My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 327

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Sera

"So he's clever…that doesn't mean he can fight. Clever men die first in the dark."

“You don’t get it.” He sighed.

"I'm not bringing him to fight. I'm bringing him to look. A man who can read a thing off a drawing might read the ground off a body, or a track, or whatever we find out there that the rest of us walk past." He straightened again. "He came up here for trade, and my sister’s hand. This is a way to prove himself to me, and he'll go home worth more than trade. That's a fair exchange."

There it was.

I want to be honest about the shape of the next few seconds, because I've turned them over a great many times since and I still end at the same dead end.

The whole of Jace's plan lived on Jace being here. On the mountain, in my hall, close enough to work on me day after day until I bent. The offer, the metal, the machine only he could run, the army he needed me to hand him.

All of it needed him standing on this ground, having more conversations of the kind we'd had in the yard this morning, wearing me down a piece at a time until the thing he wanted wore the face of a thing I'd chosen.

Fenris was about to put him on a horse and ride him into the dark for who knew how long. Weeks. Maybe more.

When Jace came back, if Jace came back, everything would have moved on without him. The window he'd pried open would have swung shut. He'd have spent the one thing he couldn't get more of, which was time in front of me, riding around a frozen country looking at tracks.

All I had to do was nothing.

The cold of it settled in before I'd fully thought it, a decision landing in the body a breath before the mind admits it's been made. I could stop this. One sentence. Fenris, he has business here, leave him, take another man. Fenris would do it. He'd grumble but he'd do it, because he trusted me and because it cost him nothing to swap one southerner off a roster.

But I didn’t say that.

I raised my eyes to my husband, who was watching me with the plain open patience of a man who had no idea he was being used, who would ride out tonight carrying a favor for me he didn't know he was carrying, and I let my face carry warmth but none of the warmth was a lie exactly. That was the part I'd think about later. It wasn't even a lie.

"You're a big dummy," I said, and I reached up and took him by the sides, by the straps, and gave him a small shake that didn't move him at all. "You can't just decide these things and load a man onto a horse in the dark. What if he doesn't want to go?"

"He'll want to go once he's going." One corner of Fenris's mouth moved, not far, the closest he came to it. "Men are agreeable about things that are already happening."