by Megan Crane
Joelle was tying her hair into a serviceable knot on the top of her head. “Almost all women in the clan fight,” she said as she worked. “Wolves don’t play around when they’re hungry so we need to know how to protect ourselves. And if the clan is under attack, the brothers will take down a coward the same as the enemy. Man or woman.”
Joelle followed Helena’s gaze across the deck to the woman standing apart from the king at the moment, her arms crossed so her smooth muscles were visible and her dark eyes trained somewhere on the open sea. Joelle laughed.
“That’s Eiryn,” she said. “Wulf’s bodyguard and one of only three women who are actually in the brotherhood. The toughest of the three. By far.”
The raider world, Helena had discovered, was not quite the mess of lawless chaos she’d been taught to fear her whole life. The king ruled over his clan, and usually won his throne by a direct challenge to its previous inhabitant—and the fight to the death that challenge necessitated. He held the throne by a combination of cunning, politics, strength, and the loyalty of the brotherhood. “The brotherhood” was what the raiders called their warrior class, the clan members who actually went on the raids to the mainland, conquering lands, hunting big game, and taking prisoners. Mostly men, entry to the brotherhood was earned in combat and by unanimous vote, not inherited. The brotherhood was the most powerful group in the raiders’ world, second only to the king. All raider clan members had a right to make their voices heard in the annual assemblies. Only the brothers had a vote. And only the king could rule, either according to the votes of the brothers or against them if he thought he was strong enough to fight them off if they took exception to his high-handedness.
What amazed Helena the most was that these terrifying men, the monsters mainland children were taught lurked in every darkness, were the raider elite and a very small fraction of the clans as a whole.
“There are lots of raiders who just farm,” Joelle told her, laughing at Helena’s astonishment. “How else would we eat? We can’t sail for days every time we want a meal. We have boat builders. Blacksmiths. Healers. Teachers. Butchers and judges and tech heads and shopkeepers. All the usual things any settlement has. We all come together for the big celebrations each year and then go about our business the rest of the time. It’s only the brothers whose occupation is fighting. All they do is train and fight, because that’s their life.” She laughed. “And have sex, of course. They do a whole lot of that.”
“That’s the fun part,” a dark-haired woman called Ranya said from Helena’s other side. She was bathing herself as best they could out on the deck, with a bucket of seawater and a rag she ran over her light brown skin. “But some women prefer to mate with one man rather than have sex with them all, and that’s perfectly fine and normal, too. Just not usually the brotherhood’s thing.” She grinned at Helena. “You look worried. I know compliants think all the sex is scary, right?”
“That’s not exactly the word I’d choose,” Helena said, trying a little too hard not to sound anything like worried. “Different, maybe. And more frequent.”
“Not all compliants,” snapped the redheaded woman Helena had watched take Jurin and Ellis at once. Taryn, she’d said she was called. Taryn shook her head as if she were shaking off something unpleasant. “Screw that winter marriage nonsense. I don’t want babies and I don’t want a husband and I don’t give a crap who I have sex with as long as it’s good. You know what compliance never is? Any damned good.”
Joelle nudged Helena with her shoulder. “That’s a very popular position among the camp girls, you’ll find. The brotherhood is a great place to live. Take care of them and they’ll take care of you.”
Helena didn’t want to take care of all these big, intimidating men, she told herself, no matter how seductive it was to imagine someone caring for her again. She wanted to get her tablet back and go about her business before the rains came again—something that seemed farther and farther away from possible the longer they sailed away from the eastern mainland and into unknown territory. She found her gaze drawn to Tyr again, as it seemed to be far too often. He stood near the front of the boat as usual, his mighty arms crossed over his chest and the wind making his braids move. There was no denying the fact that as men sculpted out of stone and sheer, masculine power went, Tyr was beautiful. He was a lethally gorgeous weapon.
