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My uncle went to work on me. He told me my options in life were somewhat limited. The man known as my father had made his fortune in trade and though he was Alpha, he was not of the nobility. Even if he had been inclined to help me—which he almost certainly was not—he couldn’t have furnished me with land or titles. My uncle was minor nobility and had only a small income every year. With no children of their own, their land was entailed upon my uncle’s demise to a distant cousin.
I had always known it wouldn’t be possible to stay with them forever. I’d had an excellent education in some ways, yet I’d been trained in nothing much in particular. I had a great interest in a good many things, including classical poetry, but no real skills in any of them. Still, now that I’d been rescued from a life endured as a lowly omega, driven by his pheromones and at the mercy of every Alpha, I needed to find a way to make a life for myself. I needed a job to pay my way.
When King Harrison put out the call for soldiers, I talked it over with Sir Roscoe. He couldn’t afford to buy me a commission as an officer, but in those first heady days of freedom from being a slave to my pheromones, I was filled with hubris. I was overly confident that it wouldn’t be long until I rose in the ranks to officer status. When a recruiter for the royal army came to the closest village near our home a fortnight after I’d found Barbarosa Lagoon in the swamps, I’d decided to join the Sudfarman army. It would provide me with an income and a chance to travel. And as long as I took the potion the witch Barbarosa had given me, what could possibly go wrong?
I soon discovered the answer. Training had turned out to be so much harder than I ever dreamed it would. And after a hedonistic life of doing as I pleased, discipline and taking orders was hard to get used to. I wanted to succeed, but success and happiness, those faithless whores, seemed always to be just out of my reach.
Now we were at last nearing the end of our training and instead of gaining confidence, I had lost what I had. I had discovered that I wasn’t nearly the soldier I’d always thought I would be. I wondered what I’d do if I ever had to face a real army with real cannons—soldiers with guns pointed right at me. I began to fear I’d made a terrible mistake.
The very next morning, we received an order to go on a “patrol,” marching close to the Sudfarman border with Crillia, near where the Crillians had been raiding local farmers. Rumors ran rampant, as the soldiers around me discussed whether the raiders were in training for war. If intimidation had been their aim, they’d done a damn good job, because I was terrified. I was afraid I wouldn’t be covering myself in any kind of glory after all in this patrol we were going on. In fact, I was very afraid my not so illustrious career as a soldier would end in a hail of bullets.
Chapter Three
Wyatt
Brandon and I got our orders to go on patrol the same day as the trainees.
It would be the first one I’d gone along on, having been too busy with new recruits up to this point. But this final class of new soldiers had been my last. The time that Brandon and I had promised to commit to training recruits for Harrison’s army was up, and we’d be leaving soon to go home—right after this last training exercise.
First, though, we planned on visiting Lexington, my cousin and the new Lord Regent of Igella, a neighboring kingdom to Morovia. Lex had recently mated Rory, the heir to the throne of Igella, who wasn’t allowed by law to rule on his own, because he was an omega. It had been too long since I’d seen Lex and Rory and my new baby cousin, Princess Vesper.
Lex was still at odds with another of our cousins, the king of Morovia, Harrison, who also just so happened to also be Lex’s older brother. Since Harrison’s queen, Rozamond, tried to execute Rory and would have succeeded, if not for Rory’s own protective magic, I couldn’t blame Lex for his hard feelings. We all knew Harrison was unhappy with Rozamond, having married her only for political reasons. She had been part of an arrangement to keep peace with her father, the king of neighboring Sudfarma, a sea-faring nation on Morovia’s southern borders. It also helped to keep our trade routes open.
However, Harrison had never found any happiness with Rozamond that I could see. So far, he was still standing by her, because he was such a loyal person. I knew the estrangement with his brother made him unhappy though. He didn’t want to upset Lex, but he also couldn’t give Rozamond the type of punishment Lex had in mind for her, so he was stuck in a bad place. I had to admit that all of our pack—which included me and my cousins Brandon and Asher, as well as Lex—had a hard time understanding why he didn’t just put her aside. She was a cold, cruel woman, and I doubted her love for my cousin. I think she wanted the title of queen much more than she did Harrison. As for Harrison, he said he didn’t like the idea of divorce, because as king he was also the head of the Church, and he’d made sacred vows. So, even though he was unhappy, I was afraid he’d never put her aside.
Like many Sudfarmans, Rozamond had some magic, though her talents lay in prophecy and clairvoyance. She was sometimes able to see things that might happen in the near and distant future. I often wondered if she’d seen something about Rory and Lex or maybe even our entire pack. Something that scared her so much she’d decided to try to start eliminating members. Rozamond had been afraid to touch her husband’s beloved younger brother, Lex—at least so far. Instead, she’d gone after his mate, Rory, and she’d used her religious fanaticism and her antipathy for what she called “dark magic” to seize him when Lex was out of the country and try to have him put to death. I’d never seen Lex so furious and so utterly lost when he thought she’d murdered his beautiful omega. He had never forgiven the queen, and he was determined to see her pay for her crime.
Lex had told us that he wouldn’t declare war against Harrison for the queen’s actions—not right away. Lex loved his brother and still felt loyalty to his home country of Morovia, but unless Harrison made Rozamond pay for her crimes, including going behind Harrison’s back the way she had to try and murder Rory, he couldn’t forgive her, and he refused to move on until she was made to pay for her crime. Until Harrison agreed to throw her in prison, or at the very least, divorce her and send her back home, Lex said he’d have to consider the kingdom of Morovia to be a hostile nation to Igella.
They were at an impasse.
