Castles - Freya Ridings (Live At The Barbican)

"You should," Marcus corrected. "The pool of royalty is stagnant and crowded. You will not get close enough to throw a rock in the water, let alone dive deep enough to find the Queen."

"She's mother of the man I love...d? Loved," I said quickly, eluding his stare. "I might have an in."

His short rumble of agreement made it clear he'd caught the slip, but his expression remained neutral. "Go home."

"No."

"If you chose to hunt this wolf, you had better be prepared to shoot."

"I want justice, Marc, not murder. She set me up for a cruel death. Part of that was my fault, and in front of guards, security, cameras, whatever it takes, I want her to be judged."

"You are not having to meet her for that."

"So if I just lounge around back home in the States and drop a few lines, she'll bite? Logan will suddenly answer my calls and help? The press will change their tune? Seems to me a monster like her would wriggle underneath the deepest, slimiest stones at the bottom of the pond. I don't know what I'm going to do, or how, but I know I have to do it- and I think Logan- Nik, shit. Nik, he's key."

Marc shook his head. "Prince Niklas does not matter, Allie. You do."

"What I say isn't enough." I could feel the tears hot in my eyes. "It wasn't in the past; it sure as hell won't be now."

The northern rancher stretched around to observe his horses. Gull's head fought gravity. Her ears rotated, flicked now and then toward the glacial crumbling. "Escaping to America with a fine horse is not such a bad defeat," he said, unaware that my mind was a carousel of tombstones set to screeching tires and accusations. "With that tube, maybe you call it a victory."

I stiffened. "That's not how I want to win."

"You may have been wronged, and you are not wrong to want her gone, but this is a hot decision on a cool, safe night."

"It isn't," I argued. "I've been thinking and—"

Tentatively, he touched my forearm, a gentle pressure that drew a dull ache from the blackened whorls of bitten skin beneath my coat. "She knows worse deaths than a quick one, Allie."

Tentatively, I pulled my arm free, reached up to find the curve of his shoulder. "She's hurt too many people, Marc. She'll hurt more."

"You have a family."

"And I like to think maybe someday they'd understand."

"They would want you alive."

I leaned across his lap and took the canteen into my possession. "Sooner or later my nine lives will run out. You think she'll let me rest if I'm in Boston?"

His hand hovered over my wrist, as if ready to take the drink himself. "We would be happier sending you home than to your death."

I took another swig. "Tell me about Queen Joronn."

He shrugged. "There is little to say. When a cat hunts well, the mice do not squeak."

Firelight danced across my stitched palm. "She didn't catch a mouse."

"No," he countered from the firelight's edge. "She caught a little bear. But you remember, you owe the Prince nothing."

"Back home my classes would be chosen for junior year, my spot on the track team would be reclaimed, and Becky would be my roommate like nothing ever happened." A vicious thrust of our designated poker-stick aggravated hissing embers. "My mom hated Nik's guts, but she's a good woman. If we'd gotten engaged, I don't think murder would ever have crossed her mind. His mother's evil. He no safer than I am."

He gave a puzzled half-smile. "Little bear, this world turns through your hibernation. Your prince will be just fine for a while yet. Sweden's King Daugaard suffered a heart attack. Sweden's throne is in the hands of his daughter."

I snapped a twig. "Great."

"You will give yourself splinters." Marc softened his tone and pulled the pieces from my hands.

I crossed my arms. "So he'll be a king twice-over?"

A pensive look crossed Marc's face, like a student trying to remember the answer to a question he hadn't studied. "Princess Annelise and Prince Niklas are to rule jointly. Separate countries, shared royal family. Until Queen Joronn abdicates Norway's throne, she will hold some influence in Sweden. King Daugaard would have had similar gains. Finding the Prince was very lucky for the Queen. She will protect her interests. The Prince must have loved you a great deal, to stay away from the crown."

The pit of my stomach opened into a new low. If Nik had loved me that much, why hadn't he done something, anything, to reach out to me? Why hadn't he warned me about his mother? Did he know what she was like? He had to have.

Marcus pulled off his boots. "How will you meet Prince Niklas?"

"Crash the wedding is my first thought." I glanced toward my singular bargaining chip: the Rembrandt. Of course, if it was a fake, I was fucked.

"And then?"

There was no 'and then' yet my lips started working. "I don't know," I said softly, staring hard at the ring of fire-kissed stones.

Marcus unrolled his sleeping bag. He pulled mine from our belongings and tossed it over. "Are you hoping he will have a change of heart?"

I set mine to warm beside the fire. "Is it wrong to find it so hard to quit someone?"

"I am not thinking so."

The aurora illuminated the remote forest, tainting the snow of the glacier as color twisted like seaweed over our eternal twilight.

Gull's ears pinned back. Her head swung in nervous attention. The distant timber shivered with the howls of wolves.

"Unusual," Marc said in the wake of their haunting hymn. "But we are near Sweden's border where they are protected. Packs crisscross the valleys. We have heard them more often these past weeks, but they have not taken livestock."

A vision of flies parading over black blood and torn fur ratcheted the tension in my stomach. An awful lot of tracks had surrounded that doe.

