Chapter 9 #5
In the moment before he landed on top of the Sel, his pale eyes bugged with shock, and Ragnar had the satisfying thought that either the Sels weren’t the worthy swordsmen they claimed, or maybe this one hadn’t expected to be tackled.
Either way, he didn’t lift his sword, or otherwise defend himself.
Ragnar’s hands struck him first, squarely in the chest, and his weight and momentum toppled him backward.
The breath left his lungs in a loud whoosh as his back slammed down to the ground, and Ragnar caged him in with hands and knees.
He gripped his wrist tight, and twisted until his fingers went slack around the sword handle.
Something bashed Ragnar in the side of the head. It didn’t hurt, but it snapped his head to the side, tilted him off balance, and he nearly lost his grip on the prisoner.
“What are you doing?” Leda demanded, furious and too-loud, and when he glanced at her, he saw that her hand was raised and ready to deliver another slap.
“What are you doing?” he countered. A growl built in his chest, and he pushed it out through his teeth. “The prisoner’s loose!”
“Says the prince’s thrall! He saved me! Let him up!”
“Are you daft, woman?”
Her arm reared back, slap incoming.
It hadn’t hurt, exactly, but it hadn’t felt good, so Ragnar snorted at her and climbed up off the Sel. “Suit yourself. Don’t cry to me if he throws you down behind those shrubs and bloodies his other sword.”
“Bloody your own sword,” she said, not with the pinched and offended tone he’d always expected from a Southern lady, but with heat and ferocity and an expectation of his obeyance.
Her eyes flashed, and her delicate jaw clenched, and she still gripped a dagger in her non-slapping hand, poised like she meant to thrust it toward him. “What’s happening?” she demanded.
“Do you think I know? Ask your friend.” He gestured toward Cassius, who climbed to his feet, and brushed himself off, expression unbothered. He’d been stunned in the moment of Ragnar’s attack, but now his face was the portrait of serenity again. Ragnar wanted to topple him all over again.
Ragnar’s eyes were keen enough to make out Leda’s frown in the dark as she glanced toward Cassius, and then shook her head.
“Could they have come from behind us?” she asked him. “Have they been following us?”
“They came through portals,” Ragnar said. “Like they did on the road.”
Leda whipped around, and finally lowered her dagger-wielding arm. “You saw them?”
“I smelled them.”
Her brows jumped. “Right. You smelled them.”
Just as he smelled a sudden swell of smoke before flames jumped orange and bright off to his left. Someone had thrown a bottle of spirits into a campfire, and the resultant blaze licked at low-hanging branches…and caught.
The trees were green, damp, vibrant with spring life; their leaves would smoke, rather than burn. But the forest floor was littered with dry needles, and old, beetle-eaten branches, and the those would catch. Would light this hillside up like a Yuletide table laden with candles.
Leif. Alpha. Mate. Mine.
Fuck everyone here. They weren’t his people, and he didn’t care if they lived or died.
“Where are you going?” Cassius asked, when he turned to leave.
Had Leda asked, he would have kept walking. But to be questioned by a prisoner? Ragnar turned, snarling, nails sharpening painfully. “What business is it of yours?”
“Leda! Leda!” It was that fool stepson that Leda was fucking.
Something that started with a C, the bookish one no one had thought to take along on the mission lest he trip on a twig, fall, scream, and bring the whole Sel army down upon them.
Now he came bolting through camp, winded, shouting for her.
Cassius wasn’t distracted. His eyes seemed to glow in the dark, that awful, unnatural vivid blue, like a frozen lake back home. His white face was drawn in tight lines.
“Will you not defend your friends?” he asked.
Ragnar barked an ugly laugh. “What friends? No one loves me.” And he turned once more, empty-handed, and leaped through the undergrowth, skirting wide around the flames, and the chaos, and the Southern men dying, and ran through the darkness toward his alpha.
~*~
Cassius stood a long moment, the cacophony of the attack ringing all around him, the flames leaping, spreading, growing, until their crackling threatened to drown out the shouts of men and the chime of steel.
Ragnar had disappeared, lithe as a doe—or as a wolf, even on two legs.
He would go to Leif, Cassius knew, to his bonded master, and alpha.
And where would Cassius go? When he glanced over his shoulder, he saw that Lady Leda and her young lover were gone. Beyond that, the tent where he’d been held collapsed with a flutter, and moonlight chased over golden metal, pauldrons humped like dew-shiny beetles in the gloaming.
