Page 98 of Through Battle and Blades (The Wolf Queen 2)

“I was forced to ride to your rescue, because you were lying face down in the fields.”

“Yes.” My body was tensed, strung taut like a wire, ready to be plucked. “Yes, I was. Because I reached out. Because I connected to each one of those bloody men and felt the moment they died. When their throats were torn out and when they bled out into the dirt. I saw their last memories, heard their thoughts about their loved ones. I felt…” I staggered then, Weyland and Gael rushing in. “I felt all of it, their deaths.”

“That’s your curse and your gift.” Nordred was far, far worse than my father in this moment. Just like my father, the man was pitiless. “You can access the goddess’ power, be the conduit for it in this world and lend that strength to our people. You won’t stop them all dying and you’ll feel it each time one does, but you can arm them, strengthen them, prepare them as best as you can before this fight. I’ll be right there with you, lass.”

I looked up, feeling the wind beginning to whip up, hearing a stray rumble of thunder.

“I can’t ride the winds or part the waves, but I can bring the storms. I’ll use whatever power is left inside me to smite that fucking bastard and his deranged Reavers down, right by your side, Darcy.”

His hands slapped down on my shoulders in a way that was all too familiar. Putting his hands on my younger self usually meant a lesson was to be learned, sometimes a painful one.

“But I need you at the peak of your powers to do so. Reach out with your mind.”

“I can’t.” The words were out of my mouth without thought, but as soon as I said them a memory surfaced.

“Stare at the sword, lass,” he’d told me when I was barely big enough to lift a practice one, my father’s men snickering around me. “Memorise its form, its weight, the way it feels in your hand.”

“But why, Nordred?” I’d asked.

“Because it has to become a part of you before you can hope to wield it. Some swordsmen use their blade in the same way they do a knife and fork at dinner, with some skill, but no real heart in it. If you want to be more than just the most pedestrian of warriors…”

I looked up then, realising he’d been training me to work my mind, to expand my consciousness, since I was a small child. To lose myself in the movement of my body. But now? I was to step beyond my maidenly sense of me and into…

I took a breath in and as I did, the golden light swelled and swelled, becoming too big for me and my lungs. It needed to be allowed to travel outwards. When I exhaled, I half expected a gilt plume of smoke to escape my lips, but it didn’t. Instead, I heard a chorus of sharp intakes of breath from my mates around me.

Whatever burned there in my heart, whatever light the goddess had conjured, it bled eagerly from me to them and with that came an awareness.

I thought I knew just how fast Dane’s mind raced, but right now I was humbled by the reality. He conjured various scenarios at a dizzying rate, taking and discarding them based on what he judged their likelihood and then moved on to planning how to deal with each possible situation.

Axe’s hand strayed to his weapon, feeling like it was the only thing he could possibly bring to this fight. He would serve his brother, serve me, by flattening every single one of our enemies with a kind of viciousness that made his heart sing.

Weyland watched me, knowing he’d fight to the death to protect me, but fearing, hating that Nordred would force me to do so by his side. He’d hoped I’d stay behind, still tried to think of a way he could keep me nestled down in their tent, projecting whatever… this was and letting them face the danger for me. Please, he prayed to the golden presence inside him. Let it be me and not her.

And then there was Gael. Each one of these men claimed part of my heart, but in him I sometimes felt I’d found a missing part of my soul. He saw me, saw me glowing now with an unearthly light, power filling me, filling him. And more besides. He knew he’d have to share me with his brothers, but he hadn’t anticipated this. I’d share the light in me with the whole camp if that’s what it required, the whole world, even. And he’d help me to do it. When he stepped closer, when he took my hands in his, blue flames appeared like last time, so much stronger than the ones that he used to heal. Power seemed to well up inside him too, twining with my own.

“We need to prepare these boys for the fight,” he said, his voice a low rasp and I could only jerk my head in a nod as a response. “So let's do that.”

He sucked in a breath and I did the same, because it felt like the power multiplied exponentially in that moment, growing and growing until it was forced to burst out.

Men’s heads jerked up, their jaws clamped shut, their eyes widening as something rushed through them. Cups spilled tea on the earth, plates of vittles dropping face down. Weapons fell from limp fingers, conversations stilled as they felt us.

The first man was John. He’d left his home without his father’s blessing, the man spitting at Nordred when he’d asked John to join up with him. His father’s last words to him were something of a curse, damning him for his impetuosity, for thinking a battlefield was a noble place to die. His father had little time for the lords who never visited their lands, but wrung higher and higher tithes from them to pay for the rent on their land, though… John had seen the refugees in the local markets, something rumbling inside him at the sight of beaten women and empty-eyed children. It’d growled at each bruise, each contusion and they were the small flames we fanned now. To strike down the bastards who’d see a pretty girl and think it a fine thing to throw her down in the mud and…

He pitched forward, the sound of his clothes ripping the only warning he got before his spine bowed, his head thrown back. A strangled, pitiful cry escaped him at first, his man’s throat not able to give voice to the thing that swelled inside him.

He didn’t have enough of whatever it was that gave people the ability to be two-souled. His body, his spirit cried for it, but his body refused.

“We have to help,” I gasped to Gael, his grip tightening on me. “I can feel his pain. Gael!”

He could never bear me to feel pain, not even back when my father was brutalising me back at the keep, in the days when Gael could barely bring himself to look at me. But this was just like when he’d healed me. It hurt before it got better. John’s fingers clawed at the earth, then nails turned to talons. It felt like his body tore along with his clothes, burning and made anew with a blue fire, the muscles twitching, fighting the shift, the magic swelling hotter, harder inside him to give him the push he needed.

I sucked in breaths as a grey wolf whined where there had been a man. John had shifted. I wavered on my feet, considering the effort it took to shift one man and groaning at the prospect of doing the same with so many more.

“Nordred…” I rasped.

But right as he took a step forward, something happened.

“Gael’s power is a fire,” he told me. “Getting a spark to light is the hardest part, but once the tinder catches?”

---