Chapter Eight
CHAPTER
EIGHT
DESPITE RAGNHILD’S PROTESTS, Lyssa did not join the witches and Alderic for dinner.
A knot of anxiety and anticipation had formed in the pit of her stomach, obliterating her appetite and making the idea of idle chatter unbearable—not that she would ever admit to it in front of Alderic.
What she needed was solitude, in order to untangle her thoughts and worries, prepare herself mentally for the road ahead, and start figuring out what ingredients she could use for the sword.
She gave the usual litany of excuses: I’m exhausted, I’m sore, I’m not hungry, the hot springs are less annoying than you are, but Ragnhild thrust a bowl of vegetable soup and a hunk of crusty bread into her hands anyway.
Lyssa was too tired to argue. She tossed the bread to Brandy as soon as they left the cottage, and sipped at the broth while she walked up to the springs. As always, it needed more salt, but Rags had compensated with plenty of fresh thyme and basil.
Leaving the bowl of soup at the edge of the pool for Brandy to finish, Lyssa slipped into the steaming water and let it work its gentle magic on her, loosening her muscles, healing her cuts and bruises, and dulling the sharp edge of her anxiety into something she could at least think around.
Once she had relaxed a little, she began to mull over her list, trying to come up with some ingredients she could gather for the sword.
But she couldn’t seem to focus—she only got as far as Eddie’s grave dirt before her mind wandered to what had happened during the deciphering spell, and to what they had discovered about the Beast’s glyph.
Whatever the reason the monster was created, the emotional nature behind it seemed fitting. After all, this was deeply personal to Lyssa as well. It made sense that the weapon used to destroy it would be the most personal she had ever forged in her career as Ragnhild’s blacksmith.
That’s when it struck her. Alderic. Alderic was coming with her, which meant that he was going to be there while she gathered ingredients of deep emotional significance to her. She imagined the thousand questions he had asked about glyphs and aelfs and magic turned on her, instead.
“Ungharad’s flaming sword,” she groaned, running her hands over her face in frustration. She would rather scoop out her own eye with a jagged spoon than tell him what she was gathering and why.
Rags and those stupid fucking bones. Tethering Lyssa to this buffoon of a man who …
Who is the sole reason the Beast is within your reach at all.
The thought came unbidden, and her temper flared as hot as the water she was soaking in. “That doesn’t mean I have to like the idea of babysitting him,” she muttered, and Brandy huffed a sympathetic sigh.
The first streaks of dusk had settled over the Witch’s Wood by the time she gave up trying to wrangle her thoughts and climbed out of the pool.
She could work on her list of ingredients in the morning, before they left for Warham.
A good night’s sleep would certainly help—and maybe by then Alderic would have his own list of items that Lyssa could use as a starting point.
As she passed the cottage on her way back to the smithy, leaving her empty bowl on the railing for Rags to find in the morning, Brandy started to growl, his hackles rising.
Lyssa had just grabbed for a pistol that wasn’t there—it was on her desk in the loft—when she noticed Alderic coming down the porch steps, tripping over the herb pots while he clutched one of Ragnhild’s quilts to his chest.
“Oh, hello,” he said, raising a brow as he took in her wet hair, the damp clothes clinging to her skin. Clothes she had only begrudgingly put on because he was here. “Nice night for a swim.”
She snorted. “What are you doing out here with a quilt?”
“I was going to scope out the grass and see if I could find a suitable patch for the night.”
“You’re going to sleep out here? On the ground?” They both looked around at the clusters of gnats hovering over the long grass, and Alderic sighed.
“The ground and I are well acquainted,” he said. Lyssa recalled the sheer volume of beer he had consumed at the Morningstar, and wondered if he ever simply passed out in the forest before making it back to his manor. Good metabolism and watered-down pints could only go so far.
“Why don’t you just sleep on the porch? There’s a swing big enough to lie down on, and fewer bugs. I think Rags put spells up or something.”
“Ragnhild does not want me in or around the house. In fact, she suggested that I sleep in the smithy, with you.”
“Let me guess,” Lyssa said flatly. “The bones told her that?”
Alderic shrugged. “She just said that we should stick together—and that I’m your problem, not hers.”
