Chapter Four
CHAPTER
FOUR
LYSSA TOOK A sip of her pint, wincing as her split lip pressed against the rim of her glass.
The stout she had ordered was surprisingly good, for a backwater town with a name like Bleakhaven.
In fact, the entire place was a far cry from the dismal mudhole she had been expecting.
The larger streets were paved, the buildings mostly well-kept, and there were several pubs to choose from.
There was only one gas lamp in the whole town—in the exact middle of the main square, right where it could shine on absolutely nothing but the wrought iron bench someone had thought to place beneath it—and although most wouldn’t have considered that a point in Bleakhaven’s favor, seeing as how gas lamps were already being replaced by electric lights elsewhere in Ibyrnika, Lyssa kind of liked the smoky stink of the oil lamps swinging from every beam and rafter.
The only thing that put her on edge was the thick tangle of forest bordering the town.
She’d heard rumors of a barrow mound hidden within the dense growth, which was likely the reason this Alderic Casimir de Laurent had written to her for help in the first place—faeries tended to cluster around barrows, and the villages nearby suffered for it.
The man at the far end of the bar signaled for another pint, and Brandy’s incessant growling rose a notch. Lyssa nudged him with her foot.
“Calm down, darling. There’s no one in here I can’t handle.
” She couldn’t tell if he was still tense from the bar fight she had gotten into the night before—hence the split lip—or if there was someone in the pub he didn’t like.
Either way, Lyssa wasn’t interested in getting kicked out.
It was too cold outside. All she wanted was to finish her stout and figure out what to do next.
The pub de Laurent had mentioned in his letters was boarded up when she arrived, and she had gotten thrown out of the second establishment she’d tried before she could ask any questions.
The proprietor of this pub, the Morningstar, claimed to know every man, woman, and child in all of Bleakhaven, and she hadn’t recognized de Laurent’s name.
So, either the prissy rich prick had found somewhere else to haunt when his home-away-from-home went out of business, or he had moved away.
Or, whatever creature he had wanted to hire Lyssa to dispose of had disposed of him instead.
She sipped at her stout again. She’d been at the Morningstar since just before sundown, watching the empty pub fill up and then empty again, trying not to let disappointment tip her too far into her cups.
Lyssa leaned her elbows against the counter and watched the Morningstar’s proprietor, Molly, fill another pint glass.
She was a buxom battle-axe with a slash of a mouth and a gleam in her eye that said she welcomed trouble, if it meant she got to use the lovingly polished mace hanging above the liquor bottles behind her.
She finished pouring and slid the glass to the man at the end of the bar.
“Here you go, Icicle.”
Lyssa snorted. Molly seemed to have a nickname for every single one of her patrons, and not particularly creative ones, either.
This man was probably Icicle on account of the long, straight hair curtaining his face, so blond it seemed white in the soft glow of the oil lamps.
He had slipped into the pub a half hour or so ago wearing a shabby, pitifully out-of-fashion scarlet overcoat buttoned all the way up to his neck, and had ordered pint after pint in rapid succession.
Miraculously, he hadn’t passed out yet, though he was starting to sweat a bit.
Lyssa had eyed him for a while, wondering if he could possibly be de Laurent—loud clothing and rampant alcoholism certainly seemed to scream “wealthy and bored”—but no rich prick she knew would be caught dead in a coat that had gone out of style more than a decade ago, with patched moth-holes to boot, regardless of how expertly they had been stitched.
There were only a few other patrons at this hour. A pair of burly, bearded men sat near the hearth, playing cards, and a gangly boy who looked no older than fourteen was seated at the table directly behind Lyssa, his nose stuck in a book, the drink at his elbow untouched.
Icicle gulped down his pint, and Brandy snarled.
“If you can’t shut that mutt up,” Molly told Lyssa with a snarl of her own, “you’re going to have to leave.”
“Right.” Lyssa leaned down to where the bullmastiff lay at her feet and gave him a stern look. “Brandy, hush, or I’m going to take you home and leave you there. I mean it this time. Understand?”
He understood, giving her a contrite lick on the hand before settling his head on his paws.
“What kind of name is Brandy, for a dog?” Icicle muttered into his cup. His voice was so slurred, he sounded half a drink away from barfing on the bar.
Lyssa swilled the dregs of her stout in the glass. “None of your fucking business.”
