Beside Connor, Reggie pulled his hood and then his neckerchief up, so that only his eyes were visible. They glittered in the darkness, accusatory when they rested on Amelia.
Connor lifted a hand, and his Strangers fell in behind him like wraiths. Together, both lords and their band of wild outlaws threaded their way through the trees, and finally were gone from sight.
When they were gone, Leda sidled in close and whispered, “Do you think he’s watching?” She didn’t need to clarify who she meant.
“I have no idea,” Amelia answered truthfully, and that was why her skin was beset by fine tremors.
When she turned her head, Leda’s expression was grave, plain to read despite the darkness. “Safe travels, my lady.”
“Safe keeping,” Amelia said in return, touched her friend’s shoulder, and then went to ready Alpha.
~*~
In less than two hours, disaster struck.
9
Leif could tell from the tree line that the small, close-quartered city of Merryweather was abandoned save for rats and a few huddled, illness-stricken wretches sleeping wrapped in blankets on shop floors. He shifted back to his human shape outside the city gates, and beside him, Sten did the same. He was the youngest, lightest, and quickest member of the pack, his fair beard only a scruff of stubble in the moonlight.
Leif said, “Go back down the road and tell the men the way is clear. The pack and I will go through the city, but they should keep well to the trees and meet us outside the far wall.”
“Yes, alpha,” Sten said, shifted, and darted back down the road.
The gates were barred, but not well: a rusty chain and a broken padlock dangling from its hasp. Slowly, trying to make as little noise as possible, Leif pushed them as wide as they would go without removing the chain entirely, then shifted once more, and slipped inside the city on four legs, the bulk of his pack following. He’d scattered men on either side of the walls to keep watch, ready to send up a howl of alert at a moment’s notice. The rest trotted close at his heels as they started down a cobbled road wide enough for two large wagons to pass one another.
The buildings here resembled the increasingly-rocky foothills around them: low, slate-roofed stone rowhouses and shop-buildings, none taller than two stories against the rough scrape of the wind that poured down off the mountains. The people who’d once lived and worked here had either fled or been taken captive: Leif could smell no blood, no slaughter. The only reek of decomposition came from animals, and it was a naturalscent, rats and birds and a few rabbits gone over to age or the harshness of winter.
The road led them to a town square with a stone-lipped well at its center. The bucket swung forlornly from its hand crank, thumping against the inner wood frame with a hollowthunkthat echoed off the stone around them.
Leif reared up on his hind legs to put his forepaws on the edge and peer down into the well’s depths. The water level was higher than expected, a smooth black swallowed nearly whole by the glaring white eye of the full moon overhead. His own reflection was nothing but a silhouette: pointed ears, furred neck. It rippled and blurred as a strong gust of wind funneled down the street from the hill above, stinging his eyes…and bearing the scent of men from father ahead.
Not just men, but Sels. Many of them.
Leif hopped down off the well, skirted around it, and continued up the street.
~*~
Connor led the way through the trees. Reggie didn’t begrudge him his more extensive woodland experience, nor the unswerving loyalty of the Strangers, who seemed to like Reggie by this point, but certainly didn’t respect him.
What troubled him tonight, as their dark-cloaked party dodged the bright shafts of moonbeams in the scrub forest that bordered Merryweather, was the way Connor had brushed off his voiced concerns about Amelia’s state of mind before their departure.
“The war’s starting to become real for her,” he’d said, whilst adjusting his belt, not even regarding Reggie’s frown with the proper level of consideration. “And she’s a woman,” he added, with a snide grin and a waggle of brows. “Don’t expect her to act rationally.”
“I’m beginning to understand why you’re forced to keep company with men these days,” Reggie had grumbled, and swallowed down what he wanted to say.
Connor had patted his cheek as he passed. “Get to, you mean.”
As they moved soft-footed over a carpet of pine needles, he thought again about the look in Amelia’s eyes when he confronted her at camp. Haunted. Hunted. A look he’d given himself in dozens of house party looking glasses before he tidied his hair, and splashed his face with cold water, and went back out to feign interest in the young misses thrust in his path by ambitious mothers.
The look of someone with a secret she was terrified to admit. That, he knew, had nothing to do with tonight’s mission, or the anxiety of warfare. Whatever she was hiding, it was personal, and she waspetrified, and Leda knew it, too, but was keeping her mouth shut, no doubt thanks to feminine loyalty.
This war frightened all of them in different ways. Reggie, for instance, was oily with sweat beneath his clothes at the very idea of being captured by Sels again, but all of them were frightened together. Honest with one another, aligned in their cause and free with information.
Until today. Until he saw Amelia clinging to the edge of her cot this morning, white as a ghost and shaky as spring shoots in a storm wind.
A twig snapped off to their left, and Connor raised a fist in the air, halting their party.
Something large stepped into a moonbeam with deliberate slowness: an Úlfheðnar clothed in furs.
