Page 88 of With Fangs and Claws (The Wolf Queen 1)

“There, there, love. Don’t fuss.”

“Ladies, it might take us a while, but we’ll bring you back to the capital in the meantime. Until we work out exactly what happened here, it's not safe for any of you to remain,” Axe said.

“They’re Reavers, I told you,” one of the women said, clambering over the wreckage of the house to get to the front door, leaving us to follow. She marched down the dirt road that led through town and then pointed defiantly at a symbol I never expected to see when awake. A skull had been crudely painted, white as a ghost, and from it black wings spread.

“No…” I whispered, shaking my head, but Axe moved closer. “No…” He pressed his fingers to the paint, and they came away white, the paint still damp. “No, no…”

“What’s the matter, lass?”

Axe appeared at my shoulder, and I flung myself at him, burying my face in his chest, but that didn’t eradicate the image from my sight. I could see the symbol on the inside of my eyelids when I closed them, could hear the caw of a raven in my ears, drowning out the beat of Axe’s heart and, even when I screwed my eyes up tight, I saw the wolves come over the mountainside in a great swarm, their paws tripping over rocks and stones, but nothing would stop them. They would sweep down into the valley, even if they had to do so falling head over tail. Because what drove them wasn’t instinct or the hunt, or even a disturbing need to kill for fun, it was this. The raven flew through the air before them, its raucous caw their battle cry.

“Reavers?” I tried the name out the woman gave them and the raven in my mind’s head jerked up, its golden skull glittering.

Caw! it called. Caw!

“We need to get everyone out of here,” I insisted, and my frantic tone seemed to please the woman, her mouth becoming a grim line as she nodded at me. “We need to get them as far away from this place as possible.”

The process tooka lot longer than we had hoped. We were forced to rake through each house and retrieve whoever we could, the villagers we found sitting with Weyland, trying to prepare an evening meal from what ingredients could be recovered. But between peeling muddy potatoes and carrots, he started playing a game with the children, one we called jacks at home. We’d discovered a small ball and they bounced it in the dirt, picking up various odd-shaped rocks in increasingly complex ways. He looked up when he felt me watching him and I nodded, unable to match the bright smile he was gifting all of them, but grateful for it all the same.

“I’ve found a couple of carts,” Dane said to Gael, Axe, and me. “They’re not in great shape, but they’ll help with moving that many people. We should start tonight…”

“We can’t,” I said with a shake of my head. “Everyone’s dead on their feet and at least some of us will need to walk.”

“I can run back to the city in fur,” Gael said. “Let the commander know. He can send out some troops to assist.”

“Not you, brother, me,” Axe insisted. “If my mother caught sight of you in fur…”

I was struck then by the memory of my father’s men and their aborted attack on Axe. I grabbed Gael’s hand then and squeezed it.

“Axe will go then,” Dane said. “Tonight?”

“It’ll half fucking kill me, but yeah, tonight,” the big man agreed, but then he turned to me, pulling me close and tucking me in against his body.

I gripped him tight then, wanting to imprint that hard expanse of a body into mine, so that I’d feel him after he’d gone. I was still stumbling around where I stood with the four men, but right now it felt like there was nothing to quibble about. I didn’t want their throats slashed and dumped in a mass grave to be burned, as many of the men in the village had been. I just wanted him here with me, even though I saw the logic in him going.

“Everything will be alright, lass. Nothing gets by ol’ Axe.”

“It better not,” I said, my voice muffled by his taut stomach as he stroked his hand through my hair.

“What the hell happened here?”Gael asked much later as we sat around a large fire. In that respect we had plenty of fuel to burn. “Reavers are something grannies talk about to scare the kids.”

“Then we need to start speaking to some of the old ones,” Dane said. “Because whatever this was…” As he stared at the flames, I knew he had to be remembering what the commander had shown us on a map of Strelae and Grania, the ring of the Eaglefell mountains that fenced us off from the rest of the continent sketched in remarkable detail. But all around the mountain range, where there were tiny villages, pins had been placed.

“That’s everywhere we’ve received reports of an attack,” the commander had told us.

“And how many calls for help have we answered?” Dane asked.

The commander said nothing, because his expression did the job for him, because he didn’t want to chance deriding the king to his sons, I was willing to bet. He just stared and waited for us to respond.

“None of them?” Weyland asked, putting his hands down on the map and inspecting it more closely. “Not one?”

“The stewards ask us for help because the lords won’t give them permission to send their warriors out. When we request permission from the king to go, he doesn’t even bother to respond.”

“They’re ignoring this?” Gael asked in wonder.

When Dane blinked, his eyes met mine. We looked out at the people huddled around the fire, those we would be trying to bring back to the capital tomorrow. We both frowned at the pitiful size of the group, at the way they’d been forced to huddle up in small groups against the cold.

“Darcy.” Weyland slid down beside me and then waved me over. “I promised the children the princess would tell them a story.”

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