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There were mumblings of assent, and the scrape of chairs shifting as everyone stood.
Amelia was heading for the door, trying to decide if it would be worth taking one last scouting flight northeast tomorrow, to see if Oliver and his king and their Phalanx were within sight, when Leif said, “Amelia.”
She paused, and when she caught his gaze across the room, he tilted his head back toward the fire, silently wanting a word. She nodded.
Leda waggled her brows on the way out – Amelia sent her a quelling look that earned a sly grin in response – and Amelia went to join him at the hearth.
Ragnar lingered a few steps back, still sprawled in his chair, cleaning beneath his nails with a short knife. When the last Southerner was well away, Leif turned to him.
“Leave us.” It had the ring of a command, and the sound of it snatched Ragnar’s head upright, and put a frown on his face. “Go,” Leif urged. “I’ll speak with you after.”
After…what? Amelia wondered, and tried to ignore the pleasant twinge in her belly; tried not to think of Leda’s suggestive eyebrows, nor the encouragement she’d given the night before.
Ragnar gave an unhappy huff, but stood, and walked out. Leif watched him go, until he was out of sight, and though Ragnar didn’t look back, she could see the way he wanted to, the rigid tension in the set of his shoulders.
When he was gone, Leif sighed.
“Did you know?” Amelia asked, quietly, in case Ragnar could still hear them, even as his footfalls went thumping up the stairs. He probably could. “That he’d been tasked with killing you?”
Leif turned back to her slowly, gaze hooded, indrawn. “Not explicitly, no. But he had one of his men try to kill Rune, and then he left Erik and me for the cannibals. I always expected he wasn’t supposed to turn me.” Wry tilt to his mouth, slight shake of his head. “I’m not sure even he knows why he did it.”
Her pulse was thumping a fraction too fast; she thought he could probably hear or sense it, somehow. If he’d known Cassius’s tattoo was enchanted, how could he help but know that something in her quickened when she thought of him, and Ragnar, and whatever it was that lay between them?
“The two of you have a…complicated relationship.”
He snorted. “That’s an understatement.”
“But he cares for you. I can tell – we all could, in the days before you woke. That day, on the side of the road…”
It startled her all over again each time she recalled it, those first minutes after the portal had closed, and the chaos had come to a screeching end…that quickly gave way to the madness of the aftermath.
Men had been moaning on the ground, in two languages. Men had been sobbing, been begging: some for help, some for the release of death. Amelia had landed, once she’d scoured the area and found no more enemy combatants on their feet. She’d seen Connor and Reggie, and she’d slid down off Alpha’s back and run to them, to see what they were bent over.
Leif, it had proved. And above him, clutching at his shredded clothes, hands awash in his blood, had been Ragnar, tears coursing down his face while he murmured, “Alpha, alpha, please, please,” over and over, shaking Leif and telling him to wake up. As she’d neared, Connor had touched Ragnar’s shoulder. “Let us have a look–”
And Ragnar had snarled, and lashed out, and clutched Leif to his chest, teeth bared and growl rumbling from deep in his chest, furious, and wild, and grief-stricken.
Connor and Reggie had stumbled back from him.
It was Amelia who’d finally coaxed him to let go of Leif, and let them bandage him, let them move him. Nothing about his tear-filled eyes had been human in that moment.
Leif’s expression had turned sour with unhappiness, and she didn’t know if it was because he didn’t want to hear her say such a thing, or because he doubted its truth. “I’m not sure,” he said after a moment, “that Ragnar’s mind works the way other men’s do.” He shook his head, and said, “But I didn’t want to talk about him.” His gaze lifted to meet hers once more, and the weight of it was of the sort a person wanted to step back from. She rather wanted to lean in, instead, and see how much of it she could bear. Like her horse, like her drakes, his regard bore the intensity of an animal, rather than the duplicitous charm of a man; she found it hopelessly ensnaring for that reason, against her better judgement.
“All right,” she said, and hoped her voice was steady. “What, then?”
His weight shifted – he shifted in, and Amelia pointedly did not look down at the breadth of his chest.Eyes up, she told herself.Focus. You don’t even want him that way.
The voice that laughed in the back of her mind sounded an awful lot like Leda’s.
“I hesitated to say this earlier, in the training yard,” he said. Speaking quietly like this, his voice had a low, deep vibration not unlike a growl, the timber of it resonating pleasantly in the narrow space between them, echoing inside her chest as if he’d spoken the words directly down her throat. The idea of such a thing shocked her – thrilled her – so much that she struggled to decipher the second half of his statement. “I didn’t want to undermine your authority in front of the men. But I can tell you weren’t born to the sword, and I think it’s important that you begin formally training. In earnest.”
She wanted to do something in earnest all right, flushed right up to the tips of her ears, pulse a steady throb in all the places that craved more of his voice. And she hadn’t even drunk any wine! Ugh.
But then she realized what he’d said, and not merely how he’d said it, and she frowned. “I had a lesson or two – or three – growing up.” Mal passing her his blade in a grass-floored clearing just beyond sight of the house, the summer sun glinting off the clean blade, his arms strong around her as he helped her step through a sequence of sword stances – until they were both laughing, and she was turning in his arms, and the sword lay forgotten on the grass while they pursued other exercises.
Oh, Mal.
She shook her head, and whatever her face did, it left his brows drawing together. “You’re right, though. I need more practice – a lot more. I could barely lift that Sel sword, much less use it.”
