Haret required a readjustment. Embla pulled the chairs closer together, exchanged Annette for Kellen, who was taller and broader. She had a beautiful young man carry the rosewine, and offer it to Haret on bended knee like she might a visiting king.
Even-tempered if his pride’s not rankled.
“My apologies, Lord, that I did not speak with you first. You were not to be found.” Though Embla had known exactly where he was – having one of her courtesans behind the privies. He didn’t know she was a courtesan, of course, dressed as she was in a Lebion servant’s livery, but every server among them at risk of being approached was a professional, and paid handsomely for their work.
Haret was magnanimous with drink and feasting, however. “I am not so proud a man.”
“No.” Embla agreed, weighing out more courtesies. “I did wish to thank you again for the gift of the lamb. It was generously given.”
He arched a brow, looking down his nose. “You may think us barbarians, Queen, but we are no less god-touched. Now,” he growled, “speak plainly.”
“We desire peace.”
“Peace,” he spat the word, “is for women and weak fighters.”
“But you consider it. Here, at this feast.”
He was looking into the goblet of wine, only half-listening, and Embla registered the true extent of his drunkenness. A grim grin crept up his mouth. “What wealth you have, Truce-Queen. Even with half your kingdom put to my torch.” He gestured to the wine, to the view of the palace in the distance, the beautiful young man waiting attentively to refill his drink.
“We are blessed, Lord.” Embla said carefully. “Our gods are generous, and fierce.”
His laugh had a whetted edge. “Not so fierce as ours.”
“Yet your people are starving.”
His mouth twitched; she tracked the flex of his thick fingers. “We have starved before. We have starved for centuries, waiting for this age of ice. If we die, more of us will come. It is our way.”
Embla hated the menace in those words, the shadow as large as a continent behind them. “Perhaps we can speak instead of you, Lord Haret. There are pleasures to be had in our wealth, surely, and more easily given from grateful hands than pried from dead fingers.”
He clucked derisively at her turn of phrase. “You’re a clever little bitch, aren’t you?”
Kellen’s sharp intake of breath heralded the hiss of steel. Embla raised a hand to stop him, and Haret roared with laughter.
“That pup thinks he can best me?” He waggled his tongue obscenely at Kellen as her guard put his sword away. “Yes, yes. Do as she says, good little pup. I will never understand it.”
“Understand what, exactly?” Embla’s words prickled her throat, frosted with anger.
“Among our people, strength rules. But among yours?” He snorted. “How fragile your kingdom must be, held together by decorum.”
“I assure you, Lord, we are held together by much more than that.” Embla reached up and pulled her veil away. She hoped he could see her anger; she hoped he might not notice her fear.
Haret’s eyes widened, all pleased surprise, and he drank up the lines of her face as greedily as his wine. “What a warwife you would make.” He murmured absently, and Embla’s stomach turned.
“I make no offer of my hand.” She snapped, cool. “Only this: that with peace you will receive lands, titles, pleasures – no longer forced from fate’s fists but freely given.”
“Given from your goodwill.” He bit, his fascination retreating into sour disapproval. “You have much to learn of us, Truce-Queen.”
Abruptly, he stood, snapping a dismissive nod in her direction.
Embla bit back the loose words in her chest. Instead, she inclined her head, refusing to acknowledge his dismissal with so much as a curtsy. But as he stormed away into the trees, dread prickled her gut.
It wasn’t the right approach. She’d failed on Haret entirely. Which meant she must do better with the rest.
***
After Annette relieved Kellen, Embla asked for the she-shoal Mirosha. She had her shadow behind her, a large young man whose gaunt cheeks wore violent scars delivered by a steady hand. Mirosha swaggered onto the dais, eyeing Embla haughtily as she took her seat in a single, graceful collapse. Her gaze flickered across the dogs, over her head to Annette. A smile tugged at her lips.
“I did not think you thaw-bloods let women touch your steel, Highness.” She crooned.
