by Selena Kitt
“The scouts jus’ came back wit’ the news,” she whispered, glancing up and down the tunnels, as if someone might overhear. “They’re gonna tell Raife and Darrow.”
“No,” Sibyl breathed, grabbing Kirstin’s shoulders and shaking her. “No! They will go after her and then…”
Kirstin’s eyes grew even bigger, and Sibyl didn’t even know it was possible. They were already as big as saucers in her pale face. Sibyl cursed Laina under her breath.
“Was she out looking for huluppa?”
“What else?”
“Is she… alive?” Sibyl didn’t even want to think about the alternative. Although, after what Raife had told her about his mother, she knew there were things that could happen to a woman that had further-reaching consequences than a quick death.
“They took her ta the MacFalons,” Kirstin whispered as they approached the kitchen. It was early and most of the pack was still asleep, wrapped up in their plaids in front of the big fireplace. “The scouts say they painted a message inside the cage. In blood.”
“In Laina’s blood?” All the color drained out of Sibyl’s face.
“The MacFalon’s out to start a war,” Kirstin whispered as they tiptoed through the kitchen. “He’s defyin’ the pact.”
“He wants me.” Sibyl said this as they stepped out into the cool morning air. The sun was just coming up over the horizon. “This is about me.”
“I think so.” Kirstin nodded, standing there in the cold, shivering, her eyes wild with fear.
“I can’t… I can’t let this happen.” Sibyl looked around the valley, at this place she had come to call home. A place that felt more like home than any other ever had, even her father’s own estate. Then she met Kirstin’s eyes and knew why the woman had come to her, why she had pulled her aside to tell her quietly, without yet involving Raife or Darrow. Why she had led her out here in the morning light.
Kirstin was a wulver woman. She knew sometimes sacrifices had to be made, that there were some things the heart of a man just couldn’t handle. And Sibyl was a part of them now. This was her pack—this was her family. Her worst fear had come to pass. Alistair was going to start a war. He was willing to risk it all simply to retain his property. She was nothing but a possession to him, something that had been stolen. Something he wanted returned.
And, like a demented, twisted child, he was going to get his toy back, no matter the cost.
If that meant war—well, that was a game to him too, wasn’t it?
But Sibyl knew the costs, the real costs in human and wulver blood. Laina’s had already been spilled. She prayed her friend was still alive. The image of little Garaith filled her mind, and she couldn’t imagine him growing up without his mother. How many more wulver lives would be lost because of Alistair’s selfishness? She imagined Alistair’s men coming into the tunnels, the stream running with wulver blood, and her heart broke into a thousand pieces.
This was her family, now more than ever. Raife’s face came into her mind and she heard his objections in her head, even though he didn’t yet know this news. He would choose another, far more dangerous solution than the one she was about to undertake. But war was no solution. She had to keep the peace—the peace his mother had sacrificed for, the peace his father had fought for, the peace they all had come to accept and expect.
She would have to make this sacrifice to save them all.
She put her arms around Kirstin and the two women hugged, hanging onto each other tightly, knowing it would be the last time they embraced.
Kirstin already had a pack for her and Sibyl teared up when she saw her little satchel, the one she had pinned under her skirts when she had escaped Alistair MacFalon. Was she really going to do this? But when she met her friend’s eyes, she knew there was no other way. The wulvers would ride out if Laina wasn’t returned, and she couldn’t risk Raife’s life, the lives of everyone in the pack, when all Alistair wanted, in this end, was his own way.
He wanted his property back. Sibyl would simply return it to him.
“There is water, some food,” Kirstin told her. “Ye must hurry.”
But there was no time.
There was always a sentry at the entrance of the cave. She couldn’t go that way, and besides, she needed something faster than her own feet. She was no wulver. She couldn’t cross the rocky terrain on foot like they could, faster than any human. Kirstin hugged her one more time before heading back into the mountain, letting Sibyl do what she must.
