The practice went as well as to be expected with four strangers using three different fighting styles and four different weapon types. Feilan had eventually excused himself for his daily errand – catching whichever mangy goat a local herder saw fit to sell him, circuitously leading it to the cave without being observed or followed, and tethering it there, leaving it bleating – and returned in time to join Remy and Adeline for their afternoon visit in the foyer of Third Hill East.
Little Prince Afzal was there, with Darya and two of her guards, and a third man, very large and vacant-eyed, who Feilan guessed carried the boy about, for he saw no wheeled wicker chair of the sort he’d encountered elsewhere. Such a contraption would give Afzal some measure of independence inside his own house of rule, no doubt a distasteful idea to his stepmother.
The two, or perhaps three, guards wouldn’t have been enough to stop Micah, but they’d’ve slowed him just long enough for Darya to get a knife into Afzal’s throat. She eyed Feilan, the champion with an alliance with her enemy, with a great deal of suspicion, which eased somewhat as he acted the besotted fool with Remy. That wasn’t difficult.
The youngest of Remy’s sisters was there, too: Lady Not-So-Bad, Rosmunda, and her husband, Conrad. They were only six months married themselves. It had been an arranged alliance like all the Nivardus siblings’ marriages, including her childless first, but they seemed well-suited, and quietly fond of each other in a way that suggested the young widow’s second marriage hadn’t been entirely arranged.
The doting aunt cooed over how darling Adeline and Afzal were, helpfully advancing Feilan’s plan. He couldn’t tell if this was inadvertent or whether Remy had decided to trust his sister. He hoped he hadn’t, though she was the only sibling to defend him at the suppers, and she’d been speaking up for him more and more. Feilan guessed this was because she had a large Vaer warrior on her side now, or at least someone who could be mistaken as one, if not compared too closely to Torben.
She smiled at Feilan with real warmth, and Feilan was amused to realise she approved of him, or, at least, very much approved of her baby brother’s innocently blissful expression as he curled into Feilan’s habitual arm over his shoulders. Feilan kissed the top of his head, and Remy snuggled closer.
Even putting aside the awkward end to their morning, this was remarkably sweet of him, since Feilan had gone straight from the practice session to chasing a goat about its pen. It was old and ornery, and needed wrestling to get the tether on. He had to reek of both old sweat and annoyed goat, the sort of perfume that would smell puce to him. Remy was doing a fine show of acting intoxicated by manly musk, however.
It was with decided regret that Feilan realised he didn’t have time to either wash himself or pin his husband to their bed before the nightmeal.
And now he, Torben, Noura and Micah had taken the field for the third night, the final night of true moon-gloam before it began to grow big again, and thus the final night of the official contest for this month. Feilan was fairly sure, from the stories he’d gathered, that the monster lingered in the region longer, but it would openly break the rules to take its head after tonight.
That would give him a solid month to achieve his three aims: the promised freedom tattoos for Noura, the plan to safely extricate Afzal for Micah, and a method to neutralise any inconveniently bright ideas from Uncle Bertrand when he realised he was going to lose his authority over Adeline.
Feilan did still privately think that those two latter items had a single solution, which was the wholesale murder of both ill-intentioned guardians. But Micah would not trust the simplicity of it, and Remy would not countenance the brutality of it, and so Feilan needed to keep thinking on it.
He strongly suspected the answer to the questions he had asked his mother would help with leashing Uncle Bertrand. Freyja would reply soon, on that, and the tattoos.
As he mused, he rolled his shoulders, which were aching from the sparring that morning. His whole body was complaining, different muscles and joints more or less loudly. He was, in truth, a comfortable trader a long way from a youth spent with a sword and shield trying to earn the approval of his father and the bear-god.
Torben sniggered at him, while the other two, bored, strolled into the mist to do a short patrol of what all the other mercenaries – five survivors in Bertrand’s bloc, since one of the men Micah had wounded hadn’t taken the field tonight, and only three solo now – must know was their territory by now.
