Heart of Winter (The Drake Chronicles Book 1)

by Lauren Gilley

  She’d not spoken about John yet, not since his passing. Remembering him young, and laughing, and whole sent a dark shaft of hurt through her. She felt her smile slipping.

  But then Leif said, “He was raised as your brother, then? Oliver.”

  “Oh, yes.” She leapt onto the new subject, relieved to leave John behind. She didn’t want to start crying. “Mother liked to remind us that he was actually our cousin.” She rolled her eyes. “I don’t think she ever truly disliked him, but she wanted us to know what was what; that Oliver was different. “Uncle Alfred was worse. He was always ashamed of him. Embarrassed.” She heard the angry, sour note in her voice.

  “Because he’s a bastard?”

  “No, not at all. Because he thought he was weak.” A sideways glance proved that Leif was watching her, listening intently. She didn’t like the thought of talking about Oliver behind his back, but maybe this was a chance to sow some goodwill – maybe even some that would make its way back to the king.

  “Oliver looks a lot like his father, actually,” she continued. “Slender. They have the same face and eyes. But Alfred was a splendid warrior – if he wasn’t drinking or carousing, he was throwing himself at some fight or other. And he had a mean streak – he wasn’t a famous villain or anything, don’t get me wrong. But he wasn’t kind, not like Oliver. He didn’t care about people. Uncle William said it was because his wife died in childbirth – his son was lost, too – and that he was never the same after. But I don’t know. I think…” It was a terrible thing to say about the dead, about her own family.

  “What?” Leif prompted, quietly.

  “He lost a son, and his wife, but Oliver was his son, too. He should have loved him.”

  “Well. Um,” he hedged. “Some people show love differently, don’t they? My uncle is…well, you’ve met him.”

  She bit her lip, then turned to gauge his expression. “Have you ever doubted, though? Have you ever looked at your uncle and thought him loveless toward you?”

  He made a face. “No.”

  “He liked John, but he saw John as useful. John was a good soldier. John was legitimate – he could carry on the family name and legacy.” She drew in a breath, surprised by the way it shook. She was making herself far more upset than she’d expected. “I’m sorry,” he said, toying with a lock of her horse’s mane. It slid like silk through her gloved fingers. “I don’t ever talk about this and it’s…it’s difficult.”

  “No, I’m sorry. I’m sorry that your family…” He trailed off.

  And she shot him a rueful smile, one he returned, if uncertainly.

  “Thank you. It’s fine.” She faced forward again, between the horse’s relaxed ears, the view of fluffy snow, and Rune’s horse plunging through it ahead, leaving tracks deep as Yule Festival puddings.

  After a moment, Leif said, “You can tell me to step off – it’s none of my business. But when you say that Oliver couldn’t become a warrior because of his health…” He left it open-ended.

  Tessa frowned to herself for a moment, weighing Oliver’s privacy against her previously-hoped-for goodwill fostering. She decided to do what she never normally did, and run her mouth.

  “When Oliver was little, during the Second Great War with the Sels, Uncle Alfred took him to meet my father at the coast. That was when my father and your uncle agreed to their alliance. Oliver was only little, but Uncle Alfred wanted him to see war – nevermind that it wasn’t war at all, but only a war camp, and a campaign tent. They had to pass through the Neven Marshes to get there, and by the time they got back home, Oliver had come down with a fever. We thought it was only the flu, at first, but then, next year, the fever came back.”

  “Marsh fever,” Leif said, as understanding dawned. “Shit – oh, I mean–”

  She chuckled, and found him blushing when she glanced over.

  He cleared his throat. “He still has it?”

  “Far less frequently. If he wraps up in the cold, and doesn’t overtax himself too harshly – he can ride, and go for long walks, and swim in the lakes in summer. But it does still return, from time to time. Especially under great stress.”

  “That’s unfortunate.”

  “And entirely not his fault.”

  He smiled. “I didn’t say it was.”

  “Sorry.” She felt her face heat. “I’m protective of him, I suppose.”

