“It’s a scratch,” she snapped, angry I’d even acknowledged it.
“Go straight back to our chambers,” I said softly, wanting to reach for her, still seeing the arrow flying towards her in my mind.
He almost killed her.
In one day, two people had tried. How many attempts would it take before someone succeeded? She was formidable, but not invincible.
Like she could read my thoughts, her expression twisted with disgust. “You’ve mistaken me for a simpering Saxon wench you can order to do you bidding.”
Now wasn’t the time nor the place to have this argument with her. I just wanted her to get somewhere safe, as safe as she could be in a kingdom filled with people who despised her.
She tossed her sword to the ground and strode through the ranks of Saxon soldiers without another glance, leaving her back vulnerable, daring someone to attack her. She practically radiated violence, and I wondered if it was the rest of the court I should be worried about and not her.
“Prince Bastian,” Elric barked, and I reluctantly followed him. My father was the most immediate crisis. Everything else would have to wait.
CHAPTER TWELVE
BASTIAN
Elric walked in silence towards the throne room, refusing to look at me, refusing even to walk next to me. He stayed at least a step ahead, like he was leading me to the executioner.
“Your wife teach you to throw a knife like that?” he asked without turning back.
It wasn’t the kind of maneuver taught to Saxon warriors, but it was a handy trick as a pirate, and it had gotten me out of a few bad situations. I fought a smile, remembering the days it took Astrid to teach me how to judge the distance and flick my wrist just right. We’d been becalmed and waiting for the wind to return to our sails, so we’d had nothing better to do than throw knives on deck until half the crew had been lethal with them.
We had to make rules about not throwing them belowdecks after our cook took a glancing blow to the ass. He put everyone who laughed at him on half rations that night, and the offender, our carpenter, had eaten last ever since. Cook had scowled likea proper pirate at the crew, but howled with laughter that night over ale with Astrid and me in the captain’s quarters.
Had Elric ever laughed like that with anyone?
“I learned it from my captain when I sailed as a pirate. Astrid of the Onyx.”
His neck stiffened. “You sailed for a woman?”
“Witha woman. Pirates have a captain, but we’re all equals. We had many women on our crew.”
He was too rigid in his ways to even consider such an egalitarian scenario, but I couldn’t seem to shut my mouth. I was proud of the crew Astrid and I had built together, proud of the captain she still was. “Astrid is from Ocracoke, where all people are equal. Just as the Vikings allow women to fight and rule and do everything men can do.”
The comparison was too much for him. “You’re quite the Viking lover now, aren’t you? So enamored of our enemies.”
I exhaled my frustration. “We’re at peace with the Vikings now.”
He laughed harshly. “They don’t know the meaning of the word. It’s only a matter of time.”
That was the crux of all our issues. No one trusted that anything would hold. That Sigrid wouldn’t turn on us. That I wouldn’t run again. That the Vikings wouldn’t lull us into complacency and then attack. The tension felt like a powder keg of expectation about to go off.
“Should we get our stories straight?” I asked as the great wooden doors of the throne room came into sight.
He jerked to a halt. “Ourstories? I plan to tell the truth, Bastian, as I always do. If yourstorycontradicts that, I can’t help you.”
When he moved forward again, I put a hand on his arm to stop him. “I’m not asking you to lie. But the truth can be presented in different ways.”
He shrugged my hand away to keep walking. “Your pirate captain teach you that too?”
There was a time, so far in the past that it was hard to remember, that we’d been friends. We’d only been little boys then, too innocent to understand court politics or competition or rank. I could see nothing of that boy in him now, just a man filled with bitterness and anger.
He pushed the heavy oak doors open before I’d prepared for the onslaught of memories this would bring. The boy Elric had been was gone, but I still felt like an overwhelmed child being dragged before my father to be punished. I could remember the walls of the Box of Contemplation closing around me even though that chest had been destroyed years ago.
It grew hard to breathe past the tightness in my chest, hard to keep walking when my muscles tried to lock up, responding to danger that didn’t exist.
