Chapter 97
CHAPTER NINETY-SEVEN
T he jokes Rowan and I used to make about stamina felt like they were from another lifetime, but I couldn’t help but notice that I was reaching the end of mine now.
I just barely dredged up the strength to head back down to the courtyard.
We had been so enmired in the fighting that it hadn’t entirely sunken in, the way my ancestral home had turned into a mass grave in a matter of days.
Though, the ground here should be well-accustomed to being soaked through with blood after my father’s time as duke.
A brief survey told me that at least the few who remained of my personal guard were uninjured, if exhausted. I let Kirill know to return to his familiar post outside Rowan’s door after he got some rest, then checked the status of the rest of my men before finally heading to talk to the Unclanned.
Taras had begun to arrange for their lodging and treatment, but I redirected him to our men so I could speak with them myself.
They were still picking through corpses to gather their wounded. My soldiers might have normally balked at being among them, but the exhausted men who had fought at my side for days on end were barely sparing the newcomers a second glance.
I strode over to the group of Unclanned, wondering if it was Rowan’s offer of coin or food or a new life that had enticed them to fight for the clan they hated. But they hadn’t fought like mercenaries. The fervor with which they had stormed the battlefield was nothing at all like the broken men who had attacked our party on the road—who had killed Dmitriy and Igor and tried to take my lemmikki down as well.
How the hell had she wound up working alongside them after that?
As soon as I approached, a man strode forward, showing none of the deference my own men would have. Whatever had motivated him to fight for our estate, it was certainly not a lingering loyalty toward Bear.
Though he was little more than skin and bones, he moved with a warrior’s grace. His hazel eyes were steady as they met mine, and though the Besklanovvy around us watched with wary eyes, not one of them moved to interfere.
This was obviously their leader.
“Andrei?” I inquired, though I was fairly certain I knew the answer.
I hadn’t recognized his name, so my father must have branded him—for reasons legitimate or otherwise.
He nodded, eyeing me with thinly veiled suspicion.
“I mean you no harm,” I assured him. “I’m here on behalf of my wife.”
“The princess?” he clarified, something just a bit challenging in his arched eyebrow.
“The Clan Wife of Bear,” I countered evenly.
He didn’t argue, but neither did he agree.
“Your wounded are welcome in the medical wing. There has been space set aside for your sleeping quarters, and rations are being handed out presently.”
If anything, his eyes only narrowed further. “You would allow the Besklanovvy in your estate?”
I took a breath, half wishing I had let Taras speak with the man after all, but I had wanted to take his measure. “If you doubted the legitimacy of my wife’s recompense, why did you come?”
He shook his head minutely, bitterness tilting his lips along with what almost looked like…condescension. “Not for payment. And we never doubted her.”
A muscle worked in my jaw at his double implication, that I had been the one guilty of doubting Rowan. That it was me the Besklanovvy didn’t trust to honor her agreement.
If I had sensed even the slightest hint of attraction from him on top of that, I might have added another corpse to the battlefield, but his gaze shone with nothing but respect for her.
Not for payment , he had said.
“I will honor my wife’s arrangement,” I said tersely.
“As long as it is hers alone,” he agreed.
I understood what he wasn’t saying. He would not fight for me, whatever I offered him. Whatever she had done, whatever she had promised, he was hers.
They all were.
I spun to leave without another word, more than ready to find a bed after a night and day that had stretched into eternity already.
I didn’t consider going to our rooms without her. The enemy might have been gone for now, but there was no way in hell I was sleeping on the other side of the estate from my wife.
Besides, I couldn't shake the feeling that she would disappear in the night. So I headed toward the room that held far more memories than I had wanted to face tonight, trying not to remember the way it had felt the first time I thought I had lost her for good.
Trying not to suffocate under the staggering weight of the casualties we had sustained, the men whose deaths I had scarcely had time to acknowledge.
Trying not to think at all.
I hadn’t thought sleep would come easily, but my body gave out on me shortly after I rid myself of the week’s worth of grime that had soaked into my skin.
Dusk had fallen by the time I awoke. Kirill stood guard outside my lemmikki’s door, the sight so familiar that I nearly stopped in my tracks. Had it really been over a year since the first time I climbed the stairs to find her cackling over her ill-gotten victory over my youngest cousin in cards?
Once I verified with Taisiya that Rowan was still resting, I made the rounds in the estate, checking in on the wounded as well as the refugees. Several ladies and villagers alike were tending to the injured men, and Lady Sidorov had taken it upon herself to see to the children whose families we hadn’t yet accounted for.
In whatever short time she had spent here, Rowan had garnered enough of their respect that they wanted to follow her lead as soon as they heard what she had done. Then again, that was just her way.
Just in the first few weeks she had been at Bear, she had Kirill teaching her to call me an aalio , Yuriy breaking years of training to play cards with her, and Dmitriy playing her ridiculous drinking game. Even Taras had become protective of her, in spite of himself.
If people respected me for my strategic mind or feared me for my position, they felt something else entirely for her. Rowan inspired people.
Sometimes, she inspired them toward less charitable feelings as well, but it was rare that anyone felt neutral where my wife was concerned.
When I finished seeing to the rest of the estate, I headed to the war room, surveying the map with the information I had now.
Taisiya entered shortly after I arrived, carrying a bowl of stew and the news that Rowan was still sleeping. I forced myself to eat, fighting the growing temptation to check on her myself. Not that she wanted me to.
Pushing that thought away, I read through the missives with a sigh. I needed firsthand reports from the lords, but I wouldn’t pull them all from their beds just yet. It could wait until the morning.
Besides, I needed to wait for my wife to wake up. For all that she had accused me of not giving her a voice, I had yet to attend a war meeting without her so long as she was available. Even at camp, the command tent had always been open to her, and she certainly needed to attend this meeting, given that she was the only one with information on her Besklanovvy .
