Chapter Nineteen
CHAPTER
NINETEEN
IT WAS A song that dragged her up from the depths of darkness.
Not just any song. The song. “Blood on Buxton Fields.”
“No,” she moaned, but whoever was singing paid no attention to her. Or maybe they couldn’t hear her. Had she spoken aloud, or was she still drifting somewhere inside of her own head? She tried to move, but it felt like there were rocks pinning down her arms and legs.
“—saved his love that day, and when they buried his body, at his grave she remained—”
“No!” Lyssa bared her teeth and fought against the heaviness in her limbs, until she managed to lash out with one fist. Her knuckles connected with something fleshy.
“Ow.”
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.
Her blood, 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 lightning bolt 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 word remaining, 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 if he were the one indulging her. “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 the comments 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.”
They shared a glance, a wry smile. It was the same reason the two of them had become friends, after all.
“Eventually, that friendship flowered into something else.” Lyssa had told Honoria things she’d never told anyone before.
About her parents. About Eddie, and the way he died.
Not even Rags knew who, exactly, she had lost to the Beast. But she’d been in love, and desperate to share herself after so many years of feeling alone.
“What happened?” Alderic asked.
“We found an aelf.”
He frowned. “I thought all the aelfs were dead.”
“So did we. I had never seen one before, nor have I seen one since. We were tracking a Hound in the woods outside Hayview, and when we finally found it, there was an aelf trying to coax it through a Door like the ones I can make with Ragnhild’s chalk.
” Hair like spun gold, her skin glowing faintly like she was reflecting the sun itself.
No wonder some humans had thought of them as gods, radiant as they were.
But Lyssa had seen that beauty for what it was—a lure.
Honoria, on the other hand, was transfixed, her eyes wide with reverence.
“When the aelf saw us, saw the spear in my hand, she seemed to understand why we were there. She got between me and the Hound, screamed that the creature didn’t deserve to die—that there was another way.
When I went in for the kill anyway, Honoria stopped me, and both aelf and Hound vanished through the Door. ”
Lyssa remembered the fury she had felt. The shock of that first betrayal.
Looking back, she supposed she should have known that Honoria would switch sides someday.
She seemed to feel none of the elation that Lyssa did, whenever they had a successful hunt.
Was repulsed by Lyssa’s brutality, her “lack of respect” for their quarry.
As if human-murdering monsters deserved respect.
It was a frequent point of contention between them, but at the time Lyssa hadn’t thought much of it.
People had always been shocked by her viciousness, ever since she was a kid.
It had stopped bothering her a long time ago.
“After that, Honoria was not the same,” she told Alderic. “She became obsessed with what the aelf had said, obsessed with the idea that we didn’t need to destroy the Hounds. Ragnhild and I both urged her to let it go, but she refused to listen.”
At first they thought it was some faerie-spell poisoning her mind, but Honoria swore—with a piece of iron in her mouth and salt dusting her lips—that she wasn’t ensorcelled.
She confessed that she had always hated killing Hounds, that the only reason she kept doing it was because Ragnhild had given her a home in her time of need.
Honoria’s father had been a hunter, and taught her to respect and value all life.
To kill only when necessary. This mission, she said, was beginning to feel like spitting on his memory.
Killing the Hounds is necessary, Lyssa had argued.
Killing them might be, Honoria had argued back. But enjoying it the way you do is not.
She might as well have slapped Lyssa in the face.
She knew about Eddie, knew about Lyssa’s oath.
If she had lost someone to a Hound, she would have enjoyed killing them, too.
But the grief that had brought Honoria to the Wood was not a grief forged by the faeries or tempered by revenge.
It was an ordinary bear that had killed her father.
A bear they had provoked during a hunt, when they accidentally got between a mother and her cubs.
Honoria hadn’t even killed it afterward.
She had no idea how good it felt to slay one of the monsters that had taken everything from her.
Lyssa thought Honey’s obsession would wane, eventually, but it only became stronger. “Honoria decided to track down the aelf, to find out what she knew,” she told Alderic, the old hurt resurfacing.
“I imagine you didn’t take that well?” Alderic asked.
She winced. “No. I didn’t.” Stupid was amongst the nicer words she had used. But nothing could dissuade Honoria, and Lyssa’s anger had darkened into jealousy.