Harrison’s union had produced no children, and it wasn’t hard to see why. Rozamond was an unlovely person in every way. Her hair was a colorless, ice blonde, and her face was cold and haughty. She had eyes like daggers, dark, darting and bold. Her chin jutted out pugnaciously, and she was not a woman I’d ever like to turn my back on, in bed or otherwise.
She was cunning, though and shrewd. I think she knew she’d gone too far in what she tried to do to Rory, and she’d been keeping a low profile ever since, like a sleeping serpent. She had brought her own personal guard with her when she’d come to Morovia—all of them Sudfarmans, and as sullen and unfriendly as their queen. Maybe it was a national trait in their Alphas, a bit like ineptitude seemed to be so common with the Sudfarman betas I’d been training.
For now, our pack was separated, with Asher, Brandon and I still living in Morovia, at Lex’s old lodge. It was actually the property of the crown, but most of the family acknowledged Lex’s claim to it. He’d vowed never to come back to Morovia until the queen was gone for good. Our pack bond with Lex was strong, however, and we had been talking for a while now about relocating to Igella permanently. Our loyalty to Harrison was the only thing still holding us in Morovia.
Meanwhile, as we tried to make our decision, we’d been talked into helping Harrison one last time, to train these betas to police the border because of Crillian raids. A war was probably coming before long and if it did, it would have been instigated in a roundabout way by none other than Queen Rozamond. The queen’s cousin, a young woman named Viscountess Camilla of Sudfarma, had gone to Crillia to marry some wealthy Crillian baron or other over six months ago, and had not been heard from since.
As a result of the Viscountess Camilla’s disappearance, relations between the Sudfarmans and the Crillians were dicey at best. This baron claimed to have no information on the missing Viscountess. He merely claimed she’d never arrived. The Crillian king refused to involve himself. He had ignored all of the Sudfarman king’s requests for assistance in searching for the girl.
The king’s daughter, Queen Rozamond, pulled out all the stops to harangue her husband, Harrison, about committing Morovian troops to help find the Viscountess. Knowing how Rozamond was, I could imagine she’d been relentless in her nagging. A few months later, here we were, near the Crillian border with Harrison’s newest troops, on a training mission to help provide a stronger presence in the area against the raiding, and doing what we could to search for any sign of the missing Viscountess Camilla, who would have come this same way as she traveled to Crillia. Not that we were actively looking for her—not officially, at least. And on top of all that, we were also trying to make sure the new beta soldiers knew enough to not get themselves killed on this simple march to patrol the border of their kingdom.
Someone had decided it might be a good idea to send their Alphas with them on this last patrol before the end of their training to give them confidence, and even to fight alongside them, should the occasion happen to arise. As we knew these new soldiers and their capabilities better than anyone else and had been working with them all these weeks, perhaps it was a good idea. Personally, however, I wasn’t sure if it would give them more confidence to work closely with us or strip their confidence away entirely. We’d had to be hard on these men, all of whom were betas with no prior knowledge of fighting either with weapons or in hand-to-hand combat. Many of them still strongly resented us. Hell, to be honest, most of them hated us. We had tried our best to make soldiers of these men, and that meant using harsh tactics at times. And I still wasn’t sure it had been nearly enough.
There was a reason that betas were used mainly as clerks, and I was afraid this experiment of Harrison’s in using them as soldiers was doomed to ultimate failure.
Their task of this patrol was to go all the way to the foothills of a small mountain range known as the Daluri, which lay right on the border of Crillia, near the village of Lameda, where the baron supposedly lived. We wouldn’t be going as far as the village. It wasn’t so much a village anyway as it was a mere scattering of cottages outside an ancient, gated old castle, located high in the mountains and reached only by traveling through a forest the locals called the Wild Woods.
This ancient forest was supposed to be large, dark and fairly impenetrable. According to local legend, the Wild Woods had strange creatures lurking in its shadowy confines—almost certainly just a myth, but the stories had even reached as far as Morovia and as a boy, I’d been terrified by them. Vicious werewolves were reported to live inside that forest, along with hideous, man-eating animals, including flying monkeys. The only road up to Lameda passed perilously close to the Woods. It was narrow and unpaved, lined with signs that warned travelers to stay strictly on the roads and to never, ever venture off into the forest.
When it rained, it was said that the road turned to mud that reached to the axles of any coach foolish enough to venture up it. The thick mud increased the likelihood of horses slipping and falling to their deaths, too, along with their riders. As for the baron himself, there were all kinds of rumors about him and none of them were good.
Like I said, probably not much of it was true. The stories I’d heard were fairly outlandish. It was said that the baron had a long, bushy blue-black beard, and he was supposed to be a huge, hulking figure, almost seven feet tall. Again, probably not much of that was true either, or else it had been greatly exaggerated. And we had more important things to worry about. It was my job and that of the other officers to make sure the men were vigilant and aware of the terrain around them, because we didn’t know exactly where these raiders or bandits might be coming from, and this was a bit of a fishing expedition. We only knew that they were close—for days now we’d been hearing occasional gunfire coming from the Daluri hills.
It was interesting to note that some of the raids had been happening nearby Lameda too, where the baron lived. The raids the Crillians were suspected of carrying out against the local farmers in the area had stirred up a great deal of fear and unrest. Yet the Crillian king still denied they had anything to do with him and his army and claimed the trouble was coming from “bandits” in the vicinity. In another couple of days, we would turn around and go back the way we’d come, only skirting the border. So far, there had been no sign of any bandits, Crillian or otherwise, except for that occasional, faraway shooting in the hills.
My cousin Brandon and I had been riding ahead of the soldiers for most of the day on our horses, falling back to check on them frequently and stopping often to give them rest breaks. This was the longest march any of them had experienced yet, at a distance of nearly fifty kilometers from our fort, and it was a true test of their endurance.
