Akatan bridles at Skellig daring to give him an order, at him claiming to be an equal. "They didn't see the corpses of those bandits, I did. A hunter knows what marks a beast's claws leave - no man's hands tear through flesh and bone like that."

"Kreyu must have been a witch all along," he sneers, her name turned something foul and poisonous on his tongue. "Since she's knowingly laying with a beast night after night." (There's an echo there, about knowingly laying with a beast, an echo full of old sorrow and old shame. Kreyu's voice? But it can't be.)

"In the capital they'd burn her when she died, rather than bury her, so she wouldn't poison the earth with her unclean flesh after death."