by Jessi Gage
Hand at her chest, she said, “Where are whom, Magnus?”
“You’ll call me Sire, like everyone else,” he growled, “And you know damn well I’m talking about the children. You’ll tell me where they are, and you’ll tell me now!” His shout echoed off the stone.
Diana feigned a look of shock. He repressed the urge to wring her neck. “Which children?” She sounded confused, the manipulative actress.
“Do not pretend you know nothing of this. You’re always involved when conspiracies are afoot. Where. Are. The. Children!”
She backed up to the wall of the cell. “Magnus—Sire, I truly have no idea what you are talking about.”
“No more lies, woman. I know you saw Alexander this morning. I know you were in on Bilkes’s escape. You’ll be in on this too. If I have to ask again, you’ll lose your hand, just like Ari.”
She paled. Her slender throat moved with a swallow. “Sire, if I can help, I truly will. Please, tell me which children you mean. Is Alexander among them?”
She continued to pretend ignorance. Magnus roared with rage. “Guards, take her to the interrogation room.”
They did not hesitate in obeying his order. The cell was opened, and two pairs of hands dragged a struggling Diana toward the dungeon’s entrance. One of the abandoned wings led to the room where Magnus had begun Ari’s interrogation by chopping off his right hand then commanding him to confess to the coup lest he lose the other.
“Magnus!” Diana sounded genuinely terrified. Good. He didn’t plan to actually harm her, but he needed her to believe he would. “Sire! If I knew what you were on about, I would tell you. Truly!”
“Sire.” Neil called out to them as they passed his cell.
He paused while the guards continued to the interrogation room. “What is it?” he asked shortly.
“What’s this about? Children are missing? Which ones?” Neil asked.
Magnus wiped a hand over his face. By the moon, he needed rest. “All of them. Every last one. Disappeared without a trace from the schoolyard.”
His former war chieftain paled. After a moment’s shock, he stroked his beard and said, “No such thing as without a trace.”
Magnus nodded. “That’s why I need Diana to confess what she knows.”
“Well, don’t go cutting off anything that won’t grow back. I think she’s telling the truth this time.”
“How do you know?”
“Don’t know. But for all her selfish ambition, she’s devoted to Alexander. If he’s in danger, she’ll help all she can.” Neil’s words cooled his head.
He pinched the bridge of his nose. “You were right,” he confessed. “I cannot do it all alone.” Nodding with decision, he met the dark eyes of his former war chieftain. “Help bring the children home, and I’ll give you your freedom.”
Neil jerked his head back, as if he’d been punched. “Tell me you’re smarter than this. I can’t be your new second. I’m a fucking traitor.”
Magnus huffed. “Do not worry. That honor will go to your nephew. But you’re a good tracker, and an even better strategist. I fear there’s a battle to come, the likes of which we’ve never fought before. I’ll need you standing with me. Can I count on you?”
Neil drew himself up to his full height, nearly half a head taller than Magnus. With a steady hand, he made a fist over his heart. “Aye, Sire. You can count on me.”
* * * *
Travis hugged himself as his brother issued orders. Bitter cold blanketed the great hall of the abandoned fortress Alexander had claimed as their headquarters. He might have mentioned they were going to northern Larna’s Black Mountains—a misleading name, since the range was always covered with snow. They were all dressed for the mild, wet winters they were used to in Marann, but none of them had been prepared for this bone-chilling, finger-numbing cold.
“Blue party,” Alexander said, his voice ringing off the black stone of the great hall. “You’re on fire detail. Red party, you’re hunting. Find us some dinner. Green party, you’re on cleaning detail. Sweep this place out and drag down whatever furniture you can find. Seal up the windows with tapestries. Until the weather warms, we’ll huddle in here for eating and sleeping. Yellow party, scout the area and familiarize yourself with the grounds. Bring in snow for melting, then search the fortress for usable supplies. You have your orders. Let’s go!” He clapped his hands and joined the oldest boys with the red party.
