Chapter Twenty-Five
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FIVE
LYSSA SET THE bouquet of flowers she had brought down on her brother’s grave before brushing her fingers over his headstone.
Soon, it would no longer say EDMUND CADOGAN II, with a generic inscription written by someone who hadn’t known him.
Alderic had been in conversation with the directors of the memorial park, and they had agreed to install a new headstone of Lyssa’s choosing.
She still hadn’t decided what she wanted on it—only that “Edmund” would be replaced by “Eddie”—but she would have to think of something eventually.
“Hey,” she said, murmuring so that Alderic wouldn’t hear her from where he stood a few feet away.
“I remembered to bring you flowers this time. Well, Alderic remembered. Anyway, I … I came to tell you that it’s over.
Though maybe you already knew that.” She looked down at her palm, where the scar of her oath had faded to almost nothing.
Ragnhild had always said that a blood oath was powerful magic, and maybe her flesh knew that some part of the thing had been fulfilled.
The Beast that had killed Eddie Cadogan was gone from this world at long last. “It didn’t happen the way I thought it would.
The way I promised. I hope you understand.
” She looked over her shoulder to where Alderic stood with his hands in his coat pockets, bundled up against the crisp night air.
His back was to her, and he was looking up at the sky, his pale hair stark against the black of his clothing.
Brandy was sitting beside him, the whole of the bullmastiff’s weight pressed against Alderic’s leg.
“I think you’d really like him, Eddie,” she whispered, turning again to the headstone. “He’s a good man. A good friend.”
“Lyssa,” Alderic said suddenly, and she looked back to see her father limping across the park in their direction. He no longer had the crutches, but he moved like his leg still pained him.
Lyssa kissed her palm and pressed it to Eddie’s headstone, then rose to stand with Alderic and Brandy while they waited for her father to reach them.
“What happened to your face?” he blurted in alarm when he saw the dark purple bruises mottling Alderic’s skin. Some of them had started to turn a sickly greenish-yellow, which looked even worse than the darker ones.
“Lyssa punched me,” Alderic replied brightly.
He had seemed downright proud of those bruises, and refused to let Ragnhild smear any sort of healing salve on them.
All of this still feels like a dream, he’d said when Lyssa had told him to at least stick his face in the hot springs.
But when I look in the mirror, I know that it’s real.
That I am human, and no longer a monster. These bruises are proof that we won.
Her father raised an eyebrow, but if he had opinions about his daughter’s handiwork or Alderic’s reaction to them, he didn’t comment. Instead, he turned to face Lyssa.
“I know you said never to approach you if we crossed paths in this place again, but I saw you from the entrance, and I couldn’t help myself.
” He straightened his shoulders and lifted his chin, as if daring her to yell at him or stab him again.
“You said that you needed that photograph to make a magic sword. So that you could kill the thing that killed Eddie. Did it work?”
“Yes,” Lyssa said, unable to keep the smile from her lips. “The Beast is gone.” She didn’t elaborate further; her father didn’t need to know the truth, didn’t need to know what had gone down or how it had all ended. Only that it was over. “I couldn’t have done it without you. Thank you.”
He dipped his head, looked away, but there was no hiding the sheen of tears in his eyes. “I’m glad I could help,” he said when he had mastered his emotions, though his voice was still raw with them. “Anyway, I’m sorry to have bothered you. It won’t happen again.”
“Wait,” she said when he turned to go. “Stay with me a minute?” For some reason, her pulse spiked as she said it. As if a conversation with her father was as dangerous as fighting the Beast.
His expression was wary. “Sure.”
“I’ll meet you at the night-market,” Alderic said to Lyssa, as if he knew, without her saying it aloud, that she wanted a moment alone with her father. “I saw an absolutely dashing sapphire-blue waistcoat embroidered with butterflies on our way here, and I can’t stop thinking about it.”
She groaned, and he winked at her.
“Edmund, always a pleasure,” he said.
“Likewise. Put some raw steak on that face, by the way,” Lyssa’s father told him, clasping Alderic’s outstretched hand. “It’ll help the healing process. An old prizefighter trick,” he added when Alderic looked at him like he was insane.
Alderic frowned. “You were a prizefighter?”
“Might not look like it now,” Lyssa’s father replied, patting the nearly nonexistent muscles of his rail-thin arm.
“But back in the day, I was a beast. They called me the Boiler—temper so hot, sometimes I couldn’t even wait for the bell to ring before I turned someone into ground beef.
