Chapter 9 Safe Conduct
“WHAT’S THIS THEN?”
“A messenger.”
“I can see that.” Irritation laced Beathan’s voice. “What the fuck does he want?”
Standing at Beathan’s shoulder, Alar gazed down at the lone rider waiting before the fort gates, on the other side of the spike-filled ditch. A big man with a shock of red hair. Even at this distance, he recognized him. Roth mac Tav. “To find that out, we’ll need to speak to him.”
The chieftain muttered another curse under his breath. “This reeks.”
“There are barely twenty of them in the pinewood,” Lyall rumbled. The big grey wulver had followed Beathan and Alar up onto the walls at the base of the fort. “Two queens and their escort hardly make an army on our doorstep. They’d be wise to move on.”
Beathan cut Lyall a sharp look. “How is it that your wulvers have only just noticed them?”
“They appeared from nowhere through the pines,” Lyall replied gruffly. “We’ve got sentries on the highway … but they didn’t arrive that way.”
Beathan snorted. “So, how did they get here? On the backs of ravens?”
Alar didn’t care how they’d managed to get by their sentries. What mattered was that Lara and Mor had turned up together. His breathing grew shallow then. His wife was here. She—
He caught himself then, cutting himself off, mid-thought. Enough. He couldn’t let himself think of her as his ‘wife’. They were enemies now.
Alar glanced at Lyall. His captain was staring down at Roth, his golden eyes narrowed. Like Beathan, he was suspicious. Alar was too, but his curiosity was stronger—and they wouldn’t get any answers standing up here.
He stepped back from the edge of the wall. “Come on … let’s see what he has to say.”
The wind whipped Roth mac Tav’s red hair around him as he waited astride a large bay stallion. The beast pawed the ground, nostrils flaring. They’d just lowered the drawbridge, and Alar, Beathan, and Lyall walked out to meet the captain.
Roth watched them approach, lantern jaw set, cool blue eyes slitted.
And when his gaze settled upon Alar, something ugly rippled across his face.
Hatred.
Aye, Alar hadn’t just betrayed Lara the year before; he’d stabbed them all in the back. He’d find few friends amongst the High Queen’s escort.
“Good evening, Roth,” he greeted the captain with an offhand tone that made red flush across the man’s cheeks. “To what do we owe this visit?”
“The High Queen seeks an audience,” he replied, biting out each word as if it cost him.
Warmth kindled in Alar’s gut, but he swiftly shut his response down.
“Tell her and that Shee bitch she travels with to fuck off,” Beathan growled, charming as usual. “They’ll get no meeting with us.”
“They don’t want to talk to you, mac Glen,” Roth answered coldly. His gaze flicked back to Alar then. “It’s the Half-blood who has been summoned. No one else.”
Alar walked across the meadow toward the dark wall of pines that rose up to the west. The wind had gotten up. The Whistle whined in his ears and slapped his cheeks. He welcomed the sensation though. It kept his senses sharp. He’d need his wits about him for the meeting to come.
As asked, he was alone. Only Roth rode beside him. He’d left his weapons behind too, divesting himself of the twin daggers he always wore upon his back. He felt naked without them. Vulnerable.
Beathan and Lyall hadn’t wanted him to go.
“It’s a trap,” Lyall had muttered, placing a heavy hand on his shoulder. “Don’t walk into it.”
“Both queens promise ‘safe conduct’,” Roth had replied tersely. “The Half-blood shall not be harmed.”
Silence had followed these words. ‘Safe conduct’ was a bond, a formal promise of immunity. One that wasn’t taken lightly by anyone in Albia.
Eventually, Beathan spat on the ground at this. “Stick your safe conduct up your arse.”
It had gone on like that for a short while longer before Alar had finally spoken up, cutting Beathan off mid-insult. “Very well.”
Beathan and Lyall had still tried to put him off as he removed his weapons and handed them to his captain.
“There’s no such thing as safe conduct in Albia,” Lyall had warned him. “Not anymore.”