The horses were penned, and she found Angus, the horse Raife often let her ride, in the dimness, calling to him with a special whistle. She didn’t give herself time to think. She saddled the horse and climbed on, knowing if she was going to do this, she had to do it fast, before Raife awoke and found her gone. Before the scouts had a chance to tell him and Darrow how Laina had been captured by Alistair and used as bait to lure them all into a bloody trap.
The horse didn’t want to go. It nickered and pawed at the ground when Sibyl climbed up onto its back. She urged it on, squeezing its flanks between her bare thighs and steering the horse upward, through the mountain path. She had never been on it, but she knew where it went. Raife had told her about the treacherous way up and then down the mountain, a pathway no human had ever travailed. Only wulver warriors had the skill to traverse this path.
And she was neither.
Thankfully, the horse knew the way, had traveled it more than once in its lifetime, had been taken up and down the mountain during training exercises that were, finally, serving some purpose. Sibyl leaned over the horse’s neck, holding onto the bridle, and let it take her where it would. There was nothing else to do, except hold on and pray. The path was little more than the rocky edge of a cliff, the shear drop-off so steep she couldn’t see the side of the mountain if she dared to look down to her left.
The path wound up, up, taking her higher into the mountains until she gasped for breath and clung to Angus’s mane, her eyesight blurring and her mind bolting. She wanted nothing more than to escape. The early morning cold made her bones ache and her teeth chatter. What had she been thinking, stealing a horse and riding away into the mountains? What did she think she was going to accomplish?
But she knew, and kept it out in front of her as she managed to stay on the horse as it neared the top of the mountain and started down the other side. She was going to sacrifice herself for the man she loved. A war between the MacFalons—and their local border allies in the Middle March—and the wulvers would bring King Henry’s wrath down on all of them. So what if he had once negotiated a peaceful pact between them? It had been in his best interest to do so. He needed the wulver warriors and the Scots to unite and fight for his right to wear the crown.
Now that crown—and all the power than came with it—belonged to him alone.
No matter how strong the wulvers, no matter if one of their warriors was worth ten of Henry’s, eventually the numbers would win out. Raife would be killed, Darrow too. They would all be slaughtered, the females widowed, the babies orphaned, left alone to fend for themselves in the mountain. Sibyl thought of Kirstin, of Laina’s baby, and clung more tightly to her horse.
She could stop this. If she simply returned and offered herself to Alistair, to do with as he wished, she could get him to let Laina go. His pride had been wounded, and mayhaps he would take her back and marry her after all. Or mayhaps he would set her aside, return her as damaged goods to her uncle, who would likely attempt to beat sense into her until she was senseless.
Not that any of that mattered.
They could do anything they wanted—Alistair, his men, her uncle. It wouldn’t matter, as long as they freed Laina and honored the pact.
The horse, so used to following the path, wanted to turn around and go back. She had to steer it onward, thankful she had spent so much time with Darrow searching for the huluppa tree. She knew how to get back to Alistair’s lands, the border between Scotland and England—the borderland between worlds, between
humans and wulvers.
She found the path where she had found the huluppa tree, found it growing, healthy and strong, on the other side of the stream. It was mid-morning when she found the cage, the horrible word, written in blood, goading Raife and Darrow and the rest of the wulvers to war.
“Tiugainn.”
Come.
In Laina’s blood.
Oh Laina, Laina, please hang on, Sibyl thought, tasting her own blood in her mouth where she’d worried the inside of her cheek raw. She glimpsed the tree where she had pinned Alistair with an arrow and wished she had a longbow now. But it wouldn’t do her any good. One woman and one bow were nothing. She couldn’t stand up to Alistair and the MacFalons.
She couldn’t do anything but surrender.
The day was warm, the bluebells so thick on the forest floor she could hardly see green. The mountain’s chill faded as she rode closer to the MacFalon castle. Something in the distance, behind her, gave her pause as she stopped her horse just shy of the edge of the woods.
The long, keening howl of a wolf.
A wulver.
