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He let out a slow breath, and squeezed her hand in return. “I understand, Mum.”
Mum. Had he called her that, fond and familiar, since his turning?
The way tears immediately filled her eyes once more told himno. She dropped his hands and flung her arms around his neck instead, hugging him tightly.
A beat too late, Leif draped his arms carefully around her in return. Pressed flush like this, he could feel the babe’s hummingbird pulse against his stomach, and he counted the seconds until he could turn loose without insulting her.
~*~
From the corridor outside Erik’s study, he went straight to the room he’d been given while repairs were finishing up in the royal apartments. A small, plain chamber where his various trunks had been stored alongside a narrow bed he hadn’t slept in once. He stuffed a satchel full of clothes, knives, a map, and a few other human essentials. Gathered up his longsword and shortsword both, and strapped them to his person.
In the kitchens he stopped for two heaping sacks of cheese, bread, and slightly shriveled apples, before making his way to the hay shed, across a yard full of dazzling sunlight, the snow thin and slushy. The days were lengthening and warming – not warm enough to go without sleeves, as he did now, but warm enough that the lads shoveling hay into the sheep pens had doffed cloaks and hats and sweat steamed through their clothes, rising into the morning as faint vapor.
The shed was empty, as expected, but he stashed his things there and was able to follow his pack’s scent trail across the yard, down past the orchard, along the wall and to a gate that let out onto a broad expanse of empty, snow-covered field. He scented Ragnar long before he reached him, and arrived to find the gate standing open, Ragnar leaning against the stone post, arms folded, one foot crossed over the other, staring wistfully out across the plain.
Leif hung back a moment to observe him. The defeated slump of his shoulders, and the melancholy stamped on his face. The breeze lifted a bone-studded braid toward his chin and he flicked it back over his shoulder with a toss of his head. He smelled of longing; wanted to shift and go sprinting across the snow to join his packmates, off hunting in their wolf skins.
He didn’t speak, but Leif joined him, bracing a shoulder against the opposite post. After a moment, Ragnar said, “You smell like a man who’s made a decision.”
Here was the thing that he hadn’t told any of the rest of his family – the family not currently standing here with a torq around his neck, guilty of a dozen betrayals against his own blood. He didn’t dare admit to any of them that, since his turning, talking with them had become difficult, almost painful; that a wall existed between them which they could never breach, because their senses were human and human alone. But that, when he approached Ragnar, he was met, always, with a knowing look, with an understanding that he didn’t want, but which was both undeniable…and craveable. It was so much easier with Ragnar, even in the moments – fewer and farther between – that he hated him. Hate paired with knowledge was more acceptable than hopeful, unknowing hesitancy and ignorance.
“That’s because I have made a decision,” he said, and took his first deep breath of the past hour. He smelled snow, and his pack; pine needles and Ragnar’s musk, unique from that of all the other wolves. “As soon as the others return, we’re leaving.”
A beat passed. “Leaving to go where?”
“To the land bridge Oliver spotted while scouting.” He turned to meet the other wolf’s gaze. “To war.”
Ragnar’s eyes – the same ice water blue as Erik’s, and Revna’s, and his own – widened as understanding dawned. Slowly, his lips parted in an incredulous,delightedsmile.
“You don’t have permission.” It wasn’t a guess. “You haven’t beensent.”
Leif was careful to keep his expression smooth, but gods knew what his scent was conveying. He knew his pulse had quickened, and that Ragnar could hear it. “What of it?”
“Ha ha!” Ragnar turned away, beaming, and clapped his hands. “Shit. I love it. Fuck!” Before Leif could chastise him, he cupped both hands around his mouth, tipped his head back, and howled. Even in his human shape, it wasn’t a human sound, not a child’sawoooimitation. This was a real wolf’s howl, shiver-inducing and far-reaching; it echoed across the field, dying away slowly in the pines like the wail of a ghost. He was calling the pack to return. It lifted all the fine hairs on Leif’s body, and rippled pleasantly across his skin. An echoing sound built, and was tamped down deep in his chest.
Afterward, Ragnar turned to him, still smiling. “That,” he said, with great conviction, “is why you’re the alpha.”
6
The sting of the wind lessened as the days grew longer, spring creeping toward them on slow cat’s feet. It always stung up in the clouds, though, as Alpha’s wings propelled them forward faster than any horse could run, or any sailing ship could glide. Her eyes streamed, and her lips cracked, and it wouldn’t stop being the most exhilarating sensation anytime soon.
Lord Edward had reasoned, and everyone else had agreed, that a headlong march toward the capital would be nothing but folly. They didn’t have the numbers for a proper siege, nor the war engines the Sels would have in place around Aquitaine. The first order of business, then, was securing their own headquarters, while they waited for reply from the North and those as-of-yet-unresponsive remaining Southern duchies who hadn’t bothered committing to the first war effort (a fat lot of good those troops would do, Reggie had said with a sneer). The fastest, cleanest way to scout was from above, which meant Amelia spent her days on dragonback.
In the manor’s dining room, now war council room, they’d sketched a grid over the map of the Inglewood. Methodically, working back and forth and spreading ever-outward, she was able to mark these sections of the wood as clear of the enemy.
If it hadn’t been for her love of flying, the strong flex of Alpha’s back beneath her, the thrill of the wind tearing her eyes, it would have been dull beyond reason. Even so, she wanted to grind her teeth over the sense that this was all a massive waste of time. Caution where boldness would serve them better.
Today, it was Lancet who accompanied them. Slender and sharp as a blade, she cut through the air with long, efficient strokes of her wings that resembled the fast slash of a knife, surging ahead of the larger, more methodical Alpha again and again, until one of his bugling cries brought her back, or, interesting to observe, sent her farther out, so that they might cover more territory at once. She was a quiet, serious drake, her independence unlike the young Marigold’s, who loved to play in the air, attention snagging on every bird and trembling bush. Amelia had a sense of ruthlessness and cunning from her, and when she’d telepathically urged the female to snatch up anything that so much as resembled golden armor beneath the tree canopy, she’d earned an unsentimental pulse of agreement. She was, in truth, Amelia’s favorite partner for this activity.
As expected, they flushed nothing more than a herd of deer and a few foxes. She allowed both drakes to dive and snare a buck each in their talons, and then urged them home, as the sun began to sink toward the tree tops.
Strange to think of Inglewood ashome, now. Even with her mounting frustration and sense of hopelessness, it was funny that a war camp felt like the place she’d always been meant to be.
Trumpets sounded as they approached the manor grounds, and the three remaining drakes sent up a welcome, mental and vocal, glad cries for their sister and alpha. Amelia had them deposit the dead deer at the cook’s tent, with instructions to portion one amongst the drakes, and stretch the other for the men.
“I’ll make a stew of it, m’lady,” the cook promised.
When she returned Alpha and Lancet to the pasture beneath the hemlocks that had become the drakes’ den, she was surprised to find two silhouettes framed by the large copper brazier there, black figures by the firelight, as the day faded into dusk. One was man-sized, the other only little. A man and a boy. And the man was stroking Valencia’s muzzle and crooning softly to her.