“On the contrary, Lady Mirosha. A Queensguard is most often made of women. We must make allies of our sex, do you not agree?”
The she-shoal snorted, eyes eating up the air between them.
Embla hesitated for the length of a heartbeat, long enough to decide that Mirosha was too shrewd for lies. “I confess, I wished to speak with you not at all, Lady. You might be the shrewdest of your people, and the most fiercesome.”
“Compliments, Queen?”
Embla clucked her tongue. “You are too cruel for flattery, are you not?” And before Mirosha could answer, Embla pointedly, passively raised her veil.
Mirosha’s eyes dilated like a moor cat, flickering along her features, latching on to her neck and raking up to her mouth. The look was asexual, greedy, malicious. “What a delicate, pretty little thing you are.” She mused, glancing at Annette. “Could you reach her in time? If I slit her pretty throat?”
Annette’s armor creaked, but her Captain had a cooler head than Kellen, and a better read. Embla curled up a brow. “I imagine my guard could not reach you, but my dogs?” She tapped once, hard, on the arm of her chair, and Knives growled deep in his throat.
Mirosha smiled at that too. “Very well. What do you have to say of peace then?”
Embla carefully maneuvered into the shift, shrugged. “You do not want it.”
“I do not.”
“And you cannot abide it being thrust upon you by failure. That, you can abide least of all.”
A black sneer clapped across Mirosha’s face in surprise at how easily and quickly Embla cut to a truth. “Do not pretend you understand me, little Queen.” The she-shoal hissed, rattling the back of her teeth together.
Embla tracked the way tension sprung to Mirosha’s body, the way her shadow leaned into the balls of his feet. Embla herself tried to relax the grip her fingers made on the chair arms, but all she could do was keep her voice level. “Do I tell lies? You lust after blood, and the look in the eye when it’s drained away. Peace has no quarter to sate such lusts, and failure burns them brighter.”
A shiver ran through Mirosha as clean as a spring. She leaned forward on a slight, ominous intake of breath. Her eyes were wide; the white showed on all sides, and her teeth gleamed in the firelight. A terrible, trembling moment peaked between them, Knives’s low growl the only sanity. Mirosha seemed just on the edge, just on the peak of release, when at last her gaze flickered over Embla’s head and caught sight of the palace lit in half a thousand torches. Green swam in her irises.
And just like that, the bloodlust went out of the she-shoal. She sucked in a sharp, shattering breath and relaxed back into the chair, her chest rising and falling with the exertion of her own will. “You are wise beyond your years, Queen.” She spat. “But perhaps I can make space for peace, yes? For now.”
Surety shifted into place in Embla’s mind. The way Mirosha had stared at her lords and ladies over dinner, the way she stared now, at the palace molten silver and gold by torchlight. Embla had gotten her wrong, just a little. Mirosha craved one thing more than she craved pain and blood.
Power.
She could rein herself in, control herself, if she must.
She could agree to peace for power.
It was a victory, and not one Embla had expected.
***
Cole of the Thunderers did not so much as bow his head in her direction when he climbed the dais, stinking of drink and sex and grinning ear to ear. He lazed into the seat across from her like a magnanimous prince, legs spread, arms thrown wide. His shadow was a tall, strong woman with a striking profile, and she leered at Annette, painted eyes framed in a fan of blood-dyed fur, a cloaked demon.
Embla tried to ignore her, to focus, her nerves still prickling from Mirosha’s intensity. She had another plan entirely for Cole, and it required greater dishonesty. So she waited for him to settle, and made herself smaller, more reticent. Her shoulders down-tilted, her chin pointed away so that her lashes flickered under the veil. “Lord of Thunder.” She said, shy, and inclined her head.
A slow smile widened Cole’s crooked jaw as he looked down at her. Close together, with the firelight sweeping up under his heavy head of blonde hair, she had a better look at him. He was handsome, boldly so, with black eyes crinkled from laughter, a noble nose evidenced of repeated breaking, and lips swollen from revelry.
