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He’d never thought much about it…before. Had spent his days sitting in on council meetings or addressing the peoples’ petitions in the throne room with Erik. Had gone riding, and hawking, and spent hours training in the yard, focusing on footwork and building his strength as a swordsman. He’d stayed up reading by candlelight, poring over maps, and histories of the nation he was to someday inherit. All day he spent trying to become the best heir possible, and when his head hit the pillow each night, sleep came on quick and dreamless.
He had thought, once he turned, to continue in that vein. How could the sleep of a beast be less restful or more complicated than that of a man?
But he was no ordinary beast. Not a true wolf, but no longer truly a man, either; was instead some bewitched abomination, half in one world and half in another, and dreamed of a dim place full of fields of waving grass, and forests full of shadows and whispers. He walked on four legs, in those dreams, nose full of too many competing scents. His ruff would lift, prickling the skin down his back, and he’d bare his fangs without knowing why.
Threat. Danger.
Simple, wolfish thoughts, seemingly without source.
He saw other wolves there, sometimes. Flickers through the black tree trunks; the gleam of gold eyes in the gloaming. He would bark a greeting, and trot toward them…but they always darted away, hackles up, teeth bared. They smelled cold and strange. These were not of his pack. Real wolves, he’d reasoned, in his waking, two-legged hours. His imagination’s way of shunning him? Telling him he didn’t belong? Had his self-loathing followed him into the land of dreams?
Every night that he dreamed, he dreamed as a wolf. Even in his nightmares, when man-shaped figures crowned with branching antlers reared up out of the mist and reached for him with clawed hands. Fear, despair, and empty, gnawing hunger – all of it came to him in his wolf shape. A shape he was trying hard to pretend he did not possess.
And so he hated to sleep. And he sat up most nights with his back pressed to the hard, timber wall of the hay shed while his pack lay flopped all around him, paws jerking as they enjoyed their own dreams, noses twitching; the occasional thin howl pierced the rustle of hay and, in the distance, the low calls of owls.
Tonight, he sat with his arms folded, pinching his own side every so often when his gritty eyelids grew too heavy to hold up any longer. It was too warm in the shed, with the insulting hay and all their combined body heat. Then again, he was over-warm all the time, the wolf burning hot beneath his skin. He’d taken to wearing sleeveless tunics and jerkins, like Ragnar had always favored. He loathed the concession on his part, the way it was yet another similarity they shared.
Just as he loathed the way Ragnar, the only other wolf awake, watched him now from his place reclined across three bales, head propped on his arm. His body was relaxed, utterly still, his expression unguarded; his eyes glowed blue as gemstones, fixed unblinking on Leif.
Leif growled, softly, in warning. But he didn’t mean it, truly, and Ragnar could tell.
Damn the emotional perceptiveness of wolves, himself included.
“What?” Leif asked, when the staring continued.
“An alpha needs his sleep, too, you know. Perhaps even more. How can he be sharp, how can he look after his pack if he’s dead on his feet?”
Leif growled again. “You aren’t asleep.”
“I’m not the alpha.”
The thing that continued to surprise Leif, over and over, was the way Ragnar didn’t seem toresentthe fact that he was no longer alpha. He’d been bested, forced to submit, to give up his title and his position in the pack…and though he sometimes growled back, Leif had never caught so much as a whiff of anger or jealousy to have been supplanted. It simply wasn’t possible for Ragnar to lie to him anymore, and of the two of them, it was Leif who struggled most with the idea of an honest Ragnar. It wasn’tright. But it was undeniable.
“Only you,” Leif said bitterly, “could twist subservience into an insult.”
Ragnar cocked his head the opposite way, a portrait of confusion. “How have I insulted you, alpha?”
Leif growled again, more fiercely this time, if only for the pleasure of watching Ragnar’s barely-perceptible flinch. A few of the other wolves twitched in their sleep, ears flicking at the sound of their leader’s reprimand, but none woke, thankfully.
“You know what I mean,” Leif said, and Ragnar’s gaze dropped. He gave a slight nod of acknowledgement.
It was alarming how quickly Leif’s ire cooled at one small gesture. He’d stopped trying to understand or rationalize that part of himself; blamed it on his wolf half and tried not to dwell as much as he once had.
A long moment passed, filled with the snores of wolves and the call of an owl, somewhere distant, beyond the reach of human ears. The bell sounded for the changing of the night guard.
Ragnar said, “I was being sincere, you know.”
Leif’s gaze had slid toward the crack at the top of the door, where sagging hinges had left a strip of indigo sky visible; it slid back, now, to where Ragnar had resettled, flat on his back with his hands folded behind his head.
“I know,” he admitted, reluctantly.
Ragnar didn’t grin – but his mouth twitched, and Leif knew he almost had.
“Is it nightmares?” Ragnar pressed. “Or that infernal Frodeson need to control every aspect of your life and the lives of those around you?”
“I’m not a Frodeson.”
“Pfft. Technicality. You’re Erik through and through – more than you’re your own father, what with him being dead most of your life.”
