Page 35 of Blood of Wolves

Finally, the torches appeared through the gloom: first as pinpricks, then fading into full view, snapping and fluttering in the snowfall. A horn sounded, and the silhouette of the fortress appeared, dark and crouched like a beast against the deepening gray of evening.

A torch moved toward them, carried by a man who looked small and bent in the fortress’s shadow.

Lars and Magnus rode ahead, bearing torches of their own, and Oliver recognized Snorri’s face, cowled in a warm fur hood, lined, and exhausted, butalive.

He turned to them, as they reached him, and reined up. “Your majesty!” he said, with obvious relief, not so much smiling as gaping – like a man who’d given up all hope. “By the gods, are we glad to see you!”

Oliver’s hands tightened as his reins as a sudden gust of wind whipped his hair across his face. He shook it back and turned in time to watch Snorri turn – just as Percy touched lightly down to the ground and folded his wings. He flared then flattened his frill, and gave a little huff of breath through wide nostrils.

“Perhaps the gods had something to do with it,” Erik said, a tired smile in his voice. “But, mostly, it was Oliver.”

Snorri blinked at the drake for long moments, as another series of horn blasts sounded from up on the walls. Then he shouted a laugh, and turned to look up at Oliver, eyes dancing.

~*~

The attack had come the night before, Snorri explained, as they shoveled porridge into their mouths and chased it with watered, though mulled wine. Bland, cheap fare, but it tasted like ambrosia from the gods after the day’s long, harried ride across the Wastes. Forgoing the manners drilled into him since birth in Drakewell, Oliver ate fast and messy, licking grease off his fingers after he split a still-steaming hunk of bread in half and dunked it in the salty oil on offer.

Across from them, Snorri said, “It was a clear night, and we saw the torches approaching. Riders approached the scouts I sent out the gate, and they wore the braids and fangs” – he drew a half-circle around his throat, and Oliver thought of the necklace of teeth Ragnar wore, as sharp as his own wolfish canines as he grinned, and winked, and flirted – and betrayed them – “and one carried the stag banner. Your cousin – Ragnar – he traveled with you when you passed through here.” The captain hung his head. “Forgive me, your majesty. I thought–”

“Snorri,” Erik said, firmly. “How could you have known? This isn’t your fault.”

Snorri shook his head. “Then whose fault could it be? I should have known, when it was only Úlfheðnar, when you weren’t there, your majesty, I–”

“He fooled us, too,” Erik said, cutting him off. He scowled down into his half-eaten soup. “But I don’t have the excuse of not knowing better. He’s been a miserable, scheming wretch his whole life, and I…I allowed it.”

Oliver laid a hand on his thigh beneath the table, a silent squeeze of support. He knew there wasn’t a single comforting thing he could say – Erik had known his cousin better than any of them, and hadn’t suspected his treachery; he was too stubborn to believe he couldn’t have done anything about it, now.

Erik took a big breath and lifted his head, shoulders squaring. “How many men lost?”

“Fifteen, before we got the gates shut.”

“Damn,” Erik murmured, and pushed his bowl away in favor of massaging at his temples.

“But this was no ordinary siege, your majesty,” Snorri continued. “They had rams, and wood enough to build towers – but, once we had the gates locked, they didn’t stay long. They retreated.”

“Back the way they’d come?”

“No, your majesty. They went east. If I had to guess, I’d say they’re taking the long way around.”

Oliver had spent enough time the last few months poring over Aeretollean maps that he could immediately envision the shape of Long Reach in faded ink on parchment. The tall, spiked timber wall that bracketed the fortress on two sides stretched out to the west and east, twenty miles in both directions. In the west, the wall ended at another, smaller structure, a guard tower that had slowly been surrounded by a small, rural town. In the east, the wall tied into a nasty, jagged stretch of the Wolf Mountains called the Razorback. Even growing up in Drakewell, Oliver known that only the most experienced and hardy could navigate those twisting mountain paths successfully.

He frowned. “That’ll put them behind. They know we’ll go through Long Reach; we’ll be ahead of them at this rate.”

Snorri shrugged, clearly not understanding the motives of their erstwhile besiegers.

“I’d have thought – if they were going to go around – they’d head west,” Oliver continued. “Set Wildwood to the torch and cut across country.”

“That would put them twenty miles off course from Aeres,” Erik said.

“Yeah, but they’ll lose more than time going through the mountain pass. It doesn’t make anysense.”

“No,” Erik said, face grim, “it doesn’t – unless they aren’t worried about beating us home.”

“Why…” And then understanding dawned. Dinner turned to lead in Oliver’ stomach. “There’s a second army.”

Snorri’s gray brows shot up to his hairline.

Oliver swallowed with difficulty. “And they’relettingus get ahead of them, so they can drive us into it.”

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