by Megan Crane
Gunnar looked as if he would take that on, but it was Maud who spoke, after glancing at her mate. Riordan sometimes thought she asked Gunnar for his permission, not that it would make sense if she did. Maud was neither as spacey nor as soft as she acted. He knew that firsthand.
“Bishop Seph is the acting head of the church,” she said in her musical, dreamy way, elegant and quiet enough to make Riordan feel every inch the barbarian he was. “The Grand High Priest disappeared into the mountains years ago and no one’s seen him since. Bishop Seph makes a pilgrimage to see him once a year with a great caravan of the faithful, but only he ever walks over the sacred stones and actually enters the refuge.”
“So the motherfucker could have died years ago,” Jurin belted out.
Maud inclined her head. “Some whisper that he did. And I can’t be the only one who wondered if perhaps Bishop Seph helped him along, but it would be suicide to say such a thing out loud.” She looked as if she could sit in that position of hers, on her knees with her hands folded neatly in her lap and her head both high and gently angled, forever. Riordan figured she already had, after all her years in the convent. “For all intents and purposes, Bishop Seph is the Grand High Priest.”
“I’m betting we can’t roll up on the head of the church and ask him a few questions without some blowback,” Tyr said. “Like why he has such a hard on for mercenaries or why he blew up his own temple.”
“One does not roll up to Bishop Seph,” Maud said, and Riordan was sure he heard laughter there beneath the quietly disapproving tone she used. “One awaits his condescension and notice, and abases oneself accordingly before his glory.”
There was a small silence after that. Gunnar’s mouth kicked up in one corner.
“Translation,” he murmured. “The douchebag is a smug prick.”
Wulf popped a bit of meat into his mouth and chewed thoughtfully. All the brothers quieted down as he did, waiting for him to speak.
“I need someone to track down this bishop and abase themselves,” the king said after a moment. “Or whatever else is needed to get the answers I want. And I need to know where that last temple is, exactly, and why Helena’s parents didn’t want to approach it. And you’re all right. I can’t send a raiding party unless I want a war. I don’t.” His pale blue eyes gleamed bright and hard in the firelight. “Yet.”
And Riordan knew how this was going to go before his king even slid a look his way. He was the clan’s best tracker. And he was unmated. Unattached. Nothing to hold him back from a possible suicide mission like the one Wulf had just described. He knew it in his bones as if it had been stamped there with a red-hot brand.
This was his destiny. He’d made himself into this finely honed blade of war and given it over in service to his king. There was no call not to swing it when asked.
“How do I infiltrate a church without raising an alarm?” he asked, and he noticed no one else around the fire seemed particularly surprised that he was volunteering.
Wulf only smiled.
Across the fire, Maud frowned. It occurred to Riordan that he didn’t think he’d ever seen her do that before.
“Uh, you can’t,” Helena said, from her seat on the grass next to Tyr. She sat forward. “You certainly can’t walk in as a raider. They’ll know exactly what you are at a glance.”
“It would be better if you could . . . blend,” Maud agreed, shooting a look at Helena, then back at Riordan.
The two mainland women frowned at Riordan as if he was an unpleasant specimen that had washed up before them and needed a great deal of work—not a reaction he’d ever received before. Especially not from two women. It made him very nearly bristle.
“I don’t blend,” he grated out. “I’m a warrior of the brotherhood, not a spineless little mainland twerp.”
But neither Helena nor Maud was listening to him. Also a new experience, and again, not one he loved.
“The warrior braids and the tattoos give the whole thing away,” Helena was saying, waving her hand at Riordan in a dismissive sort of circle. Practically asking for a violent response. Riordan slid an affronted gaze over to Tyr, but the hard, faintly amused look in the war chief’s gaze told him to suck it up. “Not that there’s any disguising the way he walks.”
“Like death on swift feet,” Maud said, then smiled when it got a little too silent afterward. “Well, you all do.”