He could run. Slip off through the tree trunks, blunder his way through the forest, and get back to the road.
He could go south, or north, or east, or west. Could take his chances in the forest, or hole up in an abandoned farmhouse.
He would be alone in a strange land, without supplies, and the mere sight of him would send locals into a paroxysm of fear.
He’d likely get shot by a farmer. Or fall victim to lions in the woods.
Up the hill, he heard the high, shrill call of a drake.
He firmed up his grip on the stolen sword, and set off at a jog, following the trampled path that Ragnar had left.
~*~
Amelia applied pressure to the reins and blinked against the sting of the wind as she banked Alpha in a wide circle high above the chateau, well out of scorpion range.
Alpha grumbled, wanting to go lower. Through the bond, he showed her the empty walls, the vacant yard; pushed his sense of body heat and expelled breath inside the house itself.
Not so much as a dog patrolled the gardens, which lay fallow and heaped with last year’s dead vines, not planted for the spring that had finally arrived.
Alpha tugged at the reins, and Amelia increased her pressure on them. “Not yet.”
Reggie had signaled her, just as they’d agreed: three short flashes of the lantern, and one long one.
And Alpha couldn’t see or smell any humans outside the mansion; there were no guards, no cookfires; no one was checking the horses in the stables, or ducking under the trees for a clandestine tryst. The chateau grounds were utterly still.
Alpha sent her an image of a fox burrowing through the tall grass, in search of mice, but that was all.
Still, Amelia had misgivings.
But maybe that was because her hand was on fire, and the tingling had spread halfway to her elbow.
The pain had grown so intense that her skin had begun to feel cold. But each time she darted a glance toward her palm, it looked the same: smooth, unblemished skin and a single, dark scab where the emperor had sliced her.
An updraft filled Alpha’s wings with a sound like ship sails snapping in the breeze, and he trilled an inquiry. Now? Yes?
The hot pulsing in her hand was making it hard to concentrate, but she trusted him—trusted that his senses were so keen that there wasn’t a chance he was missing an ambush.
“Yes,” she said, gathering her muscles, hunkering low over his withers in anticipation of the descent. “Now.”
He trumpeted to the girls, and they trumpeted back.
Then they dove.
~*~
“…make our way as quickly and quietly as possible to the ground floor windows,” Connor was saying as they jogged up the final incline toward the chateau gates.
“If Amelia is diving, and—yes, there they come—the drakes will start on the top floor and work their way down. It’s important that no one gets onto the lawn and makes for the walls. ”
Leif and his pack were going to circle wide, and ensure no one made it off the property on foot. He wouldn’t need to speak the instructions aloud, had only to shift, and then tilt his head to send his wolves off in the correct direction, and—
He heard a faint pop, like the click of a joint when he stretched. Then he smelled ozone.
“Wait! Stop!” He spun around on the roadway in time to see the black, yawning maw of a portal opening. Sels poured out of it.
~*~
Cassius quickly realized that he couldn’t hope to catch up to Ragnar, nor did he want to. But he’d flattened the underbrush along the easiest path, and Cassius followed it at a jog, sword held across his chest for lack of a scabbard. It came in useful when he needed to hold aside low branches.
As the din of skirmish behind him faded, it bloomed fresh ahead of him.
Other portals had opened, then; he doubted the Strangers, wolves, and Southern forces had been allowed inside the gates of the chateau grounds, which would mean Amelia and her drakes would take on the house alone.
They certainly could, especially without the threat of artillery from the ground, but Cassius knew that the emperor wouldn’t have sent just one surprise.
And that, in close quarters, no matter how strong and ferocious, drakes had weak spots. As did the duchesses.
The ground sloped up sharply, and he leaned forward, altering his grip on the sword so the blade thrust backward, less likely to impale him if he tripped on a hidden root and fell.
It was the most exertion he’d put forth since his capture, and he could feel how he’d softened and weakened in the weeks since.
How quickly muscle melted away, and stamina disappeared.
He was panting by the time he reached the top of the rise, and when he stopped to gather his breath, he beheld a full-scale melee in front of the chateau gates.
He saw swords flashing, drab browns and blacks surrounded by brilliant, moonstruck golden armor. Wolves darted, wraiths in the dark, hamstringing the enemy. He caught a glimpse of Ragnar, the only wolf still on two legs, raking a Sel’s face to ribbons with nails long and sharp as claws.