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Their first foray into the Inglewood had been the night they’d found the timber-walled town where Ragnar had…serviced him…for the first time. Thoughts thus muddled, he hadn’t paid much attention to the forest itself. It was a forest: competing scents of animals and vegetation, the former ripening toward mating season, the latter beginning to grow new shoots.
But as the weather cleared, and the days passed, and they made their way steadily southwest toward the duchy of Inglewood – he hoped – a sense of unease had settled over him, as slow and choking as a wool cloak worn in a driving rain, heavier and more suppressive by the moment.
They’d encountered nothing magical, and nothing more threatening than a trio of lions slinking through the underbrush, quickly backed off by a sequence of growls from the entire pack.
But something was wrong. Something had his hackles up all the time; something chafed at him, left him looking over his shoulder, testing the air with his nose, sure he’d caught a whiff of something that shouldn’t have been present in this green and brown, manless sea of trees.
And all the while, he felt as though someone had stuck a fishhook behind his breastbone, and was towing him forward. Every night, the wolves would flop down to the forest floor and shift to human shape, complaining of sore feet and grumbling stomachs. He was pushing them at a grueling pace, most often on two feet himself, walking apace of Ragnar while the others ran ahead and ventured to the side in their wolf shapes.
Ragnar was the only one who hadn’t complained. Not even once. That alone was suspicious, as was the open, curious, not-at-all-mocking way he watched Leif’s profile now as they began walking up a gradual incline, using roots as toeholds.
“I don’t know,” Leif finally said. “It feels…like it’s watching us.”
Ragnar snorted, leaning forward to grab at a branch for purchase as the angle of the hill steepened. “Of course it is. Forests are full of all sorts of eyes, and they’re always watching.” He shot him a grin. “You spent too long in a castle, is all. It’s taking you some time getting back to being a living thing.”
A living thing. The phrase struck him as dramatic, and insulting…but not untrue. Before his turning, he would have thought anyone who said he wasn’t living was a few arrows short of a full quiver. Of course he’d been living: he ate, he slept, he laughed; he went riding, and he trained with his sword; sat in on council meetings and learned from his uncle, trying to absorb all the knowledge he would need when he was eventually crowned king.
But after he was turned, he’d become hyper-aware of all his senses. The crisp scent of an apple sliced in half; the sweetness of last season’s honey coating his throat when he took his tea. He’d realized howloudthe world was, inside and out. And the need for sex had become damn near crippling. The way he could communicate with his pack without words, the way he could read every twitch of a brow or flicker of a pretend smile in a way he never could before; listen to the pounding of someone’s heart and smell their sweat, and know they feared him, though they pretended they were glad to see him.
There was hunting andhunting, Ragnar had said, that night by the river, when he’d let the wolf’s wants win out.
There was living andliving, too.
And there was somethingbloody wrongwith this forest.
They reached the top of the rise, and the loose, pebbled soil there slid from under their boots. Leif adjusted his stance to keep his balance, and Ragnar caught himself with a grip on a branch.
The trees here opened up for a span of at least two dozen yards. They stood on the edge of a wide stream, one that gurgled and tumbled down at the base of a ten-foot ravine. The banks were steep, and gleamed with the sort of slick mud that would send anyone stupid enough to brave it sliding straight down into the water to get swept downstream. Overhead, the trees arched together, interlaced like the peak of a sloping barn roof. The sound of the rushing water swelled up around them, drowning out the cries of birds, and the rustling of twigs and leaves.
“Fancy a swim?” Ragnar asked.
“No. We’ll head downstream, and find a safer point of crossing.”
Somewhere on the opposite side, a shivering howl rose up, and then cut off into a yelp, and then nothing.
Leif growled, and Ragnar echoed it, right away.
“We’ve got to get across now,” Leif said, and backed up the three scant strides he was able to.
“Wait. What are you–”
“That was one of ours,” Leif said. (Later, he would rolloursaround in his mind, and decide what that meant between the two of them.) “Are you just going to stand there?”
“No, but–”
Leif ran forward, one, two, three strides, and jumped.
He hung in the air an infinite moment, arms pinwheeling, legs kicking forward, as if he could keep running. In that moment, an image from his childhood flashed through his mind. He’d been about seven, and Rune only four. They’d been tagging along with Bjorn as he went to inspect a section of forest being cleared for building timbers, and the tree stumps had proven too great a temptation. Leif had hopped up onto one, and then jumped across to the next. And then the next. Like elevated stepping stones, and much more fun than the ones in Mum’s garden at the palace.
“Leif, wait!” Rune had called, and Leif had paused long enough to turn and see Rune scrambling up onto a stump, trying to mimic him.
“No,” Leif called. “You’re too small. You can’t do it.”
“Yes, I can!” Rune insisted, biting his lip in concentration as he leaped for the next stump. He hung in the air a long moment, arms and legs pumping in the air – and then he dropped a few inches shy. Clipped his chin on the stump as he fell, and let out a blood-curdling scream that had brought Bjorn and the woodsmen running. He’d had a chipped tooth – but a baby tooth, thankfully – and a bloodied tongue and lip.
Leif pictured himself as little Rune, arms and legs flailing, the ground rushing up to meet him. He stood to gain worse than a chipped tooth and bitten tongue when he landed.
But then he heard more snarls, and snaps, and yelps from up ahead, and his mind cleared of all thoughts save getting to his pack.
