Page 32 of Blood of Ancients

“I know it’s early, but we all have to be here,” he explained. “So pick up the damn hammer and get to knocking.”

I blinked at him, confused. Obviously I hadn’t been paying attention, which wasn’t like me. It was the first day of class and I was already too wrapped up in my own thoughts.

Not a good sign.

Glancing over at Grim with a helpless quirk to my eyebrows, the shifter gave me a crooked smile. He lifted a small hand-hammer and pantomimed knocking it against wood.

The sounds of hammers slamming into nails and wood jarred my brain, waking me up from my hazy morning with a sharp wince.So this is why the class is so damned early. To wake our asses up because it’s so annoying.

Ingvus paced to reprimand a few students, thankfully forgetting about me. The entire class bent their heads at their desks, arms lifting. I looked around with my head down, trying to see what everyone was doing, since I was out of the loop.

Grim wandered next to me, voice a whisper against the harsh clattering sounds filling the room and giving me an early headache. “He wants to see what carpentry skills we have, if any.”

I nodded, brow threaded. “Got it. By . . . hammering plywood together?”

Grim chuckled, shrugging. “I suppose there’s an art to it.”

Here was the thing. Everyone in this class had grown up in rural villages, off the grid, away from the hustle and bustle and technology of our magicless human counterparts in the real world.

We werealloutdoorsy people. Every student at Vikingrune Academy could swing a sword, thrust a spear, shoot a bow, hunt, build a fucking log cabin, if we had to, say, survive a harsh winter or repair our village dwellings.

I didn’t feel we needed training on putting a hammer on a nail. What was the point of—

“Kollbjorn, get back to your seat,” Ingvus snapped from the front of the room. “Or are you already finished?”

Grim looked up from me. “Apologies, Hersir. I was just showing Ravinica—”

“I don’t care.”

Grim’s lips closed, pursing, and he nodded firmly before returning to his seat.

The spitefulness in Hersir Jorthyr’s tone had been unmistakable. A few students chuckled again at my bear shifter’s whipping.

Anger roiled inside me on behalf of my mate, which I kept down.Cooler heads will prevail in this class. Like they always do.

I’d been hoping the history we shared with Hersir Jorthyr would give us a little leeway with him. That was clearly not the case. He wasn’t giving us preferential treatment.

In fact, I noticed the opposite. His eyes were never far from mine or Grim’s desks, despite there being twenty other men and women in here.

I “got to knocking,” as Ingvus had put it, after studying the drawn illustrations on the chalkboard. He wanted us to hammer the wood chunks together at certain angles, and then sand them down to make them shaped like the right-angled corner of a room, though slightly rounded.

It was actually harder than it looked.

Five minutes into my hammering, when I was starting to get into the zone, I heard Hersir Jorthyr’s voice nearby.

“The fuck is that?”

I glanced over my shoulder and noticed him right next to me, standing over Grim’s desk with his arms crossed.

Grim looked up from his work, furrowing his brow. “I’m not yet finished, sir. It’s—”

Ingvus’ hand lashed out, slapping the sculpture off Grim’s desk. With a crash, Grim’s work fell to the ground and cracked apart, splinters of wood fragmenting.

My mouth fell open, hammer poised near my head for another pounding.What the fuck? What wasthatfor?

“Look at the shoddy construction,” Ingvus said. Both he and Grim stared down at the broken pile of wood and nails. “It shouldn’t have fractured so easily like that.”

Other students were watching, as if taking in Grim’s humiliation as some sort of lesson. Thirty minutes into the first day of the first class of the term. Without anything more than squiggles on the board for direction.

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