Wild
“So ye just left withoutexplaining the Wild King Curse?” Lorcan asked as we approached the fating stones near Ballygally Forest for the Winter Solstice. We’d be setting up camp there until it was time to journey to the fating stones in Beltany for Imbolc in early February.
Yule was usually my favorite ritual of the year, but a dark cloud hung over my head less than three days into the journey through the below, as we called the expanse of the secret kingdom that stretched out beneath Ireland.
Maybe that was why Lorcan, Ronan, and their yellow-haired mate had decided to risk their lives, falling in beside me to ask many pesky questions.
“It’s better this way,” I explained to them and myself. “It took her weeks and a heat cycle to accept the prophecy. How d’ye think she’d respond to hearing that I couldn’t be with her because my ancestor killed the Sea King nearly five hundred years ago? The Wölfennites aren’t like us,” I added, glancing at Lorcan and Ronan. “They cry easily.”
“Sure, they do,” Ronan agreed with a cheeky side glance at his mate. “Especially when ye take an extra serving of their pie.”
“Ronan!” Their mate flushed red before scolding him. “This isn’t the time. Can’t you see how upset your king is?”
She leaned past her shorter mate to say, “In fact, if you need a few more days, we could take back over commanding the Wild Wolves until you’re ready to —”
“I’m fine,” I insisted through gritted teeth.They meant well, but they didn’t understand. They couldn’t. There was no helping me with this.
“But if ye’re looking to be the boss of someone, go tell those Wölfennites still sobbing over being parted from their Sea Wolf mates to quiet down. Bad enough, we had to leave so many worthy males behind in the secret kingdom. Don’t need to hear about it from them, too.”
There was a tense silence. I could almost sense the furious conversation between the three of them before the yellow-haired Wölfennite finally said, “Fine, I will go talk to the heartbroken, pregnant she-wolves who were ripped out of their tents this morning and told they had to leave their Sea-born males behind with zero notice that they needed to get over it.”
Now she sounded miserable and angry, too.
Grand.
To borrow a word Naomi had used to scold me the couple of times I pulled her off the Dublin King before he was done. I was feeling mightypettywhen it came to the happiness of anyone who wasn’t bound by a centuries-old vow not to be able to stay with a shared queen beyond our heat moon.
In my case, it was even embedded in the prophecy.
She will unite the three kingdoms, and then the Wild King will leave.
The yellow-haired she-wolf, who had gotten a bit too comfortable serving as the Queen of the Wild Wolves while Lorcan and Ronan ruled in my stead, stomped off.
And, of course, her mates followed behind her.
“This is why I chose an unshared wolf-mating,” my father once spat while we sat by the campfire, watching two heated males trailing apologies after their upset she-wolf because she’d taken offense to a joke they’d made to the Wild King about her poor cooking skills. “Imagine me sniveling after your mother that way! Pathetic.”
He didn’t understand pathetic, though.
Pathetic was knowing you could only have someone for a short time but losing your heart to them anyway.
Pathetic was having to shut down your side of the mate bond lest she heard the way your soul howled at every smile, every whimpering moan, every word out of her mouth about a future that wouldn’t include you.
My chest tightened, the pain of the memories near unbearable. It hurt to even think on an entire lifetime without Naomi. But I had to stay strong. For her. For me. For the child I’d never meet.
I looked to the sky and sent up another prayer to the three gods.Please make the babe growing in her womb a girl. One who looked like all of her and none of me.
The clouds chose that moment to move in front of the sun, a sure sign that the gods had heard my plea.
That omen should have made me feel better. But instead, my chest welled up with an anger and sadness like none I’d ever known.
What would it have been like,I wondered bitterly,to watch my son or daughter take their first steps? To see them stumble over their first words? Call me Da? Would they have her laugh? Her smile?
As it turned out, it didn’t matter whether it was a girl or a boy like the one Wild King who was raised in the secret kingdom away from his sire as punishment for the Killing King’s crime.
I’d never get to meet them.
I’d never…