Travis huffed warm air over his icy hands and set off to find the kitchen, and a broom. Being in the youngest cohort, the green detail, he was happy to remain indoors and carry out familiar chores. He would pretend to cooperate for now and use the time to plan his next move.
It hadn’t been difficult for Alexander to convince every last child to meet at the abandoned school yard for a meeting this morning. Many of them, Alexander included, had abandoned their duties to do so. Then, showing he’d inherited Ari’s talent for public speaking, Alexander had spouted propaganda that turned Travis’s stomach but seemed to energize the other children.
The kitchen was a garbage-strewn, frost-covered room with a hearth at one end and a butcher block in the center. At least he thought that’s what it was. At the moment, it looked like a mound of frost topped with dented pots and pans. Shuffling through inches of snow, blown in from the window and open door, he started digging through piles of stiffly-frozen rags, broken utensils, and dried leaves. There had to be a broom in here somewhere. Though a shovel might prove more useful.
While he searched, his mind replayed the scene from a few hours ago.
“Every one of us has spent our youth serving the ladies,” Alexander shouted from his elevated position on a climbing tower. “But will we ever get a chance to breed with them? No! By the time the youngest of you are old enough, there won’t be any ladies left still able to breed.”
Looking around, Travis saw the other children nodding in agreement. He counted. All twenty-eight pups under the age of twenty were present.
“What about Anya?” an older boy named Linas hollered.
“What about her?” Alexander scoffed. “She’s not one of us. Her get won’t be pure wolfkind. It’ll be smaller. Weaker. Shorter-lived. And how do we know it’ll be female?”
Travis was not surprised to hear Alexander taking up his father’s torch for Breeding First, but this purity nonsense came as a shock. Sure, Travis had heard grumblings about Anya not being wolfkind—especially from his mother, but most were pleased there was a pregnant lady among them. Most wanted their people to live on, mixed blood or not.
He had not known Alexander cared one way or the other. But then, he didn’t spend much time with his brother, not when there was so much to do between his lessons and seeing to Anya’s needs.
“Are we content to trust our future to a race we know next to nothing about? To a king who worships an archaic goddess? If Danu exists today, where is she?” He motioned and looked around himself, as if inviting Danu to make herself known. The action struck Travis as blasphemous, but no one else seemed bothered. “Where is her blessing? What kinds of fools continue to rely on a deity that shows no interest in them?”
“If we want to survive, we must carve our own path. We must take matters into our own hands.”
Nods and murmurs of approval filled the schoolyard.
“No more will we serve those who deny us a future! No more will we accept the lies our elders tell us.”
“What lies?” Ruben asked.
Alexander met the eyes of each child as he answered. “We have been told over and over again that the only females in existence are here in Chroina. Yet just two moons ago, twelve new females were found in Larna.”
“Human females,” someone scoffed.
“The point is,” Alexander said, “King and council were wrong. The point is there are more females out there, and they can be ours for the taking. If we’re brave enough. If we work together.”
“What females?” Craiden asked. His scruffy face twisted wi
th skepticism. He was the second oldest among them, his twentieth birthday only weeks away.
Alexander paced to the end the platform where Craiden stood, feet planted and arms folded. “There are females in Larna,” he said with a toothy smile that made the hackles on Travis’s neck rise. “And they’re ripe for breeding.”
“Boar-shit,” Craiden spat.
“I can prove it,” Alexander said. “All you have to do is come with me on a short journey, and you’ll see. Our elders don’t want us to know that there are females to be had. They think they’re lesser because they’re Larnian. But I say they’re a far sight better than human women. They’re Larnian, yeah, but they’re one-hundred-percent wolfkind. They’re part of us. They carry the same blood as us in their veins, and they’ve been hidden from us all our lives!”
“How do you know this?” Ruben’s measured voice cut through the rising grumbles. Though not the oldest, the others always seemed to look to him as their leader.