“Maybe … but it’s a rare thing for Marav and Shee rulers to unite on anything,” he’d replied.
“I’m curious to see what they have to say.
” It was strange indeed for the two queens to be traveling together.
The two races were like frost and fire—they rarely shared the same space.
The fact that they did now suggested that they had a problem, and he needed to know what it was.
It could be something that affected them all.
“Your curiosity will end when your wife stabs you in the balls,” Beathan had muttered, but Alar had merely shrugged. They were wasting time bickering.
And so, here he was, making toward their camp.
“How is Lara these days?” Alar asked Roth then.
The captain cut him a glare. “You will refer to her as the High Queen.”
Alar caught something in Roth’s voice then—jealousy perhaps. Aye, he’d marked the way the captain looked at Lara sometimes a year earlier. They were stolen glances, but Alar was adept at reading people. He’d seen the longing in the man’s eyes.
He wondered then if Lara had turned to Roth for solace in the past turns of the moon. If they now shared the furs.
His gut twisted. Painfully.
Stop it.
“And why is she here with Mor?” he asked, changing tack.
“You’ll find out soon enough.” A muscle flexed in Roth’s jaw, his fingers tightening around the reins. “Make no mistake. If it were up to me, I’d cut you down where you stand, you treacherous piece of shit.”
Alar smirked. Roth’s threats didn’t scare him. Like a loyal dog, the man would follow orders.
They approached the pines then, and Alar spied the glow of torches amongst the trees. The daylight was fading. The days had grown short. Summer was now a memory that would have to sustain them until the following spring.
The sharp scent of pine filled his nostrils as he followed Roth into the trees. Up ahead, the outlines of cloaked figures became visible.
Lara was waiting.
His heart started to kick against his ribs then. Ashes. He needed to leash himself. Lara had gotten to him all those turns ago. She’d cut through the tough cloak he wrapped himself in. On their last night together, he’d been on the brink of giving it all up for her.
All his plans. His reckoning. The justice for his people he’d fought so long and hard for.
He’d been ready to turn his back on it. For his wife.
But sanity had prevailed. And despite that the victory he’d sought had ultimately felt hollow, he needed to find that place again. He had to go before Lara with a cool head.
The Shee and Marav stood in a semi-circle waiting for him.
It was an incongruous sight, seeing both races together like this, and his step slowed.
Two regal figures stood at the center of the horseshoe. One was Shee: tall, slender, and dark, with a raven hunched on her shoulder. The other was Marav: small and pale, wearing a jade-green fur-edged cloak.
Alar focused first upon the Raven Queen.
Mor was exactly as he’d imagined. Regal.
Intimidating. He noted then the black cloaked Shee warriors standing to her left, as well as Bree, Cailean, and the robed druids waiting to Lara’s right.
Bree’s glare could have cut through granite, while Cailean, Annis, Ruari, and Ren—there was no sign of Gregor—stared him down.
He couldn’t blame them. Once, he’d sat with these people in Duncrag’s hall.
Once, they’d worked together, planning their campaign north.
But all the while, he’d been playing a double game. One they’d lost.
But then he shifted his gaze to the High Queen, and everything else faded.
Suddenly, he couldn’t hear anything except the thunder of blood in his ears.
She was as lovely as he remembered. Her auburn hair coiled in a braid around the crown of her head.
Strands had come free and curled softly around her heart-shaped face.
She looked tired; her features were strained, her eyes hollowed, yet the torchlight highlighted the creaminess of her skin, the scattering of freckles across her nose.
Her cloak hung open, revealing a thick woolen tunic beneath that clung to her soft curves.
Curves he’d once worshipped. Skin he’d once tasted.
He remembered everything, including the feeling of being wrapped around her. Like he’d come home.
Lara stared at him as if a bog wight had just crawled into the pinewood. Her face drained of color, and for an instant or two, she swayed on her feet.
But then, their gazes met. Cold washed over him, slicing through memories that made his gut ache.
There was no warmth in her pine-green eyes. No softness.
Just bitterness and loathing.