“For questioning,” she nodded. “Yes, I remember. Could it wait until we’ve had time to wash the dirt from the road from our skin? And I’m sure Finn would like something to wear that fits.”
When she turned to look at Finn, she watched the brothers regard one another. There were subtle shifts in their facial expressions, as if they were holding some secret conversation no one else could hear. Finn even stopped chewing for a moment, and then swallowed loudly.
Vilnjar gave an almost curt nod and decided, “We will meet with Hodon. We have nothing to hide.”
There was a hint of uneasiness in his voice, as if he expected her to protest, and then Logren promised, “No harm will come to either of your friends. You have my word.”
“What about the hunters who were pursuing us?”
Logren looked away from her, toward his little boy for a moment and then back to her again. “The same cannot be said for the hunters.”
“We will speak to Hodon.”
“I would like to be there when…”
“That won’t be necessary, Princess.” Finn held his hand up to interrupt her, the almost dominating gesture evoking an unexpected sense of nervousness inside her. “We can take care of ourselves.”
She knew they could; she had seen Finn in action twice now, but his declaration had startled her, and she actually felt as if he were trying to get rid of her. A self-conscious twinge of anxiety rose to the surface and her breath caught in her chest at the thought of Finn not wanting to be near her. For a moment she didn’t even know what to say or even why it bothered her so much that he’d more or less told her to butt out.
When his hand came down to rest on her arm, she felt almost as if he were using some kind of influence to calm her. She turned her gaze upward to look at him, and he smiled, but she wasn’t in the mood. Worse was the fact that she could feel Brendolowyn watching them, as if he were waiting for the right moment to leap in and rescue her. She turned to look at him and he smiled. She withdrew her arm from his touch and rose from the table, focusing her attention on Viina.
“I would give anything to take that bath now.” To relax into the hot pools and let the unwanted tension from her conflicted heart melt away. “You don’t have to interrupt your day to take me. I’m sure you have plenty to do without having to walk me all over the place so I don’t get lost. Just point me in the right direction and I’ll find my way.”
“Don’t be silly,” she smiled. “I have waited a long time for the opportunity to get to know my husband’s sister. I would be happy to take you to the bathhouse, if you don’t mind Roggi tagging along with us.”
“I would love to spend more time with Roggi.”
She didn’t look back at Finn or any of the other men around that table, but began walking toward the door to wait for Viina.
“Let me find you something to wear, and we’ll be on our way,” her sister-in-law called over her shoulder before disappearing back the long hallway with Roggi right behind her.
The men in the room were quiet, and she swore she could feel all their eyes on her. She felt a strange shift in her heartbeat that came on so suddenly it took her by surprise and it required everything she had not to react by lifting a hand to her chest to quell the startling surge.
A strange combination of anxiety and fear rippled through her, but it wasn’t coming from inside. It was Finn. He didn’t understand why she was suddenly so upset and it scared him. He was worried she was angry with him, didn’t understand how she could be, wondered what he could do to make her look at him.
Good, she thought. Let him wonder.
She wasn’t looking back, no matter how much his unanswered fears pained her. And they did pain her. That was the worst part of all. She could feel the distant flow of his emotions tangling with her own and it was a rare brand of torment.
To distract herself she tried to see out into the village through the small crack between the door and its frame. Bodily shadows passed by on the street and she could hear their voices. She attuned herself to them as best she could until Viina finally emerged from the hallway with a simple dressing gown much like the one she wore, Roggi excitedly trailing behind her asking question after question.
“Are you ready?”
“I am,” she nodded, a bit too eagerly.
The pressure of his emotions didn’t lift, even when they stepped outside the house and Viina closed the door behind them, but they lessened a little, and with every step they grew further from the house, Finn’s fears were less and less noticeable until she could almost no longer feel them at all.
But they were still there, underneath the surface, waiting for her to feel them again as soon as he was near.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
“And that over there is the bathhouse. After we meet with Hodon, we will head over there so the two of you can wash, and I’ve sent Viina to search for clean clothes that actually fit.” Logren snickered over at Finn, his amusement obvious from the glint in his eyes when Finn scowled and ducked his chin into his shoulder to bury his discomfort. “She will leave her findings with the attendant at the bathhouse.”
“I don’t know how much longer I can wear these pants if I ever want to father children,” Finn grumbled. “I think they are cutting off the circulation in my…”
“I know I’ve already said as much, but you’ve built quite a city here,” Vilnjar changed the subject, taking in the vast city again with a long, sweeping glance.
He leaned back and surveyed the buildings, sturdily raised from stone and heavy planks of wood, the slanted roofs layered in thick blocks of dried brown turf. Amazing, considering how far they would have had to travel carrying the supplies to build such a city, and in good time he would ask just how they’d managed to do just that. He didn’t believe it had been achieved with magic alone, but the size of Dunvarak alone, a city that appeared to stretch for several miles, suggested the arcane arts may have been the only way.
