Page 77 of With Fangs and Claws (The Wolf Queen 1)

Chapter 32

We tied Gael’s horse up out the front of the inn and when we walked into the alehouse on the bottom floor, the ambience couldn’t have been more different.

“Prince Gael!” came cries around the room and he smiled and nodded to those he knew, all the while steering me between the trestle tables until we found Pepin and Nordred.

“Gods, you left the castle already,” Pep said with an exaggerated wrinkle of her nose. There was a tankard in her hand and another empty one beside her. “It was awful, right? I bet it was awful.”

“Not all of it,” I said, looking over my shoulder at Gael, but as we settled down on the bench seats I nodded. “Mostly awful though. Queen Aurora is going to try and invalidate the agreement by making sure I don’t claim her sons as my mates.”

“And risk war with Grania,” Nordred observed much more dourly. “The agreement was signed in good faith and the Granian king will not take kindly to this kind of quibbling.”

“Ready to step up and take your place, Nordred?” Gael asked, leaving both Pep and I staring at the two of them quizzically.

“Not yet, young prince, and you have your own role to step into.” Nordred’s eyes slid to me. “Both of you do.”

“I have literally no idea what any of you are talking about,” Pepin said. “Do you, Darcy?”

“None in the slightest, though…” I stopped talking as tankards of beer were set before us along with bowls of food. I looked at the soft as butter shredded meat, succulent vegetables and clouds of mashed potatoes with rapt attention. “I’m guessing we’re not going to find out until it’s ‘time’.”

“You were always my most apt of students,” Nordred said, with a mysterious smile, and it was then I was struck by the change in him. This was not the gentle man who lurked in my father’s stables, the one who was my bulwark against my father, against Linnea’s wrath and that’s when a thought hit me.

“Would I have been taught to fight if you had never come to the keep to serve as horse master?”

He paused then, his spoon halfway between his mouth and the bowl, that strange smile widening.

“How very astute of you, Darcy. I will admit freely that I change things to suit myself, find ways to persuade people to do what needs to be done.” He stared at me then and for the first time, I saw his blue eyes begin to glow.

Granians birthed children with blue eyes too, but it was a rare thing and often seen to be a sign of bad luck, for exactly this reason. All of the two-souled had eyes like ice chips when their beasts rose within them, but I’d never seen this side of Nordred, not for all the years I’d known him.

“You were born to fight,” he continued, his voice containing a weight that far outstripped the king’s, the tables around us instinctively falling quiet when he spoke. “And the Granians are too hidebound by their ideas about women to allow that to happen, so I… persuaded your father that this might be a useful way to spend your time. It kept you occupied. It made you invested in the idea of appearing to be the docile daughter when he needed it. It stopped your nature from souring, forcing you to defy him in more embarrassing ways.”

“So, if you could do that…” I swallowed, my throat bone dry. I reached for a tankard to take a drink of the bitter brew. “Why was I beaten?”

“I ensure what needs to happen, does,” Nordred replied, his tone tight. “You’re not a true warrior without a notch on your belt?” At his words I went cold, remembering Magnus’, one of my father’s men’s careless words to me, the ones that drove me out onto the moors that day hunting. “You’ve a battle ahead of you, lass, and no student of mine goes into a fight untried and unblooded.”

“What did you do?” Gael growled, his presence feeling like it grew beside me, and as I watched, his fingers turned to claws and scratch at the tabletop. “You let him brutalise her?”

Nordred shook his head slowly then, his spoon dropping into his bowl. “My curse is there are times I know what’s going to happen and it does, no matter what I do. Did I know the duke would beat her half to death?” He stared at the two of us then, but for some reason I don’t think it was us he saw. “Of course I did. But so did half the keep. They’d heard your screams in the past, they’d seen you afterwards, small and bleeding. Some of the staff had brought you to me after it was done, so I could patch you up.”

His hands gripped the edge of the table and the wood creaked underneath his grip.

“I like to tell myself that night I would’ve stepped in if I wasn’t drugged and passed out unconscious, like the rest of the keep, but…”

Nordred shook his head slowly, the lines in his face seeming to deepen by the second. His brows creased, the muscles twitching in his face and when he finally looked back at me, his eyes were blazing blue.

“But you became what you were supposed to as a result of it. Stronger, faster, more resilient. I might hate the path, but I see what’s at the end of it and I cannot argue with the final result.”

The man jerked himself to his feet and was up and away from the table with the preternatural speed of the two-souled.

“What the fuck…?” Pepin hissed, glancing at us two and the space Nordred had left.

“What did you mean beforehand, about Nordred taking his position?” I asked Gael between gritted teeth. I’d managed to steer clear of the ghosts of what had happened to me, and I was determined to stay that way.

“I think your Nordred is the Nordred,” Gael said. “Nordred the wizard. Nordred the Wise.”

Pepin spluttered at that, sending a fine spray of food particles across the table, forcing us to wipe the mess off us.

“The old queen’s advisor?” she said, her voice rising. “The one who sent her across the border to the Granians? The one who lost us the bloody war with the usurpers?”

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