Page 49 of Edge of the Wild

“Because romance requires a type…?”

“Oh.” Her face heated. “I suppose that sounded rather silly, didn’t it?”

“My mother always preferred sword practice to needlepoint.”

Tessa nodded. “I was surprised, I guess. To hear her profess that she’s in love.”

“With whom?”

“That’s just it – that’s the secret – thescandal, I suppose. My poor mother,” she added, shaking her head again. By the end, there had been no hope of saving Alfred’s reputation, but Tessa and her siblings had never done anything shocking – not save Amelia, riding in trousers. “His name is Malcolm Brown,” she said. “And he’s a member of the household guard.”

Rune evidenced no surprise. He watched her, expectant, waiting for the rest of the story. Waiting, she realized, for the part that was scandalous.

“She’s a marchioness and he’s a guardsman,” Tessa said.

He shrugged. “So?”

His uncle, she reminded herself, had taken an illegitimate Southern as royal consort.

She sighed, and it eased some of the tension in her belly. “Things are different down South. She’s expected to marry someone titled.”

Rune made a face, nose scrunching up. “All of that’s bollocks. I mean,” he corrected, expression smoothing, “Leif and I are supposed to marryfine ladies, too. For the kingdom. But it wouldn’t be the end of the world if we didn’t.”

The words sent an unpleasant jolt through her.Fine ladies, said with disdain. Perhaps she wasn’t fine, or perhaps she’d only imagined the energy that sparked between them.

“Scandals aren’t that scandalous up here, is all,” Rune continued. “If you marry Leif, and Oliver has Uncle’s support, why should your sister not marry the man she loves?”

It was Tessa’s turn to shrug. “I’m sure she agrees with you – but that isn’t how things are done. And with the war…Mother wants her to marry one of my old suitors” – perhaps she imagined the way his brows snapped together – “Lord Reginald L’Espoir of Hope Hall.”

“I take it she doesn’t want to?”

“She’s always hated him. Though she does say, here” – she tapped at the page – “that he’s perhaps ‘not as abominable’ as she previously thought.”

“What do you think she’ll do?”

“Knowing Lia – the most difficult thing.” She smiled, despite herself, missing her sister terribly in that moment. “She’s going scouting, apparently. There’s been unusual animal activity in the Inglewood.”

His brows lifted. “Oh, so you saved the interesting bit for the last.”

She laughed, uncertain, still, about many things, but glad for this moment, his health, his company. She prayed for a little of Amelia’s assuredness: the strength to know when difficult meantstop, and when difficult meantthis is right.

~*~

Appropriately, dawn had slipped silver and sunless over Silfr Hall. Oliver woke cold, curled up in a ball against Erik’s side, tense as though he hadn’t slept, with the blunt sound of axes beating down below in the yard. There was a skin of ice on the basins and ewers, and breakfast passed solemnly, with darted looks shifting all around, the loudest sounds the snap of the fires and the whining of the dogs wanting scraps.

Leif was contemplative, Erik troubled.

Náli, Oliver noted, was linen-pale and unsteady; he didn’t eat, but drank three cups of strong tea straight off. His men – all in gray and brown – surrounded him and seemed to be holding him up as much as they appeared to be guarding him, protective of their young master.

When they departed, Lord Kjaran met them at the hall’s vast doors. Beyond him, in the yard, men were erecting pyres for the guards who’d been killed last night. The soil was too hard for a proper burial, here in the North, in midwinter. The bodies would be burned.

“Your Majesty,” Kjaran said, voice and face grave. “Your lordship. Your grace.” He bowed to them in turn: Erik, Oliver, Leif. “I wish your stay had been less eventful.”

“So do I, for your sake,” Erik said. “How are your children? Your wife this morning?”

“Hilda is…a bit nervous.”

“Understandably so.”

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