Cold Comfort
Alysandryn Cousland could hear the Grey Warden in his tent, tossing and moaning.
What does he have to trouble his sleep?
This was no feeling of concern on her part but bitterness and anger, and most of all, grief, but a grief that was so hot with rage and guilt that it burned away all her tears.
She had been spared the sight of the dead bodies of her mother and father, but she knew somewhere behind the walls of Castle Cousland, their flesh was growing stiff and cold, just like all the other people she once knew and loved. All of them gone. Betrayed because of Howe's treachery! She could still see Oren, his tiny little body strewn across the floor like a discarded doll from her girlhood days before she took up shield and sword and tried her best to be just as tough and brave as her older brother, Fergus. At least that's how she remembered her young nephew, a tiny and fragile little thing, broken and bleeding in a pool of his mother's blood.
I should have been kinder to her. I should have been a real sister to her, but I was just a bitch.
Alysandryn had hated and resented Fergus's Ativan wife, not because she was foreign and strange-although Alysandryn made plenty comments about that to insult the poor woman and make her feel unwelcome when she came to live with them-but XXX greatest sin was that she became the center of Fergus's world when her big brother was still the center of Alysandryn's universe. Fergus was perfect and everything she ever wanted to be and he belonged to them. When Oren was born, Fergus no longer belonged to her or her parents at all anymore but had become a part of a different family, the family he was building with XXX.
After they were first married, Alysandryn prayed she would go away, and now she was gone and Oren and Papa and Mama and Nan too. Alysandryn did not even want to count all the times she wished Nan out of her life with all her stories, stories that Alysandryn knew she made up just to make her feel guilty about something she had done or some way she had spoken or acted.
And then there was … Rory. She hadn't called him that since the night her father caught them kissing in the courtyard. As soon as Bryce Cousland confronted him, Roland Gilmore crumbled and promised not to see or talk to Alysandryn again. It seemed he gave her up so quickly and easily when she spent weeks crying over him. She had been willing to fight for their love, but Roland only seemed worried and ashamed. She would never forgive him for that, but then he was so brave and strong at the end. She forgave him and then she had to tell him goodbye forever.
Alysandryn groaned and scrambled out of her bedroll. The last thing she wanted right now was to be alone. This Duncan had rescued her from the death Howe plotted for her family. It might not make him a friend, but it must make him less than a stranger.
