Page 13 of With Fangs and Claws (The Wolf Queen 1)

Axe turned to me, running his eyes over me in a possessive way that had my hand gripping my table knife hard.

“Slight build, but strong with it,” he replied. “Red hair, bright as a flame. Skin as pale as milk—”

“Sounds like a wench you’re describing, Your Highness,” Father said with a snort. “But the red hair gives me a clue. Probably the bloody Murphys again. I’ll have someone sent around to their house to ask a few questions. Now…”

His voice trailed away as the serving staff entered the room with dish after dish of food. My hand slapped down on my stomach as it grumbled noisily. I’d scarcely eaten a thing since morning.

“Allow me,” Dane said to me in a voice as rich as the sauces Cook had prepared to go with the venison and side dishes. “Let me know if there’s anything that doesn’t please you.”

I watched mutely as he pulled my plate over and then began to pile food on top of it.

“Too much food for a woman,” Father grumped, then froze when he realised who he was saying that to. He would’ve received grunts of enthusiasm if it had been his fellow border lords visiting, but not now. The four men stared at Father baldly, forcing him to desperately rally. “But you must want to fatten her up, get her ready to have babies.” He gestured magnanimously at the spread before us. “Eat up, daughter. You’ll need to obey your husband in all things, just as you do me.”

As I took the plate, my teeth locked tight together, but I nodded and voiced my thanks to Father, Dane and the gods themselves.

“See, hardly the stunning conversationalist,” Father said, then caught himself again. Diminishing me was his usual order of business, but doing so in front of the men who wished to marry me? “But she has a healthy appetite that I’m sure will translate to other things.”

The wargen went completely still as Father winked at them, so I busied myself eating the food that was given to me. That wasn’t entirely correct behaviour. I should’ve waited for the most important person in the room to start eating first and that was Dane. He didn’t seem to take offence though, nodding with satisfaction as I sliced into the buttery soft venison and then took a bite.

It was delicious, I knew that academically, yet somehow everything turned to dust in my mouth as I cut, sliced, chewed and swallowed methodically until I couldn’t take another bite and then sat silently in my chair.

Because Father’s words had brought back to me that this was my life, one of swinging contrasts. As I stared at the gleaming wooden tabletop, I saw all the different versions of me there. Fearless huntress and sickly thing that could barely take a breath unassisted. Willing to pull a knife on a prince and put it to his throat, then dutiful, silent daughter under my father’s eye. Sometimes it felt like I was being torn in a thousand pieces, forced to pretend to be one thing, then another, but never actually being me.

And what would I be like if I had that chance?

Would I be the huntress, riding carelessly over the moors? Or… My eyes slid sideways to take in the men around the table, marking the ways their spines softened as they relaxed after a good meal, talking further with Father about the finer points of the deal until their voices all blurred together.

When my awareness of them dropped away, another’s image came forward.

Kris was the future I had chosen for myself and, as a result, he glimmered inside my mind. I saw him, a striking figure on the training grounds and off. Caught by me in the act of sweeping his blond hair off his forehead, the muscles in his forearm flexed as he did so, before he raised his sword with the other hand, ready to fight a new recruit. No one could match him on the battlefield. And off…?

I saw all those stolen moments between us. But in my mind, they changed. Where he was ostensibly showing me how to better shoot my bow, even as he walked around me, he praised me in a low voice no one else could hear, calling me a goddess among women. When I sneaked down to the stables late at night and he passed by ‘on patrol’, he slipped inside, his hands finding my face and…

I rose to my feet then, all the possible ways to have myself excused from the room forming in my mind, ready to be spoken, when—

“Ah, dessert,” Father said as the main course dishes were removed by the serving staff and replaced by sweet confections. “I don’t see much point of it, preferring a good whiskey and some cheese—”

“Then perhaps we might share dessert with your daughter?” Dane said, “Alone.”

The last word was tacked on, spelling out their intent when Father initially didn’t seem to understand what they were requesting. When he heard it? I watched my father jerk as if he were slapped. And why wouldn’t he? He was effectively being ordered out of his own dining room: by wargen of all things. But Dane knew what he was doing. He was a prince where my father was a duke. That difference in rank wouldn’t normally mean a thing, given the distrust between the two kingdoms, except for this deal.

Grania was a country rich in farmlands. It exported huge amounts of the grain it produced yet few in our country went hungry, the lands were that fertile. But what made it attractive to our people when they first came, made it equally attractive to our other neighbours. They hadn’t dared try to take the land from the fierce wargen, but us… We were merely human. So to hold what our people had fought so hard to claim, we needed weapons and plenty of them. Steel weapons were harder, less likely to rust and enabled our knights to all wear the famed armour our people had developed the design for. A huge standing army of steel-clad warriors? That would certainly be sufficient to deter any avaricious eyes from looking over our borders.

And we couldn’t do it without Strelan iron ore.

“Of course,” Father said stiffly, then got to his feet. “A word, daughter?”

I followed him outside, his fingers gripping my upper arms and digging into my flesh the moment after he closed the door behind us.

“Do not ruin this for me,” he snapped.

“Of course, Father. I’d—”

“I know about your exploits with the men on the training ground,” he hissed. “I know about your little attempts to become some sort of archer. I know that you hinder Linnea at every turn. But I’ve turned a blind eye to it all, because you knew how to keep your mouth shut and your head down when I asked you to. Your husband, I figured, would beat those uppity ways out of you at his leisure.”

He smiled slowly then.

“He might thank me for the opportunity to do so, as I did your grandfather. Your mother needed a birching more times than not and I enjoyed whipping her, right up until she died.”

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