Chapter 9
Leif could tell from the tree line that the small, close-quartered city of Merryweather was abandoned save for rats and a few huddled, illness-stricken wretches sleeping wrapped in blankets on shop floors.
He shifted back to his human shape outside the city gates, and beside him, Sten did the same.
He was the youngest, lightest, and quickest member of the pack, his fair beard only a scruff of stubble in the moonlight.
Leif said, “Go back down the road and tell the men the way is clear. The pack and I will go through the city, but they should keep well to the trees and meet us outside the far wall.”
“Yes, alpha,” Sten said, shifted, and darted back down the road.
The gates were barred, but not well: a rusty chain and a broken padlock dangling from its hasp.
Slowly, trying to make as little noise as possible, Leif pushed them as wide as they would go without removing the chain entirely, then shifted once more, and slipped inside the city on four legs, the bulk of his pack following.
He’d scattered men on either side of the walls to keep watch, ready to send up a howl of alert at a moment’s notice.
The rest trotted close at his heels as they started down a cobbled road wide enough for two large wagons to pass one another.
The buildings here resembled the increasingly-rocky foothills around them: low, slate-roofed stone rowhouses and shop-buildings, none taller than two stories against the rough scrape of the wind that poured down off the mountains.
The people who’d once lived and worked here had either fled or been taken captive: Leif could smell no blood, no slaughter.
The only reek of decomposition came from animals, and it was a natural scent, rats and birds and a few rabbits gone over to age or the harshness of winter.
The road led them to a town square with a stone-lipped well at its center. The bucket swung forlornly from its hand crank, thumping against the inner wood frame with a hollow thunk that echoed off the stone around them.
Leif reared up on his hind legs to put his forepaws on the edge and peer down into the well’s depths.
The water level was higher than expected, a smooth black swallowed nearly whole by the glaring white eye of the full moon overhead.
His own reflection was nothing but a silhouette: pointed ears, furred neck.
It rippled and blurred as a strong gust of wind funneled down the street from the hill above, stinging his eyes…
and bearing the scent of men from father ahead.
Not just men, but Sels. Many of them.
Leif hopped down off the well, skirted around it, and continued up the street.
~*~
Connor led the way through the trees. Reggie didn’t begrudge him his more extensive woodland experience, nor the unswerving loyalty of the Strangers, who seemed to like Reggie by this point, but certainly didn’t respect him.
What troubled him tonight, as their dark-cloaked party dodged the bright shafts of moonbeams in the scrub forest that bordered Merryweather, was the way Connor had brushed off his voiced concerns about Amelia’s state of mind before their departure.
“The war’s starting to become real for her,” he’d said, whilst adjusting his belt, not even regarding Reggie’s frown with the proper level of consideration. “And she’s a woman,” he added, with a snide grin and a waggle of brows. “Don’t expect her to act rationally.”
“I’m beginning to understand why you’re forced to keep company with men these days,” Reggie had grumbled, and swallowed down what he wanted to say.
Connor had patted his cheek as he passed. “Get to, you mean.”
As they moved soft-footed over a carpet of pine needles, he thought again about the look in Amelia’s eyes when he confronted her at camp.
Haunted. Hunted. A look he’d given himself in dozens of house party looking glasses before he tidied his hair, and splashed his face with cold water, and went back out to feign interest in the young misses thrust in his path by ambitious mothers.
The look of someone with a secret she was terrified to admit.
That, he knew, had nothing to do with tonight’s mission, or the anxiety of warfare.
Whatever she was hiding, it was personal, and she was petrified, and Leda knew it, too, but was keeping her mouth shut, no doubt thanks to feminine loyalty.
This war frightened all of them in different ways. Reggie, for instance, was oily with sweat beneath his clothes at the very idea of being captured by Sels again, but all of them were frightened together. Honest with one another, aligned in their cause and free with information.
Until today. Until he saw Amelia clinging to the edge of her cot this morning, white as a ghost and shaky as spring shoots in a storm wind.
A twig snapped off to their left, and Connor raised a fist in the air, halting their party.
Something large stepped into a moonbeam with deliberate slowness: an úlfheenar clothed in furs.
Reggie saw him coming, but still he startled. “Gods,” he muttered, and eased his grip on his sword hilt when he realized he’d lifted it prepared to swing.