She didn’t understand any of the things that had happened between them. What she’d felt, what he’d done to her, how he’d managed to make something as unremarkable as sex into … what they’d done at the bonfire, when it hadn’t even been actual sex. She could still feel all that sensation showering all over her and through her and around her, like a long fall of sparks against a dark night.
Even inside her own head, she didn’t have a name for what that was. What it had done to her. The effect he had on her, even on this ship where he largely ignored her.
Her body was less shy. It clamored for him. She was grateful for the wool she wore wrapped around her, hiding the evidence of her treacherous breasts and her telltale nipples beneath her stiff T-shirt, hardened to aching points, from view.
Although Tyr seemed to know anyway. He looked far too darkly intent any time their eyes met, as if his gaze alone could peel back her skin, and Helena hated the fact that when that happened, she was the first to look away—to hide that desperate flare of wildfire she was sure he could read all over her face.
“The war chief is not an easy man,” Joelle said evenly after one of those times, which, of course, meant that everyone on the goddamned boat could read her as easily as Tyr could. Great. She’d gotten good at running and hiding the past few years, Helena reminded herself, not games of pretense.
“Which is why he never stays with any one woman very long.” Ranya shrugged when Joelle glared at her. “Oh, come on. That’s not mean, that’s reality.” She eyed Helena. “Some of the men are very superstitious about having sex on the ships. Raider fortunes, raider gods, all that ancient mystical stuff. You know that, right? He’s not holding back out of respect for you or your feelings. He’s at sea.”
“You’ll scare her,” Joelle chided, but Helena thought she was biting back laughter.
“I’m not scared,” Helena assured them, and she had to fight to keep herself from looking Tyr’s way again. “And I don’t care what he does.”
Ranya laughed. “Sure you don’t.”
“In fairness,” Joelle said, absently playing with her hair again, “he’s not really into the group stuff. He usually takes it one woman at a time. So there’s that.”
“Of course, one woman at a time can mean one woman every hour on the hour, if he’s in a mood,” Ranya retorted. She wrung out the rag she was using, then hung it over the bucket’s side before she met Helena’s gaze again, her brown eyes kind. “He’s not a one-woman man, not even for a winter here or there the way some brothers are sometimes, especially if they go off island to wait out the storms. And none of the brothers are romantic at all. I know they snatch you up and carry you off and you tell yourself stories about what that means. Everyone does. But if that’s really what you want, you need to look outside the brotherhood. There are all kinds of regular men on the islands who are far better for that sort of thing.”
And again, Helena didn’t understand what was happening to her. Her heart was kicking at her, jarring thuds against her ribs that made her body feel too tight and her head feel too big, and she couldn’t have said why that was. She felt something like angry, which didn’t make any sense, and the obvious, inescapable truth that both of these women had likely had a whole lot of sex with Tyr themselves seemed to hang there on the deck of the ship between them, blazing like its own damned sun. She didn’t know whether she wanted to cry or scream and there was absolutely no reason for her to do either one of those things. Or feel any of that great, unwieldy, horrible spiked mess that seemed to kick at her, lodging in her stomach and staying there.
It took her much longer than it should have to rea
lize the other women appeared to be waiting for her response. Even Taryn, who had made it clear over the past few days that she wanted nothing to do with the other recent captives, so desperate was she to distinguish herself from anyone who was at all conflicted about being on a raider ship headed far, far away from any land they knew.
Helena’s throat was too dry and she was terrified her eyes were not, and worse, that it wasn’t only the women who could see that. But she made herself shrug, casually and offhandedly, as if nothing they’d said affected her in the least.
Because it damn well shouldn’t have.
“He took me,” Helena said lightly, if pointedly. “I never said I wanted him.”
And she didn’t really like the way the other women laughed at that, as if they knew something she didn’t.
* * *
After two more days at sea with no shoreline in sight in any direction, not even the abandoned ruins that had been all there was to see for long, slow miles, a loud cry went up from the front of the ship. One of the brothers blew into a curved, carved horn that looked made of bone. Two more horns joined in from the other two ships.