  “And he of you.” He nodded, approving, and faced ahead, reaching to push back a branch and duck beneath it, snow raining down into his hair and onto his horse’s neck. “I think Uncle likes him.”

  “You do?”

  Leif chuckled. “I do. No one ever talks back to him. He – whoa.” He pulled his horse up sharply, and Tessa did the same.

  Ahead of them, Rune had reined his horse up sideways, and unslung his bow. Slowly, silently, he drew an arrow from the quiver he wore on his back and nocked it. It was only then that Tessa noted the stag fifty yards upwind, picking its way through the snow, pausing now and then to snuffle and dig for a bit of vegetation. It hadn’t scented them, or sighted them either, apparently.

  Rune’s horse was agitated, tossing its head, tugging at the reins he’d pinned beneath his thigh while he took aim.

  Leif hissed a quiet sound between his teeth, whether reproach or encouragement, Tessa couldn’t tell, not until she glanced toward his face and saw the grin slowly spreading there. He mouthed something silent, some bit of advice that he couldn’t voice without risk of spooking the deer.

  Disaster unfolded, then, in quick sequence.

  The wind shifted, a sharp gust funneling down through the tree trunks, dumping snow and tinkling ice crystals together.

  The horses all lifted their heads, and pricked their ears, listening. Behind them, Hilda’s horse let out a great loud snort of alarm.

  The deer echoed it, flinging up his own head, swiveling it. He snorted once, twice, white flag tail lifting.

  He smells us, Tessa thought.

  But, no, he smelled something else, the same thing their horses smelled, on the new breeze, and it made itself known a moment later when a low, rippling growl pulsed from the tree just beside her.

  Her breath caught. She turned her head, and met a yellow-eyed stare.

  “Wolves,” Leif said, like a curse.

  Then it was chaos.

  ~*~

  “Mr. Meacham.”

  The sound of the king’s voice launched him upright on his bench, where he’d slumped lower and lower over the densely-packed text laid before him. He lifted his head to find that he was alone in the library, and the candles had all but burned down, and dusk was falling beyond the windows, and, well, drat, he’d done what he so often did: gotten lost in books.

  Well, he was almost alone.

  Erik stood at one of the tall, iron candelabrum, lighting fresh candles with a spill from the hearth. He wore brown today – this evening, whatever time it was – and his hair was gathered loosely at the back of his neck, braids left loose down his shoulders.

  Oliver wondered if his hair was as soft as it looked. He swallowed against a suddenly-dry throat and said, “Hello.”

  “You seem to be on the verge of missing supper again.”

  “Just lunch this time.” He was hungry, now that he thought about it, his stomach empty and clenching.

  Erik’s smirk was not cruel. He flicked the spill onto the dying fire and said, “We should go down, then. You’re welcome to dine privately with us again. Perhaps we can start talking about contracts and alliances.” He tipped his head. “If your cousin thinks herself closer to a decision?”

  Oliver winced, because even if he hadn’t asked her yet, he was beginning to have suspicions. He said, “You’re free to ask her; she can be shy, but she’s always…” With a lurch, he realized he hadn’t seen her since she set off around midday with the princes. “I should go and see if she’s ready to go down. I haven’t seen her since her return.”

  Erik frowned. “Return?”

  Oliver st
ood, his pulse bumping just a little too hard. He’d been called a pessimist, but he preferred to think of it as having a sense for the edge of disaster. “She went riding with the princes.”

  “She did?” Erik asked, sharply.

  “Should…she not have?”

  “No, it’s only–” He gave a sharp, long-suffering sigh. “Those boys,” he muttered.

  “They’re young and eager – about everything,” Oliver said. “But I’ve not seen them behave in any sort of unseemly way toward Tessa.”

  “No, but.” Erik’s jaw flexed with obvious frustration. “I’ve spoken with them – Leif is twenty-two, he’s well past the age for boyish games, and Rune knows better than to turn this into some sort of competition.”

  Oliver thought of the conversation he’d overhead between Erik and Birger, Erik’s relenting, his assertion that he would let Tessa have her pick of the boys. He couldn’t admit to having witnessed that exchange, but it gave him hope that most of what he was seeing now was a kind of show.

