Page 54 of Blood of Ancients

True.

I had a feeling I would fail at more than just my classes if I didn’t have my friends by my side.

Chapter 16

Magnus

IT WAS MISERABLE OUTin the wilderness.

Gods, I never thought I’d miss the underground caves of Vikingrune Academy, but here I was, wishing I was back behind its relatively safe walls. Warming my hands near a hearth fire, or around Ravinica’s heat. Granted, I’d had my fair share of tortures and painful events at the academy, but it beat this shit, not knowing what lay ahead of me.

Our twenty-four-hour trek turned into seventy-two because of the rampaging blizzard. By the end of the first day, we should have been to the razed elven encampment where the portal sat. Yet we were only a third of the way there, not even out of Delaveer Forest.

The winds howled all hours of the day and night. Darkness felt permanent, like a blanket of black over every stitch of land. Snowfall came at us from every direction but up. These weren’t soft petals of snowflakes, but sharp daggers of ice that sliced into me. To make matters worse, I’d hardly slept a wink.

I traveled with half a dozen Huscarls. As Hersir Kelvar had warned me, they were handpicked by Tomekeeper Dahlia—the woman who wanted me dead for killing her bastard silvermoor daughter, a girl she had hardly recognized her entire life.

Suffice to say, I had to keep my head on a swivel traveling with my would-be killers. Every fiber of my being was tense, wondering when they would choose their moment to strike.

I wasn’t arrogant enough to think I could take six Huscarls. What was my alternative? Shrivel up like a frozen prune and await my death? No, I would go out fighting, as I always had. As I had when I escaped the blood-leechings of last term, without a clue of what I would doafterescaping and stealing into Fort Woden, before Kelvar saved me.

Now, I was out in the open. There was no Whisperer to save me. No allies like Ravinica’s mates. And certainly no silvermoon, who I thought of endlessly.

When I got coldest at night, I would reminisce fondly of our torrid trysts all over campus—in the woods, underground, locked away in Mimir Tomes, fucking right there on the Tomekeeper’s doorstep.

It always brought a smile when I recalled how Ravinica felt wrapped around me. Her thick, muscled thighs squeezing tight around my middle; her heated gaze drilling to my core; her flexing arms grabbing every inch of me. Her sweet pussy—

“Oi, lad, why you slowing down?”

I blinked flakes from my lashes, glancing up from the screaming wind to the yelling face in front of me.

It was Trond. A Huscarl I’d “befriended” during our trek. Easily the most chipper Huscarl I’d ever met, the big man was simply happy to be out of the underground, and didn’t seem to mind the cold as much as the rest of us.

“Sluggish blood,” I told him.

He flashed a purple-lipped smile at me, tightening the hood of his fur coat around his neck and chin. He may have acted like he didn’t mind the freeze, but his actions sang a different tune.

“Well, we’re about to settle,” he said as I trudged through knee-high snow to get to him. “Do your little trick and get the blood pumping again.”

He clapped me on the back, shaking off a layer of white—only so another layer could quickly gather from the snowfall. I winced from the hard slap, the bones in my body feeling as brittle as the leafless trees we walked under.

The other five Huscarls were up ahead, making camp, plopping wood on the ground, setting up their tiny tents, and sitting down around the unlit fire pit.

I frowned at Trond. “I thought you said we would get there tonight.”

---