"Wolves are afraid of humans, right?" I asked, feeling for the hunting knife at my waist.

"Cautious," he said. "As you should be."

Marc changed into clothes more suited for sleep. I looked away until I heard the zipper on his sleeping bag.

"I will take second watch so you can sleep through to dawn," he declared, balling his pack into a lumpy pillow.

His hunting rifle rested by the horses. The man didn't protest when I retrieved it. Back to the flames, I sat cross-legged and scoured the tree line. Wind brushed the fire's warmth over my shoulders. My shadow stretched long and lean across the grass. Phantoms of dark others loped through the eldritch landscape.

As I settled into the night's chimerical balance between real fear and imagined, a pebble pinged off my jacket. I jumped. Behind me, Marc had sat up.

"Don't do that!" I hissed. "I could've shot you!"

"Sitting like that, you would not have. Do you even know how to use it?"

"The fact that you aren't sure whether or not I can should prove reason enough to keep your rocks to yourself. Idiots have all the luck."

"You seem to be running low," he observed. I shrugged. "I had a thought. Princess Annelise requested our carriage service for her fairytale wedding. My father has reservations about the trip south; I was considering to go for him. If you are wanting help, you could attend with me. Not as my date, but as a stablehand."

"Thank you," I said, "But don't feel obligated to help more than you have. You and your family don't deserve the ensuing fire and brimstone."

"We have survived a lot over the years. So have the Haalands. This will be no different."

"I've never been hunted. They'll probably have figured by now where I went and how I got there. End your involvement."

"I can get you in," he insisted. "As long as we do not get caught here to there. Not much I can be doing on the inside, but I am sure you will find a way."

"Thanks," I said, ending the protest. "I really do need you. I've got no one in Oslo. No one anywhere, really, not without risking them and myself."

"What is your family thinking through all this?"

"Far as they're concerned, I'm either out of cell service, moping about the arctic, or, if the Queen released news of my fake death, I'm already a polar bear's corpsicle. Might not sound like I love my parents, Marc, but I do. I've acted stupidly; I wish I had listened sooner, but making contact now isn't worth them watching me dying twice."

"I understand." The firelight caught the edge of a claw strung around his neck by a leather cord. He'd been wearing it when we'd first met, but I hadn't given it any thought until now.

"That a bear claw?"

He tucked it underneath soft cotton. "Belongs to the pelt from the wall."

"Did you kill it?"

He went quiet. I couldn't stand the stillness in that moment, nor the horizon's whispers of wolves. Laying my hand over my knee, I started again. "What if I tell you a story in return for yours? I'll tell you how this grand mess of a woman came to be."

Marc kept me in his dark eyes a moment, then rolled onto his back and stared into the green sky. "When I was seven Papa tasked me with closing the barn every night."

"When I was seven the most responsibility I had was playing pretend." Mom, forward-thinking, often modified my toys. I still remembered being surprised to learn Barbies could be something other than doctor, lawyer, and geneticist.

Marc's smile broke. "One night, instead of taking the time to close proper, I rushed to watch a movie or play a game or something. I do not remember. What I do remember, is the horses' screams in the night. A young bear, maybe three years, maybe his first season apart from his mother, had chosen that night to investigate the barn. He killed a mare and her foal. The bear had been around for a few weeks. I did not pay attention to the tracks, scat or my parents when I left the barn exposed. The next morning Papa and I followed him to the fjord. I put a bullet in him for my mistake."

"And you wear his claw?"

"I am not proud, but I do not want to ever forget."

"You really had to kill him?"

"After he got a taste of horse flesh, he would have returned."

"The bear was being a bear."

"And I live with this shame every day," he continued. "But my barn is safe for Gull and the bears are safe outside of it."

"I have another question, Marc. You don't have to answer. I want to make that clear. Those scars . . . What happened?"

"We have a long way yet before we speak of such things," he said, propping up on his elbows. Curiosity softened his expression. "I am thinking it is your turn to share."

My knee twitched with phantom pain. Open sky and endless forest condensed into four concrete walls and a kitschy basement bar. Even here, the grip of memories strangled. Even here, I heard the pulsing music of a raging party upstairs. Josh and I had snuck into his cousin's partially-finished basement to exchange one kind of heat for another. We were sticky with the salt of a seaside day. His breath was warm and smelled of mint and cheap beer. He pulled me into his lap, his hands navigating the smooth skin of my waist, all the way up to my bra. I wasn't sure what to do, how to do it, but he knew. "You love me, don't you?" he whispered, kissing the side of my sunburned neck. "This is how you show me."

Shivering, I eased closer to the fire. "Marc," I said hoarsely, brushing through the broken glass. "There was this beach house—"

"Allie," he replied, covering his face with his arms. "You know, I am feeling very tired. Maybe another time you can tell me. Wake me after midnight."

"Sure," I said, wiping my cheek on my shoulder, grateful for the chance to turn my attention to the woods. But no matter how tightly I gripped the barrel, the rifle in my lap did little to keep the wolves in my mind at bay.