It was Raife. She knew her mate’s call, would know it anywhere, and he was and would forever be her mate, she realized. It wouldn’t matter if Alistair accepted her back, married her, and she spent her life with the MacFalons, raising his children as Scots. Raife would forever have her heart.
She knew Raife’s mother had felt the same about Darrow’s father, even if she had sacrificed herself to a king. Avril had already been mated to and in love with Garaith, was being held prisoner when King Henry had taken a fancy to her. A woman’s heart knew the truth—and while Sibyl would be forever grateful that Raife had been the result of her sacrifice—she understood now what it was to really love someone.
To love them so much you would give your own life to save theirs.
And what else could Avril have believed, except that Henry, who would someday sit on the throne of England, already had the power to wipe out her entire pack? Henry had been a kind captor, but a captor nonetheless. And in the end, he had let her go, had given her back in exchange for an army of wulver warriors who had fought for his right to wear the crown.
All in the name of peace.
“Raife.” Sibyl whispered his name, feeling him still, tasting him on her lips, her body filled with him. It always would be, now. She wore the shape of his heart within her breast, and nothing else would ever fill it again. She was his and always would be, no matter what happened now.
She hadn’t stopped to think, had just stolen this horse and rode out with the hope she could avert a disaster, but she stopped now. She stopped and remembered him, every look, every touch. How much time they’d wasted, how many couplings she had missed out on, too afraid to say yes to him, to life, to love. But how sweet those few joinings had been, how perfect, how complete. They would last her forever.
They would have to.
“Tha gaol agam ort,” she whispered in Gaelic. I love you, Raife. I never said the words, but I do. I love you more than life itself.
She rode out into the clearing alone, head held high.
Alistair’s men met her halfway to the castle. She had hoped Donal would be among them, that he would listen to reason, but he wasn’t. The same Scots who had made derogatory comments about her behind her back were no longer afraid to make them to her face. They called her a harlot, a strumpet, a whore. The one called Gregor grabbed the horse’s bridle and spit in her face. He yanked her by the arm, pulling her off her horse and throwing her face first across his saddle.
And Sibyl just hung her head and let them, thinking the whole while, I love you, Raife.
That was all she knew and all that mattered.
* * * *
She hadn’t expected kindness from anyone, but Moira clucked and fussed over her as much as she ever had. Sibyl didn’t realize it would be so hard to give up her plaid, how dependent she had become on its warmth, its safety, its freedom. Moira threw it in the fire and burned it and Sibyl had never been more bereft. It was as if her heart had been thrown into that fire. The tears came, relentless. She couldn’t stop them and she stopped trying after a while.
“Ye have gone and done it now,” Moira whispered as she cinched Sibyl into a corset that crushed her ribs and forced her breath up high in her chest. “I’m surprised the MacFalon will still have ye.”
So was Sibyl. She had yet to see Alistair, but she was being groomed and dressed for him. They had started calling him “the MacFalon” in her absence. She wondered at that—his men hadn’t the respect for him they had for his father, at least that had been the case when she left. But things had changed and she couldn’t quite understand why or how.
“Yer t’be married t’im today.” Moira nodded as the women brought in Sibyl’s wedding dress, the train so long it took four of them to bring it all in.
“Today?” Sibyl felt her knees go weak at the thought, at the sight of that wedding dress she couldn’t imagine wearing. “But I must speak with him!”
“Ye’ll have plenty of time after yer married fer that.”
“You don’t understand,” Sibyl whispered. She had been on MacFalon land already for over an hour. If he didn’t let Laina go—and soon—the wulvers would come looking for her, armed and ready to do battle. “He must let her go.”
“Her?” Moira raised her bushy white eyebrows. “The she-wolf?”
“I hear she threw herself on a spike when one of the men tried to... be with her…” One of the other girls whispered. Sibyl recognized her as one of the kitchen maids. Moira had enlisted extra help today, since Sibyl was to be sewn into her wedding dress.
“No,” Sibyl whispered, looking between the two younger women with wide eyes as they snugged Sibyl’s gown down over her hips.