I looked around the table, thinking of the last time we had been in this room, and the council room before that. She was the first Clan Wife in the history of Bear to be in the war room to begin with. But because of that, there wasn’t a clear place carved out for her.
That, at least, had a solution. I got to my feet, eyeing the way my chair sat at the head of the long table, where every duke sat in his own war room. Though the table was narrow, it was by no means too small to fit several chairs on this side of it. The placement was intentional, a way to emphasize the duke’s command in a room where tensions ran unusually high.
Last time, Rowan had sat directly to my right, a placement that conveyed her importance to me and the room. But that wasn’t a spot for a Clan Wife, it was a spot for a high-ranking lord or commander.
There was no place for her here.
Pushing my chair to the side, I pulled a chair over from the right side of the table and settled it next to mine. Then I moved the other chairs so the gap wasn’t apparent, nodding when I surveyed the results.
Perhaps it would help her to understand that it wasn’t her right to a voice in this room I had ever questioned. That with a chance of survival, I would have her fight at my side every time.
No, I was never going to sit by while she marched to her own torture and death, when there was no conceivable escape, but I had made it clear time and again that I had faith in her.
Maybe she would remember that now.
It was after midnight when I headed back to the East Wing. All the resolve I had not to go into Rowan’s rooms had waned with each hour she stayed behind her solid oak door.
Surely, she should be awake by now.
I raised my eyebrows at Kirill, who shook his head. She still hadn’t emerged.
With a sigh, I rapped on the door as I had earlier, two short knocks that weren’t quite loud enough to wake her if she was actually still sleeping.
When the door opened several seconds later, I let out a relieved breath before realizing it was not my wife emerging. It was Mila, holding an imperious finger to her lips as she shut the door behind her.
“She’s still resting.”
“She should be awake by now.” I voiced my earlier thought aloud.
“Perhaps it was exhausting to change the tides of an entire war,” Mila shot back.
Kirill chuckled, and I didn’t deign to look at him in response.
“Or perhaps she was injured in the many hours she spent fighting,” I growled.
“You know that Taisiya has already checked.” Mila crossed her arms under her chest, balancing them just over her small bump and looking no less fierce for it.
That didn’t stop me from letting out an irritable growl. “What I know is that my wife fought in a battle for hours, then disappeared into that room and hasn’t stirred since.”
Mila’s face softened incrementally. “She has stirred a bit, and she has not acted like she was in any pain. You talk about the battle, but you forget that you left her weeks ago and she showed up with an army today. Before that, she was at the war camp. She is just tired.” She brought a hand to my arm, her gaze flitting over my own exhausted features. “And so are you, Evander. Get some rest. I will stay with her until she wakes.”
“And you’ll tell me when she does?” It was more a demand than a question, but Mila let out a slow sigh, pulling back her hand.
“I will tell you when she wants you to know,” she countered.
I opened my mouth to argue, but she held up a hand, not giving me the chance. “Whatever your reasons, you have taken a choice from her already. You won’t do yourself any favors if you ignore her wishes on this, too.”
She slipped back into the room before I could respond, leaving me with only Kirill, who, in spite of his previous chuckle, was looking at me with more sympathy than ire for a change.
I sighed, nodding a dismissal.
“Go home to your wife. I’ll take over here.”
It wasn’t like I was going to sleep anyway until I knew my lemmikki was all right.
“Thanks, Van.” He didn’t waste any time before taking off down the hall.
Minutes ticked by while I sorted through strategies in my mind, making mental lists of what to reorder for supplies, doing anything to keep myself from obsessing over the silence from Rowan’s rooms.
It was only partially successful. As the shock of Rowan’s arrival wore off, it made way for a host of other feelings.
Gratitude, obviously, that she had saved my people.
But there was a bit of fury, too. In the darkest hour, when I had been convinced that Bear would fall, I had clung to the certainty that she was safe. She was out of his grasp.
Instead, she had been creeping right alongside his troops, then throwing herself into battle against them. What if it hadn’t been enough? What if we had still lost, and she had been there in her glorious armor with her very obvious red hair?
Her reckless maneuver might have worked, but I still wasn’t sure she had escaped from it unscathed.
The minutes turned into hours, and my agitation grew. What in the storms-damned-hell had Korhonan been doing? Had he just changed his mind about deciding she should be far from where his brother was waiting to torture her?
Or had something happened to him? But surely, she would have led with that.
Taras interrupted my mental tirade when he came to check on his own wife, which only resulted in her shooting a glare my way.
“I see you took my suggestion to rest to heart,” she said sarcastically.
I shrugged with all the nonchalance I didn’t feel. “I will rest when I am assured of her wellbeing.”
She only shook her head, informing Taras she didn’t need anything before once again closing the door. He leaned against the wall, offering out a flask that I was more than happy to partake in.
Then he left to make the same rounds of the estate I had made several hours ago, coming back to report intermittently.
He had just taken off again when the door finally opened, wan shafts of morning light spilling into the hallway from the crack in the door. Mila’s head appeared in the gap, her lips tilted up into a small smile.
“Since you insist on standing out here, you may as well make yourself useful and send for a bath and breakfast.”
I doubted seriously that Mila would order those things for herself to Rowan’s room, which meant…
“She’s awake?” My feet pulled me toward the doorway on instinct. “Is she all right?”
“Yes and yes.” Mila actually shooed me backward with her hand. “But in need of a bath and breakfast, as I said.”
She closed the door quickly, but not before I saw a flash of crimson in the middle of an onyx bed. She was sitting up, awake, and she wanted food.
Admittedly, she was still refusing to acknowledge my presence, but still, it was enough for me to feel like I could breathe again.