“Can you look less like a raider?” Helena asked him. With a smile, as if she already knew his answer.
“No,” Riordan retorted. But he grinned at her. “I don’t even know what that means.”
“It means that in order to walk into places like the Great Lake Cathedral—or the western highlands at all, really—you have to look like one of the faithful,” Helena said. “You need to look compliant.”
Compliant. That stupid word. All the raiders laughed at the sound of it, the way they always did, because it was a crock of shit and a scam. At best. And the idea of Riordan masquerading as one of them? That was even funnier. Even Wulf looked amused to an unholy degree, still lounging there in the grass as the specifics of this madness he’d requested were ironed out in front of him.
“Right,” Riordan drawled. “Remind me how much fun that is. Pussy on a set schedule, no fun at all, only for boring-ass procreation. Is that about it?”
“Good people want to repopulate the Earth, Riordan,” Helena said, so piously it took him a minute to realize she was messing with him.
“That means you can’t take a wife for the winter and do her in the ass the whole time, you fucking deviant,” Tyr said, laughing outright. “Can you handle that?”
The level of mocking laughter from the rest of his brothers—and the camp girls, all of whom knew his preferences intimately and had spent a lot of time enjoying his particular talents—accompanying that question forced Riordan to flip off every single one of them. Every one of them except Eiryn, that was, who was doing an impression of stone statue over on her tree trunk.
Not that he was noticing her in particular, of course. For fuck’s sake.
“A winter marriage is a good idea,” Helena said after the laughter died down. “Single people roaming around at this time of year are always considered suspicious. Winters are long and are for doing your duty in the dark months, not wandering all over the place, risking death and making trouble.”
Riordan knew what a winter marriage was, of course. But the idea of him participating in one was . . . impossible. Ridiculous, even. The looks on the brothers’ faces told him they all felt much the same.
“Can you imagine some poor, naïve mainland girl shacking up with a raider for the winter?” Bast asked, laughing. “It might kill her.”
“It shouldn’t be a mainland girl at all.”
Eiryn’s voice was cool and sharp, cutting through the night, the fire, even the laughter. If she was aware of all the heads that swiveled around to stare at her, she gave no sign, sitting there cool and haughty on her tree trunk as if she was the one on a throne instead of the lazy-looking man sprawled out at her feet.
“That would be far too risky. If it’s going to work it needs to be someone who’s an asset to the mission, not an impediment.” Eiryn glanced at Wulf beside her, but then slid that unreadable gaze of hers across the small ring, hitting Riordan like a punch. A hard and fast uppercut, straight to the gut. No mercy. “It should be me.”
3
Eiryn didn’t know what she’d expected in the wake of her announcement. The world to end—again? An outcry of some sort?
But there was nothing. Just the snap and shudder of the logs in the fire, the rushing sound of the sea against the sand, and the faint song of the summer wind through the forest that huddled around them.
Riordan sat on the other side of the fire, kicked back against a rock as if it was some kind of cozy fur-draped couch instead of an exposed boulder on a chilly beach in the middle of the night. His dark gaze was hard on hers. Too hard, like the kiss of a blade, and the firelight
didn’t help, making him look bronzed and edged in shadow at the same time. Mysterious and perfect all at once, and she told herself there was no lump in her throat, no tightness in her chest at the sight of him. None at all. She was immune.
She watched his jaw clench, the telltale sign of his temper or any other deep emotion in him that she didn’t want to know about. She saw the way his dark eyes glittered and braced herself, but he didn’t say a word.
Somehow, that felt like a reprimand. She hated that it stung.
Gunnar let out a bark of what could as easily have been surprise as laughter, breaking the silence, but that was all. Asshole. Eiryn didn’t know why she’d expected anything else from the man who had, until recently, lived like some kind of vagrant in his junkyard of a basement. When he wasn’t off arm wrestling wolf packs like a suicidal idiot and then swanning around with their fangs on cords around his neck like a complete jackhole. Or collecting nuns, for that matter.
