21 Call To The Spring
Sera
I spent the first hour after kicking Mina out pacing the length of my room. The stone floor was cold, but I didn’t bother looking for shoes. My mind was a mess of sharp edges and half-finished thoughts. I kept coming back to the way Fenris had looked on his knees. He was a man built like a siege engine, all scars and hard muscle, yet he’d handled my foot like it was made of glass.
I told myself I hated him. It was the only logical response. He was the “Barbarian” Alpha who had let my father sell me off like a horse. He’d kidnapped me from my hiding spot and slung me over his shoulder. But when I closed my eyes, I didn’t see the kidnapper. I saw the way his shirt had strained against his shoulders and the thick wires of veins in his arms.
My stomach let out a long, hollow growl. I’d barely touched the turkey at dinner, too busy being revolted by the way his men tore into their food. Now, the hunger was a physical ache. There wasn’t so much as a grape in this room.
I looked at the door. I could call for Mina, but the thought made me grit my teeth. Now that I knew she was his step-sister, the ” personally assigned help” act was insulting. I should have seen it sooner. Her accent was too polished for a servant, and she talked to the warriors like they were stray dogs. She was a princess playing at being a maid, and she wasn’t particularly good at it.
I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of seeing me hungry. I dressed in a simple tunic and trousers, grabbed a heavy wool cloak, and slipped out into the corridor.
The fortress was quiet, but it wasn’t empty.
The hallways were wide, lit by natural light that bled through deep fissures in the mountain ceiling. The architecture was deliberate and heavy. Massive timber beams supported the rock, and the iron brackets holding the torches were hand-forged with intricate, twisting patterns.
I turned a corner and stopped. A group of children, maybe six or seven of them, came sprinting down the hall. They weren’t moving with the stiff, practiced propriety of the children in the Valdris palace. They were laughing and shoving each other, playing a rough game of tag that echoed off the stone walls. One of them tripped, rolled, and was back on his feet before I could even flinch. Nobody was there to tell them to be silent.
I kept moving, eventually finding a balcony that looked down into a training yard. Below, a female warrior was sparred with two men at the same time. She was lean, her hair pulled back in a tight braid, moving fluidly between two boulders. One man lunged with a wooden sword. She stepped into his guard, used his own momentum to sent him stumbling, and simultaneously parried a blow from the second man.
She didn’t stop. She spun, a low sweep of her leg taking out the second man’s knees. As he hit the dirt, she brought her wooden blade to the first man’s throat. He raised his hands in a silent forfeit. Nobody on the sidelines cheered or looked surprised. They just watched as she offered a hand to the man on the ground and pulled him up. Here, a woman winning wasn’t a spectacle; it was just another day.
The smell of yeast and roasting meat led me to the kitchens. It was a massive, humid space filled with steam and the rhythmic sound of knives hitting wood. An older woman with arms as thick as my thighs was pulling a tray of bread from a stone oven. She looked up as I hovered in the entrance.
“If you’re looking for the Alpha, he’s not here,” she said. Her voice was blunt, lacking any of the honeyed deference I was used to in the South.
“I’m looking for food,” I said.
She pointed a flour-covered finger toward a side table. “Bread’s there. Butter’s in the crock. Don’t touch the stew-it needs another hour. And don’t get in the way of the runners.”
She didn’t bow. She didn’t call me “my lady” or “princess”. She just went back to her bread. I grabbed a hunk of the warm loaf, smeared it with thick yellow butter, and ate it standing in the corner. The kitchen staff moved around me like I was a piece of furniture. In Valdris, the servants watched the royals with a predator’s focus, looking for any scrap of gossip. In Blackwater, I was the omega they looked down on. Here, I was just another mouth to feed.
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I wandered for a while after I finished, half-exploring and half-avoiding the trek back to my room. I found myself in a narrower residential corridor, likely where the staff slept. Voices drifted from around a bend. I slowed down, pressing my back against the cool stone and staying out of sight.
“He was out there again last night,” a woman said. Her voice was low but clear. “The east balcony. Talking to himself.”
“Talking?” another asked.
“He was having a full on conversation. I heard him mention Alpha Dimitri’s name twice!”
There was a heavy silence.
Dimiri. That’s his dead brother.
“He hasn’t been right since the battle,” the first woman continued. “Viktor raised him to be a weapon, not a King. Put a sword in Fenris’s hand and he’ll win you a war, but he doesn’t know the first thing about a crown. The council knows it, too. Half of them are just waiting for him to snap so they can put someone more stable in that chair.”
“And the Southerner?” the second woman snorted. “Did you see her at the feast? Looked like she was ready to faint because someone used the wrong fork. She won’t last a month in the frost.”
They laughed and the sound of their footsteps faded as they moved away. I stayed frozen against the wall. Information. Useful, but heavy. Fenris was talking to his dead brother. His own people thought he was a broken weapon, a soldier playing at being an
Alpha.
“Princess.”
I spun around, my heart slamming into my throat.
A young guard, probably no older than twenty, was standing five feet away. He was looking at me with a neutral expression, but
I knew he’d seen me eavesdropping. My chest tightened, waiting for the reprimand or the threat.
“The Alpha requests your presence,” he said politely.
“Where?” I asked, my voice coming out thinner than I wanted.
“At the Spring.”
The Spring. Where Mina had said he’d be bathing.
“Now?” I asked.
“Now,” the guard confirmed. He stepped aside, gesturing for me to lead the way.
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