4. The Rose
Chapter 4
The Rose
“ C oncentrate!” As if I had a choice.
I’d like to see Fenrir juggle spheres of fires before sunrise in a field, surrounded by rain-deprived grass and trees, to see how well he concentrated. Maybe I’d be the one yelling orders and tossing things for him to dodge and see if he fared any better than I had my first time.
“Is this really necessary?” I asked, side stepping from the path of a thrown dagger. The blade had been dulled, but the impact would still leave a nasty bruise. “We’ve been doing this five mornings a week for seven years, and I haven’t lost control of the spheres for half of that.”
An occasional spark or two? Sure. But a complete loss of control? Never.
“It’s necessary now more than ever,” he implored. “You risk more than just discovery at the Academy. Inter-realm relations are strenuous at best these days. And you don’t just represent the pack, you represent?—”
“I know, I know,” I said exasperatedly, “I represent the entire shifter community in the new age.” As if I needed another reminder that my every movement, every choice could be watched, noted, and used against me by the other realms or even my own pack mates.
Every child of the Hidden Realms’ elite had entered the Iolite Academy when they came of age for more than two hundred years. It was founded to educate the next generation of leaders and bolster inter-realm relations, but an opportunity to create an alliance is also an opportunity to create an enemy. I was no one’s child, but I confirmed my place at the Academy when I challenged Logan and won.
“You can’t show weakness,” he continued to lecture and began to pace. I took that as my cue that we were done for the day. I walked over to my water skein as he continued, “No matter what’s thrown at you, no matter how you feel or what you have to do, you are impenetrable. Nothing can get beneath your skin.”
His hands were a frenzy of movement in the air now, and I half expected a sheen of sweat to coat his skin as though he’d been the one training for the past hour.
“Fenrir.” I waited until he stopped pacing and looked at me, the fear in his heart reflecting in every line of his face. “If you keep fixating on the many ways I can screw this up, you’re going to give yourself more gray hair than you’re already sporting, and while you look very distinguished with a tinge of gray, I don’t think you’re ready to look like a grandfather before you’re fifty.”
His eye roll confirmed I’d successfully distracted him from his doom spiral of what-ifs. Good. There was only space for one of us to be anxious today and considering he got to stay here while I trekked across the continent to unseat a Luna in her pack, it didn’t get to be him.
“Fine.” He came up behind me and rested a hand on each of my shoulders. “I do believe you can do this, you know.”
I snorted.
“It sounded like it,” I said dryly, but I smiled as I spoke. His worry was his care. His fear was his way of shielding me from harm.
“I do,” he said more emphatically. “It’s my job to give you counsel, but that doesn’t mean I think you’re incapable of making your own decisions.”
“If you say so,” I said with a chuckle. “I’ll try to use sound judgment while we’re apart, though I’d wager your quill will stay plenty busy keeping tabs on me through your son while I’m away.”
“I’ve been thinking about that.” He didn’t bother denying my observation. “I would never presume to tell you what to do–”
“Oh, of course not.”
“But I really think you should appoint Isaac as your Beta,” he instructed and began to pace. “No one will question a Luna and her Beta disappearing together. They’ll assume you’re training or seeing to pack business not suited for the ears of others. Furthermore, he–”
“Okay,” I agreed, but he didn’t hear me.
“– has exceptional attention to detail and intuition which will–”
“I said, okay, Fenrir.”
“– be paramount in navigating pack politics and relations with the other realms. Now I know you may have already–”
“Fenrir!” He halted his back and forth to look up at me in alarm.
“I was already planning to offer him the Beta Luna position.” He pursed his lips before nodding more to himself than to me.
“Right,” he drew out, “of course you were. He’s the natural choice.”
“He’ll make an excellent Beta,” I agreed, and he would. Not just because he knew my secret, but because he was as steady as a rock in a storm. If the world turned to chaos, it was Isaac I’d want facing it beside me.
“I know he will,” Fenrir said, a proud smile stretching across his lips that reminded me so much of his son’s expression after setting a new record in the obstacle course–a record I broke not half a year later.
“You’re quite a confident family.”
“Better to be confident in the face of a threat than uncertain. A cunning opponent will sense both but only benefit from one.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” I raised my hands to begin braiding the front half of my hair away from my face.
“You need to,” he said gravely. “We were lucky Isaac didn’t report you while he came to terms with what he discovered. If someone else realizes who–realizes what –you are, we may not be so lucky a second time.”
Isaac learned my secret just days after Grayson had left for the Academy. He’d been too observant. He noticed Fenrir sneaking off into the woods occasionally and decided to follow him on a day we were training in this very meadow—a typical curious cat if I’d ever met one. He’d stepped out in front of us, just as I was conjuring a ball of fire in my palm for target practice against a nearby boulder.
Once he stopped screaming about demons, death, and damnation—you know, the usual topics surrounding my kind—his dad lectured him about putting his nose where it didn’t belong, and tried to frighten him with the threat of what would happen if he breathed a word of it to anyone. He’d been begrudgingly sworn to secrecy.
His horror had cut me deeper than any blade ever could. I understood the reaction—I even expected it—but watching someone I considered a friend look at me in revulsion and fear was a blow that flattened me, even though I saw it coming. I wanted to be strong and unyielding in the face of adversity, but as he and his father argued over the morality of my very existence, I failed to stop the tears dripping down my face.
Were years of sharing secrets, playing in the halls, and training together so meaningless, one revelation could transform it all to dust? Was I so inherently repulsive—so unworthy—as to deserve instant vilification without trial, testimony, or trust?
