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ChapterNine
Jace
Icouldn’t get back to Sebald’s cottage fast enough. So help me, I didn’t care what Barthold’s past with Sebald was, if the man had so much as frightened Genny, I would kill him with my bare hands.
Sebald apparently felt the same intense protectiveness.
“I should have known something like this would happen,” he hissed as we walked fast through Hedeon to the neighborhood near the wall. “I shouldn’t have left this morning. I should have stayed and faced Bee when he came.”
I glanced sideways to Sebald, shifting what I thought about him yet again. The last twenty-four hours had taught me that Sebald and I were a lot more alike than I’d ever guessed, which was actually nice. I had friends, but there was just something about discovering you had a lot in common with someone, even someone you already knew. What we didn’t have in common, though, was that I didn’t have the annoying streak of self-doubt that Sebald had.
“You did know this would happen,” I reminded him as we rounded the final streetcorner and charged toward Sebald’s cottage. “That’s why you asked Ox and Katrina to stay and watch over everyone.”
“But I should have stayed myself,” Sebald said, his jaw tight.
“What, and leave the Kostya Kingdom without a proper representative at the meetings this morning?” Jorgen joked from Sebald’s other side.
At least, it would have been a joke, if Jorgen didn’t look as angry about someone messing with his pup as Sebald and I looked and felt.
I started laughing, then realized that Jorgen had insulted my brother. Then I wanted to punch him. Even though part of me agreed with him. Fuck, it was frustrating having a king for a brother, especially when yesterday and today had shown me that Sai was in over his head. Severely.
I had to do something about that, but I had to protect Genny first.
We could hear a man shouting inside the cottage before we reached the front door. That just made the four of us and Nikandr speed up.
“I demand you let me go! And tell me what you’ve done with my wife!”
We burst through the front door of Sebald’s cottage and found Katrina towering over a man about my and Sebald’s age. That had to be Barthold. He knelt on the floor in the middle of the main room, doubled over, Katrina’s knee on his back. I didn’t look too hard before my gaze zipped to Genny, standing near the open door to the garden.
Genny was looking over his shoulder at something outside, but when he saw all of us storm through the front door, his gaze shot right to me, and he let out a visible sigh of relief.
“They’re here,” he called over his shoulder, then left the door and rushed toward me.
I ignored everything else in the room, striding to meet Genny halfway and throwing my arms around him.
“Are you alright?” I asked, breathless from hurrying to the cottage and from worry. “Are you hurt at all?”
Genny shook his head and leaned heavily into me. “Just unsettled.”
I nodded, then turned back to see how Sebald would handle the situation.
“You shouldn’t have come here, Bee,” he said, walking around the furniture to crouch in front of Barthold. Katrina hadn’t budged from the way she held him down. “You should have stayed away.”
“You don’t mean that,” Barthold groaned. His whole demeanor changed completely as he craned his neck to look up at Sebald. “I…I know you want me here. I know you still want me. Premila is my wife, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be together. The three of us could leave here, start a new life somewhere else.”
I didn’t have anything to do with the drama, but the way Barthold spoke sent a chill down my back. The man didn’t seem to be in his right mind. It made a sick sort of sense, I guessed. I’d run into a lot of men in the past year who had been tipped over the edge by the stress of all the changes on the frontier. Some people definitely dealt with it better than others.
“That isn’t going to happen, Bee,” Sebald said, speaking to the man with far more patience than I ever would have managed. “You hurt Pre, and you hurt your baby, your own son. You could have killed him.”
“I didn’t do anything,” Barthold said, switching from pleading to panic. “It was Premila. She lost her balance and fell against the stove. She knocked a pot of boiling water over, and it splashed the baby.”
I gaped at the audacity of that excuse. I might have been willing to consider it as legitimate if Avenel and Kliment hadn’t walked in from the garden at that point. Avenel held a damp rag to the side of his face and Kliment’s lip was split.
I managed to suck in a breath half a second before Sebald and Jorgen saw them, then everything went to hell.
“Kliment!” Jorgen called out his pup’s name and flew past me and Genny to reach him. He grabbed Kliment’s face first, though not brutally, and turned it to the side so he could see the lad’s lip better.
At the same time, Sebald leapt to his feet, instantly ignoring Barthold, and rushed to Avenel.