Icicle snorted, eyeing her sidelong as he struggled to get his coat off. He managed to undo the buttons, but gave up on the whole enterprise when taking his arms out of the sleeves proved dangerous for his continued occupancy of the barstool. “What’s wrong with your face?”
Ah, now that was something she didn’t mind talking about.
“I got into a fight.” She ran her tongue over her split lip and grinned, turning around on her barstool to face him.
“What’s wrong with yours?” she added, just to piss him off.
He had quite a nice face, actually—straight nose, strong jaw.
Symmetrical. Eyes that vague sort of color between blue and gray.
What she could see of his clothes beneath the scarlet coat were absolutely ridiculous, though, frothy with ruffles and lace, and he smelled like a flower.
It was him—the prissy rich prick—shabby, moth-eaten coat notwithstanding.
It had to be. Only an aristocrat would dress like an expensive cake and call it fashion, and Bleakhaven wasn’t exactly dripping with aristocrats.
But it wouldn’t do to ask if he needed any faeries killed.
Not yet. One could never tell who might get offended by her line of work.
While most city folk had never seen a faerie with their own eyes before, the countryside was different.
Some of the more remote villages were downright infested with hobs and kobolds, and the humans there revered them, leaving the little monsters bowls of porridge in exchange for swept hearths and darned socks.
What those country folk didn’t seem to understand was that it was only a matter of time before someone got stingy with the pat of butter atop the porridge, and their children went missing along with the socks.
“A fight?” Icicle’s eyebrows scrunched together, as if he were having difficulty making sense of her words. “Who in their right mind would hit a lady?”
Lyssa’s grin widened, and her lip oozed blood. “I might be a woman, but I’m no lady.”
Molly saluted her with an empty glass, one battle-axe to another.
“What was the fight about?” Icicle asked, taking another swig of his drink.
“Some asshole in Frederick’s Ale House stole my new coat off the back of my chair while I was taking a piss and slashed it to pieces,” she said.
“So, I beat the shit out of him. Got thrown out into the street even though it was my property damaged. Where’s the justice in that? ” She was still furious about it.
“Frederick’s is a festering pit,” Molly offered. “Worst pub in this whole town.”
“Looks like he did quite a number on you,” Icicle said.
“This?” Lyssa pointed to her face and smirked. “This is nothing. He’ll be eating mush for the rest of his life.”
Icicle gaped at her. “You knocked his teeth out over a coat?”
“I worked hard for that coat,” she grumbled.
He perked up. “Was it expensive?”
“Not particularly. But it took a long time to track down that troll.” It was meant to test the waters, gauge Icicle’s reaction and the reactions of the pub’s other patrons—and since no one glowered or spat insults or threatened to make her skin into a coat, that meant the Morningstar was safe enough, for now.
Icicle set down his pint, looking at her appraisingly. “You killed a troll?”
“I did,” she said.
“Why?”
“It’s my job.”
“Killing trolls?”
“Killing faeries.”
“Oh. Oh!” Icicle’s brows scrunched together, as if he had realized something of monumental importance. “You wouldn’t happen to know the Butcher, would you?”
She barked a laugh, certain that it was him, now. “Yeah. I am the Butcher.”
There was a gasp behind them, and Lyssa turned to see the gangly boy flushing scarlet at her sudden attention.
“Sorry,” he said, pointing to his book. “I just … er … got to the good part.”
Icicle slid off his barstool, yanked off his coat, and took the seat directly next to Lyssa’s, nearly toppling over in the process. Brandy growled, and Lyssa nudged him gently with her foot to remind him to be quiet.
“That is … quite the outfit,” she said as Icicle settled himself again.
It was even worse than she’d suspected—a billowing pink silk blouse complete with ruffles down the front and lace cuffs, a pale yellow cravat that covered what little of his neck the high collar left exposed, an emerald green satin waistcoat with peonies embroidered all over it, formfitting orange pants that left very little to the imagination, and heeled shoes that looked more suitable for the polished floors of a palace than the uneven cobbles of a backwater town like Bleakhaven.
Lyssa was hardly an expert on fashion, but it looked like an odd mixture of styles from various decades, as though he had brought a book on the history of clothing to his tailor and selected pieces at random to create the ensemble.
The only thing it had going for it was the pants.
Icicle had very sculpted legs. If she had to guess, she would say dancing.
“You’re the Butcher?” he asked.