She slapped him playfully, but then tipped his face up to meet hers. “I wish you didn’t have to go.”
He grew serious as he smoothed a hand down the side of her face. “I’ll return to you a free man with my name cleared.”
“Thatis the best gift you could give me.”
They kissed once more in the candlelight as the snow swirled outside before Bryn had to say goodbye to Rangar and watch as he and his soldiers rode off into the darkness.
Chapter 11
BOOKS WITH NO ANSWERS . . . a healed troublemaker . . . the dead wolf . . . talk of enemies . . . brandy and dresses
Heavy snow followed for a week after Rangar’s departure, and Bryn began to feel like a prisoner, too. She’d been warned about how bleak Baer winters could be, but it was a different thing to experience it for herself. She began to call it aBearwinter in her head and think of the season as a blustering old bear that settled in somewhere at the first chill and refused to leave again until spring.
How could Rangar track anyone in this weather, let alone a spy? Bryn could barely make it to the village square without losing both her boots in the snow. She tried to ride Fable a few times, but Oliver had left with Rangar, and she’d barely made it past the docks on her own.
“Ah. My nurse. And what a lovely nurse you make.” Valenden sat up in bed when Bryn entered his sick room, already licking his lips at the sight of the soup bowl in her hand.
She thrust the bowl at him and sat on the foot of the bed as he started shoveling venison stew in his mouth. “I hate to break it to you, Val, but I think you’re healed. You’re going to have to get up and start fetching your own supper.”
“Shh!” He glared at her over the bowl. “Don’t say such awful things.”
“Let me see your bandages.”
He begrudgingly finished his stew and then tossed aside the covers to swing his legs out of bed. A bandage hugged his torso over a poultice ofwitrathmoss. Bryn rolled back the bandage and peeked under the poultice. The wolf’s bite marks were still red, but the wounds had mostly closed with no sign of infection.
“Ren wrapped this poultice?” she asked. “He’s very skilled. I haven’t seen a wound heal this fast, even under the care of the Mirien’s best healer.”
“Ren is a marvel at healing hexes and potions,” Valenden said as he smoothed down the bandage. “That was always his focus; Calista handled weather and communications.”
Bryn again felt a stab of regret to think of the apprentice they’d lost at the Battle of Saint Serrel. She wished she could have gotten to know Calista better. “Well,” she said, “I’m impressed with his work. And you’re sure you don’t feel . . . odd?”
“Odd how? Odd like I might grow fangs and an insatiable bloodlust at the next full moon?”
Bryn wrinkled her nose. “Well, yes.”
“I think if the berserkir wolves had any illness, I escaped it. I feel depressingly just like myself.”
Bryn paced the length of his room, toying with the chain around her neck that held his and Trei’s rings. “Where did Mage Marna put the wolf carcass?”
“In the dungeon,” Valenden answered. “It’s cold enough down there to freeze the body to preserve it.”
“Are you strong enough to show me?”
He grumbled but got out of bed and into some clothes and, after she’d grabbed some supplies from the mage stores, they made their way to Barendur Hold’s dungeon. The last time Bryn had been here, Valenden had snuck her down to say a final goodbye to Rangar before they fled from would-be assassins. The memory haunted her as they splashed through frigid puddles in the dank tunnels. She felt sorry for any poor souls that were incarcerated down here during the thick of winter. It was cold enough to see her breath clouding in the air.
After speaking with the dungeon guard, Valenden led her to a vacant cell where the wolf’s body was wrapped in canvas. Bryn crouched before it cautiously. She pulled on gloves and peeled back the canvas. Fortunately, the cold kept the wolf’s body from smelling, though it was stiff enough to be nearly a block of ice. Cuts had been made in the wolf’s side and at the top of its skull.
Bryn used a knife blade to poke at the cuts. “Mage Marna’s work, I assume? Did she discover anything?”
“She found no signs oflyssaor any other illness. She noted the wolf’s abnormal size but said there was no obvious cause. She brought in a huntsman from Clarentry who’s killed over a hundred wolves; he said it’s no subspecies he’s ever come across.”
Bryn used a pair of clamps to pull back the skin Mage Marna had cut open and peered at the wolf’s flesh inside. There didn’t seem to be anything off with the beast’s organs except for their size. “Dark magic?” she asked Valenden in a low voice.
He shifted from one foot to the other. “I don’t see what else it could be, though it’s no spell I’ve ever heard of.”
Bryn packed away her tools while staring at the wolf. “Maybe the question isn’t how someone created these wolves, but why? Who would want vicious wolves attacking villages?”
Valenden leaned against the cell’s bars. “The villages were in the Mirien and Vil-Kevi. So it must be one of their enemies, not ours.”