“And you’d rather sleep in the grass than the smithy?”
“I’d rather sleep in the grass than force you to share your living quarters with me,” he said.
“I am an intruder in your liminal wood, an intruder on your quest to forge the magic sword. The least I can do is refuse to intrude upon your bedroom, on your last night of freedom before you’re stuck with me for the next couple of months.
” He gave her a wry smile. “I really am sorry, by the way. All I wanted was to pay you and be done with it. I never intended to have any part in this beyond that. But I suppose I should know by now that nothing in my life will ever be as easy as I want it to be. Now, if you’ll excuse me, my bed of leaves awaits. ”
Before she could reply, he bade her good night and strode toward the tree line, where the clouds of gnats weren’t as thick. She watched him flop down in the grass, wrap himself up in the quilt, and turn his back to her.
“He’s odd, isn’t he?” Lyssa said as she and Brandy made their way back to the smithy, and the bullmastiff yowled in assent.
Still, there was something about him that Lyssa found sort of charming.
She looked over her shoulder—Alderic was batting wildly at the air, the gnats undoubtedly having discovered his existence.
She had half a mind to invite him to sleep on the floor in front of the forge, but decided against it.
A few gnats might toughen him up a little, and the Lady knew he needed a little toughening up before they set out.
Lyssa couldn’t sleep. The knot of anxiety had become a net, tangling her up in what-ifs, most of them to do with Alderic.
What if he got himself killed before they gathered all the items they needed, and the sword was too weak to kill the Beast?
What if he got himself killed before he showed her where, exactly, the Beast’s den was located?
What if he didn’t get himself killed, just horrifically injured, and they had to stop altogether until he had recovered?
If anything happened to him, it would mean her failure.
“This is why I like working alone,” she muttered. Brandy gave her a look of reproach. “Why I don’t like working with other people,” she amended, and he closed his eyes again, seemingly satisfied.
Eventually, she wrote off sleep as a lost cause and got up, leaving Brandy to hog the bed.
She sat down at her little desk and found a piece of scrap paper—the back of an advertisement for camping gear that someone had mailed to her—and a pencil.
She started by jotting down the categories that their usual ingredients fell into:
faerie repellant
elemental/banishing items
· water:
· earth:
· botanical:
personal concerns
piece of the Hound
She wrote Beast’s claw beside piece of the Hound. One item down, five to go.
Next she wrote grave dirt, black moon beside earth under the elemental banishing items. She always used grave dirt from a Hound’s victim for her weapons, and Eddie’s would be all the more powerful because his death was so personal to her.
It had to be gathered on a moonless night, but that wouldn’t be a problem—they would just have to time things correctly.
She wrote coffin nails? beside faerie repellant.
They were another powerful tool—made of iron, which was poisonous to faeries, and often used in “destructive magic,” as Ragnhild called it.
Unraveling spells, breaking curses, that sort of thing.
But they were hard to come by, these days.
Digging up a coffin was a hangable offense now, in order to combat the rise of the Resurrectionists—grave robbers who stole bodies and sold them to anatomists for dissection.
Sometimes Lyssa found old nails in cemetery grass, so it was always worth listing them as a potential item, but given that they had to use something of personal significance for the sword, she doubted they were a viable option.
She had no plans to exhume Eddie for a handful of nails, even if she knew she wouldn’t get caught, and Alderic definitely seemed too delicate to dig up whoever he had lost to the Beast.
Salt was another powerful faerie repellant, but she had no idea how to make it personal. She wrote it down anyway, though, just in case Alderic had a salt shaker with sentimental value in that parlor of his. The parlor that is probably filled with Hound-wardens right now, she thought grimly.
After that, her mind went blank again. “Emotional connection, emotional connection,” she muttered to herself, chewing her pencil and trying to think of something that might work. “Fuck, why is this so hard?” She resisted the urge to snap her pencil in half, throwing it down onto her desk instead.
The Beast, Eddie … it was all so personal, and yet she had nothing she could use, no tangible items that represented her love for her brother, or how much he had meant to her. The realization chafed her heart raw and left her aching.
Eventually she just started making notes, in case the act of jotting them down helped jog something loose in her mind.