by Megan Crane
His blue eyes seemed bluer then, and her heart kicked at her.
“I think, princess,” he said quietly, “that I can do a bit better than fine.”
Kathlyn didn’t know what he meant. But her body seemed to have access to a whole wealth of knowledge she didn’t. She felt very nearly feverish. She could feel herself sweat. And she was sure that the little, lurking curve in the corner of his hard mouth meant he knew exactly what was happening to her.
“What the hell is a mounting ceremony?” he asked, before she could summon up something to say. Or confront the possibility that her voice had completely deserted her. “Is that what happens when they sell you to the highest bidder? Like a cow?”
“It’s a woman’s introduction to society,” she told him, a little too close to grateful that he’d steered the conversation back to ground she knew. “Not a cattle drive. Though I imagine there are more than a few comparisons to be made. I’ve never witnessed a cattle drive, so I couldn’t say.”
“And why is it that the daughter of a famous man requires an introduction in the first place?”
She frowned at him, and that felt better than it should. As if she’d remembered herself at last. “It’s necessary.” Then she parroted all the women, her father’s many winter wives, and the permanent ones, too, who had taught Kathlyn her role in life one way or another. “A good mounting sets a girl up for a good marriage, usually within a year or two. Before the princess market spoils her.”
“And then what?”
Kathlyn didn’t understand him. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“What happens after the good marriage?” he asked, almost idly, as if he was playing some game. But she could see that electric gleam in his gaze. And that big, lean and solid body of his was still so tightly coiled, as if he was about to explode at any moment, no matter how relaxed he might appear from a distance. She was still so close to him. She could see he wasn’t relaxed at all. “You—what? Disappear in two years?”
Some highborn women did, in fact, disappear. Like her own mother. But Kathlyn didn’t think that was what he was talking about.
“We are all called to do our part,” she said, the old words from the priests who’d taught her as a young girl seeming to come out of nowhere. Swelling up inside of her and bringing a little solace as they did, because this was the world she knew. It might choke her one of these days, but it was hers. What could a raider king know about life in these mountains, so far from the seas? Much less what women half his size and lacking his obvious strength might have had to do to survive? “I know that raiders are said to be happy living as they please, but some of us take both comfort and pride in knowing our place in the world.”
His hard mouth crooked unmistakably then. “Bullshit.”
Kathlyn swallowed. It was more difficult than it should have been. “And I think you already know what a good marriage is. If we are blessed and lucky, we will bear our husbands many children, to do our duty to the world as well as provide him heirs. The difference between your people and mine is that we look forward to the opportunity to earn our place in society.”
He dropped his hand from her hip then, but only to move it back to the wall on the other side of her head. He never shifted his gaze from hers, and Kathlyn didn’t understand how he could still look so powerful. Almost entirely naked and so close, besides. No weapon in his hands, no gun or blade. Nothing but his magnificent body, honed into a weapon all its own, and the way he watched her in that narrow blue way that made that same old heavy thing press down into her again. Then pulse even harder than before.
“I don’t need some asshole priest or douchebag king to tell me who I am.” He lifted his brows. “Do you?”
“I know who you are,” she replied, though she knew that wasn’t what he meant.
Something different shone in his too-blue gaze then. “Are you sure? There are so many raiders out there, ignoring opportunities to live in compliant chains. So many nighttime stories to scare the children. We all blend together in the dark.”
Kathlyn wondered if that was why he’d come by day. So there could be no confusion.
“Wulf,” she whispered. As if his name was a curse. Or a prayer. “You’re the raider king they call Wulf.”
It wasn’t as if she’d had any doubt about who this man was, but the way his eyes lit up then with satisfaction confirmed it. Wulf.
Wulf, the raider king her father wanted to hunt down and exterminate, the way he’d bragged last summer to Bishop Seph, the head of the church, who’d always made Kathlyn’s skin crawl. I’ll burn the vermin out at the source, her father had proclaimed. With great relish and all the confidence in the world, as was his wont. As if it was that easy. When if it really had been that easy, he would surely have done it already, instead of raging over the settlements lost and stores stolen in the eastern mainland where the raiders roamed unchecked.
Wulf, whom the raiders she’d met last fall had admired so clearly. She could still remember, vividly, the electric way they’d reacted when she’d said his name. It had occurred to her, more than once over these dark and gloomy months, that the fact she’d uttered it was the only reason she’d made it through her encounter with the brawny big warrior and his lethally scary female companion conscious. And alive.
Kathlyn had been filled with fanciful, silly fantasies of breaking free of her attendants to deliver the information she’d overheard in the palace that summer. She wanted something, anything to change. She wanted something other than this same confining life of hers, forever trapped beneath her father’s thumb before he handed her over to husbands of his choosing. She’d imagined stealing one of the many vehicles her father’s men had brought down from the mountains into Great Lake Cathedral City last September. She’d pictured herself bravely driving it east on the Eighty as far as she could go before the highwaymen stopped her, which everyone knew was inevitable on that deceptively well-maintained road that stretched across the whole of the western mainland, from the shores of the Pacific near Reno to the port city of Lincoln, Nebraska, on the Mississippi Sea. After that she’d ransom herself to them or whatever other bandits she encountered to find a boat that would take her to the eastern islands, where she could find the raider king her father so fervently wanted to kill and warn him.
