Page 72 of Kill the Beast
Lyssa’s eyes snapped open. She was in Ragnhild’s kitchen, on the table, her legs covered in blankets and weighed down by over a hundred pounds of bullmastiff. A fire blazed in the hearth, and the too-warm air was bitter with herbs and sour with stale sweat. Alderic was in a chair beside her makeshift bed, a relieved smile on his face despite the fact that she had just punched him.
“Welcome back, Carnifex.” He looked exhausted, his hair mussed and his sleeves rolled up to expose his scarred forearms, his skin crusted with dried blood.Herblood, she supposed, given that she felt like she’d been run over by a stagecoach, though she couldn’t remember what, exactly, had happened. Alderic was holding one of her hands in his, so tightly that she could feel the firm comfort of his touch through the leaden numbness in her limbs.
“What happened?” She tried to sit up, but it sent a lightningbolt of pain through her, and she gasped, sagging back against the table. Brandy whined deep in his throat, his eyes wide with worry. She reached out a bandaged hand to him and let him lick her fingers to show him that she was okay.
“How much do you remember?” Alderic asked.
Lyssa frowned, trying to think through the fog that seemed to have settled over her brain. “Nothing,” she said after a moment. “Nothing after we came out of the crypt.” Her mind was muddy with magic and pain, the confusion that came with regaining consciousness. There were disjointed images floating around here and there, but she couldn’t seem to piece the wisps together into the semblance of a memory. “I feel… weird.”
“I suspect almost dying might have something to do with that,” he said with a half smile, his voice rasping as though his throat was raw.
Her frown deepened as she remembered the thing that had drawn her up from the darkness of almost-death. “Why were you singing that stupid song?”
Alderic flushed. “Ragnhild said that talking to you might convince you to wake up. But I figured that if anything could coax you back to the land of the living, it would be the urge to punch someone in the face.”
She laughed, then gritted her teeth at the sharp stab of pain it brought on. When it had subsided enough that she could speak again, she said, “It’s about my brother. That song, I mean. Except they got it all wrong. He—”
“Lyssa,” Alderic said gently. “I don’t think now is the time to tell me things that you might regret later. Wait until you feel more like yourself again.”
She stroked Brandy’s fur absentmindedly in the silence that followed, trying to force herself to remember something—anything—about what had come after the crypt, but her mind refused to cooperate.
“I want to know what happened,” she said finally, frustrated.
“I think it would be better if—”
“Tell me what happened,” she demanded. “How did I almost die, Alderic?”
He sighed and shifted in the chair, crossing one leg over the other, though he didn’t let go of her hand. “Honoria ran you through with her sword before she and her remaining Hound-wardens fled.” She noted the tightness in his voice at the wordremaining,the anger that flitted over his face when he said it, but he didn’t elaborate.
“Hound-wardens…” There was something else about Hound-wardens that nudged at the edges of her memory, but when she thought about it too hard, it vanished into the fog. She sighed. “Honoria ran me through?”
“She did.”
“That must have been thrilling for her,” Lyssa said dryly, then lay back and studied the scrunch of Alderic’s eyebrows, the tight line of his mouth. “Go on. Ask me.”
“Ask you what?”
“Whatever question you’re desperately trying to keep caged behind those pearly-white teeth of yours. I can see it clamoring to get out of you.”
He shifted, looking uncomfortable. “Like I said, I don’t want you to tell me anything you’ll regret later.”
Lyssa rolled her eyes. “I may not remember what happened, but I have a feeling you’re the reason I’m not dead right now. I owe you something for that.”
“Ragnhild is the reason you’re not dead right now. But… if you insist,” he said with a sigh, as ifhewere the one indulgingher.“Why do you and Honoria hate each other so much? I know you and the Hound-wardens are on opposite sides, but it seems…”
“Personal?”
“I was going to say ‘excessive,’ but yes.”
“Honoria and I used to be lovers,” Lyssa said, and Alderic’s eyebrows shot up so fast she was surprised that they didn’t fly off his face and settle in the rafters like a pair of blond bats.
“Bad breakup?” he said wryly.
She smirked, secretly pleased that he hadn’t made all thecomments people usually made when they found out she enjoyed the company of both men and women. “You could say that.”
“And why, pray tell, would you take the leader of the Hound-wardens to your bed to begin with?”
“She didn’t start out as a Hound-warden,” Lyssa said. “She was Ragnhild’s blacksmith before I was. And in the process of her teaching me the trade, we forged a friendship—out of loneliness, proximity, and little else, but a friendship nonetheless.”
