Chapter 96
CHAPTER NINETY-SIX
M aybe I had been injured after all. Maybe this was all some elaborate trick of my imagination, a way for my mind to comfort me in the minutes before I succumbed to death?
She stopped in front of me, and all I could do was stare mutely, my breaths forming a fog in the freezing cold air between us.
For all that I usually read her so well, the cold, hard lines of her face were unfamiliar to me, and again, I wondered if she was even here at all, even as she stuck her sword into the ground.
Then her eyes met mine, and the unrelenting fury burning in their bright-green depths was enough to bowl me completely over. I knew then that this had to be real. There was no version of her in my imagination that would look at me like that.
“Lem—”
A lightly gauntleted hand roughly connected with my cheek before I could finish the word.
I was stunned into silence. By her presence. By the literal weight of her rage. By the fact that she had shown up at my castle with an army and the miracle we needed.
While I was still reeling from all of that, she yanked her sword out of the ground and walked into the estate.
“Lemmikki.” I belatedly followed her, but she didn’t slow down until she got to one of the young squires who was waiting inside the door.
“Please see that these are cleaned and returned to me.” She handed him her blades with hands that trembled slightly.
He nodded, looking nearly as overwhelmed by her presence as I was.
She took off her helmet as she turned to a second squire.
“I need you to fetch Lord Taras for me,” she told him.
The boy nodded, taking off at a run.
“What do you need with Taras?” I asked, confused.
I had been fighting for days with only scattered minutes of sleep. My mind was more sluggish than it should have been, still struggling to process the reality of my lemmikki standing in my midst—of having walked through a literal battlefield—when I thought I would never see her again.
And sounding colder than I’d ever heard her.
Now she was asking for my cousin, who, to my knowledge, she had never once sought out?
“I need someone to take care of a few things for me,” she said without looking at me, continuing toward the main stairs.
I bristled in spite of myself. Whatever else had happened between us, I had storms-damned well always taken care of her and provided everything that she needed.
But now she wanted Taras.
“And you don’t think the duke of the entire clan could help you with that?” I pointed out, working to keep my tone even.
She didn’t falter in her footsteps, not so much as glancing at me from the corner of her eye.
“I’m sorry.” The sarcasm dripping from every syllable very much belied that sentiment. “What I meant was, I need someone I can trust.”
The words were like a punch to the gut. After everything.
I do trust you. I always have.
Until now. Perhaps I had misjudged her capacity to stay angry. Then again, this felt like more than anger.
My lips parted, but before I could respond, she spun around to head toward the East Wing. Where our old rooms were.
She paused only long enough to ask a maid to send Taisiya to her room, clarifying that she meant the ones in the East Wing. I opened my mouth to ask her about it when Taras’s voice sounded behind us.
“Rowan?” He didn’t sound surprised, but then, he had probably seen her trek across the battlefield.
And the way she slapped me.
“Could you kindly walk with me to my room, Taras?” Her voice was all dispassionate, cold efficiency, in a way I had never heard it before.
Something uncomfortable churned in my stomach. Not quite dread...but close. Like I was watching the enemy soldiers march on Bear all over again, preparing for the inevitable destruction with no way to prevent it. And this time, it was coming from the inside .
“Of course, My Lady.” My cousin stepped around me with a single wary glance in my direction.
Naturally, I followed. Nothing could have made me leave her now that she was here. Alive and real and breathing after all the times I had pictured her verdant eyes empty and her perfect body unmoving in death.
“I’m sure you noticed the men who came to your aid today were Unclanned,” she began.
Taras nodded. I was fairly certain the enormous brand on their foreheads hadn’t escaped anyone’s notice.
“They are under my protection and my care.” She sounded more commanding than I had ever heard her.
He glanced at me for approval, and Rowan let out an irritable breath.
“Not as a Clan Wife,” she clarified, “since that position obviously does not afford me the luxury of having an actual voice.”
I clenched my jaw. She might not have been acknowledging my presence, but the words were clearly meant for me. Just as she clearly believed that everything that had happened before I left her for the sake of keeping her alive no longer mattered in the wake of that single choice.
“Lemmikki,” I interjected to explain that very thing to her, but she barreled over me.
“They are under my protection as the princess and second-in-line to the throne of Lochlann. A man named Andrei is one of their leaders. You can deal with him. They can be fed from my dowry, and Lochlann will replenish the stores from my holdings.” Her tone was matter-of-fact now.
I didn’t bother interrupting again to tell her how unnecessary that was. Obviously, I would feed the men who had come to our aid. Surely, she knew I had that much honor, whatever else she thought of me at present.
“ I feel as though they have more than earned their reintegration to society,” she continued.
