A few rays of morning light fell on her face and Selissa reluctantly returned to the land of the conscious, just to immediately regret this development once she became aware of the violent pounding in her head.
Some distant part of her mind noted that she usually slept in a windowless room. She reluctantly opened an eye, fearing what she might see.
The goat staring at her wasn’t the weirdest thing she had ever woken up to, and judging from the look on the goat’s face, an unconscious mercenary wouldn’t have attracted much interest if she hadn’t been laying in its feeding trough.
“I’m never drinking again,” Selissa groaned as she pushed the goat away and gracelessly dragged herself out of her makeshift bed. She wasn’t exactly sure how she had ended up in the stable, but at least it beat passing out in the snow and waking up after losing a couple of toes to frostbite.
The goat was still staring at her, its strange slitted eyes unblinking.
“Don’t judge me,” she told it sullenly.
Her head was killing her and her memories of the previous night were fuzzy at best, but she was pretty sure she hadn’t achieved much in the way of information gathering. Unless you counted the fact that some of the mousy little mage researchers were far better at handling their booze than she would have given them credit for . . .
The last thing she remembered was challenging the Professor of Archaic Artifacts to a drinking match, and while she would already have been pretty inebriated before suggesting such a thing, she had clearly underestimated the spindly, bespectacled mage.
‘You also tried to pick a fight with a hat stand later,’ Cadeyrn informed her helpfully.
“Shut. Up,” Selissa said. The hangover was bad enough; she didn’t need the voices in her head right now.
Fighting the urge to stay on the nice cold floor, Selissa decided she better get moving before the owner of the stable showed up to chase her out with a pitchfork.
It wouldn’t have been the first time.