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Jacob started to protest, hands still trying to stop the blood flow from his nose. "You can't do that."
"Oh, but she can," Richard said, and there was a coldness in him that I'd never seen before. He wouldn't have come up with the idea himself, but he liked it. It let me know just how frustrated he'd been with Jacob.
"Great," I said. "Shall we all walk like civilized wereanimals to the oubliette and rescue Gregory?"
"I will not go willingly down in that hole," Jacob said. His voice sounded a little funny, what with all the blood and his nose smashed to hell, but he sounded sure of himself. He shouldn't have been.
"Your Ulfric and your lupa have both decreed you will go," Sylvie said. "To refuse the order is to refuse their authority."
Jamil continued, "To refuse their authority is to be declared outlaw from the clan."
Jacob glared at me when he said, "I will obey my Ulfric, but I do not acknowledge the Nimir-Ra as my lupa."
"If I say she is lupa, then to deny that is to question my authority as Ulfric," Richard said.
Jacob's eyes flicked to Richard. "We voted her out as our lupa."
"I'm voting her back in," Richard said, voice deep and quiet, but loud enough that it carried.
"Take another vote," Jacob said, still trying to slow the blood from his face. "It will go against her again."
"No, Jacob, you misunderstand me. I said, I am voting her back in, not you, not anyone else, just me."
Jacob's eyes widened. "You've preached about democracy in action since I joined this clan. Are you going back on all of it now?"
"Not on all of it, but we don't vote for Freki, or Geri, or for Hati and Skoll. We don't vote for Ulfric. Why should we vote for lupa?"
"She's f**king the Nimir-Raj. For that alone she should be cast out as lupa."
"That's my problem, not yours, not the pack's."
"You going to f**k her, too? You think the Nimir-Raj will share?"
Richard started to say something, but Micah spoke first, taking a step from the rest, his guards flanking him. "Why don't you ask the Nimir-Raj?"
Richard looked at me, a question in his eyes. I shrugged.
"Ask him, Jacob," Richard said. The blood had almost stopped dripping from Richard's mouth.
"You mind if the Ulfric f**ks your Nimir-Ra?" Jacob was still bleeding like a stuck pig. His chest, stomach, even the front of his shorts were soaked with blood.
"I've agreed to any arrangement that Anita wishes, as long as she remains my Nimir-Ra and lover."
"You'd share her with another man?" Jacob said, voice thick with disbelief
"With two other men," Micah said.
That got almost everybody staring at him. I glanced at him, but mostly watched everyone else's reaction, especially Richard's. The others looked shocked, Richard looked thoughtful, as if Micah had finally done something he didn't hate.
"She is the Master of the City's human servant. Being my Nimir-Ra has not changed that. I've felt the mark that binds them together, and it is not something that will break, as, apparently, the mark that binds her to the Ulfric will not break."
"Nothing binds her to the Ulfric but her stubbornness, and his," Jacob said.
"You think so?" Micah made it a question.
Jacob looked uncertain. The blood from his nose was finally beginning to slow. "You've seen more than I've seen, if you think they still have a special bond."
"More than any of us have seen." This from Paris, who had pushed her way to the front of the crowd.
"I am Nimir-Raj, of course I see more than you do." His voice made it so logical, so matter of fact.
"I am Geri, third in line to the throne."
"Noah is my third in line. I think if you ask him he will say he did not see what I saw either. Third in line to be Nimir-Raj, or Ulfric, is not the same as being the real thing."
I fought not to give Micah the look of gratitude that I wanted to give him. We were still deep in bluff territory, and not safely out the other side yet.
"You can't mean to share your lupa with two other men," Paris said. She'd pushed her way to stand in front of Richard, with her back to me. She was either being insulting, or stupid. Maybe both.
Richard looked down at her, and it wasn't a friendly look. Somehow I didn't think Paris ever had a very good shot at being lupa, not with Richard in charge anyway. "What I and my lupa do, or don't do, is none of your business."
I saw her back stiffen, as if he'd hit her, and maybe he had hit her pride. She'd really believed she could seduce him into picking her. I could have told her that sex wasn't the key to Richard's heart. He liked it well enough, but it wasn't one of his top priorities, not if it interfered with other things that were. It had been the same mistake that Raina had made with him, or one of the mistakes she'd made with him. Raina had never really understood Richard, either.
"You can't just arbitrarily decide you don't need a vote for this," Jacob said.
"Yes," Richard said, "I can."
I stepped up beside Jacob. "That's what being Ulfric means, Jacob."
"You're going back to a dictatorship after all the high-minded talk," Jacob said.
"For tonight, it's sufficient that Anita is my lupa, and that's not going to change. We'll discuss everything else later."
"I say we put it to a vote whether the pack wants to go back to being a dictatorship," Jacob said.
"If you don't have someone set that nose, it may heal crooked," I said.
He glared at me. "You stay out of this."
Richard called up a man with short brown hair and a neat mustache. He shrugged a backpack off his shoulders and began taking out medical supplies. "Fix his nose," Richard said and then turned to Sylvie. "When he's bandaged up, pick some people and escort Jacob to the oubliette."
There were murmurings in the crowd. One clear voice that I hadn't heard before said, "You can't do that."
Richard looked up, searching the crowd, and they fell silent under his gaze. His power rolled out from him like a burning invisible fog, something that clung to your skin and made it hard to breath. They avoided his eyes; some even dropped down into submissive postures, their bodies low to the ground, eyes rolled up, arms and legs held close, making themselves seem small and defenseless, clearly asking not to be hurt.
"I am Ulfric here. If there is any among you that disagree with that, then you are free to challenge the next in line, and the next after that, until you are Freki, then declare yourself Fenrir, and you can challenge me. If you kill me then you can be Ulfric, and you can set any damn policy you want. Until that time, shut the f**k up and follow my orders."
I don't think I'd ever heard Richard cuss. The silence was thick enough to cut. It was Jacob who cut it, like I knew he would. He pushed the mustached doctor away impatiently, while the shorter man tried to pack his nose with what looked like gauze. "Anita shows back up, and so does your backbone. Does she kill and torture for you like Raina did for Marcus?"
Richard's fist struck out in a blur that I couldn't follow. It was almost magical. One moment Jacob was standing, the next moment he was on the ground with his eyes rolled back inside his head.
Richard turned to the rest of them, the dried blood decorating his nude upper body, his hair turned to spun bronze in the torchlight. His eyes had gone wolf amber, and looked more gold than normal against his darker than usual summer tan. "I thought we were people, not animals. I thought we could change the old ways and make something better. But we all felt it tonight when Anita and her leopards melded. Something safe and good. I've tried to be temperate and kind, and look where it's gotten us. Jacob said Anita is my backbone. No, but she's doing something right, something that I've missed. If you won't take kindness, then we'll have to try something else." He looked at me with those alien eyes, and said, "Let's go get your leopard. We need to get him out of the oubliette before Jacob comes to." And he stalked off through the trees and left the rest of us to trail after. There was no question about what to do next. We followed Richard into the trees. We followed the Ulfric, because you're supposed to follow your king, if he's worthy of the name. For the first time ever I thought maybe, just maybe, Richard was going to be Ulfric after all.
Chapter 26
THE OUBLIETTE WAS a rounded metal lid set in the ground. The metal lid sat in the middle of a clearing scattered with tall, thin trees. Honeysuckle bushes ringed the lid on one side; leaves were so thick on the ground that the area looked untouched. I would never have found it if I hadn't known it was there.
