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“I am going to whip you, lass. If I don’t do this now, there’s no guarantee I’ll ever have a chance to do it again. You’re on a wild and reckless path.”
“Bryn. I get it. I’ll be more careful.”
“When you’re well enough to take it, I’m going to whip your hide, girl.”
They were both pretending she wasn’t already well enough. Bryn was hard as nails, covered in scars. He’d led the kind of life that leaves marks. But he hated punishing his whelps, even the overgrown ones who acted out of turn. Hail knew that as well as he did. It was all threats with Bryn. He’d never so much as laid a finger on her in all the time they’d known each other, no matter what she’d done. She’d grown up in his care and she would have called him her father, if not for the fact that fathers beat you, and usually worse. Bryn was too good a man to be a father.
“For now, I’ve got business to attend to,” Bryn said. Hail kept holding his gaze and he knew he was going to be pushed into following through on the threat to beat her one day. That much was true. There was much to be done. Thirty-three lyrakins ranging from twelve to twenty-something depended on him to hold things together. Hail was supposed to be one of the elders, someone who helped. But she’d been clear since she was a whelp herself that she had bigger ambitions than joining the guild as a full time authority.
Bryn had hoped she’d see sense and settle down as she got older, but it wasn’t happening. Instead, every year that passed made her that little bit wilder.
The hand of destiny was on that girl. From the moment he’d found her as a teenager with an attitude and nothing else, he’d had a soft spot for her. There was something special about her. But there were others to take into consideration, a half dozen new youngsters who needed him to teach them and keep watch over them too. His life couldn’t be about chasing Hail anymore. She was supposed to be part of the hierarchy, one of the ones the whelps could look up to, but she acted like she’d never heard of the idea of responsibility. Everything was an adventure. There were no boundaries. There were just limits she hadn’t found yet. He admired that about her, but it was going to get her killed. There was no doubt in his mind about that.
“Why were you trying to increase your healing powers?”
“In case I needed to heal.”
“So you got hurt, so you could practice healing, and then you couldn’t heal yourself because you were hurt.”
“Exactly.”
She grinned broadly, her smile so removed from any sense of consequence it made Bryn despair. It was one thing to be an outlaw. But smart outlaws understood that laws still existed, like the one that said if you dropped your mead, it would spill, or if you let a bearoark chew on you, it would be one of the last things you ever did.
Two
Contraband
“I thought you were dead!” Elise’s hysteria almost made Hail feel worse than Bryn’s disappointment. Her friend’s eyes were full of tears, her face twisted with relief.
It had been three days since the bearoark incident, and Hail was fully healed. There wasn’t a mark on her, unless you counted the one on her pride. Bryn had kept the others away from her, which was another way of saying he had sent her to her room as punishment, grounded her from the rest of the den. Finally, she was allowed one visitor.
“Of course I’m not dead. I’m fine. I was barely hurt. You know how rumors are here.”
“I heard your head was broken open and your brains and eyes had swapped places, and your guts were…”
Bryn cleared his throat. Both young whelps looked up to see their master filling the doorway, a thin switch in his hand. He’d removed his tunic and was down to a vest which left his arms free to move. His hair was tied back behind his head in a way that made the features of his face harder and more prominent. There was no part of Bryn that had not been made for war. He was scarred all over, though he did not have to be. There were potions and salves, spells that could have taken away all those marks of battle. He refused to use them. He was himself, absolutely and entirely, and the story of his life was told in all the marks and scars on his body.
Bryn looked at Elise and jerked his head toward the doorway. The good lyrakin did not need to be told twice. She scuttled away, dipping under his arm to escape the realm of pain Hail was now trapped inside.