Because she needed to warn him. She’d known that with bedrock certainty, the way she knew she needed air to breathe. Because she hadn’t believed in much in a long, long time, but if raiders were real they needed to stay real. They needed to remain the stories that people whispered to each other in the dark, when the nights were so long, and there was nothing but the crackle of the fires and dreams of a far-off morning. They needed to loom large, they needed to stay alive, and they needed to fight her father.
Someone, somewhere, needed to fight her father.
There had been a number of flaws in her big plan. First, her attendants were as scared of her father as she was and never let her roam too far, especially when outside her father’s borders. Second and more important, Kathlyn had no earthly idea how to drive a vehicle of any kind, so her fantasies of charging off down the Eighty were little more than signs of her overactive imagination. And of course, even if she’d managed somehow to overcome those obstacles, she doubted there would be any reasoning with highwaymen and bandits. What did they care that she had something to tell a raider king? They’d sell her themselves. If she was lucky. If not, they’d likely kill her once they’d had their fill of her. There were no happy-ever-afters with desperate men. Kathlyn knew that much.
So when she’d happened upon a pair of raiders in the princesses’ private rooms in the Cathedral—the place where the highborn girls in the market for husbands rested between command performances down at the great equinox celebration, which also served as an auction—it had seemed like a sign. She’d told them what she knew of her father’s plans. War, brought directly to the raiders’ shores when they’d least expect it: in March, a time no one was foolish enoug
h to attempt an ocean crossing.
There’d been nothing more she could do after that. The brash, bold raiders she’d encountered hadn’t been what she’d expected. They’d been more than a little bit overwhelming, for one thing. The moment she’d seen them, Kathlyn had assumed they’d kill her, and part of her was still astonished they hadn’t. And more than that, one of them had been a woman. A warrior, capable of knocking people out with a single strike and apparently at ease with the murder in her eyes, and a woman. Kathlyn had never seen anything like her, lethal and quick. She hadn’t known anything like her could exist.
It had never occurred to her that women could fight. That maybe she could fight.
The truth was, Kathlyn still didn’t know if she could. Or how she’d even try. She’d spent another winter under her father’s thumb, locked up in the wives’ quarters with all the women who jockeyed for his attention and tried so hard to give him sons he could raise to take his place one day and daughters he could use as currency. Another dark season locked away in this jail he called a palace, waiting to see how he would use her. Who he would sell her to and how she would survive it. If she survived it.
Then, today, she’d had the brilliant idea to defy her father the only way she could. And in a way he would find particularly galling. That was what her life was. She’d been reduced to nothing more than a largely empty gesture that would hurt only her in the long run. Or maybe that was all she’d ever been in the first place.
And she’d miscalculated terribly in thinking this man would be like all the other men she’d met in her life. Wulf was about as similar to the aristocratic men who’d been sniffing around Kathlyn since she was twelve and her father had stopped hiding her away in the women’s quarters as one of the wolves roaming in the snowy wastes to the north was to a defenseless fox cub.
“Yes,” he said, in that lazy way of his. “I am Wulf.” He shifted back from her, dropping the hands that had caged her and letting them rest on his lean hips as he regarded her in a way that made her feel as caged, as pinned, as his hands had. “I offer you my thanks, princess, on behalf of my clan. I would not have enjoyed waking up one March morning to find your father’s minions desecrating my islands.”
It was ridiculous that she should feel that. Deep inside her, in a part of that endlessly pulsing thing that was starting to scare her a little. She would have thought she was suddenly ill—but she didn’t feel sick. Whatever that was inside of her, making her breath so shallow, it wasn’t sick.
“You don’t have to thank me.” Kathlyn drew herself up to her full height and peeled her fingers off the wall. She tugged the gauzy skirt a little further down, hoping it covered her a little. Not that she had great hopes on that score for a garment her friend Yajaira, her father’s current winter wife, had dared to steal from the laundry of the palace’s most notorious courtesan, the much-feared Biyu. “It was luck, that’s all. There was no reason there should have been raiders in the Cathedral. And if there hadn’t been, much as I might have wished otherwise, there would be no way for me to tell anyone anything.” She heard that edge in her voice then, but didn’t let it stop her. “I’m only heroic and adventurous in my own head. Everywhere else, I’m just a girl in a gold dress, waiting for my life to start.”
She felt unsteady then. As if she’d ripped herself wide open and was trying to stuff it all back inside while he stood there, still and focused, and watched. Heat crept over her, making her miserable. And ashamed that she couldn’t seem to handle herself now when her whole life had been about handling herself beautifully. Calm at all costs, serene and unobjectionable in all things, that was Princess Kathlyn.
If she’d been a little more superstitious—only a very little bit more—she might have imagined that dressing like a courtesan had doomed her, somehow, to that life. That she was breaking down where she stood and becoming something she’d always feared instead.