“I know because I’ve had my ear to the ground. I pay attention. I read between the lines. And—” Alexander paced while he spoke, but stopped dead center to make eye contact with the children on the outskirts of the group. “Because I’ve seen them.”
A collective gasp lifted on the cool breeze.
Alexander spread his arms like Travis had seen their father do. “We have the opportunity today, right now, to make a stand. To say to the council, to say to Magnus ‘We Will Not Walk Calmly into Extinction!’ We may be young. We may be overlooked. But if we work together, we can Change. The. World!”
Cheers soared into the sky. The other children were soaking up Alexander’s rhetoric. One voice Travis recognized as belonging to Julian, Riggs’s youngest brother, said, “What’s your plan, Xander?”
Alexander grinned. Holding his fist high over his head, he opened his fingers. Between his forefinger and thumb was the gemstone that had been stolen from the temple that morning. “We take a little journey, friends. We show our elders that they cannot overlook us anymore. And we claim what’s ours!”
Beneath a pile of straw and broken jugs, Travis’s frozen hand met a wooden handle. Shifting debris aside, he found not a broom, but a pitchfork. “Good enough,” he muttered. Taking the tool to the great hall, he started to make a plan. He had to get back to Marann and tell King Magnus where the children were. And that they had the red gemstone.
The only problem was the journey. The Black Mountains were on Larna’s northwest coast. Chroina was the crown jewel of Marann’s eastern harbor. The entire island of Eire stretched between. In the most pleasant weather, the journey would take two weeks on foot. Here it was the dead of winter, and Travis had no experience cutting a trail through wilderness.
Then there were the tales he and the other children liked to frighten each other with. Of course, they were all make-believe, but Travis couldn’t help his wariness at the thought of passing through the Larnian forests. It was said the mutant wolves rejected from Jilken’s breeding experiments roamed there, monstrous, murderous, and fertile enough to have maintained their numbers all these years.
He sank the tines of the pitchfork into a pile of bracken and garbage and began pushing it toward the nearest door.
I can’t do it alone. It’s too far. Too dangerous.
But he must. Otherwise, Magnus would have no idea where to look for them. The whole of Chroina was likely already turned inside-out with every able-bodied man searching for them.
I could try to take the gemstone from Alexander.
And likely be discovered.
Digging the pitchfork into a new pile, he tried not to let hopelessness sink as deeply as the cold had. Danu, he cried from his heart, please help me.
Chapter 18
“Took you bloody long enough,” was the greeting Duff received when he made his presence known to Seona after visiting Danu in her dream. “For a man wanting to wed one lass, you’re spending a fair amount of time with another.”
Earlier, he’d explained what he knew about her and Danu swapping bodies, a fact she’d accepted with the predictability of a woman who had known precious little luxury in her life.
“I’m a goddess,” she said, running her hands over her body. “How powerful am I?”
“You have no power whatsoever,” he said honestly, because Hyrk’s bars made it so. Though technically, if she were free, she would be quite powerful indeed. Certainly more powerful than him. But he was a trickster, after all, and tangling the truth came as easily to him as breathing. “Long ago, Danu created a relic to hide her power from Hyrk.” He did not specify the relic contained only the portion of her power that sustained the wolfkind people. “She gave it to me, and I saw it safely to the mortal realm, where Hyrk will never find it.”
“So the power that is rightfully mine is in a—a relic? What is a bloody relic?”
He clucked his tongue at his power-hungry bride-to-be. “A relic is an embodiment of an immortal’s power. You’ve touched one. Remember the red gemstone?”
The dungeon’s shadows did not prevent him from seeing her face grow deathly pale. “Aye. I remember.”
“That, love, is Hyrk’s relic. Danu’s relic is what allowed your sister to communicate with Riggs when she arrived in the wolfkind realm. It is what allows King Magnus to communicate with you and the other women from your realm.”
“I thought you said Danu gave the relic to you. How did my sister get her hands on it?”