‘Shut your mouth,’ Feilan told him, managing a smile.
‘Of all the things for you to get narky about,’ Torben said. ‘We’ve all known you can’t fight since you had sixteen summers. Even before you almost died on your first raid.’
‘Lots of bear-warriors die on their first raid,’ Feilan said, folding his arms.
‘Yeah, and they’re dogshit fighters, too, Little Wolf.’
Feilan scowled. He wasn’t sure why he was finding Torben’s needling on this one subject so effective. His friend was right: he’d never been as good with a sword as the real bersverdar, the ones who heard the bear-god as a roar rather than a whisper.
But he’d been good enough to protect Freyja for years, until they were reliably earning enough money to hire guards, until other Cursed from all over the heartland began to gather around them.
Those had been hard years. They had been good years, too. In the village, the two of them had been Ulfr’s victims, allied but ultimately each alone. He had supposed Freyja loved him, from the way she stood between him and his father. But when she rescued him, he had known it. And once she had the chance to finish raising him out from under Ulfr’s dark shadow, their closeness had grown, their care for each other a precious, chosen, golden thing that made the only solid weight in his heart.
Meanwhile, his younger self gained in precious confidence every time his mere presence made an unscrupulous dealer think twice about trying to cheat Freyja Anjasdottir, every time he drew the bastard sword that had so aptly replaced his father’s unwieldy longsword and scared off a robber band with sheer Vaer bravado, every time he’d actually had to use that blade.
He hadn’t, he thought now, had to do that often. But he had had to, and he hadn’t done it surrounded by stalwart comrades on every side, either.
‘You’ll want to shut your mouth,’ he told Torben, putting a snap into his voice.
Torben laughed, perennially unoffended – the only thing that could really offend the man was inaccurately impugning his warrior courage…or accurately calling him a serthr. ‘Do you know, I think Freyja picked me for the mercenary contract so you’d have to spend real time with me for the first time since we were sixteen and realise I’m not worth moping over.’
Feilan obligingly performed his usual brow raise out of respect for Torben’s apparent acquiescence to the polite request to change the serthing subject. ‘I’ve never in my life moped over you.’
‘Sure,’ Torben said. ‘At least three men looked miserable when you left Siftar, and one of them was that Meik fellow, who I’m fairly sure is not even cursed.’
‘Don’t need to be a Cursed to enjoy shoving your cock in a man’s mouth occasionally. You’d know.’
Torben ignored the bait. ‘Yeah. You had your occasional fucks. Why did none of them ever turn into more?’
‘Not because of you.’ Feilan heard the defensive note and winced. He was lying: it was because of Torben.
‘No?’ Torben was smirking, radiating the usual arrogant complacency he took to bed with Feilan.
‘Do you actually think I spend my whole year counting the days until summer rolls around and you sail in for a fly-by-night fuck?’
‘Wouldn’t surprise me.’
Feilan scoffed. ‘And what, spent all the years before you started camping nearby pining over my long-lost first love? As if I wasn’t travelling through entire lands with whole crops of men who don’t have the backwards prejudice our people are stuck in.’
‘Why did none of them become anything to you?’
‘Who says they didn’t?’ Feilan said, struggling to recall the name of any who had.
Only his patient Ystheran, Helios Taurasi, came to mind, and they’d both gone into their handful of months together knowing one of them would leave Low village eventually and the other would never voluntarily leave.
‘I do.’
‘We were travelling.’
‘For a dozen years. Haven’t you been just as long at Siftar?’
‘Longer,’ Feilan had to admit. Twelve years establishing Freyja’s reputation and her trade network, travelling to every corner of the great landmass of Enea and crossing the sea to the east as well. Thirteen years at Siftar, their spindly ash sapling now a full-grown tree. ‘But we were busy establishing the trading post, the first few years. I didn’t have time for anything more back then.’