“How pretty it sounds on your lips, Queen.” He sang in a deep, felted voice, his gaze bouncing around the clearing – not as Titulus’s had, observing and retaining, but like a child with far too much to enjoy.
Tambre lifted her head at his undirected energy, and Embla felt, rather than heard, a warning rumble in the dog’s chest. Cole seemed to catch it; he lifted his lip in a sneer, showing his teeth at the dogs so that Knives’s hackles prickled as well.
Embla redirected immediately. “I have heard of your exploits.”
Cole’s gaze flicked back to her veiled face. “All my exploits, Queen?” Feral, animal wildness crackled around him, his big hands lain over his knees, stubbed and bruised from bloodletting.
She made a show of shifting uncomfortably in her seat – not much of a show given the pulse of fear running beneath her skin. With a note of carefully curated embarrassment, she said, “It is improper, Lord, to speak on all I have heard of you.”
This earned her a gratified leer, and Embla was forced to consider what it might be like to have those heavy hands on her body. A chill ran through her, like cold water from a brass ewer, the first of the morning. Unpleasant but bearable. He had the look of a man who would grow easily bored and set her aside, if she could survive his initial interest.
“Suffice it to say, I know that you are a terrifying adversary.”
Cole grinned, eating up the compliments, the delicate movement of her hands, the softness of her voice. His gaze roved over her, trying to see through the veil, through the furs, thinking of all the ways he could pin her beneath him. “Is that why you wish to speak of peace, Queen? Because you fear me?”
“My people fear for their lives, and their fear is my fear.”
He wasn’t interested in that though, and when he answered, he tilted his head playfully, a rumble creeping up his throat. “Is that all you fear of me, Queen?”
Embla resisted the urge to roll her eyes. He was drunk, decidedly, and couldn’t bring his attention off the animal ramblings of his cock. Very well then. She fidgeted, made a show of pulling at the collar of her robes like she’d grown hot. “Please, Lord.” She cooed. “Let us speak instead of peace.”
His desultory grin was a brief reprieve. He was playing along, pretending, but it was clear that politics, truces, compromise – these were beyond his purview or his interest. “What do you say of it? We will not starve, if that’s what you think. Or we will, and die. That is the way of things. Life, death, fighting, fucking.”
“Is there nothing you want more than that?” She asked, weighting her words with breathless curiosity, cloying at his ego. “I thought we might see eye to eye.”
He cocked a brow. “No man needs more than that.”
“What of lands, estates…advantageous marriages?”
That got his attention. “What, to you?” He laughed, but the sound quieted.
“At a cost, of course.” Embla said softly. “That cost is peace.”
He bristled, repeating Haret’s words. “Peace is for women and weak fighters.” But the palace’s bright spire reflected in his black eyes and length pressed against the front of his pants as his weight tipped into the edge of his chair.
He needed more, and she couldn’t make it easy for him. He didn’t like to be given. He liked to take.
“Then what cost, Lord of Thunder, would you pay?” She brushed a hand across her veil and he tracked it, eyes flaring.
“Raise it.” He snapped suddenly. “Raise the lace.”
Embla reached for it, hesitated, placed her hands squarely in her lap. “No.”
He rankled at the steel in her voice as sharply as if she’d struck him, and half-raised from his chair. Annette took a step forward with a hand on her hilt, the dogs growled, Embla remained very, very still.
“If you want it raised,” her softened voice stroked through the tension, “raise it yourself. Are you not a conqueror?”
Something hot and fierce flickered in his eyes, a pulse she knew passed straight into his cock. He sneered greedily. It was a dare, and he was up for the challenge. He leaned far forward, bridging the distance, and Knives and Tambre growled. Embla whistled sharply, and though they hated every second of his nearness, the dogs only showed their teeth and watched him from below.
He was close enough now that she could smell the mead and ale and sex on him, the stink of the grease under his fingernails as his hands reached for her veil. She remained absolutely still, and as he peeled it up off her face, she raised her chin and met his gaze. Demure, afraid, delicate, she reminded herself, but proud.
