Page 26 of Claimed By the Wolf Heir

It isn't advice about the bracket. I hear what's buried in the words the way I hear what's buried in Signe's healer voice: the real conversation running where the language can't reach.

I straighten the bracket. I watch the face.

The forge sound fills the chamber, two hammers working separate rhythms that occasionally sync and occasionally clash, and the clash is as useful as the sync because it tells me where my timing has drifted. Leif doesn't say anything else. He doesn't need to. The forge said it for him: stop watching the fire. Watch where the hammer lands.

I work until my shoulders ache and the bracket is finished. The worst of the restlessness has burned off with the scale.

The anger at Balric is still there, banked beneath the grief, but the forge has filed the edges into something I can carry without cutting myself.

Before I leave, Leif speaks without looking up from the piece he's quenching. "She doesn't let wolves sit on her worktable. You know that."

"I know."

"And you're going to sit on it anyway." The water hisses around the cooling metal. Leif lifts the piece, examines it, sets it on the rack. "That's what I'm saying."

The day passes the way fortress days pass: in increments of usefulness. I walk the western perimeter with Gunnar in the afternoon, not because he asks but because he doesn't tell me not to, and the distinction is becoming the language of our arrangement.

He points out the drainage gap on the lower approach. I point out that the gap creates a choke point, and any attacker with half a brain would use it to pin a patrol against the slope with no room to maneuver.

He looks at me the way Leif looks at a piece of metal that's performing above its grade.

"You've run border assessments before," he says. It isn't a question.

"Since I could keep up with my father's stride."

He nods. The nod carries the practical weight of Leif's, and the accumulation of wolves who communicate in gestures rather than speeches is becoming one of the things I like about this fortress.

I find Signe's infirmary door ajar after midnight. The corridor is empty, the fortress gone quiet except for the night patrol's boot-falls in the distance and the mineral ticking of stone cooling after the day's fire.

Candlelight spills through the doorway in a thin strip, and the light carries her scent: the botanical sharpness of whatever she's been grinding layered over a deeper note that hits me like a fist to the sternum.

The closed room has concentrated it. Hours of her in a sealed space, and the suppressant can't keep up with the accumulation.

Everything in me drops low and locks on, every instinct narrowing to the doorway and what's in the room with the single-minded focus of an animal that has found what it's been tracking.

I lean against the doorframe and let the scent settle into my lungs before I speak. It's a bad idea. The kind of bad idea I specialize in.

She's at her worktable with the leather satchel open and the old ledger spread flat under the candle. The pages are the ones I saw at the cottage, the faded ink and the notations in a hand that isn't hers, but the configuration is different. She's arranged other pages around the ledger, loose sheets covered in her own handwriting, notes and lists and what looks like a map drawn from description rather than observation.

The layout is a cross-reference. I recognize the pattern from my father's war table: information from one source laid against information from another, looking for the overlap that turns speculation into knowledge.

I step inside. I sit on her worktable, close enough that the candlelight catches the pages beneath my hand and her scent catches everything else.

The concentration of her in this room is doing things to my blood pressure that have no place in a midnight study session, and my wolf doesn't care about the pages or the research or the centuries-old handwriting. He cares about the pulse I can see in her throat and the fact that the omega bleeding through her compound is louder in here than it's ever been.

She looks up, and the expression on her face carries the particular irritation of a wolf whose workspace has been invaded by the one who invaded it yesterday and will invade it tomorrow.

"Eirik."

"Signe."

"Get off my worktable."

"No." I pick up the nearest loose page and examine it. "What are you cross-referencing?"

"Get off my worktable and I'll tell you."

"Tell me and I'll think about it."