by Bec McMaster
“Do I get any choice in this matter?” Marduk stalked after her, water streaming down his body.
His very naked body.
Despite herself, she stepped back.
As her back hit the tree, he rested one hand on the bark beside her head and leaned closer. “Because I can assure you that the only princess who’s captured my attention is the one in front of me. Even if she looks like she wants to cut my throat.”
“Don’t tempt me. And no. The answer is no.” All she could see was Aslaug’s face tear-stained and ruddy. What was wrong with him? Why was he pursuing her? “Stop flirting with me. I’m not interested.”
“Stop lying to me,” Marduk said, capturing her chin in his hand. “Because your mouth is saying one thing, and your eyes another. You were about to kiss me back; I know you were.”
“I was never going to kiss you,” she hissed. Her knife met his heart.
He looked down, but when their eyes met again there was heat there. And anger. “Kiss me. Kiss me and prove there’s nothing between us.”
“No!”
Because she wasn’t sure if kissing him would prove anything at all beyond her vulnerability to him.
Rage enveloped her. Rage and violence and a mess of raw lust.
It happened before she even knew what was going on.
The knife was in her hand.
And then she stabbed it low, aiming for his hip. Instead, it drove into his thigh.
Marduk staggered backward, taking the knife with him.
“What the hell is wrong with you?”he yelled, as he clapped a hand around her blade.
“Stay away from me,” she hissed. “Don’t… don’t touch me. Just go, Marduk. Crawl off into a cave somewhere and die.”
Solveig darted toward her horse, hauling herself up into the saddle. She urged her gelding into a gallop, putting a quarter mile of distance between them before she finally eased up.
What was wrong with her?
Holding her hands out, she stared at them.
They were covered in blood.
And they were shaking.
Marduk stared moodily into his ale as the tavern bustled around him. The bleeding had stopped, but he wasn’t entirely certain the wound was healing.
He’d told Niels that he was done with this farce.
There wasn’t going to be a mating ceremony, and if his mother pushed for it, then she could mate with one of the damned princesses herself.
His mother.
His ears were still ringing after she’d contacted him through the flames in his hearth.
But that wasn’t what set the hairs along his spine on edge.
“He never did trust your mother.”
What if… Rurik was innocent?
He barely even dared breathe the thought. But there was a horrible, knotted feeling inside him.
He fled. Why would Rurik flee if he was innocent?
He’s never once tried to contact you, to see how you felt about it all—
And if Rurik was innocent, then… that meant his father’s killer had been by his side all his life, purring in his ear about how Marduk wouldn’t be as treacherous as his brother was, would he?
Every inch of him felt battered and bruised—from his pride, to his thigh, and the hollow ache within his heart.
Fuck.
Fuck.
Why had she said it?
“What’s wrong, Your Highness?” A hand clapped on his shoulder, and then one of the Sadu clan warriors straddled the bench beside him. Erik, he thought. “You look like you’ve seen the inside of a storm.”
“Not the inside, no. Maybe the storm’s teeth.”
“I smell blood.”
Well…. “Your princess stabbed me.”
“Oh, that one.” Erik laughed. “Aye, she’ll tear your throat out if you look at her sideways. Best you look at one of the others.”
“Damned if I do,” he muttered, and swayed a little bit. “If I look at one of the others, she’ll cut my throat for daring to break her sister’s heart. If I glance her way, then she castrates me for even thinking of taking her to bed.”
Erik shuddered. “Perhaps better to lose your balls than to allow them anywhere near her.”
“Like sticking your cock in a bear trap,” he muttered.
“Exactly! Here, drink up, friend!” Erik lifted his hand and called for another round. “Torin! Axel! Come and join us. My friend here needs to drown his woes. He’s run afoul of our sweet lady of knives.”
He really ought to return to the court and see to his wound, but a foaming tankard of ale was plonked in front of him, and, well, curse it. Drowning his sorrows seemed to be the perfect way to end this day.
Because a part of him didn’t want to be alone right now.
Marduk staggered out of the tavern, the sound of a dozen bearded dreki warriors singing at the top of their lungs behind him.
Something about baiting the bear and trying to subdue it before it ripped your throat out. Or your cock off. He couldn’t remember.
Hell of a night.
There was blood on his breeches, wet and sticky.
Marduk laughed as he ran a finger through it. “Stuck me good.” He swayed sideways and fetched up against a fence. “Beg pardon.”
The fence did not answer as he pushed himself off it.
It felt as though there was a noose around his neck.
“It’s not as though I was given a choice,” he muttered under his breath, ducking into an alley in search of a place to piss. “Did anyone ask me whether I wanted to ’gree to this?”
Why was he even lingering?
The longer he stayed, the more tangled this web around him became.
But where the hell are you going to go?
The Zini court wasn’t an answer.
Even thinking about returning home made the breath catch in his throat. He’d leaped at the chance to take this trip simply because it got him out of there. And now he was here, with no constant nightmares hauling him out of sleep, he’d begun to think that maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.
But he couldn’t stay here.
