Page 91 of With Fangs and Claws (The Wolf Queen 1)

“Be careful how you speak about your princes,” the king said with quiet menace. “Dane will rule after me”—his eyes flicked to the man in question—“if he can get his head out of his arse. He will be the king you answer to.”

“Of course, Your Majesty. My apologies, Your Highness.”

The mood in the room had well and truly soured, but for us it had been that way since the moment we stepped inside.

“So, you propose to do nothing?” Dane asked, the challenge just simmering under the surface of his words.

“Of course, I will do nothing,” the king replied. “Wildeford is not that far from the capital. A few days'hard ride, so these ‘Reavers’ you speak of should already be here, ready to lay siege to Snowmere.” He tossed his hands up in the air. “Where are they?” He shook his head slowly. “If you become king, you’ll need to prioritise, Dane. A bunch of spats between some tiny mountain towns is beneath our attention. They’ll sort things out in the same backwards way they have for centuries - without our input. Now.”

Whatever jovial facade he’d been maintaining, it was in this moment that it well and truly slipped. The lords might be hazy-eyed with drink, but not the king.

“If you want to protect your country from outside threats, find a way to improve this deal.” The king shoved a curled-up piece of parchment at Dane. “If we sell iron ore for a decent price, our coffers fill. Money equals soldiers, equals a larger army, equals a stronger, better Strelae. One that might have a chance of throwing off the yoke of the humans, once and for all.”

I felt like I’d been suddenly thrust into a thick fall of snow, every single part of me going ice-cold and numb. Like all Granian children, I’d been schooled in the cost of the war, seen whole paddocks filled with the old graveyards where all the dead from the battle between our two countries had been laid to rest. To consider doing this, again?

“You want the Granians to bankroll a future war against them?” Dane asked, aghast.

“Genius, no? No one has ever had the kind of vision I have. No one has had the balls to make the changes I have. The previous packs that ruled us were all caught up in these hidebound rules, following traditions, waiting for the return of a queen that was never coming. If we are to take back our land, we’re to do so the old-fashioned way.”

The king’s nails lengthened then, and he rapped the sharp claws on the desktop in a rapid staccato.

“With fangs and claws.”

“With fangs and claws!” the lords said, lifting their glasses in the air in a way that seemed well practised.

“Brother,you better have a deadline in that head of yours for when we challenge that bastard,” Gael hissed, once we regrouped on the steps outside the palace. “Because I’m not sure how much longer I can bear this.” He wrapped an arm around me to pull me in close, and I welcomed the heavy weight of it. “I don’t have it in me to keep playing their games. If you’re still telling me we have to bide our time, Darcy and I will go and hole up somewhere, wait it out there, because…”

“I always knew Father was a fucking bastard,” Weyland said, shaking his head, “but…”

I knew what he was going through, the way it felt when all the worst things you suspected about your parents turned out to be true. That sometimes, just sometimes, monsters came together and rutted, producing children who weren’t touched by their madness. Children who were unable to believe that the people they’d been raised to love were more frightening than any imagined monster hiding in the dark. But then as you grew older, your ability to ignore the truth faded, and you were confronted with an uncomfortable reality.

“Your father is a fucking monster,” I said, the four of them blinking when they looked at me. “But you knew that already. Well and truly before this happened. He saw his true mate serving in a castle in Grania and… There’s nothing that gets through to him, no fine feeling. Just ambition and greed and an incredible willingness to sacrifice the lives of hundreds of thousands in a bloody war?” I shook my head. “Grania is an independent state now, with its own king. It might not be able to draw on support from the Empire but…”

I stared at the floor, my whole body shuddering in reaction: my breath, my lungs filling and then deflating, my muscles trembling with a need to do something, my legs coiled.

“You have to challenge him,” I said, emotion rising that I couldn’t keep down no matter how frantically I tried. I smiled then, but it was utterly without mirth. More a wolfish baring of my teeth. They watched fur prickle across my skin and then fade away as I thought of Del and Jan, as I saw that tiny baby, the women huddled down in the cellar. “They’re going to let that happen again and again, and they’re going to laugh about it.”

Dane moved in then, with much less confidence than the others used when they held me, but still, he enfolded me in his arms and pulled me against him and it was only then that both of us could let out a full breath.

“I’m working on it,” he said, real passion in his voice. “I hate this situation just as much as you do, but if we don’t do this right, we’ll end up successfully defeating Father, but without an ally in the country. We need to find out more about these bloody Reavers, about what they are and why they didn’t march on the capital. What is that symbol about? Why would they destroy a village so wantonly like that? They didn’t seem to take a thing, just—”

“Thrill kill,” Gael said grimly. “We know what they got out of it, but you’re right, we don’t know why, and we need to find out. As Father pointed out, they haven’t attacked anywhere large yet and he’s assuming that’s going to continue. We need to work out if that is going to be the case.”

“And we need to keep helping people,” Weyland said, his voice somewhat forlorn. “Those children…”

All those pins in the map we’d seen, they were like tiny gravestones now, rather than attack sites, because we knew that each and every one of them would be just like Wildeford.

“But we might not be able to be the ones that go there,” Axe said, and we all let out a sigh. “If Father has his eye on us…”

“I got word you were back. Pleasant trip?”

Nordred appeared on the steps, Pepin in tow, a wary smile on his lips. But it didn’t meet his eyes and it faded quickly, to be replaced by a steady regard.

“You knew about this,” Dane said.

“I know many things, young king,” he replied. “That’s my curse.”

“But you knew about the attacks. What these Reavers did.”

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