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I know I didn’t lock the door behind me when I left for the tavern with Eamon, and he certainly didn’t, since he was walking ahead of me, carting a rolled-up rug over his shoulder.

We don’t lock it. Nor would we. It is a rule of ours.

In the weeks since we moved into the dwelling, we have locked the door once. We learned a lesson, not to do it again, and I had to scale the face of the lopsided, bloated building, slipping over mossy stones, to climb through the terrace windows, all to tackle the jammed latch from the inside and let Eamon in.

Locking the door means the latch will jam, and the key doesn’t work when it does.

So as I slide the key into the hole, then turn it with a gentle rotation of my own wrist, a curse murmured under my breath, and the latch unbolts so easily, a frown is quick to furrow my face.

I boot out at the door, braced for resistance of some kind—but it pops open without trouble.

I step into the doorway.

The look I aim at the old, scratched door isn’t kind. Unpredictable, and a menace. That is what you are .

I huff a bothered sound before I turn back for the corridor. On the dusty runner rug is a row of netted bags. I left them there to prepare for a battle with the door that has now decided to behave.

The bags shift and droop as I snatch the handles, then haul them over my aching shoulders.

My body screams for rest, more rest, never enough rest. Almost two weeks of survival and fighting for my life on the mountain and weeks in Kithe under Eamon’s regime of brutal labour, with only some black powder peppered here and there, and I am struggling .

It's more than the muscles of my body that are tired and tense. It’s the joints, too, the balls knitted into my hips, the creak of my knee, and that constant gait that haunts me ever since Mika shot an arrow into my thigh. That little limp that’s only noticeable if one was to watch me for a long while, that slight tilt off balance, or noticeable to myself, because I feel it, the extra weight distributing to one side, my hip and thigh and knee, where all the problems are gathering.

What I wouldn’t do for a healing pond. Small water pools of rejuvenating elixirs. I only know of the ones in the homes of some princes and princesses of Licht.

I’ve never actually been in a healing pond before… or seen one for that matter. But it sounds like it would be something of a help at the moment, especially as my limp worsens under the dragging weight of the netted bags that I haul through the doorway.

That’s all the energy I have for the bags of unwashed potatoes and turnips and wrapped cuts of meat, and I toss them onto the kitchen floor. The thud shudders the floorboards before a pattering sound thumps and thumps.

I frown into the dusty darkness; sparse light to illuminate the dwelling from just a few dim glowjars dotted around. I expect to see potatoes rolling out of the bags and tumbling over the floor, thump, thump, thump .

But then I see two emerald orbs gleaming in the dark.

My throat thickens.

The orbs flicker from the other side of the netted bags, tucked in the dark corner of the kitchen…

My eyes widen—and a familiar shudder rinses through me.

I recognise these orbs, I recognise this beast. I have stared down its kind before, my life teetering on the edge of a blade under its gaze.

There is a fucking faerie hound in my kitchen.