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“Okay, okay,” she said, once she’d stopped choking and mopped her chin with her sleeve. Her mother would have died to see her thus. “As I was saying. Prince Leif is behaving out of character.”
“And marching our way, apparently.” Leda sipped her wine, gaze narrowing as she considered the fire. “I don’t like hearing that there’s a rift in the king’s family. A disunited ally isn’t a consistent or focused one.”
“We don’t know that they’re disunited,” Amelia cautioned, uneasy, now. She sipped more wine, but its warmth failed to soothe anything besides her tired, aching muscles. Her mind was spinning off into unpleasant directions.
If the royal family was fracturing from within –if– that could spell chaos. An emotional distraction none of them could afford.
“Perhaps,” Leda said, drawing her attention once more, “Oliver will enlighten you further.” She sat forward, and offered another parchment – this one still sealed with a blob of crimson wax bearing the complexly woven stag and wolf seal of King Erik of Aeretoll.
Amelia took it, passed her thumb across the thick, finely-crafted parchment, traced her nail at the edge of the wax. “You opened one and not the other.” It wasn’t an accusation…at least not all of one.
Leda’s brows quirked, her smile rueful and knowing. “Turn it over.”
She did, and saw that an extra line had been added beneath her name.
For the Lady Amelia Drake
(Not to be opened by anyone BUT Lady Amelia Drake)
She could hear the words in Oliver’s voice as she read them, and smiled to herself. She made to stand. “I’ll–”
“No, you stay.” Leda stood, taking her glass with her. “I’m off to see about a hot bath. Or.” She frowned. “At least a warm one.”
Colum followed at her heels like a sullen puppy as she left.
Amelia shook her head over the strangeness of them, then broke the seal and unfolded Oliver’s letter.
The address alone kicked her pulse into a faster pace.
Lia–
She recognized Oliver’s handwriting, but it was slanted and hard-pressed, as though he’d written in a hurry.
Tessa wrote to your mother to tell her of our impending march. We’re coming, all of us, drakes included. The land bridge I told you of before will afford us passage directly into the Inglewood, and we’ll make our way through the forest to you. We’re taking falcons, so I should still be able to write in transit. I’ll be flying, of course, Náli and I both –
She recalled the necromancer Oliver had befriended, the at-first-unbelievable tales of his communion with and animation of the dead. Given she’d spent the day on dragon back, however, there wasn’t much she found unbelievable anymore.
–so we should arrive a little ahead of the Phalanx.
But, Lia, harken: Tessa will have written that Prince Leif has departed early. I don’t know if she will have conveyed that this was very much NOT PART OF THE PLAN. He and Erik argued – or, well, they disagreed. Leif doesn’t speak to any of us enough these days to warrant an ARGUMENT. He and Erik’s cousin are leading a small band of Úlfheðnar – the Waste clan from which Erik’s family is originally descended – toward Inglewood. They travel light, and are quick besides, and they’ll likely arrive at least two weeks before us. It seemed only right that I warn you what to expect should you cross paths with him.
He wanted towarnher. Gods. Dread and curiosity mounting in equal measure, she took a long swallow of wine and read on.
I told you in a previous letter that he’d been through a difficult time. That the battle had changed him…but I wasn’t entirely truthful. In person I would try to say this delicately, but, well, one can only be so delicate in writing, and I must hurry before Erik catches me and grows morose all over again about his favorite nephew’s “betrayal.”
On the journey from Dreki Hörgr to Aeres, the one that I undertook in the air while the rest of Erik’s people marched on foot, the party was set upon by wolves one night. They weren’t regular wolves, but skinwalkers: men who’ve been permanently cursed so that they may change from man to wolf and back again at will. Shapeshifters. Their leader was Erik’s cousin, the one who tried to have Rune killed and who betrayed us all to the Fangs up in the high mountain passes. He left us all for dead and then led his pack, for they are literally a pack, just as real wolves are, against Erik while they sat vulnerable round their campfires.
Leif was bitten. Leif was turned. He himself is a skinwalker, more wolf than man now, even when he walks on two legs.
He ischanged. Not only can he howl, and growl, and smell a man from a mile away…he’sangry, Lia. Broody, and silent, and nothing like the boy I met and grew to love as my own nephew when I arrived. Rune despairs, and Erik does too, though more quietly. Each of us feel as though we’velosthim. No one knows what he’s thinking, or how to reach him, how to make him feel included in the family. With enough time, with enough love, I think that we could break through to him, draw him back to us.
But he has his pack. Sleeps with them in a hay shed rather than his own room in the palace.
And then there’s Ragnar. The real traitor. The cousin who turned Leif and remains, inexplicably,alivestill.
Because Ragnar was of the clans – the former chief of the Úlfheðnar, to be precise – Erik handed down the old laws. HegaveRagnar to Leif, to mete punishment as he would, thinking, just as I did, that Leif would take up an axe and strike off his head. But he didn’t. He kept him. As a thrall, he said. To serve him. A flesh war prize.
Amelia let her eyes lift from the paper and drift toward the fire, going unfocused. Her breathing had elevated, she realized; sweat prickled at her hairline. She wasn’t sure what to make of that; she’d only ever read of such a thing in a dusty old history tome. Tried and failed to rectify all that she’d been told of Leif Torstansson with the sudden, shocking mental picture of a man who’d kept his attacker as a slave. Aflesh war prize.
