Reggie saw him coming, but still he startled. “Gods,” he muttered, and eased his grip on his sword hilt when he realized he’d lifted it prepared to swing.
Connor had nocked and drawn his bow, and the wolf didn’t react to the arrow pointed at his chest. “Alpha says the city is clear. He’ll meet you beyond the far gates, in the trees.”
Several beats passed before Connor lowered his arms and said, stiffly, “All right. Thank you.”
The wolf nodded, melted back into the shadows, and then was gone without a sound. Reggie didn’t know if he shifted back into his wolf shape, nor did he care. Could only hope that one of two things would happen: either the shifters would stop making his skin crawl, or they’d return north the moment the fighting was done. Neither was likely to happen soon.
“Is that ever not going to annoy the piss out of me?” Connor muttered, and pressed forward.
~*~
Alpha did his best to hunker low and crawl beneath the thickest of the tree branches that barred their path, but Amelia still caught one across the face. She got her hand up in time to take the brunt of impact, and Alpha halted straight away to crane his neck around and purr an inquiry.
She plucked a stalk of pine needles from her helmet’s chin strap and then patted his neck. “It’s fine. Carry on.” He did, tucking down even lower, so his already-strange walking gait became the unsteady rolling of a choppy sea.
The soil here around Merryweather made farming difficult. A few hearty crops, such as onions, garlic, and potatoes, were grown in terraced hills clear-cut into the slopes, but the city’s main contribution to the crown—before the war—was minerals. Dozens of mineshafts littered the forests beyond Merryweather’s wall, accessible via narrow, twisting footpaths, down one of which she now rode her drake, clad in armor, bearing two swords, a variety of knives, and even a tabard strungup behind her saddle. Valencia walked ahead of them, Marigold behind. None of the drakes liked the arrangement, all of them itching to take to the sky, but Amelia knew the importance of waiting. The moon was too high, too bright tonight, their outlines too stark against a silver-washed sky. If there were archers on the walls, or scorpions in the yard of the chateau, one of the drakes could be struck. It was a risk none of them were willing to take, though Amelia’s gut twisted with worry over the men.
After a few more close calls with low-slung branches, they arrived at a slope, and a yawning black opening in the side of it, its edges braced with wood in a slanted makeshift lintel. A mineshaft.
Valencia thrust her head inside, and then breathed fire. Amelia could hear thewhoompand rush of the flames igniting, and then the shaft filled with a brilliant orange glow, so bright it left her eyes watering. She squinted and caught a glimpse of carved-out walls, an earth floor, and part of an old abandoned cart. No sign of enemies, though.
Satisfied, Valencia withdrew her head, smoke curling from her nostrils, and then scrambled up over the lintel to sit at the peak of the hill. She stretched her neck up and turned toward the city walls, and the road that snaked uphill above it, acting as lookout.
Amelia shifted in the saddle, peered through the trees, and spotted a scattering of tiny, glowing rectangles of gold. The chateau windows.
The Sels inside were awake.
Inside her heavy, armored glove, the wound on her hand started to burn.
~*~
A quarter mile up the road from Merryweather’s rear gates, Prince Leif waited, human-shaped, in a cluster of small trees. “I sent men ahead to the chateau,” he said by way of greeting. “There are Sels inside. Drinking. Enjoying the favors of what are clearly Southern women taken prisoner. There’s a pair of guards at each gate, but none on the walls. They aren’t expecting us.”
“When you say drinking…” Connor began, voice skeptical.
The wolf standing beside Leif said, “Some of them are passed out on the floor. One was dancing. Others are fucking women.”
Reggie’s belly turned to ice. The forest around him closed in, tight, andhot. Hot as a fire, smothering as dozens of hands, grasping, pinching, pulling, pinning him down. Phantom pain lit him up from the inside out; the pleasant ache from his last coupling with Connor was now a spike of hot agony, forcing, tearing. He opened his mouth to scream a protest, and could only gasp, and weakly at that.
“…eg. Reggie.” A hand touched his face, and he blinked, and he was standing on the roadside, the moon a fat white pearl overhead, shining in the brown, concerned eyes of the man standing opposite him.
“Reg,” Connor said again, quietly, just for him, though the wolf ears of the shifters could doubtless hear every word spoken, and just how tenderly. “Are you with me?”
Reggie licked dry lips and managed to croak out a “yes.” He felt the noose around his neck, strangling him. But when Connor’s other hand landed on his chest, heavy and reassuring through his layers of clothing, the sensation began to ease. “Yes. I’m here.”
“Did you hear what he said? About the drinking? And the being passed out?” He rightly didn’t mention the fucking,though Reggie’s mind leaped straight back to it and nearly sent him spinning back into memories.
“Wait,” he said, a thought striking, and clutched at the front of Connor’s tunic. “That doesn’t sound like Sels.”
Connor’s brows lifting, inviting elaboration, and he nodded, and his little smirk was proud.
“That doesn’t sound like them,” Reggie repeated, stronger now, and stepped around Connor to face the prince. “The Sels are incredibly disciplined. They drink wine, but never to excess. They—they rape, yes, but it’s about power, and humiliation, and demoralization, and not about base pleasure. I find it hard to believe they’ve given over to debauchery in this instance.”
Leif frowned, and cocked his head. “This is a remote location, and not an important one. Perhaps this is a less disciplined company.” But he sounded worried.
“Perhaps,” Reggie agreed. “Or perhaps it’s a trap.”
“They could hide men from sight,” Leif said, “but not from scent. We found no ambush waiting along the walls, not inside nor outside of them.”