Connor had nocked and drawn his bow, and the wolf didn’t react to the arrow pointed at his chest. “Alpha says the city is clear. He’ll meet you beyond the far gates, in the trees.”
Several beats passed before Connor lowered his arms and said, stiffly, “All right. Thank you.”
The wolf nodded, melted back into the shadows, and then was gone without a sound.
Reggie didn’t know if he shifted back into his wolf shape, nor did he care.
Could only hope that one of two things would happen: either the shifters would stop making his skin crawl, or they’d return north the moment the fighting was done. Neither was likely to happen soon.
“Is that ever not going to annoy the piss out of me?” Connor muttered, and pressed forward.
~*~
Alpha did his best to hunker low and crawl beneath the thickest of the tree branches that barred their path, but Amelia still caught one across the face. She got her hand up in time to take the brunt of impact, and Alpha halted straight away to crane his neck around and purr an inquiry.
She plucked a stalk of pine needles from her helmet’s chin strap and then patted his neck. “It’s fine. Carry on.” He did, tucking down even lower, so his already-strange walking gait became the unsteady rolling of a choppy sea.
The soil here around Merryweather made farming difficult.
A few hearty crops, such as onions, garlic, and potatoes, were grown in terraced hills clear-cut into the slopes, but the city’s main contribution to the crown—before the war—was minerals.
Dozens of mineshafts littered the forests beyond Merryweather’s wall, accessible via narrow, twisting footpaths, down one of which she now rode her drake, clad in armor, bearing two swords, a variety of knives, and even a tabard strung up behind her saddle.
Valencia walked ahead of them, Marigold behind.
None of the drakes liked the arrangement, all of them itching to take to the sky, but Amelia knew the importance of waiting.
The moon was too high, too bright tonight, their outlines too stark against a silver-washed sky.
If there were archers on the walls, or scorpions in the yard of the chateau, one of the drakes could be struck.
It was a risk none of them were willing to take, though Amelia’s gut twisted with worry over the men.
After a few more close calls with low-slung branches, they arrived at a slope, and a yawning black opening in the side of it, its edges braced with wood in a slanted makeshift lintel. A mineshaft.
Valencia thrust her head inside, and then breathed fire.
Amelia could hear the whoomp and rush of the flames igniting, and then the shaft filled with a brilliant orange glow, so bright it left her eyes watering.
She squinted and caught a glimpse of carved-out walls, an earth floor, and part of an old abandoned cart. No sign of enemies, though.
Satisfied, Valencia withdrew her head, smoke curling from her nostrils, and then scrambled up over the lintel to sit at the peak of the hill. She stretched her neck up and turned toward the city walls, and the road that snaked uphill above it, acting as lookout.
Amelia shifted in the saddle, peered through the trees, and spotted a scattering of tiny, glowing rectangles of gold. The chateau windows.
The Sels inside were awake.
Inside her heavy, armored glove, the wound on her hand started to burn.
~*~
A quarter mile up the road from Merryweather’s rear gates, Prince Leif waited, human-shaped, in a cluster of small trees.
“I sent men ahead to the chateau,” he said by way of greeting.
“There are Sels inside. Drinking. Enjoying the favors of what are clearly Southern women taken prisoner. There’s a pair of guards at each gate, but none on the walls. They aren’t expecting us.”
“When you say drinking…” Connor began, voice skeptical.
The wolf standing beside Leif said, “Some of them are passed out on the floor. One was dancing. Others are fucking women.”
Reggie’s belly turned to ice. The forest around him closed in, tight, and hot.
Hot as a fire, smothering as dozens of hands, grasping, pinching, pulling, pinning him down.
Phantom pain lit him up from the inside out; the pleasant ache from his last coupling with Connor was now a spike of hot agony, forcing, tearing.
He opened his mouth to scream a protest, and could only gasp, and weakly at that.
“…eg. Reggie.” A hand touched his face, and he blinked, and he was standing on the roadside, the moon a fat white pearl overhead, shining in the brown, concerned eyes of the man standing opposite him.
“Reg,” Connor said again, quietly, just for him, though the wolf ears of the shifters could doubtless hear every word spoken, and just how tenderly. “Are you with me?”