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“You don’t sound very happy about that,” she ventured.
He shrugged, which pulled at all his aching muscles. Winced. “I don’t care either way: it’s her life, and her decision.” Truthfully, he didn’t care…or, he hadn’t. But Amelia’s words – the idea that the baby would be his sibling, even if a half-sibling – set his mental wheels to turning. Boy or girl, this sibling would only ever have known him as he was now, as a wolf, a pack alpha; as someone who’d slept with the traitor cousin the rest of the family loathed.
Perhaps that was for the best. He or she would never know the Leif he’d been as a boy, softer, kinder. But, unlike Rune, he or she wouldn’t give him those miserable, longing looks, and wish for a return of a brother who’d been lost somewhere between the full moon and a mouthful of flashing fangs.
“Sorry,” she said, “I didn’t mean to broach a touchy subject.”
“You didn’t,” he assured. “I still don’t think I’ve quite grasped the idea: Mother having another child. It’s…”
“Strange?” Ragnar asked, turning to lean back against the window embrasure. “Revolting? Unnatural?”
“Birth is natural, you dolt. And what did I say about my mother?”
“I would never sully the name of the vaunted Lady Revna of Aeres,” Ragnar said, faux loftily, nose lifting in the air for good measure.
“You don’t play innocent well,” Leif griped.
“I don’t, do I?”
“Anyway,” Amelia said, drawing both their attentions. “I came to see if you were too sore to move.”
Ragnar darted a glance to Leif, dangerous light flaring in his eyes. “Oh?” he asked, continuing his piss-poor attempt at innocence. “And where would you have him move, Lady Amelia? In what way?”
Amelia sent him a withering look that instantly deepened Leif’s liking for her. Then she said, “Well, it involves quite a few stairs. There’s something in the wine cellar I’ve been waiting to show you. A subject we need to address before we march.”
“Ooh, the wine cellar,” Ragnar said, grin growing dangerous.
Ignoring him, Leif sat up a little straighter. “I can move. What is it?”
“A prisoner.” Her gaze slid to Ragnar. “Perhaps two, depending.”
Ragnar chuckled. “Don’t threaten me with a good time, my lady.”
She turned for the door. “I wouldn’t dream of it.”
~*~
The wine cellar was not nearly as deep as the catacombs at Aeres; he’d walked much farther for a bath. But he’d not been healing from mortal wounds, and then spent the day battering opponents in the training ring, then. The first staircase was bad. The second was worse. Walking behind Amelia, with no one to see him struggling with gritted teeth and seized-up body, he accepted Ragnar’s silent support as they reached the final, much simpler staircase that led from the manor’s basement to its cold, damp wine cellar.
He paused halfway down, and his hackles went up the same moment Ragnar released a low growl.
Amelia paused four steps down, haloed by the light of the candle she carried. She turned around at the sound of Ragnar’s growl, and frowned up at them. “What is it?” she asked, quietly. A murmur of voices came from below, and her gaze darted that way and back, eyes wide and uncertain.
“It’s not right,” Ragnar said, and then sneezed and tossed his head as a wolf would.
Amelia looked startled.
Leif took a deep breath, and swallowed his own growl. He could smell Edward, and Reginald, and Connor, and Leda, and her younger lover, Colum of the Dour Face. He smelled two other men as well, guards: they had a scent of leather and mail about them. He smelled candle wax, and human waste. Old, old wine, spilled and then dried, and the casks it had been stored in, dust, and mildew, and mouse leavings.
It was the scent of the prisoner that had roused his wolf, that left Ragnar growling still, quiet but constant.
Amelia was waiting, watching them, alarm showing clearer and clearer on her face; the dance of the candle flame revealed the unsteadiness of her hand.
Leif tried to put it into words. “The Sel. He’s been searched? You took all his weapons?”
Her tension eased a fraction. “Yes. We stripped him bare, and doused him with water, too, to be sure he hadn’t coated himself in anything.” She made a helpless gesture. Who knew what a Sel might have coated himself with, but after the fight on the road, there was no such thing as overly cautious.
Leif nodded, but Ragnar continued to growl, the hairs on his arm bristled up where they brushed Leif’s skin. “He doesn’t smell as if he possesses magic himself, but he’s…touched by it.”