My cousin’s eyes widened in shock, and I didn’t blame him. To my knowledge, no one had ever suggested reintegrating the Besklanovvy . That was why they were branded, so that it was permanent.
I had been so enmired in the imminent starvation of my people and then my father’s wanton need to slaughter, and finally this war, that I had never stopped to consider whether I agreed with that practice. And I sure as storms didn’t have the energy to consider it now.
As it was, the roughly forty hours I had been awake and battling were catching up with me perilously fast.
Rowan held her hand up to forestall my cousin’s response.
“But as it has been made abundantly clear that my opinion is neither desired nor given any consideration, if that cannot be arranged, I will settle for them being taken care of until such time as they can accompany me back to my holdings in Lochlann.”
Rowan stopped so suddenly outside her door that I nearly ran into her, my exhausted mind belatedly processing the last thing she said . Accompany me back to my holdings.
My heartbeat pounded in my chest. She was leaving when I had just gotten her back, against every foreseeable odd?
“You’re going back to Lochlann?” I all but blurted out, parsing through my fuzzy thoughts for an explanation that made sense.
To escort the Unclanned? To visit her family?
To stay?
No. She wouldn’t stay. Would she?
But she didn’t respond, holding Taras’s gaze like I didn’t exist. I might have believed she actually couldn’t hear me, were it not for the pinching around her eyes, the way she swallowed before she spoke.
He returned her stare, his own fatigue bleeding through in the form of his openly troubled features.
“Will you take care of that for me?” she asked when he didn’t respond.
Her voice was quieter now, though no less sure.
“Yes, My Lady.” His tone was a match for hers, his stress of her title intentional.
Did she hear what he wasn’t saying? That he would do this for her, but as his Clan Wife. Because she had earned his respect here in this estate, not with the title she had brought from another kingdom.
Because she belonged to Bear now, not storms-blasted Lochlann, where she was certainly not going to return to indefinitely. Surely.
Though, she still hadn’t answered on that front.
“Lemmikki?” I pushed, not sure if I was asking again if she was leaving or just trying to get her to look at me once.
She had been furious with me before, of course, but even on our worst day, when she was clinging to Korhonan in the middle of the Lochlannian court, she had never felt as far away as she did right now.
She took a deep breath, shaking her head incrementally.
“Thank you,” she said to Taras, turning as Taisiya appeared to open the door.
I reached out for her arm, half expecting my hand to meet with nothing but air. She still didn’t feel quite real, quite tangible.
But my fingers closed around the steely links of her unusual armor, sticky with dried blood.
“Rowan,” I said more insistently, almost growling.
She turned very slowly, meeting my eyes at last. Whatever calm she had summoned to speak to the squires and Taras was eclipsed by something far more wrathful when she fixed her attention on me.
“Just leave me alone, Evander. You’re good at that.”
I had heard her breathe my name like it was the only deity she believed in, had heard her growl it in anger and scream it in ecstasy and sing it in her teasing tone.
But I had never heard the three clipped syllables fall from her lips like they were the freshly sharpened edge of her dagger, flaying us both from the inside out.
It felt like she had slapped me all over again. I stood, frozen, as she tugged her arm out of my unmoving grasp and slammed the door in my face.
Taras only raised his eyebrows and let out a low whistle.
“Can’t say I didn’t see that coming, Cousin,” he said drily, though he did wince a bit in sympathy.
If I had been less tired, perhaps I would have mustered up the energy to punch him in the face. As it was, I only glared at him.
Still, he clapped me on the shoulder in a show of support before he took off down the hall, presumably to see to Rowan’s orders, which I had every intention of following up on myself, once I actually spoke to my wife.
I didn’t blame him for his turn of mood. We had survived. He was going to see his wife again, be there for his child, and that would be a happy occasion since she would likely consent to speak to him. Unlike my wife.
I turned back to her door, rapping on the solid wood.
“Lemmikki,” I called. “Talk to me.”
Had she ever refused to speak to me? I thought back to our long line of arguments, everything from the first time we had danced to our more recent fight about the council room.
She always had something to say. Sometimes I had wished she didn’t, but this...this was infinitely worse.
I tried a couple more times before finally forcing myself to walk away. A sick, sinking feeling twisted in my gut with each step I took farther from her. Time still felt precarious, the war still far from over. Every part of me rebelled at spending it away from my wife when she was here. Safe and alive.
But we were getting nowhere tonight, and she needed rest.
Hell, we all did.
There was no telling how long this reprieve would be. But I knew that was exactly what this was, a reprieve.
And besides, I needed to see to the Unclanned and my own men. None of them had believed we would live to see the dawn, and against all odds, we had.
We had won .
Even if it didn’t feel that way right now.