No one moved or spoke. An expectant silence fell over the ship. There was the sound of the ropes against the masts, the shuffling sound of the wind in the sails. The waves surged against the hull. But other than that, nothing.
And then in the distance came an answering horn from the land Helena hadn’t realized it would panic her not to see for days on end.
The ships erupted with loud, long cries from every man’s throat—and from a great many of the women’s, too.
Helena wasn’t the only captive who looked around uneasily, wondering what new raider madness this was.
“Home,” Ranya cried as she leapt up and down, her black cloud of tight curls like a halo around her. She and the other camp girls were dancing on the deck, jubilant, their arms in the air. “We made it safely home!”
Helena felt something flutter through her then, a many-threaded thing too complicated to pick apart or name. She settled on panic with maybe more than a hint of dread. She’d tried to put it out of her mind, these last few days, but there was no getting around it now. She’d provoked a raider into taking her, and he had. She’d wanted to escape Ferranti and all his ugly little plans for her, and she had. She’d wanted to get the hell out of that compound before Krajic showed up to kill her the way he’d butchered her parents, and she had. But she hadn’t planned ahead. She hadn’t thought about anything but seizing the opportunity before her as best she could, no matter that it might well be a case of diving head first from a campfire into a blazing inferno.
And now she had to reap what she’d sowed.
She climbed to her feet like everybody else, but while they all craned their heads around to see where they were headed, Helena watched these raiders she’d been studying for days. The brothers who took down the sails and the brothers who took over the oars. The war chief and his king, who stood at the front of the ship as if they were guiding it with their fierce expressions. Eiryn, the king’s bodyguard, called a brother despite the fact she was quite obviously a very beautiful—if deadly—woman, was at an oar, her smoothly muscled arms seeming as capable as those of the men around her, which should have been impossible.
Helena let her gaze travel from one man to the next, trying to remember if she’d seen them around the bonfire and if so, what they’d been doing. How they’d treated the women they’d been doing it to. With the possible exception of the brother who’d been spanking that one woman—with what had appeared to be her enthusiastic consent, in all fairness—Helena hadn’t seen any of them treat the women badly. She needed to remember that.
Because she believed what the other women had told her. She’d seen what had gone on around that campfire. She had to prepare herself for the kind of life they’d described, because she wasn’t likely to pick up a blade and she certainly wasn’t signing up for the hard labor of a farmer’s mate, all that toil and heartbreak for a meager crop in the cold north. Which left camp girling as her only remaining option, if she’d understood her new friends correctly.
The idea made her stomach flip over a little. Maybe a lot. But she ordered herself to suck it up. None of the camp girls looked like they were suffering. Taryn had signed herself up for this adventure deliberately—as had every other one of the female captives. When Tyr was done with her, which for all she knew he already was, she’d handle it the way she’d handled everything else that had happened since her parents had died. And while none of the brothers looked like pushovers, exactly, there was no denying the fact that Tyr was in a whole different class of frightening thing. She repressed a shudder. Maybe she’d be better off passed around to the other raiders, who’d likely pay a little less attention to her—which might very well give her some room to figure out how the hell to get her tablet back and then get herself back to the mainland so she could continue the work that had already been put on hold for too long this summer thanks to Ferranti.
After all, no matter what happened, it was better than Krajic.
You have to stop letting all these men control your life, she snapped at herself, aware of the irony there, given she’d once snapped the same thing at her sister. But men had controlled every place she’d ever lived. It was only in private, behind closed doors with people like her parents, that she’d seen anything different. Where she’d dared to imagine that it wasn’t men in general who were the problem, really, but the kind of men who could command whole cities and hold off invaders both human and animal. That was why it was so important that she finished her family’s work, so that kind of man had less power behind him when he lorded it over others.