Goddess’s breath, what a mess. Marduk limped down a street to the right, then blinked at the sign. Where was he?
Well, fuck. He was probably drunk enough to have gotten well and truly lost.
Staggering sideways, he tripped on a snarl of ivy and landed on his ass, which was so laughable he simply lay back in the ivy and stared at the stars. What an utterly, miserable, wretched day. The only relief was that tomorrow could not possibly be as bad as this, despite the promise of a hell of a thumping head and—
“He went down this way” came a whisper-soft voice.
Marduk froze in his patch of ivy, because he hadn’t, until this moment, been aware that he wasn’t alone.
“Make it swift,” another voice murmured. “I’ll keep watch. The Sadu clan patrol these streets at night, and we can’t afford to have this witnessed. Make sure you leave the princess’s knife somewhere nearby with Marduk’s blood all over it.”
Every hair on his body rose. It was a baffling moment where his ale-befuddled brain provided a menacing sort of Shakespearean underplay to the night, despite the instant recognition of the speaker’s voice.
Niels.
That was Niels’s voice. Friendly, affable, always polite Niels who would never—
“This isn’t my first assassination,” the first voice muttered.
Drunkenness sloughed off Marduk in a prickling wave of ice. It was real. His brain wasn’t leaping to nonsensical conclusions. He crouched and slowly gained his feet, still a little unsteady, but the rush of blood in his veins sharpened the world around him.
A shadow moved past him, and Marduk realized he could hear someone singing ahead of him. They sounded young and drunk, and as the assassin slipped down the street in that direction, he could scarcely believe his luck.
The bastard had walked right by him.
He tried to make sense of it all.
/> Niels was trying to have him killed, and they were going to try to frame one of the princesses.
He had a good idea which one it would be too.
And after that rousing little rendition in the tavern, they’d have enough cause to lay this at Harald’s feet.
But why?
Why would Niels want to kill him?
He doesn’t, you idiot. He’s just following orders.
“No,” he breathed, his heart pounding out of control as realization chased its way through him.
Niels had no reason to see him dead, but there was someone else who wanted no competition at court.
It all fell into place.
He came of age next month, which meant he’d be old enough for the court to start pushing duties on him. His mother had agreed to be regent until then, but… he knew she liked power.
She’d kept him as far away from the throne as she could, and he wasn’t stupid enough to miss the fact that she’d managed to isolate him from the court. Maybe he’d been foolish enough as a young man—go hunting, Marduk; why don’t you take a trip to the coast; been in the taverns again with those human girls?—but in the last year his eyes had slowly begun to open.
His mother had done everything she could to push him away.
She’d surrounded him with court-approved dreki youths who dragged him to taverns and challenged him to fly through the glaciers at breakneck speed. She’d insisted he have a private tutor instead of joining the communal classes because he was “special.” And he’d often return to his rooms and find a buxom drekling woman in his bed.
It wasn’t until he’d caught Niels slipping one of those girls a set of coins in a darkened hallway of the court that he’d finally understood.
His mother wanted him drunk and distracted.
She wanted to paint him as a wastrel whose head turned every time a pretty young woman came into view.
She wanted him to be controlled.
He’d fought back by refusing to join his so-called friends. He’d showed up one day in council, shocking his mother and uncle when he insisted he ought to learn the court’s ways if he was going to rule it. And the next time a woman appeared in his bed, he’d politely held out her dress until she left.
“Tell my mother I am not interested in paid company.”
“You walked right into her trap,” he muttered as he hauled himself up onto a window ledge and then scaled the house to reach the roof.
It took more effort than needed—a sure sign of his level of inebriation. Or maybe it was the shock of betrayal. His hands shook. He swore his heart was skipping beats.
All he could see was his father’s blood on the floor, and there was a roaring sound in his ears as he heard Solveig’s words replay themselves, again and again…. “He never did trust your mother.”
What was he going to do?
King Harald was his mother’s ally. If he went to him for help, then he was either asking the king to risk an alliance—or trapping himself forever with one of Harald’s daughters.
Solveig had told him to crawl off into a cave somewhere and die.
And Árdís was the only link at court that meant anything to him.
Marduk looked to the sky. His mother wanted him gone?
Then fine.
He’d vanish into the winds and never come back.
9
Now
They arrived deep in the heart of Zilittu territory—far to the north of Norway—just as the sun reached its zenith.
The rest of the Zini delegation was waiting for them. Solveig circled lazily as Marduk suddenly swooped down toward his family. Truth be told, when it came to taking wing, she might not be able to match him. His aerial acrobatics showed a dreki who’d spent many hours pushing himself to the limit in the skies.
Marduk was… playful in the air. Always circling her. Always trying to nip at her tail or tempt her into plunging through clouds. And part of the reason they were late was because she hadn’t been able to resist chasing him.
Her dreki might despise the thought of being controlled by a male, but his playfulness was softening even her dreki’s rage-filled heart.
Solveig landed much more gracefully and shifted into mortal form. The others were in various states of dress, so they couldn’t have been here too long.
