He chopped the side of his hand against the captain’s wrist, right at the join between the plates of his gauntlet. His grip loosened, and Cassius snatched up his bloodied shortsword.
He hadn’t touched a sword in weeks, and it weighed heavier in his hands than he remembered. But deeply-ingrained habit and instinct powered him past his physical weakness, and he swung hard, and true, and struck the captain in the neck, blade burying itself halfway through.
He lurched backward a half-step when he ripped the blade free; it had bitten into bone, and took no small effort to withdraw. The severed arterials fountained blood in pulses; it steamed in the cool evening air; it splashed Cassius’s hand, his wrist, and poured in scarlet rivulets down golden armor.
It was lovely as a painting, the sort he’d glimpsed fleetingly when he’d drawn palace duty, horror etched with glamor.
The third soldier, the one still standing just inside the tent, roared and charged.
Behind him, Cassius heard the second, a flurry of clanks and thumps from his armor as he scrambled to assist his doomed commander.
The captain tumbled to the ground, gurgling and kicking in his death throes, and the man at the flap skirted around him. It offered Cassius the chance to snatch a spare tabard from the end of a cot, reset his footing, and meet his attack.
Sparks flickered when the Sel’s sword struck the tabard. It was steel, but thin, and dented, pinching in tight against Cassius’s arm. He grunted, and his feet slipped on pine needles, and he thought about all of his training. Made slow by their armor, their movements hampered by the pinch of metal joins, they were taught to bludgeon and overwhelm the enemy with quick, punishing strikes at heads, necks, shoulders, arms, torsos.
So Cassius ducked low, tabard held above his head and struck to the side of the petal-shaped flap that covered the soldier’s knee. The edge of the blade bit through trouser, and hose, and severed tendons.
The leg collapsed. As the soldier fell to his good knee, he brought the sword down hard enough to send the tabard spinning away across the ground. But Cassius was ready, and ran his own stolen blade straight through the man’s throat, in the narrow gap between gorget and helmet.
This time, the soldier spasmed so violently that he fell back and began writhing before Cassius could jerk his blade free. He staggered to his feet, panting, and spun, expecting to meet the fall of the third soldier’s sword.
Instead, he found the soldier lying on his side, arms and legs twitching, a long, narrow dagger jammed down his throat, blood puddling on the ground from his slack lips.
Lady Leda smoothed loose curls off her face and left a smear of blood on her forehead. “He was distracted by your…” She gestured at him, at the captain and soldier he’d killed. “And no sensible lady would walk around in a dress such as this without a dagger hidden on her person.”
She was wide-eyed, and her pulse throbbed visibly in her soft throat…but she grinned, sideways and amused. “Gods. That was satisfying.”
“Yes, it was,” Cassius agreed, and a strange pressure in his cheeks proved, when he probed them with bloody fingertips, to be a smile.
Shouts and the clash of steel rang out beyond the tent.
Still holding the stolen shortsword, he wiped his free hand on the front of his tunic and offered it to her. “My lady, I believe we’d best seek shelter.”
“Yes.” To his shock, she laid her hand in his. “I believe we should.”
~*~
Ragnar had not yet expressed with words how painful it was to be left behind by the rest of the pack, but surely Leif could detect it; he could certainly catch a whiff of misery coming off himself. Explaining the sensation to a human would have proved impossible, because it was not a petulant, human sense of missing out on a shared experience. No, this was grief. This was a loneliness so acute it left his stomach shriveled, and hisskin itching, and his bones howling, morose, and fractious, and devastated. Too far away to scent, to sense, to feel, his pack might as well have been dead, and here he sat alone, a trapped, caged wretch with no hope of feeling the sun on his face again. All the fine hairs on the back of his neck and between his shoulders stood on end, hackles refusing to smooth so that he couldn’t stop twitching, and shifting, and giving up all pretense of rest; every few minutes he got up to pace laps around the rough tent where he’d been left to wait. He’d tried arguing that, even if he couldn’t shift, he could still fight, and his senses were still keener than the humans’. But Leif had insisted he remain, and so remain he did, slowly going out of his mind.
He asked himself, in that bleak span of time, if he would still bite Leif the way he had, if he could go back and do it all over again. Even as he scratched at the raw, irritated skin beneath his torq, he found that the answer wasyes, and he marveled at the turn of his own sentiment. He’d turned soft.
No, an unhelpful voice in the back of his head chimed in,you were already soft. Isn’t that why you were always so terribly angry with Erik? Why you covet his son?
Before Leif’s turning, no such voices had ever encroached upon his conscience. Never before had he coveted something he’d actually been able to obtain. That he was afraid to lose.
His fingertips pricked with pain as his nails lengthened, darkened, and the torq strangled him lightly as he let his claws come down, and raked them down a tree trunk, leaving deep, fresh marks behind. He gasped afterward, head spinning, breath burning in his lungs, but the fat curls of bark littering the forest floor were satisfying to see. He was still a wolf; the beast still dwelled within him, trapped beneath his skin, waiting for its moment to strike.
Already hypersensitive because of his pack separation, Ragnar felt it at once when the atmosphere changed. A shift inthe pressure and quality of the air; an intrusion, something there amidst the camp that shouldn’t have been. It reminded him of the sensation that came just before a thunderstorm…but not quite. And it was familiar, though he’d felt it only twice before.
Sel magic.
His scalp prickled, tight and painful, and his heavy wolf pelt tried to bristle through smooth skin, so forcefully his vision grew spotty before he could clamp down on the instinct.
He turned, and breathed deep, and smelled that ugly, ozone stench of the portal that had opened up on the roadway and poured drakes and soldiers across their path.
“Oh, bollocks,” he muttered. “Fuck.”
Shouts erupted, at least fifty feet away. Surprise, alarm, and then pain.