‘And then I showed up seven summers ago.’
‘Doesn’t mean anything.’
‘Doesn’t it?’
It meant, Feilan thought, biting his tongue on a bitter response to the incendiary smugness, that twenty-five years ago, he’d been badly betrayed by the boy he loved, who had turned out to value him only as a you’ll-do, to be discarded the moment he became inconvenient.
Never, in all those years since, had he felt more than a passing desire to ever trust someone like that again, to ever let himself make someone precious who would not make him precious in return. He’d been glad to move on from town to town, notwithstanding the occasional brief pang, Helios the pangiest. He’d certainly been content to keep his Siftar lovers at arm’s length.
He’d only noticed that habit in the last few years.
Well. Seven summers ago, to be precise.
But he didn’t say that. Vaer men didn’t say things like that to each other. He and Torben didn’t say things like that to each other.
He could say it to Remy, and Remy would listen. Remy would look at him with that naive trust, so very open and unsullied that it would be too easy to trust him in return, if only because he was too innocent at playing his own game to conceive of ofundi krokr, the malicious trick – betrayal.
And Feilan had trusted him – he had told no one else about the goat ploy. That hinted of something he didn’t need to examine yet. He would leave that stone unturned, just for now.
‘Maybe Freyja did want me to remember how obnoxious you are,’ he said at last. ‘I didn’t get my brains from my father, did I? But you found some brains somewhere, spotting one of her manoeuvres. Head not so jolted about, after all, Thunder Bear.’
‘Always so mouthy.’ Torben stepped in closer. ‘But I never noticed how funny you think you are.’
‘No, you knew that,’ Feilan said, exasperated. ‘You’d forgotten.’
Dropping his voice into its deepest rumble, Torben murmured, ‘I don’t think I appreciate you enough, do I?’
He reached a slow hand to brush Feilan’s hair back. Feilan stared up at him in surprise. Torben didn’t caress. Torben grabbed, and took.
‘We’ve got a little time, before the other two circle back.’ Torben’s hand stroked over Feilan’s hair to rest at his nape. ‘Let me show you how much I appreciate you, Little Wolf.’
‘This is just more jealousy, isn’t it?’ Feilan asked, holding still. ‘You think Remy’s wriggling on in to a space you can’t fit.’
The hand on the back of his neck tightened. ‘Isn’t he?’
‘It’s just one more moon-turn. And then it’s done.’
Torben’s face twisted, then almost immediately smoothed over. He dropped his hand. ‘He’s such a scrawny little bugger,’ he said, sounding almost wistful. ‘What do you even see in him?’
Feilan opened his mouth and then decided Torben would never understand Remy’s tart sweetness as anything other than weakness, his persistent courage on behalf of his niece as anything other than weakness, his open-hearted trust in the face of years of rejection as anything other than weakness.
He said, ‘Yeah, that’d be the sex.’
‘He can’t be the sort of man you prefer in bed.’
‘What would you know about what I prefer, in bed or anywhere?’
‘My cock knows all about it,’ Torben said, his broad grin suddenly ascendant.
It struck Feilan that Torben’s grin in this moment served the very same purpose his own ever-ready smile so often did. ‘Thunder Bear…’
‘Never mind,’ Torben said heartily. ‘So what if you’re choosing him for now? You’ll come chasing a bit of this again, soon enough.’ He slapped his chest.
‘I’m not… This is… You’re being…’
Feilan, so rarely at a loss for words, gave up the endeavour and shoved Torben, who swatted him fondly enough in return, if, as always, more firmly than he generally enjoyed. The world steadied back to their usual keel.
A goat ran past them, full tilt.
It was trailing its tether, much abbreviated. Feilan had a moment to note it: the woven hemp rope he’d tied around a narrow stony jut hadn’t come loose, and its new short length ended cleanly, not frayed as if chewed through or abraded by rough rock.
Then the monster was upon them.