Wulf, meanwhile, shifted from his lazy position lounging on the grass. Slowly. Very slowly. Eiryn realized that, as usual, everyone was waiting—frozen and quiet—for his exalted reaction to his personal bodyguard’s declaration. She’d be lying if she pretended she wasn’t doing the same. He looked over his shoulder at her, and even with his face cast in shadow there was no getting away from the punch of his blue gaze.
“I was unaware I released you from your position,” he said. Mildly.
So mildly. Yet no one within the sound of his voice thought he was anything but leashed danger and too much power just waiting to explode, and maybe this would be the thing that ignited his famous and terrible rage. Eiryn thought the whole of the raiding party might have been holding their collective breath.
She made herself exhale.
“You can find another bodyguard easily enough,” she replied, ignoring all the alarms going off inside of her, shouting at her to appease him, and now. To ingratiate herself. To do whatever she had to do to gain his favor and trust again, before it was too late.
Eiryn had been doing that for too long. Much too long. It had occurred to her in the moments before she’d opened her mouth that she’d been doing it her entire life. What if she didn’t want to bend and kneel and reshape herself to suit someone else, for a change? What if she was tired of thinking of her own shit last? What if she didn’t have it in her to serve her king or her father or her clan with quite so much single-minded, breathless devotion any longer?
But if thinking such things was dangerous, saying them was treason. A repudiation of the vows she’d taken and had inked deep into her skin, and a deep insult to every man around this fire who wore the same sigil stamped over his heart. At the very best, it was disrespectful.
Unless, of course, she volunteered herself for a job that would give her a little breathing room without directly challenging her king or risking her place in the clan.
She’d had no choice but to jump in, mouth first, the moment she’d seen the opportunity.
“I like the bodyguard I have,” Wulf said, sounding almost idle. Though Eiryn knew it was a test. It was always a test. “Most of the time.”
Eiryn didn’t make the mistake of imagining he was anything like idle, because he never was. He was the most dangerous predator she’d ever encountered. But she shrugged, as if this was a negotiation. She was aware that all the brothers were watching this interchange closely. And if Riordan had felt it was necessary to jump all over her in the woods, it was more than likely that every single one of them was equally aware that she’d been a little less on the mark lately than she should have been. That was impetus enough to take a step back, even if it involved dealing with Riordan in a way that she would likely hate. That couldn’t matter. She couldn’t let it sway her. He was a necessary evil, nothing more.
What she needed was space. Distance from all of this crap.
From the way Gunnar scowled at her as if he knew her when he’d spent the better part of her life locked up in the Lodge basement with his machines or his first, crazy mate, and spent more time with his collection of pit wolves than with her. From the condemning way Tyr watched her every move, as if he was waiting for the excuse to take her out, which was regrettably fair enough after she’d spent so many years openly plotting his death. From the dangerous line she’d been walking this whole last month, treating her king like the half-blood brother she was pissed at instead of what he was: the head of her clan who she was lucky to serve.
This can’t go on, Wulf had told her up there on that cliff. You need to choose.
Oh, I have choices? she’d asked. Unwisely. Maybe the smoke had gotten into her head. Or maybe she’d truly lost her mind at last. That’s a shocker.
Wulf’s stance had changed almost imperceptibly, as if he’d considered knocking her to the ground the way he would have if she’d been anyone else who dared speak to him so disrespectfully. It had sent a bright, hot slice of something a little too close to fear straight through her. A welcome, almost too late reminder that this wasn’t a game.
Wulf was the raider king, not some bitch she could mouth off to without repercussions. And she’d already spent a month not quite doing her duty, pushing back at every opportunity, and in all ways acting like a stupid little shit who she herself would have wanted to teach a lesson a few months back.
What the hell was she doing? Where did she think this would end?
Choose, Wulf had said again, through his teeth. There had been no trace of idleness in his voice or on his face then. He’d been openly angry and he’d let her see it—and that should have terrified her more than all the rest of it. It did. You either serve me or you don’t. There is no middle ground.