It was every highborn girl’s nightmare. Lose enough status and no one would make a permanent offer, and then, sooner or later, one September, no decent man would claim you at the equinox. And then what was left? If you wanted a place to spend the dark months safe from the rains and the storms and the bitter cold, you crossed that line and went down to the courtesans, and everyone knew that once that happened you might as well be dead. No one from your old life would acknowledge you—at least, none of the women would. The men would take you as they chose, and Kathlyn had heard entirely too many stories about men who’d taken out their feelings about a girl’s father on his disgraced daughter. No wonder the courtesans always seemed so brittle and hard, off in the shadows. She’d often thought taking her chances with the wolves might be better. Kinder, anyway.
She wasn’t entirely sure that wasn’t what she’d done today.
Wulf’s startlingly hard face looked more beautiful the longer she looked at him, but maybe that was the clothes. Making her think these impossible, incendiary things that could only make things worse.
“If you want your life to start, start it.” Wulf’s voice was quiet and still. It seemed to echo inside of her, filling her up. “And if you don’t agree with the rules others have imposed on you, break them. No one holds you captive unless you let them.”
Something crashed through her, intense and nearly vicious, and she’d stepped away from the wall before she remembered herself and made herself go still.
“Easy for you to say. You’re a man. A raider. A king.” Kathlyn spat that last word out, very much as if she had a death wish. “Things look a little bit different on the other side of the throne. The side where, if you don’t kneel, you die.”
“I would rather die than kneel, princess.” His eyes were nothing like the summer sky. They were nothing so gentle. They were harsh and blue. Like whole, vicious days in January, all wind and snow. “It’s a choice, not a curse. You make it every time you bend your knees.”
“Is that what you did?” she demanded, still too unsteady to heed the danger she was in. “You just straightened at the knee, changed the rules, and magically created the life you wanted out of what you’d been handed?”
His eyes gleamed with something that reminded her of the blades raiders carried, too sharp and much too deadly. Several of them gleamed behind him on the table. “Yes.”
That was it. One syllable, but it sounded like a commandment and a judgment in one. Kathlyn was shaking again, and she hated it. “I’ll keep that in mind the next time my father threatens me. I’ll just stand up. I’m sure that will silence him.” She pulled in a breath. “I’m sure that will show him the error of his ways. Then again, he might just have me beaten for my temerity.”
Wulf reached across the scant few inches that separated them, and Kathlyn forced herself to stand still, even though it felt as if everything inside of her was rocking apart. He wrapped his hand around the side of her neck, and she thought, This is it. This is where he hurts me. This is how I die, after all.
But he didn’t squeeze tight. He didn’t break her windpipe or crush her throat. He only held his hand there. Hot. Heavy.
“Kathlyn.” She wasn’t sure he’d said her name before, but even if he had, this was different. It wasn’t just her name. It was the way he said it, as if it, too, was a royal command. “Breathe.”
She was so startled she did what he’d ordered. She pulled in a deep breath, then let it out.
“Again,” Wulf told her, in that low, sure way. As if he expected her lungs to obey him whether or not she wanted to. And they did.
That was the amazing part. They did.
“Tell me how your father can threaten you and beat you when he plans to sell you,” Wulf said after she’d stood there for a while, breathing. Because he’d told her to. And he didn’t move his hand from her neck. “You’d think it would put off the potential buyers to find you bleeding and battered.”
Kathlyn smiled faintly. “I can think of a handful who would probably find that an improvement.” She didn’t like the way his expression changed at tha
t, as if he’d gone frozen. “But mounting ceremonies aren’t held at specific times. Only when a father accepts a bid and calls for one.”
“Which means he’d let you heal.”
She didn’t know if it was that heavy, weathered hand that made her throat feel so tight then, or something else. Something that had more to do with how quiet his voice was and how it still shuddered through her like another man’s shout.
“Probably.” Her mouth was much too dry and she wet her lips, then regretted it when his gaze dropped to follow the movement of her tongue. When he raised it again, his eyes blazed. “But then again, I wouldn’t underestimate how little my well-being plays into my father’s decisions.”
“Like this mounting ceremony bullshit.”
“Mounting ceremonies are actually very boring,” she told Wulf, trying to focus on him rather than all the things swirling around and around in her head and making her feel a little dizzy. It was possible that was just him. The effect he clearly had on her. That hand wrapped around her neck as if he knew he was the only thing steadying her. As if he wasn’t the reason she was unsteady in the first place. “A girl’s father accepts a bid on his daughter’s virginity and calls for a feast. Depending on what time of year it is, people gather from near and far to celebrate. The deed is performed on the stage, the crowd cheers the blood that proves she was untouched, the girl proudly wears her white dress stained with her virgin’s blood, ideally, to announce she’s now available for winter marriages and a life, and everyone dances and feasts. The end.”
“There’s a stage?” He tilted his head slightly to one side. “Is it a live performance? How remarkably kinky. I didn’t think you dreary mainlander types had it in you.”
She frowned at him, though she still felt much too hot. And that pulsing thing was back, connected somehow to the place he rested his hand and the place he’d pinched between her legs.
“It’s just a raised platform with a bed on it. Sometimes the beds are very elaborate, but everyone secretly thinks it’s desperate when that happens. It usually means the family are trying to hide something or divert attention.”