“Very well,” he relents finally when neither Aurora nor I say anything more. “Let’s go.”
“Now?”
“Yes, it’s best if I have more time to maneuver you through the camp to shake any wandering, curious eyes, otherwise it might look suspicious if we leave here and you go immediately to my tent.”
“Send Conri to me if you need to buy time,” Aurora says as I stand. “Tell him I need to revitalize his magic.” Her eyes dart my way and she gives a wink. “Don’t worry, I won’t actually.”
“Thank you,” I say as Evander leads me out of the tent. Aurora gives me one more look of encouragement, one I leech off of as best I can and hold close to my heart. My gut tells me I’ll need it.
“We’ll take a walk around the camp,” Evander announces. “Give you a lay of the land.”
“Won’t the camp change every time we move?”
“Some of it will, but much remains the same. The tents are set up in the hierarchy of the pack…” He explains how Conri’s tent is always set up adjacent to the central area of camp—but not quite on the inner ring that circles the bonfire. His preference. Next to Conri’s tent is the pack alpha—or alphas, in case of multiple packs gathering at once. In circles out from there are the knights and favorites of the leaders. Then families. Then the footmen and more knights on the outer edge to protect the pack.
That’s where we end up: on one outermost edge, staring out at the grassy sea as the sky turns a blazing orange.
“Is there anything Conri doesn’t control?” Everything Evander said was hedged with, “so long as Conri wishes.”
He shakes his head, staring over the grasses. “The king is just that…a king. He rules all of us. The one true alpha, caretaker and life giver for all the packs. All he asks for in return is complete, and utter, subservience.”
I note how he doesn’t say loyalty. “Is that all?” I mutter.
Evander huffs with slight amusement at my dry tone. “That’s it.”
“Tell me, what was it like before the wolf king?” I think of Aurora’s story, that there was a time before the packs were united as one. That Evander was born in one of the last such dissenting packs.
“I wasn’t born then. I’m not that old.” He must be thinking the same thing.
“Are you sure? Given how curmudgeonly you are, I’d guess you’re at least a few thousand years.”
He snorts and shifts his weight, facing me. “How old do you think I am, Faelyn?”
I bring my attention to him, making a leisurely assessment from toe to head. He boasts the physique of a man in his prime. Those black trousers trace the contours of his formidable strength, an asset that would elude both younger and older men. The scars on his chest and back are old wounds, turned white, puckering along the skin and crafting constellations that tell stories of traumas long past. His face is mostly unmarred by the lines of age, though a shadow of stubble graces his jaw.
But it is his eyes that my attention sticks on and refuses to move from.
They are alight with the intensity I’ve come to associate with him alone—an insatiable hunger that I have no doubt has been gnawing at him for decades longer than he’s even been alive. As if he’s been searching for something, or someone, he will neverbe able to find. Left forever needy and yearning. Gifting him with a wizened gravity that men half a century his elder could scarcely even dream of.
“Answer me one question first,” I finally say, before giving my guess. He raises his brows and says nothing. “Do lykin age in the same way as humans?”
He hums. “I’m not sure if I should answer that.”
“You should, if you don’t want me guessing you’re in your hundreds.”
Evander grabs his chest, fingers pressing into the bare skin. “You wound me. Hundreds?” He chuckles, shrugging it off at my smile. “All occupants of Midscape live and die in the same way as humans. None of us are blessed with lifespans greater than your kind. Save for Aurora in her unnatural state.”
“Then, I would say you are…twenty-eight.”
He grabs his chest again, more sudden, and sways back as though he has been physically struck. “You wound me again. I look so old?”
“Twenty-eight is not old.” I laugh from the bottom of my stomach. I’m reminded of a time when I was younger, when I told Grandma that I couldn’t wait to be “old”—and, by old, I meant in my twenties. She howled with laughter to the point that I thought the roof shingles of our hut shook.
He grins, recovering from the mock offense. “I’m twenty-three.”
“Only a year older than me?”
“Is it that surprising?” He looks back out across the grasses.
