Visca nodded shortly, but she was still scowling at the misty valley before us. “I still don’t like it. Something is up, and we’re blind to it.”

“Most likely. Has Hakkon ever given us a surprise we enjoyed? All we can do is send out the extra legions. Arm the villagers, the women and any child old enough to fight. With the mines open, the walls will be rebuilt before winter. We’ve two fiends in residence—we have no need of the extra guards.”

She made a tchk sound with her teeth. “And what if the plan is to empty the keep of the guards? That’s what I hate, this uncertainty. This could be a plan, or it could simply be more of Hakkon’s random uncertainty that he likes to spread around. That man was always good at making us second-guess ourselves.”

“Then don’t second-guess yourself.” I put a hand on her shoulder and she patted it absently. “Send our people out to keep watch. There is nothing Hakkon can send to us that Wroth and I can’t handle alone.”

“I’m going with them,” Visca said. “I’ll miss Bloodrain again, and Wyn will probably unspool my guts for missing another one of her functions, but I can’t send the untried boys out alone.”

“You know she’ll understand.”

We watched the mist roil in silence for several minutes, and I debated offering myself up, to make the journey alone. I could cover the ground of the Rift far faster on all fours than the legions could with their weapons and supply wagons, but… I couldn’t stand the idea of leaving Cirri, even if every room in the keep was packed with knights.

Not when I’d heard, from a warg’s own mouth, that she was to be eaten by them.

She sighed again, blowing her lips out. “Well, to hell with it, then. I’ll get them moving. Keep an eye on Wyn, would you? You know she starts some questionable shit when no one’s around to tell her it's a bad idea.”

I winced, remembering a time Visca had brought the legions south, and in the span of that week Wyn had created a self-replicating blood sigil that propagated via flesh. Everyone had gone hungry for a while after that, as the entire convict population had been affected, and most of them had bled out through their pores after being infested.

“Both eyes,” I promised her fervently.

“There’s my lad.” Visca turned away from the forest, stepping up onto the wall and dropping down into the inner courtyard with feline elegance.

I turned back to the forest once more, giving it a last, long look before I followed.

Whatever Hakkon was planning, he would have no luck trying to get to Cirri through me.

I finally found my wife, who was in precisely the last place I’d checked that she hadn’t been: my tower, curled up in the bed with the ritual book of the vampires open before her, scowling at her journal.

“I’ve been looking for you.” I closed the door behind me, mostly to keep her trapped in here. I didn’t fancy searching the keep from top to bottom again.

Cirri looked up, the scowl fading, but for a brief second a different expression crossed her face before it melted away—and it was not the usual, bright-eyed happiness I’d come to expect. It was something almost wary.

But then she was smiling at me, her hands moving: I was with Wyn. I decided to give her and Visca a little privacy.

She moved her hands a little more slowly so I could follow, and I nodded. “Visca is taking the legions out into the Rift. She won’t be here for Bloodrain.”

Why?

She looked so wide-eyed and curious, and I told myself I imagined that wary look. She was just tired, and Kajarin had clearly been in the library with her. That would make anyone tired and irritable.

“The wargs,” I started to say, and cut myself off. I didn’t want to give her any cause to worry.

Cirri stared at me patiently. To hell with it; she was the Lady of my hold. The only things that grew in the dark were mushrooms.

“The wargs haven’t been coming,” I said, shedding the constriction of my shirt and climbing onto the bed. “For months—years, really—we haven’t gone longer than a day without a sign of them. For them to just up and quit entirely… we think Hakkon is planning something. The only question is what.”

Cirri considered that, carefully closing the ritual book and putting it on the nightstand. Instead of signing, she turned to paper.

Don’t you hunt them? she asked.

“I do. I could.” I looked at her face, hungrily drinking in every detail. After the travesty of a painting I’d commissioned, nothing could be so lovely as my Cirri in person, rumpled in bed with wild hair. I pushed her skirts aside, stroking her bare leg. “But that would involve leaving you… and, like Wyn, some things I feel are better done by my own hands.”

I don’t want you to go, but I won’t complain if you must, she wrote. Rose and Thorn are here, after all, and Wyn. And that one guard you’d assigned me. Either way, the Rift-kin come first, right? 

“Koryek? He’s leaving with the legions. As for the golems… they’re a marvel of modern bloodwitchery, but…” I examined my hands, hideous and bulging and long-fingered against her smooth thigh. “I would not be able to think clearly, knowing your life was in others’ hands. It’s something I must do myself.”

She smiled at me over the journal. I suppose I understand.

“No. I don’t think you do.” I looked up at her. “There was a warg the day you were brought to the Rift.”

She raised a brow, waiting, but some of the color had left her face.

“He was like any other warg—a young man, probably brought into the fold by Hakkon for the sole purpose of being used. But this one… he was sent for you.”

For me? She frowned. How could he even know who I was?

“Oh, he knew nothing about you personally. Not your name, nor your face. He knew only that there would be a girl in the carriage, and that the girl was his target. To eat my bride would have been a powerful blow—demoralizing my people, upheaving the Accords, to say nothing of the agony you would experience.”

Cirri licked her lips. To… eat me? I thought that sort of thing was just tales. 

She signed it, seemingly forgetting the pen resting on the pages.

I looked down. “I don’t want to tell you this. I want you to understand why I feel the way I do, why I can’t run the Rift myself and leave you here, but I want you to live a life blissfully ignorant of these things.”

She wrote, and touched my hand. No one in Veladar has gotten to live a blissfully ignorant life. I’m only surprised that there was a warg waiting for our arrival—and that eating me was a priority over just killing me.

“That’s what they do,” I said bitterly. “Everyone knows what happened to Andrus’s first bride, and yet they don’t. We tell everyone they simply slaughtered her, but… she was mostly devoured. To outright kill you is their mercy stroke, and they don’t grant it often.”

Cirri stroked the tendons standing out on the back of my hand.

“So you see why I can’t bear to leave you alone,” I muttered. “To find what Andrus had to find, to know it was my fault if I had only stayed put… to know you’d spent hours in agony, devoured bite by bite. I could not bear that. It’s best that I stay here, because I trust in myself alone to prevent it. Ancestors, this is grim. I didn’t mean to come here and horrify you with could-have-beens.”

She touched my face, fingertips playing over the crests of my forehead and cheek, and wrote: Well, you should stay with me then. Under no circumstances should you go anywhere. 

I couldn’t help but smile at that. “As you wish.”

She hesitated before writing again. I do feel a little guilty asking you to stay. Especially with Visca out there.