Chapter 52 Arctos
Arctos
Inside Yrsa’s private chambers, she dismissed her guards with a wave of her hand. Though she promoted austerity at court, her inner domain overflowed with furs, furnishings, and paintings. As she’d explained, “At my age, luxuries are necessities.”
She sank onto a plush divan and motioned him to a chair opposite her. Without preamble, she said, “There is tension between you and Torben. Am I the cause of it?”
Arctos was so tired of intrigues that he nearly confessed every doubt pounding in his skull, hoping she would dispel them easily enough. Then Torben’s sharp warning echoed in his mind: When will you wake?
So Arctos said evenly, “He is about to become a father for the first time. He has much on his mind.”
“Yes. That would make sense. And I understand Hulda has declared it an ill-omened pregnancy.”
“I hope Hulda is mistaken.”
“Indeed.” Yrsa poured vodka from a crystal service, offering him one, but he declined. “I heard a song yesterday that reminded me of you.” In a soft, lilting voice, she hummed a few notes of a children’s song: “The Bear Cub’s Smiling Mother.” “Do you remember it?”
“I do. You used to sing it to me and Torben at bedtime.” They’d soaked up her attention even as the lyrics cut deep. Each had freshly lost his mother, and Arctos’s relationship with bears had been…complicated.
“You both feared the dark,” she said. “Afraid vampires would return to finish off your family.”
“Night was not our friend.”
“No.” Her expression softened. “You’d seen such terrors. And Torben is so close to you, he had to have felt them through you.”
Torben used to ask him to describe what Arctos had heard and seen so that he could know what vampires had done to his own parents. “I never told him a single detail, which was maddening to him.”
“I remember hesitating to stroke your brow,” she murmured. “Your wounds were still so raw.”
“I could tell you wanted to.”
A ghost of a smile. “I did. I often want to do kind things but must weigh them against the harms that might arise.” She adjusted her kirtle, looking younger than her years. Softer. “I am all at war with myself.”
“Can I assist you in finding peace within?”
She sighed. “The die is cast. I will follow my heart more than my head. Sometimes that is all that any of us can do.”
Sounds like a godsdamn awful plan for a queen.
Before he could press, she said, “Your vampire wife dressed like a Berserker tonight. And I have seen her genuinely attempting to become a warrior.”
“She works harder than anyone I’ve ever trained.”
“Your admiration is showing. It’s not often that one raises the brows of demanding Arctos, is it?”
“No, my queen.”
“She dresses like us and trains like us. Yet as I watched her earlier amid the clan, she clearly doesn’t fit in.”
“I had the opposite impression,” he said honestly.
Did she look different from Berserker women? Yes. Emilia was slighter, her skin pale as new snow, her movements hesitant—as if she expected rebuke with every breath. She gave those small, uncertain smiles that she might just as quickly reclaim. At least at first.
“Others welcomed her tonight,” he added.
Yrsa’s eyes glinted like bermetal catching firelight. “Mustn’t they? Else risk offending the great shield who has taken her under his wing.”
He inclined his head. “By your decree, my queen.”
“I’ve been thinking about that, dear Arctos.” She drank her vodka. “Perhaps I was hasty. I believe I might have…wronged you.”
He stilled. In all the years he’d known her, he’d never once heard the queen hint at regret.
“She isn’t one of us,” Yrsa continued. “And she never will be. She belongs with her own people. Her own family.”
He met her gaze squarely. “Despite what they’ll do to her?”
“The machinations of vampires aren’t our concern.”
“You don’t fear them creating day-walking soldiers?”
Her laughter came soft and low, more dangerous than mockery. “I have no fears about Bloodreach at all.”
Something in her tone froze the air between them. “Then will you allow me to retrieve our people?”
“I’ll consider it. In the spring.”
He parted his lips to argue, but she lifted a hand, elegant and absolute.
“Arctos, you must think further ahead,” she said, her smoke-smooth voice threading through the chamber.
“Think like one who has lived for millennia. How would we feed a hundred newcomers through a brutal winter? Those Berserkers have never hunted, would starve at our table. Our law is simple: all must pull their weight. But in spring, with abundance, I could relax that rule. You could train them properly.” She leaned back and sighed.
“A few months is nothing. Patience would serve us better than hunger.”