Each homestead had a garden plot teeming with rows of vegetables, and several housed corner stables filled with pigs, goats, chickens and a cow for milking. Hounds lingered outside the doors of several households, and he spied a few stray cats ducking into alleyways along the buildings in the merchant’s square, lurking and watching the fowl with greedy eyes and twitching whiskers.
Dunvarak was an overwhelming place, an unexpected surprise that could not possibly be fully appreciated under cover of darkness. He felt like some backwoods countryman seeing the world for the first time, even though he’d been as far as Leithe before his father was executed. He’d seen enough in his twenty-eight years that he’d come to know and love the hamlet he’d been raised in, but Drekne seemed almost pathetic when compared to Dunvarak.
How had they done it? Where had they gotten the resources? Such a place should not have been possible, and yet, there it was all around him. Silver sunlight streamed through the invisible barrier that kept the city hidden and warm, despite the frigid temperatures beyond their walls. Dunvarak felt warm and comfortable as the Edgelands in mid-spring. People they passed on the streets wore light clothing, the fabric made from wool spun so thin he wondered if they’d used magic in the process of making cloth as well. With only eleven mages in their midst, he found it hard to believe, but the evidence was undeniable. He even spied a few children running along the cobbled street without shoes on their feet, rushing through the four of them as if they were obstacles set up in their game of tag.
“Hey, hey, hey!” Logren called after them and the first child skidded to a halt, causing the two behind him to barrel into the boy. “No running through the walk! You know better.”
“Sorry, sir,” the oldest of the three boys straightened his shoulders. “We’re trying to catch Gildon’s cat, sir.”
Vilnjar leaned out just enough to judge the look on Logren’s face, the careful tightening of his lips and the narrowing of his eyes. It was as if he were gaging their statement for truth, and after deciding they were, in fact, telling t
he truth, he softened the tightness in his shoulders and nodded understanding. “Gildon’s cat will likely be moving away from people as they attend to their morning business. You might try in the alleyways.”
“Of course, sir,” the boy agreed. “We’re sorry we bothered you, sir.”
“No bother, boys, not this time. Just please keep others in mind when you’re preparing to race through the streets.”
“We will, sir.”
“Now run along.”
They started out slow, edging forward before breaking into fast-paced steps that led them toward the alleyway to the right. As Vilnjar followed their bustling bodies, his gaze scanned the streets again and a strange flutter of conflicted joy trembled through him. Children. Everywhere he looked there were children. He’d seen plenty of them the night before at the gathering in the hall, but in broad daylight playing in the streets, their numbers were overwhelming and they were beautiful. Four little girls crouched on the paving stones across the street, playing pebbles and filling the morning with their laughter. Three houses up another gathering of young people hiked themselves up onto the fence beams surrounding a hog pen to wait for a little boy slopping feed into the trough for his family’s two pigs.
It was astonishing, how the people of Dunvarak thrived while the U’lfer imprisoned within the Edgelands watched their race die off. One by one, the elders passed from the world and no children were born to replace them. The council’s answer had been to encourage non-mated pairings, and shortly before Lorelei showed up Cobin suggested they take that encouragement to the next level and begin arranging marriages in hopes of producing offspring to keep their people from dying out.
But the people of Dunvarak, the half-blooded U’lfer, who all but disappeared from their numbers shortly before Rognar and his men were taken captive, started over in a place that did not encourage growth, and their numbers swelled. It was astonishing.
How different life might have been for his family, his sister and brother, if they’d been raised in a place like Dunvarak, he lamented. Among such people, perhaps their mother might have even lived through the loneliness and grief of losing her mate and survived well into old age because she had a community to help her through it. Try as he might to continue convincing himself the Council of the Nine had community interest at heart, the distance his decision to follow Finn put between him and the council gave him new perspective. Cobin and the others, they weren’t trying to preserve their people or their traditions. He wouldn’t say they were purposely working against the survival of their own people, but it certainly was starting to look that way in his mind.
“How many people would you say live here in Dunvarak?” he asked.
“At last count there were around seventeen hundred. Why do you ask?”
“Seventeen hundred,” he gasped. “That’s… how?”
More than eight times the number of survivors left to eke out a meager living in Drekne. How was it even possible?
“A man willing to survive will do whatever it takes,” Logren said.
It wasn’t much of an answer, but with nothing more to go on for the time being, he continued to take in his surroundings with a sense of awe. His mother, who had always been very accepting of the outsiders brought into their walls by returning raiders, would have happily lived in a place like Dunvarak if she’d known it existed. Again, he felt sadness upon realizing she might have lived with such a community to uplift her after the loss of her mate.
Thinking of his mother always made him think of Ruwena. Rue would fare well in a city like Dunvarak too, a place where she was free to be herself. Perhaps there she might have even found a mate, if what he’d overheard Logren say during their travels was true. Barely an eligible woman over the age of twelve or under fifty. There was no shortage of people, obviously, but if they were all spoken for…
It was impossible to tell on first impressions if what he’d said were true, but the night before in the main hall he’d seen a lot of paired couples with small children, an overwhelming number of men and only a handful of maidens of marriageable age.