I stood there, not five yards from the quarreling pair. I had an epiphany: I was weak. Weak to be so dependent on the affection and approval of others. I didn’t need them. I only needed myself. The rest would be ancillary.
After what felt like hours of watching them in silence, Isaac finally looked at me. He ceased his protests. He just stared at me, drinking in whatever he found looming in the pits of my eyes. I didn’t look away. I met his gaze and steeled myself against whatever ignorance-born venom would spew from his mouth even as tears continued to leak from my eyes. I kept waiting, but the words never came. Instead, he dipped his chin to his chest.
“Fine,” he’d said on a breath. “I’ll say nothing of this.” Then he’d left.
I’d spent the next week with my breath half-held, waiting for him to break his word and the Enforcers to come drag me from my bed in the middle of the night, but he never did and they never came.
Our once lighthearted friendship had morphed first into an ocean of silence, but then, after months of tepid tiptoeing, we evolved. It started with Isaac sitting next to me in the dining hall each meal. Not conversing, just coexisting. A week later, he would nod at me in the halls as our paths crossed. Another week and he lingered on the outskirts of my sessions with Fenrir. Eventually, he reclaimed the roles of sparring partner, confidante, and friend.
In many ways, we’d grown closer from the time he’d discovered me until he left to join Grayson at the Academy last year, but I’d never forget the revulsion on his face when he’d first seen me. It ran through my mind every time I even fleetingly considered confiding in Ivy. If she ever looked at me that way, I don’t know how I’d bear it.
I shook my head at the thought and refocused on the man behind me now, in the present.
His hands fell from my shoulders as I turned to face him.
“Do whatever it takes,” he said in a deadly serious tone. “No matter what you have to do or whoever you may need to do it to. Do you understand?”
My blood turned to ice as I took in his meaning. I’d killed before, and I would kill again, but to take the life of an innocent? Of that even I was incapable. I already had the blood of too many on my hands. One more would stain them red for eternity.
“It won’t come to that,” I promised.
“I hope it doesn’t.” Then with a tight smile, he took his hands off of me and said, “I should let you head back to get ready. I’ll see you at the send-off.”
I moved to collect the dagger, stones, and other weapons from the training session, but Fenrir waved me off. He’d gather the training supplies and bring them back to the compound. It’d give me time to take a much needed bath, he’d said. A quick self-sniff proved he was right, but I made a gesture in the air as I walked away all the same. His laugh echoed against the surrounding trees.
I should have gone straight to my bedchamber to wash this morning’s grime from my skin, but my feet carried me in the opposite direction instead. The hallways were dimly lit as I made my way to the apothecary, and the first stirrings of life reached me from behind closed doors as I passed. Soon my pack mates would be flooding the halls as they set about their daily tasks and responsibilities. I wanted to be back in my bedchamber readying for the day’s journey before that happened.
Someone seeing me pay a visit to the healers would have more than one tongue asking questions. I’d once gone to have a cut stitched and by the time I left the apothecary, not twenty minutes later, there were already rumors I’d been poisoned, was gravely ill, or covertly collecting a treatment for one of the Pack Leaders. I gave a final glance around the halls before taking the three shallow steps down to the apothecary’s entrance and pushing the iron laden door open.
The only light in the near-windowless room came from the three half-melted candles on the High Healer’s desk. Her head rose from the documents scattered across it at my arrival, a mug of steaming liquid cradled in her hands.
“Good morning, Helena.” The bird-shifter looked at me over the glasses perched along the bridge of her nose and leaned back in her chair.
“Beta Briar. I take it that it’s you I have to thank for that monstrosity contaminating my clinic.” She nodded her head to where the doe splayed across one of the sick beds. It was difficult to see in the low lighting, but the stench was even more repugnant than it had been the night before.
As Helena raised her mug to her lips, I had to ask, “How can you keep anything down with that smell in the air?”
She swallowed and said, “Thirty years of death, decay, and infection tends to steel one’s stomach.”
Or maybe her sense of smell had been destroyed from the ever-present burn of antiseptic.
“Have you had a chance to examine the body?” I approached the side of her desk and leaned against it, only to straighten at her scowl. Best not to anger those with the skills to kill you without leaving a trace of foul play.
“In the five minutes I’ve been here?” She reached to straighten a paper I’d inadvertently crinkled on the edge of her desk. “No, I haven’t. I’ll take a look after the morning clinic, but I’ll remind you I’m a healer not an expert in the anatomy of fauna.”
“Oh come on, Helena,” I said with a cheeky grin. “Don’t tell me you’ve never treated a deer shifter over the years. You’re far too experienced for me to believe it.”
“I, in fact, have not.” She sniffed and raised her nose in the air slightly. “Though I suppose I have seen to an elk or two. There may be some overlap.”
My smile grew.
“I have no doubt you’ll be able to find us some answers. I’ll leave you to it.” I knocked my knuckles on her desk as I turned to go, earning a final disapproving glance.
“I’ll have Fenrir send a copy of the report sent to the Academy when it’s ready. It’s a nasty wound, but I do suspect we’ll find the natural food chain to be the source of it,” she grumbled as I walked away.
“You may be right.” I suspected she was wrong. “But I’d like it confirmed all the same. We can’t be too careful when it comes to the safety of our borders.” And the pack mates residing within them.
She grunted before calling, “Goddess guide you on your journey, Beta. The Academy is no tranquil place.”
So everyone continued to warn me.
“Then it’s a good thing I’m no tranquil woman.”