It was easy to prey on people’s fears in the dark, especially when the dark lasted for six months.
And of course, instead of picking up where her parents had left off and going directly to the Catskills where she could activate the whole electrical grid, or so she hoped, Helena had been on the run. Then she’d been trapped in Ferranti’s compound while Melyssa indulged herself and played at being a queen. Then Helena had gone ahead and delivered herself into a whole clan filled with the kind of men she most wanted to avoid, like the rash dumbass she’d always been.
She had to stop thinking about this or she’d do something really stupid, like launch herself off the side of the boat to swim for it. That would obviously solve nothing. She’d drown in the cold sea, or be torn apart by sharks, and anyway, as long as Tyr—or any other raider—had her tablet, she might as well be tethered to them with steel chains around her throat. It amounted to the same thing.
This was a community, a true brotherhood—but that didn’t make Helena any less alone. She had to force herself to stop trying to read each raider’s inner character on his forbidding face, until finally she jerked her head around to take stock of where they were going instead.
For a long moment she didn’t understand what was happening. The ship was heading—fast—for what looked like the side of a mountain rising steep and straight directly up from the water, all sheer, slick rock. It wasn’t until they were nearly upon it that Tyr shouted out the order and the ship turned sharply. They followed the mountain around its rocky, jagged base and into a narrow channel that Helena would never have known was there.
No one would know it was there, she understood, unless they overshot it at an angle and then looked back. She imagined it would be difficult to see from too far out at sea. She didn’t need anyone to point out to her that this was an excellent tactical advantage for the raiders.
For a while there was nothing but the sound of Tyr’s blunt commands and the oars in the water, echoing off the sheer rock on both sides of the winding channel, until one last gliding push threw the ship out into a much wider, more open space. A kind of long and crowded bay, Helena thought as they moved through it, studded with small rocky islands and bristling with evergreens, and then the higher, rockier hills in the distance, climbing up toward the clouds. When she looked
over her shoulder she couldn’t see the ocean any longer, only the sharp-needled trees and the islands here and there, uninhabited as far as she could tell but offering an excellent camouflage for the dark and quiet raider ships. How anyone could navigate their way through so many small islands if they didn’t already know where they were going was a mystery.
After a few moments of rounding one island here and avoiding another one there, which would likely be impossible without the oars the brothers used so deftly, Helena realized that was the point.
Eventually the ship stopped weaving in and out of the little islands, shooting forward into another open stretch of water. Then they headed in a straight, fast line toward the shore, where a horn blew at intervals over the raider settlement that waited there. Helena was vaguely aware that there was a tightness in her throat, that her pulse was hammering at her as if her body knew, somehow, what this meant. She’d heard about the raider’s lair her whole life. Some said they lived rough in caverns like animals. Some said they were supernatural and could animate at will from thick swamps or salt marshes. Helena had never had a preferred version of everyone’s favorite monster story kicking around in her head.
But she hadn’t imagined this, either.
The raider village was a collection of buildings hewn from wood and heavy stone, all laid out beneath the huge, imposing lodge that sprawled there on the mountainside, clearly a remnant from before the Storms when buildings had been made with machines instead of hands. It sat halfway up the slope of the mountain on a wide green, with paths that led up to it and no other dwelling too close to it. It featured a huge central area several stories high with windows everywhere that must have offered clear views straight to the sea, and wings spanning out on each side. Evergreens and birch trees guarded it and dotted the slope of the hill, all the way down through the tiers of other buildings that clustered much closer to the bottom, so the whole thing looked somehow as if it was built into the trees as well as the mountainside. Some structures looked old and some new, all piled onto the hillside in what seemed like a haphazard fashion but might as easily have been another form of deliberate confusion like the islands themselves. There were a great many of them, uncontained by the walls necessary on the mainland, sweeping all the way down to the docks and the strip of beach—where more people than Helena was used to seeing in one place were already gathered, cheering.