“I gave it to her. I sensed she would need it, and I was correct. I’m often correct, you’ll find. And you can trust me on this: the power within Danu’s relic belongs to Danu. What ‘rightfully’ belongs to you is death, my dear, since Hyrk threw you from a cliff.” She sucked in a breath, but he did not temper his rebuke. This woman needed a man with a strong hand to lead her on the right path. He was that man. “You’ll remember what’s rightfully yours when you speak of the goddess in whose body you dwell. But—” He softened his voice. “Once we are wed, you’ll have all that is mine, and I will have all that is yours. What power we find ourselves with, we will use together. For our good and for the good of others.” That was every bit the truth, and he meant it with all his heart.
Seona had grumbled but eventually agreed that if she was suddenly granted a goddess’s power, she wouldn’t know the first thing to do with it. That was when Duff had sensed his magic calling him to his friend’s dream. Heeding the summons, he’d told Danu about the blond boy who’d helped Seona and Bilkes escape. Now he had returned to Seona and was eager to resume their conversation.
Reclining in a shadow as comfortably as the sharp rocks would allow, he said, “Tell me, love. Why do you hate wolfkind so much? There has to be more than what you suffered at the hands of that shite-bastard Bantus.”
“More than that? Are you mad?” Her furious screech echoed off the dungeon walls. “Was that nay enough?”
He regretted the implication of what he’d said. He hadn’t meant it like that. “My apologies. What you suffered was horrible. Despicable. Unforgivable. What I meant was that you are a smart woman. You know that one evil man does not make an entire race of people evil.”
She was quiet for so long he thought she wouldn’t answer, but at last, she spoke. “’Twas more than one man.” Her voice slid over the stones, sad and wet with tears. “I was shared.” She sniffed.
Duff was glad Bantus was dead. He only wished his death had been more painful. An eternity of agony wouldn’t be punishment enough for what he’d done to this woman—and the others. “You’ll never be harmed like that again. I vow it.” His vision pulsed red with fury. He almost forgot the question that had started this line of conversation.
Until Seona said, “You are correct. ’Twas more than the violence in Larna that makes me hate them all.” She wiped her tears away, and her gaze turned hard as ice. “You think I dinnae understand there are groups of those wolfmen? Two opposing clans. Anya has explained it to me more times than I can bear to recall. The Larnians are the ones
who held us. Who—who abused us. But she acts like the Maranners wear robes of white and bloody halos atop their shaggy heads.”
She scoffed. “That moldering bastard Ari was a Maranner. A sweet-talking, finely-dressed Maranner who lied as smoothly as the devil when he put on a snakeskin. And like that simpering idiot Eve, I bit right into his apple. Promised I’d be consort to a king if I came with him. Promised me riches, power. And I was fool enough to believe it.
“And then there is Magnus.” She bit out the king’s name as if it were a thorn in her tongue. “He had in his possession the very magical gem Ari used to bring us women over. Used the bloody thing to send us across leagues of mountains and lakes and forests as easily as a lass steps from one cobblestone to another. But does he use it to send us home, where we long to be most of all? No.” Her fists clenched. “He locks it in his bloody temple and says no one can use it. That was why I went along with that prisoner. I wanted to go home.” A tinge of sadness softened her ire.
She looked toward his shadow. He longed for her to be able to see him, the real him. If she could, she would see that he felt for her. He cared about her trials. He hated that she’d been deceived and abused, tortured.
Face resolute, she said, “The Larnians arena the only wicked ones. They’re all wicked no matter what side of their bloody island they live on. And dinnae suppose I think the men of my kind are good and pure. They’re wicked too. Every last one of them. Men. Are. Wicked. You’re wicked, too.” Her pointing finger was slightly off from aiming directly at him, and it made him smile sadly. “But at least you pretend to want goodness.” Her shoulders slumped. “All I wanted was to go home, where I understand the wickedness. Where I ken how to live with it.”
His heart cracked for this broken beauty. “Sweet darling,” he said, but he did not have a chance to continue. His spine straightened with the unmistakable knowledge that Hyrk had entered his residence. “Shite. He’s coming.”