“Well met,” Marduk called, hauling Árdís toward him for a hug as Solveig swiftly buckled herself into her leathers. He clasped hands with Ishtar, pressing a light kiss to her cheek. “You look well.”
The next in line was Sirius Blackfrost, and as Marduk laughingly turned toward him, she noticed both males drew up short.
There would be no hugging the Blackfrost, by the look of it.
“You’re late,” the enormous dreki warlord sneered.
“I’m never late,” Marduk replied. “I always arrive precisely when I mean to arrive. Haakon!” He moved on. “Let me help you with the packs.”
Solveig’s knife hand itched. The Blackfrost was the terror of the north, and no dreki clan felt comfortable when he was in the skies. He could freeze a dreki’s heart in their chest with a mere thought, and she’d heard tales of how he slaughtered one of the marauding German clans by the dozen.
He’d been flying under the Zilittu banners back then, which was interesting. Granted, his father had come from Zilittu, but where did his allegiances truly lie?
“I promise he won’t eat anyone,” said a soft voice at her side. Malin. The Blackfrost’s wife. The pretty redhead had once been drekling—half-dreki, half-human—until she’d finally proven that she had enough magic within her to make the shift to dreki form.
“What?”
“The way you were staring at my mate….” Malin offered a faint smile. “You looked like a cat who was sizing up a large, ferocious dog. He won’t hurt anyone. I promise.”
“I swear you’ve been spending too much time with Freyja,” Árdís said irritably, hauling her extravagance of blonde hair over her shoulder and absently braiding it as she stared around her at the mountains. “I believe this one time you’ve gotten your analogies wrong. She was looking at him like a wolf eyeing a lion.” Árdís offered a smile to Solveig. “Malin’s right. She’s practically leashed him. Sirius is almost tame now. Like one of those little yapping dogs that the human ladies in London carry around with them.”
Solveig wasn’t sure what to make of the entire situation. The females of the party seemed to be trying to… take her under their wing?
“A yapping dog?” The Blackfrost looked affronted.
“You should put a bow in his hair, Malin,” Árdís continued, grinning at him. “He’d look so pretty with a bow.”
The look the Blackfrost gave his wife was a long-suffering one. “I’m trying to remember why you insisted that we save her.”
Malin’s smile slid off her face as the last two members of their party joined them, and Solveig realized that both Árdís and the Blackfrost had been bantering back and forth partly to settle his wife’s tension.
Andri was the Blackfrost’s younger brother, though you’d never know it to look at him. The gorgeous dreki youth was in his late forties, according to her intelligence, with thick black curls, tanned skin, and eyes the color of a field of lavender. He wouldn’t reach full maturity for another twenty or so human years, but there was something ancient about the look in his eyes, as if he’d seen enough hardship to make him older than he was.
But it was the woman at his side—Malin’s younger sister, Elin—who seemed to be creating the tension in Malin’s shoulders.
Solveig had become a master at reading body language.
Some argument dwelled between the two of them, and the way Elin clutched the book in her arms and stared at the mountains, pointedly ignoring her sister, argued for a cutting one.
“Good flight?” the Blackfrost asked.
Andri ran a hand through his hair. “My wings are fully healed. I carried Elin’s weight with no issues.”
Ah. Elin was drekling th
en, unable to shift. Maybe this was at the heart of the two sisters’ separation, for Malin had only recently proved she could shift shape.
“It’s so beautiful here,” Árdís said, changing the conversation abruptly.
Sharp granite cliffs strove through enormous billows of mist that cloaked the valley floor.
“You were expecting otherwise?” Solveig asked.
Árdís gave her a mysterious smile. “My mother was Zilittu, and there are all kinds of tales of her people. There’s an abundance of Chaos-wielders within the clan, and some say that in their pursuit of power they turned to the darker aspects of such magic. So no, I was expecting eerie forests and human bones hanging in the trees as warning. Not… this.”
“They’re still not to be trusted,” Marduk said as he rejoined them, fully clothed. Somehow, despite the way he looked like he’d just tumbled from bed, he always seemed to have a regal air about him.
Or maybe that was just arrogance.
“Perhaps.” Árdís examined the forest around them a little wistfully. “Though I’ve always wondered what it would have been like to have been trained in my magic. They revere Chaos-wielders here.” Emotion darkened her face. “They don’t lock them away and try and smother their talents.”
Interesting.
The former queen had not been kind to any of her children she suspected.
And it struck her then, that both Árdís and Marduk masked themselves with charm. She’d been so focused on Marduk’s careless smiles that she hadn’t realized there was pain in his eyes sometimes too.
She hadn’t wanted to see it—she who watched and gauged an enemy for weakness.
A troubling thought….
“Zilittu means ‘spirit of the mist,’ while Zini is ‘spirit of the wind.’” Marduk continued, and there was a hint of the warrior in his stance as he surveyed the valley. “The court’s been impenetrable for years, though rumor has it that when Draco overthrew his father, the king, he started breaking several of its long-running traditions. A merchant in Kristiania said the new king is insistent upon dragging the Zilittu kicking and screaming into the future.”