Her logic was flawless—practical, even merciful on its surface. He should have felt reassured. Instead, unease crawled up his spine. She was lying to him; he could feel it, as surely as he could feel the shift in the air before a storm.
When he hesitated to respond, she added, “The Fey fear a catastrophic All-Battle nears with this Accession. I don’t share their concerns, but should we not limit our risk for a few months, just in case?”
Yet more logic. He had no argument. Only that unease. At length, he said, “I believe you’re following your head, my queen.”
“Ha! With that settled,” Yrsa said, her tone brightening, “let us return to the subject of your marriage.”
His heart gave a hard, defensive thud.
“I give you leave to annul it,” she said. “Your patience with Emilia has been noted. Berserker females will welcome your suit. You could father a cub of your own to grow up alongside Torben and Dagny’s.”
He had noticed the lingering looks. The veiled invitations.
The thought of filling his long table with laughter and the small, fierce energy of children struck him like an old wound reopening.
For a heartbeat, he allowed himself to imagine it—the warmth, the belonging—and then confusion swept in.
The ache in his chest deepened until he could hardly draw breath.
“Even your nymph friend would suit you better,” Yrsa said lightly. “When I made my decree, I didn’t consider the insult to you, but a vampire wife is an insult.”
He’d thought the same.
“Your queen apologizes and thanks you for your continued loyalty. We can announce this tonight.”
Send Emilia back to Co?tin? Prey gifted to the predator?
Sensing his hesitation, she said, “You don’t believe Emilia wishes to remain wed to you, do you?”
No. He was not the vampire scholar of her dreams. But he believed she now understood the benefits of staying with him. “There are other considerations. Her brother is as evil as you can imagine. He believes she is his Bride, has abused her for years. I won’t send her back to that.”
“She told you this?”
“She confided it, yes. I only share it with you so that you fully understand the situation.”
In a low tone, Yrsa said, “Maybe she is his Bride. Maybe they do things differently there. Are we to judge them for matters of the heart?”
Yes. Yes, we are. Arctos struggled to find his mental footing with her.
“If she is indeed Prince Co?tin’s mate, then she has shirked her fated and royal duty,” Yrsa continued. “Which no Berserker would do. Yet more evidence she doesn’t belong here.”
Was he hearing Yrsa correctly? On the tip of his tongue: Are you jesting?
“In any case, I know you wish to continue the life you led before Emilia, so I am freeing you from her.”
He’d wanted this so much!
Yet things were different now, weren’t they? Emilia wasn’t what he himself had dreamed of, but hadn’t she earned his loyalty? Above all the sounds in the raucous banquet, he heard her sweet laughter, could imagine her eyes shimmering in the candlelight.
“Well, shall we announce this and set the maidens free to woo you?”
He gazed at his queen’s upturned chin. She expected one answer, and more, he sensed she would be puzzled—and angry—not to receive it.
Was she a threat to Emilia?
Gods, he could hardly believe he was thinking in these terms, taking the side of a vampire he’d known for mere weeks over the queen who’d avenged the murders of his and Torben’s families.
Yrsa was the protector who’d helped him overcome his fear of the monsters that haunted the dark.
“Your offer is generous,” he said carefully. “But you know me. I am painstaking in all decisions. I need time.” She’d given him no choice before and had made a hasty mistake; now she would be forced to allow him leeway. He’d trapped her, and they both knew it.
She flashed him a cagey look. Then another forced smile emerged.
“Painstaking. Judicious. Which is why you are my finest shield—the ideal foil to a queen’s follow-her-heart impulsiveness.
” She tilted her head. “But I believe relinquishing Emilia to her people is the right course. Do you still trust your queen, Arctos of the Wintry Eye?”
The chamber seemed to tilt. The currents between them churned like the Ravinelun River in flood.
Lie and she would know. Speak truth and he might lose everything.
The ruler he’d served—the Yrsa of old—seemed a far distant creature. “My queen would never give me cause to doubt her. And she would want me to make a decision that would benefit my future. Perhaps your earlier decree wasn’t flawed.”
Thinned lips. “Very well, my gods-son,” she said calmly, even as her eyes flashed silvery with stirring Berserkerage.
A breach. As deep as the one between him and Torben.
Except this one might prove deadly.