Eiryn had felt as if he’d knocked her down after all. She’d felt winded all the way through. I’m your sister.
Which is the only reason I’ve allowed you to have an extended temper tantrum with a sharp blade to my back. Wulf had eyed her, too much ferocious temper in his gaze and all over his face. But that ends tonight. There are names for assholes who abandon their king and their clan in the middle of a fight. Don’t make me use them.
And she had wisely shut her mouth before she’d provoked him into labeling her a traitor right there and then. Or worse, to her way of thinking, a coward. Or any other blood insult that would require she defend her honor with her blade. She’d have to fight another brother—Tyr perhaps, maybe Gunnar, maybe even Riordan—because she doubted Wulf would condescend to raise his own blade to teach a traitor or a coward a lesson. Especially if it was his sister.
And then what would she do? Win or lose, the stain of the insult, delivered from her king’s mouth, would remain. It was instant dishonor. She would lose her place in the brotherhood. In the clan.
In the world.
And that was a dislocating notion. It made her feel dizzy. Eiryn was so angry—so bone-deep and surpassingly furious, and had been for at least a month now—it took her breath away again and again. Every time she looked at either one of her blood brothers, in fact, but especially when she looked at Wulf. And she was a woman of action, not of discretion and quiet, graceful contemplation. She wanted to use the weapons she had to fight the things that battered at her. Her voice, her blade, her fists—whatever worked.
But the clan was all she had. All she’d ever wanted.
It was one thing to imagine walking away from everything she knew in the confusion after an explosion like the one tonight, letting them all think she was dead. It was something else entirely to do something so heinous and unforgivable that she could never, ever come back.
There had been nothing to do but keep her mouth shut and follow Wulf back to camp. But when she’d seen an opportunity to sidestep all this crap, no matter how completely insane it was to imagine herself compliant or in a winter marriage of any sort or off in the mainland somewhere with only Riordan, of all people—she’d jumped on it.
Feet before head. Her preferred method of travel.
“If what’s required is a compliant couple, I c
an’t think of anyone else who’s qualified,” she said now, working hard to make sure she sounded almost cold. Rational. Certainly in no way overly invested in the outcome or Wulf’s decision. “Hedy or Emmalyn could play the part, but they’re both off on raiding parties further down the coast. And I think we can all agree that sending two warriors into an extended, undercover battle is better than one.”
Wulf looked at her for what seemed like a very long time. She gazed back at him, refusing to blink or fidget or give him—or anyone watching—the slightest hint that she wanted this more than she could possibly admit. Desperately, in fact. That she’d thrown herself into the conversation heedlessly and recklessly, seizing on this insane idea as the one thing that could create the middle ground that Wulf claimed didn’t exist.
This way, she could serve the clan—and him—without having to fight the urge to slam her blade into the back of his skull every minute of the day. This way, she could postpone the inevitable conversation about her loyalty awhile.
Because it wasn’t that she doubted her loyalty to the clan. Of course she didn’t. She was a loyal brother to her core and always would be.
But she was sick to death of her blood family.
“It will be a long winter, stuck with narrow-minded fools and petty little assholes on the mainland,” Gunnar said into the silence. Eiryn didn’t look away from Wulf, so she couldn’t tell if he was speaking to her or to Riordan. Or maybe to some random machine he’d found somewhere and already cared about more than most other humans, which was infinitely more probable. “A long time to pretend to be something you’re not.”
Wulf looked away from her, and she tried not to let her relief show on her face. He still looked lazy and boneless, the way he always did, the better to trick the unwary into imagining those things might be true when in reality he was always at a simmer and ready to boil over. But she could tell he’d made his decision.
“Tomorrow,” he said in that way of his, low and yet reaching at once. He nodded at Helena and Maud. “You two can teach a pair of raider brothers how to pass for meek, compliant mainlanders.”