Sedrak grabbed his blade and yanked it from the dirt. A single, scattered thought crystallized and rose to the forefront of her mind as the metal glinted above her uncle’s neck, moving through the air. Act. Act, you must do something!
Falling to her knees she held her hands out clasped together in supplication. “No! Please!” she cried. The ground was cold on her knees, her breath floating before her face. It was the coldest moment of the night.
The sword, a mighty, thick blade that seemed better suited for crushing victims than slicing them, paused in the air as the great beast held it suspended in mid-swing.
Leola’s breath clung to her eyelashes, freezing, as she panted in the moments of stillness while the beastly man appeared to consider her. His unblinking eyes stared down at her, and he appeared as a terrible statue, unmoving, still enough that for a moment Leola wondered if he had been turned to stone.
A sound, something like a chuckle, emanated from the enormous chest. With an almost playful air, he sheathed the weapon, looking at her with a bemused interest that she found almost more terrifying than his violent bellowing.
Her head started to spin. The cold was creeping through her body now, biting her skin. On her knees, with her hands clasped together, she was no more than an insect before the enormous man, who stared at her with eyebrows raised, a cruel smile on his lips.
A wave of quiet laughter rolled through the horde behind him. It was not the laughter of humor, but of pitiless cruelty. She hardly heard it, though, because her own thoughts pulsed between her ears: What now? What do I say now?
For the great warrior towering above her expected… something.
“What will make it right?” she whispered. The words caught in her throat. She had asked the same of Ryken when he had so disparaged and humiliated her in a drunken rage many moons past… what could she do, to make right the wrongs she herself had not brought about?
The warrior eyed her with a changed expression. Now he looked wary.
He looked up at the castle walls, then back at the line of prisoners. “The first of my demands, lady,” this was accompanied by another wave of cruel chuckling diffusing through the horde, “is a promise that this crowd of filthy barbarians won’t cross the Northern hills again.”
Leola blinked, for a moment confounded. Several beats passed as she came to understand that the ‘filthy barbarians’ Sedrak referred to were Ryken and his men, not the barbaric horde behind him.
So Datharia had been right. They were Northern raiders.
The beast Sedrak had ridden stamped and snorted behind him. In an incongruous moment, the warrior turned slightly to put a hand, almost tenderly, on the muzzle of the terrifying animal, and it calmed at his touch.
“Of… of… of course,” Leola croaked, eyes falling to the ground in submission. “A solemn promise. A vow. You will never see them again.” She stole a glance between the legs of the warrior at Ryken.
He was still staring at the ground ahead of him. Would he live down this humiliation? Knowing that his people were seeing him bow before an enemy? Would he break the promise she’d just made in a quest for vengeance?
It mattered not: those were questions for another time. She shivered and kept her eyes fixed on the ground.
“Those are merely words,” Sedrak said. “And you are barbarians without honor. I prefer a more solid agreement.”
Leola glanced up at him. “Mmmm… my…” She did not know what to call him, and her mind grasped at the first thing that came to her. Surely he was some kind of ‘lord’? “My lord, I am… unaccustomed to the… nature of… agreements, I am not… but I shall…” She looked at Ryken again. Closed her eyes.
“Anything,” she said. “Just let him live.”
She opened her eyes. The way Sedrak looked at her made the skin on her neck crawl.
“Anything?” he growled. The cruel smile formed beneath his beard again.
Her chest felt as though a hole had been clawed through it, and the cold wind was now ripping her apart. “Any… anything,” she repeated. She gathered her wits as she spoke, suddenly finding her voice. “We have coin, and, and… and meat. And mead. Furs, grain… the… artisans have many… lovely things…”
She was babbling. She had offered too much, she knew Ryken would cuff her for this terrible negotiation if it were under any other circumstances. But if it saved his life, what did it matter?
The warrior was staring at her with an expression she could not read.
“I’ll have it sent out as soon as I return to the—”
“I don’t need food and coin I have aplenty,” the warrior interrupted.
His eyes were still on her, roaming along her hunched frame.
For a blissful moment, she did not recognize what was in his eyes, and she believed that he was about to innumerate the other things he might wish to take.
But a cold fear poured over her when, suddenly, she recognized the glint in the warrior’s eyes. In them burned a hunger she’d seen in other men, when they watched her surreptitiously, after she came of age.
She shuddered.
“I have other needs,” the warrior said, bending over her, crouching with his forearm resting on his knees. He tipped her chin up with a thick finger.
Leola had to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from fainting. Her imagination was already spinning, thinking of what other needs he had in mind. It was forbidden to speak of such things before marriage, Datharia had explained. And there was no one but Datharia to whisper the secrets of marriage to her, as the milkmaids and court attendants had.
But she was not a fool. She could guess
