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3
Aeres
It was becoming a daily habit for Leif: going down into the dungeons and sitting with Ragnar. Picking his brain. Learning how to be a wolf that lived in a man’s skin.
Today, he paused on the spiral stairs that led deep into the bowels of the palace, and his gut clenched tight, even as his inner wolf wagged his tail. He was…looking forward to this. To sitting cross-legged in the straw with the scent of chamber pot and wolf musk in his nose, talking candidly about the way it felt for his fangs to get long in his mouth; the way the ground was starting to smell like spring beneath the crust of snow and ice.
He didn’t like Ragnar, but every night at the family table, he felt the weight of everyone’s eyes; noted the way his mother would hesitate before asking him a benign question; saw the morose glances Rune shot him, guilty and helpless. He wasn’t like them anymore; they couldn’t understand him.
Maybe Ragnar couldn’t either – impossible, he wanted to say, for that traitor to understand me – but Ragnar called him alpha, and showed his throat, and didn’t skirt him looks like he was a creature from another world.
No, he didn’t like him, but he needed him. And, unfortunately, coming down into the dungeon with him was a relief, one that left his wolf eager and hurrying down the rest of the steps.
Damn it all, and fuck him.
The guards had long grown used to his visits, and they offered quick bows and “my lord”s, but didn’t try to hand him a torch. His pupils were already expanding, drinking in the dark, the flickering cresset shadows bright as daytime as he strode down the hall.
Ragnar was sitting up on his cot, chains attached to wrists and throat pooled his lap, waiting for him. He huffed a low, lupine greeting that Leif found himself returning automatically.
Annoyance bristled up his ruff. He’d grown used to this, was eager for it – and was only just now, today, realizing it. It set his teeth on edge, and when he plopped down on the stool opposite the cot, it was more or less an act of throwing himself onto it, so that it creaked ominously.
Ragnar perked up a fraction from his slump against the wall, chains clinking. “What’s got you bothered, cousin?”
Leif bared his teeth.
Ragnar’s head tilted. “True. ‘Brother’ would be more accurate. We’re closer than cousins now.”
Leif growled.
Ragnar showed his dirty palms – and his throat, head tipping back so the collar he wore dug into the flesh there. His voice shifted, flat and obedient. “What’s got you bothered…alpha?”
Better. Leif subsided with another huff. Ragnar’s eyes stayed pinned to him, watchful, assessing – but his gaze didn’t unnerve the way Rune’s, or Mother’s, or Tessa’s, or Uncle’s did. Of the family, only Oliver seemed to treat him exactly as he had before. Oliver had his own strange sort of magic, Leif supposed. Some might have even called it a curse…though he didn’t drop to four legs and howl at the moon.
(Leif had howled, but not at the moon. Not yet.)
Unwilling to speak with Ragnar about the thoughts weighing heaviest on his mind, he said, “Talk to me of the Sels.”
Ragnar made an inquisitive sound. “How should I know anything about the Sels?”
Leif stared at him.
Earned a sigh. “Well, we’ve got no books in the Waste, do we? I can’t read about them. Real men out in the wilderness have no use for studying.” He grinned with all his teeth, but could quickly tell that Leif wasn’t impressed. “Fine, fine.” He rolled his eyes and resumed his earlier slump.
“We’ve talked about wolves. Now I want to talk about men. Aside from their sheer numbers, what makes you think they’re going to overrun North and South both? Why is it useless to fight back against them?”
“You don’t ask easy questions, do you?” He held up a hand before Leif could growl – and then dragged it back through his snarled hair. His braids had all come unwound, leaving only knots, and bits of bone beads caught in dirty tangles. “You remember what I told you about the ritual? Becoming a skinwalker?”
“Yes.” He remembered it all too well.
When he was a boy, the older children, and even some of the old men who sat close to the fireplace and sipped liquor constantly, liked to try and frighten – toughen up, they would have said – the little ones with tales of the old magics of the Wastes. The shamans of the wild tribes, they had said, could turn a man into a beast by carving the heart from a virgin and having the hopeful skinwalker consume it. Horrifying tales of bloodletting, and burning men alive in wicker cages; headdresses of wolf pelts and deer antlers; bright eyes blazing from blood-painted faces, and intonations to gods from another realm.
Leif had thought it all rubbish.
But then there had been the dragons. And Oliver. And now Ragnar.
The true ritual, Ragnar had explained a week ago, hadn’t been far off from the scary, fireside stories. He and his would-be pack had entered a ring of fire, a circle of flaming oil pots in the snow, and a man wearing antlers, with long-nailed, bloody hands had offered Ragnar, the alpha, a bowl from which to drink. Blood, and something oilier and heavier, the taste overpowering the familiar copper tang. Ragnar had doubled over sure he’d be sick – but had fallen into the snow, stars wheeling overhead instead. He’d drifted, the old language drifting overhead, tingling pleasantly all over. And then strong jaws had clamped down on his bare shoulder, and the pain had been excruciating.
He never got the chance to meet the skinwalker who’d turned him, but he’d been the one to bite and turn the rest of his pack.
