Deirdre could not believe what she just saw.