Page 3 of The Wolf Queen

Hot blood stained my skin, again, and I looked down at my dress and saw I’d made a mess of it. Annis would be vexed with me. She had ideas of dressing me as a queen, but she didn’t realise what that meant in Strelae. Their queens had ruled by being conduits to the goddesses’ powers, something Callum had been able to wrest away due to some accident of birth and will. But he wouldn’t retain that control for long, not if I had anything to bloody say about it. Ravens landed around us, cawing and eyeing the corpse with greedy eyes, just as Axe moved forward.

“Shoo!” I said, flicking my bloodied hands at them and smiling at the sounds of their disgruntled cries. “Return to your mistress. There’s nothing to report here.”

Chapter3

“I’ve got it.” Axe slid an arm around the stag and then hoisted its dead weight up on his shoulders. I just blinked at this display of strength. I knew in theory how strong each one of them was, but it was moments like this when it was pushed home. “Many of your burdens I cannot carry, lass,” he told me. “But I can at least bear this.”

“Axe…” I took a step toward him, hearing in his voice the notes of regret, of self-deprecation, and I couldn’t bear it. Although I turned the blade of derision against myself most days, I couldn’t tolerate it cutting into him. I moved closer yet and felt him go very still as I placed my hand on his chest. “You have far more value than that.”

“Do I?” There was a note of challenge in his voice as he shifted the stag until it sat more comfortably. “And what could I hope to do for you? I couldn’t save Snowmere for you. I couldn’t keep that prick from cutting down Nordred. I couldn’t even stop—”

I placed my fingers against his lips, feeling the prickle of his beard as I did so. His eyes widened, shining bright blue as he moved his mouth to press the smallest kiss there. I drew my fingers away and his face fell, until I went up on tip toes and kissed him instead. His fingers tightened around the stag’s hocks, gripping it tight to stop himself from reaching for me.

“You are here. Sometimes that’s enough.” I pressed my forehead to his before I continued, quietly, intently. “You don’t question what I do, but simply make sure I am not alone when I do it. That’s what I need, Axe. That trust is exactly what I need.”

“Then you shall have it,” he rasped out. “As long as I take breath. Always and forever, lass. I’ll be there, at your back.” A sharp caw had us jerking guiltily apart, as if we were clandestine lovers caught in a forbidden tryst. “And we better get back. Who knows what the Morrigan is up to,” Axe growled. “Is she forwarding our position back to Callum or…?”

Or did she stand with me? That was the question. There was no reason to believe she was going to, her treatment of our people at the battle of Snowmere had made that plain, but… I watched the raven hop forward across the leaves. Perhaps there was a way to strip Callum of that power and take it for ourselves.

“Well, that’s a big beauty,”Annis said approvingly as we walked back into camp. She rubbed her hand down the flat span between the stag’s eyes. “Not sure it’ll go far though. Soup.” The other women around her nodded. “Broth from the bones, soup from the meat, padded out with some of the barley, though we’ll be needing some of that soon.” A meaningful look shot my way.

“For that we’ll have to go into Grania,” I replied.

The women all stilled at my words, though what I was saying was hardly news. We’d been edged back, back, back, until it was either cross the border or fall to the Reavers’ blades.

“My father’s estates first.” I nodded sharply. “At least I know what to expect there.”

“Grania is the granary of Strelae,” one of the women said with a frown. “Good grain that should’ve always been ours. ’Bout time we took it back.”

Easy for her to say, I thought, but I held the words back. The people I was born amongst, they had long past assumed ownership of the land, and the current generation viewed the Strelans as the interlopers, not themselves. We would not be met with open arms. But in my mind’s eye I saw again the vision I had caught right before I’d fallen to the ground: the Granian king bending the knee at my command.

“We’ll try,” I said with a nod.

“Plotting our next move at the cooking fire?” Dane strode forward, raising a wry eyebrow while taking in me and the other women. “It seems the hearth is a more productive place than your council, Your Majesty.”

He bowed to me as he said my title, but it felt jarring, wrong, as though it put a distance between us. Worse, he was the one making sure it was there. I knew he’d meant it as the highest of compliments because it was his birthright, but…

“Women make the decisions, then we persuade men it was their idea all along,” Annis said, sending the ladies cackling. But before I could say anything, Gael strode directly to me.

“You’re all right?” He took my head in his hands, searching my face then running his fingers over me, as if he couldn’t believe anything I said, not until he’d checked for himself. The feel of him, it awakened a terrible joy and pain at his touch. “I woke and you were gone.”

“With Axe,” I replied. He paused then, shooting his brother a dark look. “We went hunting. You tell me I’m queen. Well, I must provide for my people, mustn’t I?”

Although I kept my voice gentle, the fractured blue of his eye blazed bright.

“You send some of the lads into the forest,” he said. “You tell them where to go and what to do. Bugger it, I’ll go for you. You don’t put yourself in danger, not…”

Not after I already had, that went unspoken. I stiffened and Gael’s brows creased, his gaze growing more intent.

“Not anywhere near the Reavers, not withinherreach. Promise me.”

I knew what he wanted, to tell him that all would be well; that we would have other children, that we would only think of our first, wistfully, from time to time. But I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t promise anyone anything. Instead I gave what little I could, running my hand along his face, as though learning the shape of it to store it away in the vault of my mind forever.

“Darcy was with me the whole time,” Axe said.

“And what were you doing?” Gael snapped, looking down at the stag his brother had deposited on the ground. “Letting her go into the forest?!”

“I don’t ‘let’ Darcy do anything.”

---