“And we plan to honor her with a feast?” Aksel mused, looking more confused than murderous.
Then it was chaos. Everyone talked at once, voices rising, climbing over each other. They gestured wildly at me as though I were some unwanted mongrel that had slipped into the room and piddled on the floor.
Except Vetr. He said nothing. Stood as silent as the first snowfall in winter, his eyes a cold wind moving over me.
“She should be banished,” Aksel suggested, his clarion skin flashing, the lustrous yellow peeking out beneath his human skin as he pointed a damning finger at me.
“Banished? For such a crime?” Anders snarled. “Come now! Execution is more fitting!”
“I did not nurse her back to health just to kill her,” Brenna protested.
“Can we really afford to lose a potential breeder for the pride?” Arran asked evenly, and I supposed I should be grateful he was not demanding my death, but his words curdled inside me like sour milk. I did not welcome the suggestion that I should be allowed to live because of the value placed upon my womb, even if it did save my life.
“If she brings ruin and death to us all?” Anders raged, nodding his head furiously. “Yes! Yes, I say we lose her! I say we undo all of Brenna’s work andburyher in a deep,deepfucking hole.”
The vehemence of his words pulled at me like a curse, a spell cast from the lips of a wrathful witch.
I felt my eyes, already huge in my face, grow impossibly wider when he surged forward past Harald and reached for me as though he would seize me and pull me from my sickbed and fling me into that hole himself.
Suddenly Vetr was there, between us, blocking Anders from reaching me. He flattened his hand wide on the skeppar’s walllike chest. Then, as though he had conjured a bone dagger from nothingness, Vetr pressed the weapon to Anders’s throat. “If you succeed and throw her into a hole, it will mean you’ve gone through me to do it.” Vetr’s flesh shimmered silver, winking in and out, the change upon him.
Anders’s responded in kind, his black skin rippling in a wave of glittering yellow.
My breath caught and held in my heat-swollen lungs.
Silence descended again.
Anders, an onyx like Harald, towered over most at close to seven feet. Vetr stood a few inches shorter but was no less formidable. Menace vibrated from him, and the air in the infirmary shifted, cooling, thickening with curling mist.
Anders looked confused. He sent a questioning glance to Harald, who answered with a swift shake of his head and eyes that seemed to convey that Anders needed to relent.
“Vetr, what she did—”
“You’ll not touch her. She was not raised in the pride,” Vetr cut in, pushing the blade a fraction closer to Anders’s neck. “She cannot be punished for what she did not know to be a crime.”
“Of course she can’t,” Brenna seconded. “Now put away your blade, Vetr. We’re all family here.”
Arran and Harald murmured in agreement.
Vetr took a step back and sheathed his dagger.
Anders still looked angry, but also uncertain. He lightly fingered his throat where a tiny drop of blood swelled on his skin. “Does ignorance of a crime negate the crime? It happened. We cannot pretend otherwise. The Terror of the Borderlands knows of her existence.”
I spoke up. “And yet no one believes him.”
Anders’s face screwed tight with impatience, his prismatic black eyes snapping. “That does not stop him from taking his army and hunting in the Crags, does it? Looking foryou. Looking forus. And what if he finds us? It will be the second Threshing. He will wipe us from the face of the earth.” He took a sharp inhalation and let that sink in. “Just as he’s increased the bounties on witches, he will destroy all and everything with the slightest whiff or suspicion of magic. Anything not human. Anythingdifferent. All will fall beneath him.”
His words rang out like a dark portent. I trembled, knowing them for truth.
“The Terror will be handled,” Vetr announced. “And then the talk of dragon will fade.”
“Oh?” Brenna frowned. “Youwill handle him?”
Vetr nodded once, hard.
“How will you do that?” Harald asked very reasonably, possessing none of his mate’s high temper. “As a human, you will not be able to get anywhere near him … and as a dragon, well …”
Harald’s voice faded, but we all understood. If Vetr went after Stig as a dragon, it would be a spectacle and counter to all efforts to keep our existence a secret. Nothing about it would be discreet.
