My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 266

Fenris

The blue had spread since I was last down here. Dimitri would have had a name for it. He had a name for everything that grew in this place, the long ones and the low creeping ones and the pale things that only opened after dark, and he would say the names to me while he had his hands in the dirt, and I would forget them before I reached the gorge. I never learned a single one. He was the one who learned the names. I learned where to put a blade.

The caldera held its heat the way it always had, the deep springs breathing warm wet air up through the grass while the snow piled against the black walls and never crossed them. It was the one warm place in a country built out of ice, and he had made it that. He had found the steam and the dirt and coaxed a garden out of the belly of a mountain, and now he was under the white stone in the middle of it with the flowers growing up over the edge, and I stood at the foot of it the way I had stood at the foot of it more nights than I would admit to anyone.

It did not get easier. The old women came to the courtyard and gripped my arm and told me time was a mercy. It was not a mercy. It was the same now as it had been the night they brought him down the mountain, the dirt still loose, as though I might walk the gorge tomorrow and find him on his knees in it with his sleeves pushed up.

We had buried what we could put together. That was the part that stayed. Not the burial. The sorting. The men who climbed the eastern slope came back down with him in pieces, and we laid the pieces out on a table in the lower hall and stood over them trying to decide which were his and which belonged to the four who had ridden out at his side and not come back whole either. I had vetted those four myself. I had broken them and built them and set them at my brother's back because there were no harder men in the North to put between Dimitri and the world.

It had taken Vane until this morning to name the thing that did it.

I had sat in the chamber and let him lay it out slow, the way he lays everything out, the names and the dates and the dead horses, and when I finally dragged the truth from him, when I stood and the wall came down in dust and asked whether the thing eating the eastern packs was the thing that had eaten my brother, he had held my eyes and said yes. Then he had asked me to sit. And I had sat. And he had turned the parchment over and told me.

"The Lycans are back."

The word meant nothing to me. I looked down the table and saw it meant nothing to any of them either, not Bram, not Toren, not one face in the room. It was an old word. It had no business in any mouth of my generation or the one before it.

"The what?" I asked confused.

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