Page 97 of Edge of the Wild

“He wasn’t lying – but he was also the one who’d put the arrows in me. He threw me over for my brother, blamed my slaughter on the Strangers – who incidentally fished me out downstream and found that none of the arrows had pierced my armor, and that I’d nearly drowned, but was otherwise in no danger of dying.”

“Most dukes would have rallied an army and toppled his usurper,” Thomas pointed out, managing to sound halfway respectful.

Connor tilted his head. “Most dukes like their positions, I imagine. I was tired of it – of ducal horseshit. I had no heirs, and three wives in the ground.” The first, Amelia remembered, had died in childbirth; the next in a hunting accident; the third of a sudden illness. Rumors had swirled that he’d killed them all, but Amelia had never truly believed that. “I have a wife, now,” he continued, and, to Amelia’s shock, laid his hand on the shoulder of the girl from the road; she’d pushed her hood back, revealing tangled, tawny hair, smooth cheeks, hard eyes. “And a son.”

“Awife?” Malcolm asked, with obvious scorn.

“She’s older than she looks. But isthatwhat you want to talk about?”

“I didn’t want to talk about anything,” Amelia said. “Youtookusprisoner.”

Another smirk, this one accompanied by real amusement shining in his gaze. “Yes, fine. Won’t you please have a seat?”

They ended up sitting cross-legged on the moss, in a loose semicircle. A young man passed around cups of strong home-brewed wine – cups that were an eclectic mix of drinking horns, pewter mugs, crude wooden bowls, and even a few porcelain teacups that had clearly been stolen.

Amelia set her own cup untouched on the ground before her and said, “What do you want with me?”

Connor drained off his own cup and took a deep breath; settled more deeply, with his elbows on his thighs. Amelia was struck by a sudden memory of a ball, years ago: of his hair cropped, and his chin shaven, and his silk gleaming beneath the candlelight; Mother had entertained a brief notion, when she was fourteen, that he might make a smart match for her – but then he’d married his third wife, and she’d died, and thenhe’ddied…but not really.

“The Sels moved into the western side of the Wood two months ago. They overran the manor, turned my brother into nothing more than a puppet” – he grinned, briefly – “and trust me, I’m not losing any sleep over that. But. Then they started clear-cutting the forest.”

Amelia blinked in surprise. “For firewood?”

“Possibly. But they’re building siege engines, too.”

Malcolm whistled. “Shit.”

“Precisely. Based on my own experience, I think their plan is twofold: use the lumber to build siege towers, rams, and trebuchets, even walls, perhaps. And eliminate the threat of the forest. There’s six-hundred-thousand acres of impenetrable woodland between my old duchy and yours. It offers access to the mountains to the north, and the waterways to the south, and it’s too great a place for defenders all across Aquitainia to hide and meet in secret. They will raze this entire Wood to the ground, of that I have no doubt.”

Amelia felt a sick lurch at the idea. The Inglewood was deep, and dark; mysterious, unknowable, full of terrors…but it was ancient, too. A home to uncountable animals, and to humans; a source of springs and rivers. Every leaf, every toadstool, every rotted, moss-covered long contributed to the richness of the central duchies in their own way. She couldn’t imagine Aquitainia without it.

“We can’t allow that,” Connor said, seriously.

“No,” she agreed.

“We stood against them, at first. Ambushes; arrows from above; we left bloody tableaus to frighten them. It worked – but, again,at first. There’s no end to them. They’ve taken to wearing heavy armor, and working in shifts when they grow tired from swinging axes. They pour pitch on the stumps and set fire to them; fires that burn the leaf litter, and catch the dry shrubs. They’re ten acres deep, and still coming.

“At least, they were. Before we set the beasts loose.”

A single, small shudder stole down Amelia’s spine. “What do you meanbeasts? Have you tamed bears? Lions?”

“No, my lady.” Dusk was falling; torches were being lit with hisses and pops, and the light danced in his eyes, so that he looked, suddenly, afraid. “We found the deep caves. Way down, deep down, into the earth, and we woke the fire-drakes.”

“The – the what?”

“Dragons. We woke the dragons.”

~*~

“… ‘it was then that Sir Richard realized the error of his ways, but it was too late,’” Tessa read, and, as she turned the page, glanced toward Rune’s face. His lashes lay like dark fans on his cheeks; his lips were parted, his jaw relaxed. Asleep.

She stifled a yawn with the back of her hand, marked her place in the book with a bit of ribbon, and closed it. She was tired, too: unaccountably so. She didn’t feel in danger of swooning again, as she’d done so ridiculously that morning, but she didn’t feel as energetic as she usually did, either. Worse, she felt this faint tickling at the back of her mind; the sense that she’d left a window open, or a candle burning. Like there was something she was meant to attend to, but didn’t know what. It was…aweight. That was the best way she could think to describe it.

“Ah,” Hilda said, chuckling. “Poor lamb. He finally dropped off. I don’t know what he was thinking of, up and walking around. Stubborn, stubborn, just like his uncle.” She folded her knitting up and tucked it, along with the needles, into the deep front pocket of her apron. “If you don’t mind me saying so, my lady, you’re looking a little peaky yourself.”

Night had only just fallen; the sky beyond the windows still held a tint of pink, and supper hadn’t been called, yet. But Hilda was already wanting to herd her to bed.

To be honest, Tessa didn’t hate the idea of taking a supper tray in her room, what with Lady Estrid and her friends sure to be gossiping away down in the great hall.

---