My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 216

Sera

"I am not going to feed something that is going to feast on me on a slow day."

He laughed.

The sound bounced off the stone behind us. The wolves in the dark lifted their heads at the sound — the redistribution of weight, the shift of bodies on stone. The wolf at our feet did something with its tail against the floor that was the first wolf-thing I had seen it do. A slow, single thump.

Yvara was already throwing the next carcass. Without raising her eyes she said: "My Luna's smart."

Fenris's hand had come around me. He started me back from the gate, toward the corridor we had come down. We climbed.

We were halfway up the second stair when I asked.

"Why don't we have rifles."

He did not answer for a few steps.

"Old law," he said.

"What old law."

"There has been a generational law in these lands. No human invention crosses the border. No rifles. No black powder. No engines. No clocks past a certain size. A few other things. The list is long."

"Why."

Two more steps.

"I do not know."

"You do not —"

"My father didn't know either. Or his father. He was told the same thing I was told and his father was told the same thing he was told before that. The reason is gone. Whoever set the law down took the reason with them. What we have left is the law and the saying that comes with the law — the sacred laws hold. Disobedience comes back. Hard. Always."

"And nobody in three generations has —"

"A few. Smaller things. A clock, once. A fancy lighter, twice. The story that comes back is always bad and never makes a clean line to the broken law. A wife dies. A fortune goes. A child goes funny. So we don't break the law. The cost of obeying is — we live with horses and steel and our own hands. The cost of breaking is whatever the gods felt like that year."

"And without the rifles, you —"

"We are the rifles," Fenris said.

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