Got banned for it, but it felt worth it at the time. ”
Alderic grinned at Lyssa. “Well, that explains a lot.”
She rolled her eyes. “Go on, go get your hideous waistcoat.”
Once Alderic was gone, Lyssa and her father walked back to Eddie’s grave and stared wordlessly at it for a while, Brandy lying on the grass between them.
There was so much to be said between them, so many grievances and wounds—some that might never heal—but they didn’t have to untangle any of that now.
All Lyssa wanted was to share this moment with him, the only blood-family she had left.
The only one who missed Eddie as much as she did.
“We’re having the headstone redone,” she said finally.
“Thank the Lady,” her father replied. “He would have hated having his full name on there. Only your mother ever called him Edmund, and even then, only when he was in trouble. Like the time he didn’t guard the table like she’d asked him to—”
“—and Brandy got up on one of the chairs and ate the entire roast duck right before the dinner guests arrived.”
They laughed. Brandy barked, still pleased with himself for that.
Lyssa crossed her arms. “I don’t know what else to put on it, though. The headstone, I mean. How do you distill someone’s entire life down to a few sentences?” She looked at her father, at the lines that grief had engraved on his face over the years. “What do you think?”
His eyebrows shot up, and he stared at her, stunned. “You’re asking me?”
She shrugged. “He’s your family, too. Why should I be the only one who gets a say in the matter?”
He thought for a moment, running his thumb over his chin as he considered it. “That’s a tough one. I don’t know.”
“Well, if you think of something, let me know,” she said. “You could, uh … send me a letter, I guess. I promise not to burn it.”
He hesitated. “Or … we could hash it out over a pint, sometime? Say, next week?”
“Yeah, okay,” Lyssa said, surprising herself. The old anger was still there, burrowed deep in the chasms of her heart, but there was a new voice inside her now, urging her to give him a chance. It sounded suspiciously similar to a certain ruffle-shirted asshole, and it was impossible to ignore.
“Really?” Her father seemed as surprised as she was, but beneath his confusion was a tentative sort of hope.
“Sure,” she said. “It’d be nice to talk about Eddie with someone who loved him like I did.”
Part of her still hated him for what he had done. But maybe he deserved a bit of the mercy she had shown Alderic. After all, the world wasn’t black-and-white, and her father wasn’t her enemy, despite all of the mistakes he had made.
He was simply human, just as she was.
÷ ÷ ÷
“Did you and your father have a nice chat?” Alderic asked Lyssa when she finally found him in the overcrowded night-market, at a stall selling embroidered socks.
He already had two shopping bags looped over his arm, and was currently scrutinizing the stitching on the toe of a powder-blue sock decorated with white poodles.
“We did, actually,” Lyssa replied, reaching down to scratch behind Brandy’s ear. The bullmastiff leaned into it and heaved a blissful sigh. Or maybe the sigh was directed at Alderic. Poodles?
Alderic returned the sock to its display, picked up a pair that featured a repeating pattern of marigolds. “And you didn’t stab him this time?”
She snorted. “No, I did not stab him. We’re … going to get a drink next week,” she said, with a clench of nerves in her stomach.
Alderic eyed her sidelong as he handed the marigold socks to the stall-owner, along with a few more coins than the advertised price. The corner of his lips curved in a barely suppressed smile, and Lyssa flushed.
“What?” she demanded.
“Nothing.” He took his purchase and thanked the stall-owner with a gracious smile, moving aside to make room for the next customer. “It’s just…”
“Just what?”
“I’m proud of you,” he said as he tucked his new socks into one of his shopping bags.
Lyssa’s flush deepened. “Oh, shut up,” she said, though there was no real bite to her words.
Now he wasn’t even trying to suppress his smile. “What? Am I not allowed to—”
“No, you are not.” It still felt strange, this sensation of a new Lyssa beginning to displace the old one.
Even thinking about it too much overwhelmed her.
The last thing she wanted to do was talk about it.
“Did you get that waistcoat?” she asked, in a desperate attempt to change the subject. Fortunately, it worked.
Alderic held up his arm and shook it, rustling the bags. “And three more, besides.”
She made a sound of disgust, looking to the sky like she was praying for patience, but the grin on his face was worth all the waistcoats in the world. “Then let’s go home, before you find anything else.”
“Home,” he repeated, drawing the word out. As if he liked the feel of it on his tongue.