Though there had been that one beautiful young creature he’d spent a good deal of time watching. The nervous muscles in his stomach twitched when he thought of her, wondering if he would even see her again in such a vast city, and if so what could he possibly say to her?
They were carefully scrutinized when they made their way through the streets, wary eyes watching them pass by with Logren, as if they expected the U’lfer to jump out of their skin and rampage through the city in beast form. A few of them even seemed to scoff with distaste, the way many of the U’lfer had been known to do when in the presence of their half-bred brothers and sisters. Vilnjar didn’t let it get the best of him, but he could feel Finn’s temper brewing beneath the surface.
Vilnjar had never bought into all that prejudice, and judging from the number of people that filled Dunvarak, neither had half the men his father called shield brethren. Despite how rigidly his father adhered to the ways of the U’lfer warrior, he surrounded himself with U’lfer who’d taken wives and husbands not of the blood.
Rognar, for instance, had taken not one, but two human women as wives before he was executed, and had plans to reforge the U’lfer hierarchy to include those of half-blood. Men like Logren, Viln realized, turning a glance over in the other man’s direction, would have been given power. Had Rognar succeeded in his plan, he and Logren very well might have been sitting at a full council in Drekne planning their next raid, rather than stranded out in the middle of a frozen wasteland. In the end, his liberal attitude toward those of half-blood descent had been the very thing that turned the counsel against him and got him killed.
As much as he resisted the unexpected change Lorelei’s sudden appearance in Drekne brought to their lives, Viln thought he was finally starting to understand Rhiorna’s last words to him. They didn’t have to be a dying race, not if they banded together with those of the blood, no matter how thin the U’lfer blood that ran through their veins. And while he had no idea the extent of the task Yovenna had for Lorelei, it sounded as if there were a way the half-blooded could finally embrace their inner-wolves.
A way his brother might be instrumental in bringing about.
“I really don’t get her at all, Viln. One minute she’s hanging on my every word like I’m the most important guy in the world, and the next she’s in a huff with me and I don’t even know why. What did I do?”
He glanced over at Finn, his eyes rolling as he realized his brother was still moping about Lorelei’s silent departure. As experienced as Finn thought he was with the fairer sex, he certainly had a lot to learn about women.
“That is half your problem, brother? You really know nothing about women at all.” He nudged him with his elbow, but it barely budged the big ox.
“This coming from the guy who hasn’t been laid in at least two years,” he muttered. “I just don’t understand what I said that made her so mad at me.”
“Everything you seem to say makes her mad at you.” He wasn’t falling for his brother’s goading. Instead he snorted a laugh and lifted his gaze in the direction of the smithy across the street. “Maybe you should stop talking altogether if you ever want to win her ov...”
Vilnjar’s voice trailed into stunned silence and he stumbled a little over his own feet as he watched the fair-haired young woman he’d seen at the gathering the night before bring the heavy head of the hammer in her hand down to strike the glowing orange blade she was shaping on the anvil in front of her. She had her hair drawn back and tied at the nape of her neck with a strip of leather, and the pale, loose locks around her face clung to the beads of sweat that decorated her soot-smudged brow.
She was breathtaking, making his heart thump a little harder in his chest until Finn’s heavy hand jerked him back to reality and the present moment.
“Are you even listening to anything I’m saying?”
The gesture was startling, like being tugged from a b
eautiful dream, and he immediately felt the anger and regret of having been woken.
“Yes, your back hurts and she doesn’t even care that you sacrificed a good night’s sleep to protect her virtue.” He muttered, craning his head over his shoulder to get one last glimpse at beauty before his brother wrenched him away again. “You should have slept in the bed with her last night if she invited you to do so. The two of you have slept side by side nearly every night since we left Drekne. What difference does a bed make?”
“Are you kidding me? I’d probably have crushed her. She’s so tiny, I can’t even imagine what it would be like to… I mean, don’t get me wrong. I’ve imagined it, but the reality of it all would be a whole different story, I’m sure. She’d fit perfectly in my lap now that I think about it…”
Vilnjar shot him a disbelieving glare after he realized Logren’s nostrils were starting to flare. “The fact that she invited you to sleep anywhere near her after you kept the truth from her is a miracle unto itself. You were a fool to turn her down.”
Logren’s eyes widened with disbelief that they were having such a conversation about his little sister in front of him, and Vilnjar cleared his throat uncomfortably.
“All I’m saying is that her even still wanting to be near you after learning she is potentially stuck with you for the rest of her days is astonishing. Especially considering the fact that you weren’t honest with her from the start about it.”
“She is not stuck with him, not really,” Brendolowyn interjected, an arrogant tone in his voice that caused Finn to roll his eyes. “She has a choice in the matter of her future mate, even if he does not. And lying to her about anything is certainly no way to win her over. Honesty is the only way to truly win a woman’s love.” He turned a smarmy smirk toward Finn and added, “Now she will doubt you as long as she knows you, always wondering if you’re telling her the truth, or keeping secrets from her. If you ask me…”
“No one did ask for your opinion, Elf,” Finn sneered. “You should keep it to yourself.”
Edgelanders (Serpent of Time) Page 45
