Page 77
“Enough coin will hire anyone.”
He sounded almost bored, which I have since decided was a performance, because I could feel him breathing too fast against my back.
“Is it terrible to hope your beast kills them both? I’d have my purse back.”
The knife shifted under my jaw.
“Stop struggling.”
And when my Mate has finished with them, what do you imagine happens to you?
But I stopped struggling, because Maardok would be disappointed if I managed to irritate John into murdering me while he was distracted.
Beyond the fighting, up along the tree line, the Battleborn stood in a long silent row with their weapons in their hands…watching.
Forty of them. Vrogul at the front with his axe hanging loose, looking as regal as any lord.
Anyone who comes for ye must first come through us.
He had said that to me in a cottage on my first day here, when I was too tired to do anything but weep into a cup Jean shoved at me, and I had thought it a kindness. A thing a chief says.
But it had been a fact. They had come, all of them, and they were standing in the cold for a human woman with flour still on her hands.
Mine, I thought, and ‘twas the first time I’d thought it about anyone but my sons.
They are my clan. My people. My home.
And I would choose them—choose this chief, choose this village—over anything a son of a baron, or a baron himself, could offer me. My mind still reeled at John’s casual announcement, but I had believed it from the moment he explained. Of course Richard was the son of a powerful lord. I’d seen it in the manners and education he’d refused to explain, and as someone raised without either, I hadn’t known what it had meant.
Richard was the son of Baron Godwin, and he’d named my son after his father. Was John right? Was Baron Godwin searching for word of his son? Would he wish to know about Ewan?
He cannot have him. Ewan is mine—ours—and Maardok and I are keeping him here with us. Where he will be safe from anyone who tries to control him.
Aye, I would never allow a man, even a powerful warlord like the baron was rumored to be, to take Ewan from me. But a small part of my heart broke, thinking of the old man’s pain at missing his son, and I wondered if—
Maardok spun out of the way of a blade, and I would have missed it, were it not for the way Vrogul winced and several of the watching warriors let out whoops of what I hoped were approval. My Mate continued his turn, and one of the hired men went down.
I do not know what Maardok did. I could not follow it. There was a twist, and a sound like a spade going into wet earth, and the man folded around his own middle and sat in the dirt with a look of mild confusion, and then he flopped down.
And before he had ceased moving, Maardok had dismissed him, turning to the other opponent, his blade gleaming in the winter sunshine.
And I watched him, my breath in my throat and my eyes wide, completely enthralled.
Three nights ago, that male had lain on his back on the floor of our cottage and let a five-year-old use his ribs as a mountain range for his wooden soldiers. He walks with our youngest son on his bare chest in the dark hours so I can sleep. He whittles. He asked me to wash his back and respected my autonomy over my own body.
But today? That same male stood on that shore taking a man apart, piece by bloody piece, and he was beautiful doing it.
He was enormous, and he moved as though he weighed nothing at all. Every part of him went the same direction at the same moment. ‘Twas the least wasteful thing I have ever seen, and if you had told me ‘twas a dance I would have believed you, right up until the blood.
I was not horrified.
Mayhap I should have been, but I wasn’t, not even with the blood on his blade.
Because I love the male who builds beds against warm chimneys, and I love the one on that shore, and ‘twas not as if they were two separate males. He told me my sons would be safe and my sons were safe. He told me he would keep them so.
And the cost of that safety, that surety, was this blood. This dance.
Behind me, John had begun to vibrate.
