"Rhystan. Just Rhystan." He looks away. "My family name... there are too many bad memories associated with it. So I don't use it anymore."
Rhystan.
A strange name to put to the monster from my nightmares. Too human. Too ordinary.
"Rhystan," I repeat, testing the shape of it.
He watches me say it with an expression I can't read.
"No one's said my name like that in a very long time," he says quietly. "Like it belongs to a person instead of a monster."
"Don't read too much into it. I just want to know what to call you when I kill you."
Almost a smile.
"Fair enough."
He turns and walks away, disappearing through the doorway. Leaving me alone with forty-seven names carved in gold and one new name I don't know what to do with.
Rhystan.
The name sits in my chest like a stone.
I look at the markers one more time—at Sina who lasted two minutes, at all of them who died in this castle at the hands of a beast who remembers their names and tends their graves and counts their deaths in scars on his own ribs.
A beast named Rhystan.
Then I go find the food he left me.
Because I'm too stubborn to die.
And I still have work to do.
7
Rhystan
She askedme for my name as if she intends to say it out loud.
The thought circles through my head as I walk away from the memorial hall, leaving her alone despite the fact that I want nothing more than to stand near her and speak the shape of her name into the curtain of her dark hair.
Kessa. Just Kessa. No surname, no family lineage, nothing to trace her back to whatever people produced something so fierce and impossible as to survive my beast and ask for my name.
No one has spoken my name in decades. They call me Beast King, or Your Majesty, or simplyhimin whispered tones when they think I can't hear their voices. Rhystan is the name my mother gave me, spoken on her lips as she died violently, and its shape has been worn away by three centuries of blood and failure—but Kessa asked for it like she intends to use it, and I gave it to her like it meant nothing though it means everything.
Rhystan.The way she said it—testing the shape, tasting the syllables—set my heart on fire. I can still feel it echoing in my chest, like my name belongs to a person instead of a monster.
I don't deserve that. Don't deserve her in all her fierceness and strength, or the way my beast has gone quiet for the firsttime in three hundred years, curled up in some deep part of me andcontentin ways I didn't know it could be.
I find Corvith, the Head Butler, waiting for me at the base of the east tower. His back is curved with age and his eyes filmy with cataracts. He's old enough to have served my father, and loyal enough to have stayed when he had every right to leave with the old king.
He takes one look at my face and straightens his aged shoulders.
"The omega is awake," I tell him. "She'll need attending."
"Shall I assign a maid to?—"
"No one enters unless she permits it. Food left outside her door. Hot water for the bath brought up and left in the antechamber. Give her fresh clothes. Simple things, practical outfits like those the farm girls wear. Shirts, trousers, boots that fit her. Nothing that looks like it belongs to a bride or a mother."