For a moment, he stared in fascination, hand hovering almost tenderly near the cup of her jaw. Then an unpleasant trap closed in his eyes. A large, hard palm latched onto her face, fingers digging painfully into the back of her neck, thumb shoved deep into the hollow of her cheek. Embla jerked and Knives snarled. Annette had steel at the back of his neck.
“Hold!” She choked out over the wave of undiluted fear, and Cole stared into her, a pit opening in the hedonism of his eyes. A slow, penetrating smile crept across his face, slithering across her flesh.
“There now, little Queen.” He cooed, a cruel mimicry of comfort. “Now we see eye to eye.”
Embla jerked again, instinctively, and he drove his thumb deeper into the hollow of her face, until she almost cried out.
“Release her!” Annette’s vicious bark was distant. “Release her now!”
Embla quelled her impulse to struggle, forced every bit of cool command into her words. “Release me, Lord, at risk of your own life.”
Cole licked a sated little smile onto his lips; in one movement he released her, hands raised in boyish placation as he settled back into his chair. He grinned, eyes stroking over the bright red line where his thumb had stabbed into her.
“That was unwise, Lord.” She managed, refusing to flinch at the pain in her jaw.
But Cole watched her with dreamy fascination. “They say the thaw-blood gives you strange powers.” He murmured. “And strange beauty.”
Embla registered nausea, pain, terror in her body like a workman running through a list. She wanted to scour his touch off her cheek, but she forced herself to look away and back again under her lashes, like she was coquettishly thrilled by his overstep. “Consider, Lord, what strange power and strange beauty you may buy with peace.”
Cole’s gaze had gotten sleepy, drink and adrenaline catching up to him at last. He gave a snort, amused by her audacity. But he stood unceremoniously. “I need a piss.” He growled, and shoved off the dais toward the clearing, his shadow in tow.
Embla remained where she was, still and unaffected, until he was out of sight. Then she peeled her broken fingernails out of the wood of her chair arms and burst to her feet, storming across the dais. She ripped the veil off her head and scrubbed at her face where he’d touched her, crumpling the delicate lace in a fist.
Annette was beside her. “My lady!” Her concern barely shielded an immensity of rage.
“I’m fine!” Embla shouted; she heard the warped edge of hysteria in her voice and fought it down. “I’m fine, Annie, really.”
Annette’s scowl steamed. “By your leave, I’ll have a knife through him at the trenches before he’s done taking his piss.” She hissed. “Or if you’d rather, I’ll spare his life and bring you his dick.”
Embla barked one hard laugh; it bucked off some of her fear and tension like a door slamming in fresh snow. She covered her guard’s hand with her own where it rested on her shoulder. “It’s enough just to fantasize.”
The woman snorted, clearly disagreeing, but she relented. Snow crackled along the path to the clearing; Kellen had arrived to take Annette’s place for their last meeting. As he took in the scene, confusion and concern flattened his features. “Your Highness?”
“Kellen.” She smoothed a hand down the front of her undisturbed furs. “Do you have the last of the warchiefs? Edutch of the Fawkes.”
“He cannot be found, Majesty.”
Of course. “Annette, let me know at once when you locate him.” She said as Kellen took the woman’s place.
Embla was so desperate for this day to end, and end well, and Edutch of the Fawkes would delay it. Irritation spiked through her, but she knew it was a feint; she knew it was fear, anxiety, revilement at Cole’s touch. Her jaw still ached where he’d speared her. She closed her eyes and took a few steadying breaths of cold, fresh Lebion air.
A delay was for the best, she told herself. More time to relax. To prepare. What did Titulus say of Edutch? Reasonable, but with more room on his war belt. A second son made warchief after his older sister’s death. It could mean he responded well to female authority. Or that he rankled under it. She couldn’t know which, yet.
Embla tried to calm herself, and made decent enough headway, but her hands were still shaking when a voice strolled out of the forest behind her.
“Queen.”
Caledonia James 