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“I want the same thing I’ve wanted from the start,” he said, turning surprisingly serious. “I want to get out of here. I want to get away from this shithole and its petty wars and ridiculous, pretend kings. I want to go somewhere where I can have a real life, where a man with intelligence and cunning can live like a king without having to put up with all the nonsense of men like Magnus and Vikhrov, or even Rufus or Julius.”
“Then why don’t you just go?” I snapped. “Why didn’t you just leave and disappear into the forest to start your own kingdom, since everyone else seems to be doing that.”
Dmitri pressed his mouth shut. He stared at me for a long moment before jerking away and marching across the room toward the balcony. He didn’t actually pull open one of the doors to head out there, though.
The back of my neck prickled. Not for the first time, I felt like there was something Dmitri wasn’t telling me. The man claimed to have a dozen secrets that he said would make or break the new kingdoms of the frontier, but I doubted that was it. In fact, after talking to Hayk, I doubted he knew anything of value anymore.
“You’re full of shit, Dmitri,” I said, walking to the bureau on one side of the room to fetch clean clothes. “You don’t know anything.”
When I reached the bureau, it hit me in a rush that Hayk had walked out of the room with Billie completely naked. He hadn’t gone back to the washroom for his clothes. He hadn’t seemed to notice that he was naked either. I wondered if it was because of what he did for a living or if that was just the way Hayk was.
“I know things,” Dmitri said, though he didn’t have the same arrogance in his voice as usual. He glanced across the room, watching me dress. “I know things that could change the course of the entire frontier.”
I snorted and shook my head. “I don’t believe you anymore. If you knew anything, you would have used the information already. And if you really valued your life, you would have run back into the forest the moment you saw Magnus on the dock in Hedeon instead of bluffing about your nonexistent information.”
Dmitri’s eyes went wide, and he stormed back across the room to me. “I stayed with you instead of running back into the forest because you need me,” he said. “I stayed because of you.”
“What?” I balked. Fortunately, I’d just pulled up the trousers I’d stepped into, otherwise I would have fallen over.
“You need me to protect you from a murderer like Magnus. He killed a man, you know,” he said, pointing to the balcony as if Magnus were standing right there. “He killed a friend of mine after the attack at Neander. Had him drown in the river.”
“That was one of the men who raped Peter,” I all but shouted.
“They didn’t rape—” Dmitri huffed out a breath and shook his head. “It was a misunderstanding. And what would you have had me do? Let that old lecher, Ludvig, make you his pup again?”
“Ludvig and I have an understanding,” I said. “We respect each other.”
“You’re naïve, Anton. You need me to protect you, to watch out for you. You need me to stop you from wasting yourself on old men and whores.”
“I can look after myself,” I snapped in return, yanking the tunic I’d taken from a drawer over my head. “And why do you care what happens to me anyhow?”
“I care because—” He stopped, his face contorting in frustration, then turned away from me. “This is a stupid argument. All I’m trying to do is help you and get you out of here, but if you insist on acting like a fool—”
“I am not a fool,” I said. “I have friends, which is more than you can say.”
Again, Dmitri looked inexplicably hurt by my statement, but that didn’t stop me from going on.
“You’re a liar, Dmitri. You’ve lied from the start. Hayk is right, you don’t know anything. Magnus let you come with us and spared your life, and you don’t have a single thing of value to trade for it.”
“General Rufus isn’t recruiting wild wolves for an army,” Dmitri barked. “He’s recruiting them to start his own kingdom.”
I froze, gaping at him. “What? That’s ridiculous. He’s one of King Julius’s most trusted generals.”
“And after only a short time over here, on the frontier, he saw that the things the wolves and the cities are doing will have longer-term benefits than anything going on in the Old Realm. He saw that he has the power to become a king himself, if he can convince enough of the wolves in the eastern forest to band together with him.”
“You’re lying,” I said, but in my heart, I knew he wasn’t.
Everything I’d seen in the eastern forest suddenly made sense. General Rufus wasn’t recruiting the weakest, hungriest wolves to be soldiers, he was selling them on the idea that they could have food, shelter, and revenge on the feral wolf leaders who had made their lives miserable if they joined him. The territory of the eastern forest was the largest geographically of any of the new kingdoms that had sprouted up on the frontier. Boris and Yates might have taken over Neander and Tesladom, but both Boris and Yates, and Boris’s lover, Igor, were city-born and bred, more so than other wolves. The cities indoctrinated people with the idea that exploration and life outside of city walls was bad.
General Rufus probably thought he could establish his own kingdom with a combination of wild wolves and the soldiers he’d brought with him from the Old Realm, and maybe even refugees from the cities.
I shook my head as my thoughts became too big. “King Julius would find out about it and send more soldiers to defeat him,” I said. “Some of the soldiers General Rufus has with him must be loyal to their king still. His plan wouldn’t work.”
Dmitri looked at me as though I were stupid. “Do you want to know why no one has seen General Rufus’s full army, or what they think is a new army made up of wild wolves?”
“Why?” I asked, suspecting Dmitri might know things of vital importance after all.
Dmitri looked me dead in the eyes and said, “Because they aren’t amassing in the eastern forest yet. General Rufus has most of the men he brought with him gathering near the passage through the mountains, the one in the north. He’s planning on destroying the passage right before the snows start in a few weeks. And as much as they’re trying, the southern pass is a disaster. The wolves who are trying to build it don’t have the skill, tools, or manpower to complete it. They’re debating giving the project up entirely.”