  Oliver said, “What if Tessa and Leif don’t suit? What if her heart leads her in a different direction?”

  Erik’s gaze narrowed. “You want Rune to be the Duke of Drakewell?”

  “All I want is for Tessa to be as happy as she possibly can be.”

  The king studied him a moment, before his brow cleared, a quiet disbelief breaking across his face. “You’re serious.”

  “I tend to be, yes.”

  “Whatever her choice,” Erik said, “your family will be displaced either way. The next duke will not be a Drake.”

  “Lucky for me, I’m not a Drake either, so I don’t care about that.”

  Erik’s head tipped. Come on, his look said. You don’t believe that.

  “I’m only plain Oliver Meacham. Titles and legacies have nothing to do with me.”

  Erik didn’t look convinced.

  “I’ll just go up and see if she’s changed and ready for supper.”

  Someone slapped him on the back with a glad cry as he left the library – and then had to grab his elbow to keep him from staggering forward and smashing his nose against the opposite wall.

  “Whoa, whoa!” It was Magnus’s laughing voice. And when Oliver recovered, and turned, found him and his brother, Lars, kitted out and serving as Erik’s guard retinue this evening. “Sorry, lad, I don’t know my own strength sometimes.”

  Or my lack of strength, Oliver thought, sourly, but scraped together a smile. “Hello, Magnus. Lars.”

  “At the books, eh? It’s quite the collection, though I’m not one for reading myself.”

  Oliver didn’t think a king’s personal guards should be so talkative on the job – or, rather, he’d never seen such a thing before, and thought it might have said something complimentary about Erik that he didn’t put a stop to that sort of thing.

  He finally managed to extricate himself from the conversation, went upstairs – and found that Tessa was not in her room.

  “Back again so soon?” Magnus asked when Oliver returned to the library.

  “Yeah,” he said, distracted, and stepped back through the door. Erik was at a table with a book, but looked up sharply at the hurried sound of Oliver’s footfalls, a rhythm that matched the staccato beating of his heart. “Tessa’s not in her room.”

  “She’s not?”

  “No, and I don’t think–”

  Erik lifted a hand in a soothing gesture, and stood. “She probably just stopped for a mug of cider in the kitchens. We’ll go and see.”

  ~*~

  Tessa was not, in fact, stopping for a mug of cider in the kitchens. The space was composed of three levels, with stairs leading down from one platform, to the next, to, finally a domed-ceilinged chamber where round balls of bread dough sat rising beneath towels on a staggering series of racks. Oliver stood beside the king on the second platform, where staff chopped vegetables at long wooden tables and kitchen boys and girls toted them up to the top tier, where three cooking hearths roared.

  “No one’s seen them return,” Bjorn said, striding toward them.

  Revna groaned.

  Oliver closed his eyes and concentrated very hard on regulating his breathing.

  “I love my sons, but sometimes they’re idiots,” Revna said.

  “Where would they have gone?” Oliver asked, not proud of the way his voice shook, but not caring in the moment.

  “Nobody panic,” Erik snapped. And then, with a slight softening of his expression, “We’ll find them.”

  Oliver stepped in front of him when he turned to leave the room. “I don’t mean to disparage your nephews…”

  Erik’s brows lifted. “Then don’t.”

  Oliver held up a hand, when he started to step forward, keenly aware of the fact that Erik could pick him up like a toy and set him aside. He didn’t, though. “I’m only saying: they’ve been off together for hours, now. There will be talk.” He didn’t say: someone has to marry her at this point.

  “Not here, there won’t be,” Erik growled. “We don’t deal in gossip and backstabbing in the North.” He stepped around Oliver, and marched for the door.

  Oliver stood with his pulse throbbing painfully, anger and panic warring for supremacy, both leaving him shaky.

  “Mr. Meacham, are you coming?” Erik called over his shoulder.

  He stuffed it all down and hurried to follow.

