He hoped Petur was right.
Chapter seven
Petur
Six months was not a long time to whip an army into shape.
Petur wasn’t overly modest or even mildly modest when he didn’t have to be. That sort of affectation had never suited him. He preferred to be honest and forthright in all his dealings and assessments, particularly when it came to himself. Even if it was irritating.
He knew he had many failings even if he didn’t want to admit those where other people could hear. He was impatient, unwilling to compromise, and reluctant to change his mind once he had made it up. As someone who was naturally gifted as a shifter, it was often frustrating for him to work with people who didn’t share his capabilities. It had taken a long time, numerous arguments, and more tears than he was comfortable with for Petur to learn how to be a good leader to his people.
Not just acommander. Command he could do. Command was a position he’d been born into. But to lead his Shifter Corps, to lead them in such a way that made them want to follow him, that made them inspired to do his bidding and seek his approval? That took real time and real training. A six-month timeline fromhis sister that was meant to lead to huge changes in the way the Shifter Corps did their business? That was tight timing, almost unbearably so. Deyvid had done a good job of showing people that his methods had merit, but when it came to winning hearts and minds, Petur expected he’d have to step in. Stepup, even take over as needed, and give Deyvid the support necessary so that people learned to follow his orders as readily as they followed Petur’s.
When all his good intentions came to nothing, admittedly, he was genuinely a little put out about it.
In the space of a week, Deyvid had memorized the names of every member of the Corps living in the barracks beside the palace. In a month, he’d learned the name of every Corps member in the entire city. More than that, he had a sense of their strengths and weaknesses and how to hone them at the sort of guerilla warfare Petur and his squad had found so frustrating.
Deyvid, with Petur running interference with his sister but otherwise hands-off, instituted a new system of patrols that put his shifters to work in small teams that were tweaked with the help of sergeants until they worked seamlessly. Each team then competed to win more time off by being given a task and a timeline—and never knowing when Deyvid would be watching them. Those who weren’t competing were plunged into a training regime that included advanced tracking in their human shapes, a new vocabulary of hand signals to learn, and maneuvers in their shifted form that were so complex and tailored to their skills it genuinely stunned Petur that they came from a man who couldn’t shift himself.
It was a master class in leadership and almost unbearably attractive. That was bad because it had been an ungodly long amount of time since Petur had had Deyvid to himself so he couldexpressthat attraction.
“Three months,” he snapped in a show of pique over dinner that evening with Deyvid. It was the first time he’d had dinner with Deyvid in over a week. Tania had kept both of them running around at top speed, Petur following whatever whim she was chasing at the moment, and Deyvid proving to her spies that he was demonstrably improving the effectiveness of the Shifter Corps.
“Three months and fully a fifth of our Corps is pursuing their second shift. Afifth.” Petur stared at Deyvid, flabbergasted, from across the table. “A fifth,” he repeated.
“I can, in fact, hear you,” Deyvid said, cutting through the mutton chop on his plate with a little smile. Mutton chops, barracks food—Petur had offered him lamb, and he’d only turned it away and said that while he lived with their soldiers, he would eat what they ate. Which was honorable of him and surely part of the reason he was so godsdamn popular in such a short amount of time, but it also meantPeturhad to eat it as well.
He was feeling petulant, and Deyvid was going to have to deal with it.
“Hearing isn’t the same as listening,” Petur snapped. “Never in the history of the Shifter Corps—and I’m not the one who founded it, let me assure you of that—have so many of our people started training for a second shift. Ninety-five percent of the shifters in the Corps have one shift, and that’s more shifts than the majority of people in the entire country.”
Shifting was a magic almost unique to Riyalians, but even within Riyale, it was considered an enviable ability. “Do you know how many people I’ve tried to persuade to learn another shift? Do you know how many I have personally approached with the offer of tutelage since I began here as the commander? Over a hundred,” he exclaimed. “And all but three of the efforts were failures.”
“Were they failures?” Deyvid asked in the tone of voice he tended to use when he was about to say something Petur didn’t want to hear. That it happened often enough that Petur couldidentifythe specific voice was disturbing. “Or wereyouthe failure in those scenarios?”
Petur narrowed his eyes. “Explain that,” he said frostily. He didn’t think Deyvid was intentionally insulting him, but there weren’t many ways to construe a word like “failure.”
“Petur.” Deyvid took his hand, and Petur relaxed the clenched fist he hadn’t even realized he was making. “You are their prince,” he said as calmly as if they were discussing the weather. “You’re their ultimate example, the rod by which every shifter in your Corps measures themselves. It’s impossible for them to look at you and not find themselves wanting. Except,” Deyvid amended, “in a few very specific cases.”
“Ah, well. Lise is special,” Petur said.
“She is,” Deyvid agreed. Lise had only ever sought one form, her owl, and was so devastatingly effective in it that no one would dare suggest she take on another.
“You didn’t stop with one form,” Deyvid went on. “You didn’t stop with two. You didn’t even have the decency to stop with three. You went on to master the battle shift before the age of twenty-five as I understand it. That’s unheard of even among the most gifted of your kind.
“Petur, you’re an exceptional shifter. You’re the ultimate outlier. Your accomplishments are so distant a possibility as to make the people around you feel, not hopeless, but …”
“Intimidated?” Petur suggested, nodding his understanding. Honestly, he was a little abashed that he hadn’t come to this conclusion on his own. He was the prince of the nation—his own sister had two firm shifts and could have had a third if she had put her mind to it, and her son was likely to be just as successful.How could Petur not do his utmost to outperform her, when he was meant to be the strong arm of Riyale? “Daunted?”
“Among other things,” Deyvid agreed. “Of course, most of them were going to fail. Some proportion will always rise to the challenge, but how many of those have managed a third shift?”
Exactly none, and Petur was sure that Deyvid knew it. “We’re not talking about third shifts,” he said a bit grumpily.
“No, we’re talking about seconds, and you should be pleased that a hundred of your people are willing to put themselves through an unbelievable amount of tedious training in order to even try.”
“It’s not tedious,” Petur said, then paused to drain his wine. Heat spread through his limbs, making him loose and languorous in a way that had been sorely missing from his life lately. “It’sfun. It’s a puzzle to solve, a connection to make. It’s the easiest way to truly change yourself.”
Deyvid frowned. “What do you mean?” he asked. “Changing yourself is easy. You simply identify that which you don’t like about yourself and stop doing it.”