“Why would ye?” The dark-haired scullery maid gasped in shock at this news. “It’d be like lyin’ wit’a dog!”
“Well I would’na mind bein’ wit’ one,” the blonde remarked with a grin that showed a considerable gap in her teeth. “If he was hung like a dog…”
All the women cackled at that and Sibyl couldn’t stand it another minute.
“Where is Donal?” she asked. There was no one else who would listen to reason. Maybe she could talk to him, if they weren’t going to let her see Alistair before the wedding.
“Alistair has had him locked up down the hall,” the gap-toothed blonde told her, arranging Sibyl’s long train behind her.
“He came ta the defense of the she-wolf,” the dark-haired one snorted. “He did’na want ’er harmed. He said if they broke the wolf pact, the wulvers would come for ’er…”
“Of course they will come for her.” Sibyl rolled her eyes, glancing at the open door. Half her train was still stuck in the hallway.
“Come back ’ere!” Moira called as Sibyl grabbed a knife off the table, where the maids had put a tray of bread, meat and cheese, and stalked out of the room.
Sibyl ignored the maids and Moira, wading through the fabric of her wedding dress toward the man standing at the end of the hallway. It was the one called Gregor—the same one who had thrown her over his saddle, who had pulled up her plaid to spank her in front of the men, and who likely would have done more, if another man hadn’t ordered him to take her inside.
“Where is Laina?” She held the dagger up, snarling at the guard. “The wolf—the wulver. The she-wolf. Where is she?”
“I… I do’na know,” he stammered, glancing down the hall at the maids, who gathered up the length of Sibyl’s train as they made their way toward them.
“Who do you guard behind this door?” she demanded to know, still brandishing the knife.
“Sibyl?” came a muffled voice. “Lady Blackthorne?”
“Donal!” She brightened at the sound of him, pounding on the door. He pounded back, definitely behind it.
“Me brother wants war wit’ the wulvers!” he called. “Let me out of ’ere!”
“Let him out,” Sibyl told the guard. “Do
it. Now.”
“I can’na.” The man mopped his greasy brow with the back of his hand, frowning at her. “I’ve me orders.”
“Come back now, ye hear me?” Moira tugged at Sibyl’s train—the women had caught up. “Come get ready fer yer weddin.”
“You will open this door,” Sibyl insisted, hand wrapped around the hilt of the knife, pointing it straight at the man’s chest. “Or I will stab you straight through the heart with this before you can even draw your sword.”
The women behind her gasped, but Sibyl ignored them.
“Do not test me,” she snapped, eyes flashing.
The guard took one look at Sibyl’s face and then fumbled for his keys. He undid the big padlock and Donal rushed out of the room, knocking the man flat on his back, the wind escaping his throat in a hiss.
“Stay down,” Donal instructed, drawing the man’s sword before he could even think about getting up.
“Donal, you have to help me,” Sibyl begged. She knew he would listen to her—especially now that she’d discovered Alistair had him locked up. “Your brother has broken the wolf pact. Do you know where Laina is?”
Just the mention of the woman’s name brought tears to Sibyl’s eyes.
“Lady Blackthorne, ye must come wit’ me.” Moira wasn’t just pulling on Sibyl’s train now, she was yanking on it. “I must get ye ready fer yer weddin’!”
“I will worry about my wedding later!” Sibyl cried, grabbing a yard of the fabric attached at her waist and yanking it back, making the older woman stumble. “Right now I have more important things to concern myself with!”
“How d’ye know of the wolf pact?” Donal asked, frowning at the guard still on the ground as he inched his way past Sibyl, the fabric of her dress making it difficult to move along the floor.
“I have been living with the wulvers this whole while,” she explained, hearing the maids gasp again. That little piece of gossip would keep them going for years, she thought. “Do you know where she is? If he will just let her go, war can be avoided.”
“I do’na know.” Donal shook his head. “I came t’her defense, and I ended up locked in ’ere.”