  11

  In truth, Oliver liked riding. His spotty health had left him a poor swordsman and archer; naturally slender, it would have required constant, rigorous work to become a proper warrior, and the fever always seemed to sweep over him just when he began to make progress. But riding was as much about sensitivity and intuition as it was balance and strength, and so he’d enjoyed escorting his cousins on his fleet-footed mare, cantering over the gentle hills and splashing through lazy streams.

  This was to be an entirely different sort of ride.

  A covered, torchlit gallery offered a clear path to the stables, and Oliver hurried along in Erik’s wake. It was snowing, he could see through the arched openings, a lazy spin of light flakes, patches of clear sky still visible overhead as the stars winked to life. His belly drew so tight he couldn’t speak, not as Erik ordered mounts ready for them, nor demanded that someone make sure Oliver wasn’t going to “catch his death.”

  “Here, lad.” Magnus produced a heavy, fur-lined cloak from a cloak room at the front of the stable and slung it across his shoulders. “Make sure the hood’s up.” His smile was encouraging, but Oliver could only nod a response. He was given thick gloves, and then boosted up onto the broad back of a massive draft-cross gelding with white, feathered hooves, and a mouth that proved tough as an anvil when he played experimentally with the reins.

  Bjorn and Magnus lit torches that blazed and spit sparks against the stone walls of the stable.

  Erik gathered his reins, his own hulking mount pawing impatiently at the ground, and Oliver paused, a moment, in his spiral of worry, struck by the sight of him. Snowflakes swirled in on the breeze, catching his long, wild hair, blowing it like streamers back away from his face, so his regal profile was limned cleanly in the torchlight: the proud nose, the strong jaw, the high brow. Oliver had never before been made so consciously aware of the color of someone’s eyes, the way they burned like backlit jewels, always.

  Panic, he decided, was making him even more fanciful.

  “Let’s move,” Erik commanded, and then, before they did, glanced toward Oliver; locked gazes with him. “Hood.”

  Oliver scrambled to drag the fur hood of the cloak up over his head, and his horse lurched forward with the others.

  ~*~

  Tessa drew her cloak more snugly about her, for all the good it did, and tried unsuccessfully to keep her teeth from chattering. Her cloak was sodden; her dress was sodden; her boots were holding steady, the sturdy waxed leather and fur ones that Revna had loaned her. A small mercy for which she could be thankful – or at least try to be. The branch upon which s
he sat creaked ominously every time she shifted her weight. Her skirt had gotten rucked up, and the bark had scraped her knees.

  But she was alive, and that beat the alternative.

  Night had come on swift and bitterly cold, with just enough dappled moonlight through the patchy clouds to allow her to see the glow of white snow beneath her, and to see the white steam of her breath. It had started snowing, softly, only a light dusting, but she had no way of knowing if it would intensify – had no way of knowing if she could survive the night here, if it came down to that.

  A hard chill nearly sent her toppling off the branch, and she rubbed ineffectually at her arms through the wet cloak, shrinking down even more tightly within its clinging folds.

  I wish I was Amelia, she thought, eyes stinging again. Amelia would know what to do. She sniffed, and batted her lashes, and refused to give in to the tears that continued to threaten. Crying would do no good – the tear tracks would freeze on her face and give her frostbite.

  Of the two of them, Amelia had always been the braver. Not reckless and wild, not like Rune, the last glimpse of whom had been his gray mount plunging wildly through the snow, screaming, Rune’s bow flying out of his hand as the wolves gave chase. (She gritted her teeth against that vision; was he alive? Dead? Had the wolves…She shook her head.) No, Amelia had always known when to pull back, when to try a different tack. She could keep her head in a crisis, barking orders to those who’d frozen in shock or fear. Amelia would certainly have found something smarter to do than climb up a tree and wait there, shaking, freezing, straining for sounds of life.

  When the wolves first emerged from the trees, they’d surrounded their riding party.

  “Bless me,” Hilda had breathed, voice high and quavering with terror.

  Rune had shifted his aim from the stag as it fled, toward a wolf that slunk out from between two tree trunks. The wolves hadn’t pursued the deer – for whatever reason, they’d decided the humans on their heavy horses made for a better supper. He’d loosed his arrow – just as the wolf darted forward, and his horse reared.