Captive Of The Warg, (Wargs of the Outland #2)

North Gate

WARNING: This story contains depictions of violence and strong language that may be upsetting to some readers.

At the age of twenty-three, Reia Rathbone had reached the pinnacle of her military career. The youngest prefect in all four Gates. Doubtless the youngest ever to attain such a rank. She should have been standing on the north-facing ramparts with a chest full of pride. Not this hollow dread gnawing inside her.

She missed Wrais. Missed having that vast distance between herself and this dungeon of her childhood.

The granite walls of this frozen landscape taunted her now. It served to remind her she was worlds away from lush palace gardens. There were no lazy brooks festooned at night with twinkling candles. No more marble-clad towers or fragrant vines, heavy with blooms. No verdant breeze perfumed with beeswax and endless summer. Even the temple incense smelled different here, imbrued with winter—colder. Darker.

Here, at the spear edge of the untamed north, stood leagues of mountains, snow, and ice-clad evergreens. The unnatural quiet was haunted only by the howling winds.

Reia had never heard the place so quiet. No mechanical thunks and roaring fires. The silver furnaces had been cold for months. It made the blistering wildness of North Gate all the more grave and dark.

Death prowled along the frozen walls of the Iron Girdle like a starving wolf. The nights were already growing longer, the cold sharper. It was an unforgiving, feral cold, and many a flame of life that trembled at dusk was snuffed by morning. One had to be hard as steel to survive in a place like this. One had to thrive in the dark like a wolf to live in a world of monsters.

Soon the goddess, Nixra, would devour all sunlight until spring. And those with silver in their pockets to spare, had long since migrated south. Those soft-bellied lords and ladies with mansions in Wrais. Escaping to their temperate comforts, their gilded vomitoriums and marble piss pots. They wouldn't return until the god, Fagar, released his winter grip.

She stared out at the jagged mountains rumbling with avalanches. Summits that, on rare nights, seemed to glow white under the moonlight. Her shoulders felt heavy, the weight of duty like a mantle of thick ice. The burden of leading a cohort—the life of every soldier under her marching banner—kept her chest so tight at night that she couldn't breathe. And as she stood on the battlements, looking out over hinterlands obscured by blizzards, she trembled under the weight of every single one of those lives. All five hundred of them. Names and faces garroting her sleeping hours. Suffocating her like rough fingers under which she fought powerlessly. Most of all, the enemy of sleep was the cold prickling that never left her skin. An immemorial chill no Wrasian summer could dispel.

Power and rank couldn't even dull it. That was all a farce. She was a gods-damned charlatan. And everyone knew it. The monsters beyond the wall likely sensed it, too.

But the High Lord and the Nixrath King cared nothing for the opinions of monsters and mortals. They were the monsters here. Corfen and Rafen Rathbone were gods in this realm and every life herein was a pawn, including hers. Especially hers. And they were plotting something.

Their identical heads had been bent together all throughout dinner tonight, glares impaling her like shards of hollow mirrors. She'd been too nauseous to eat. Not that she ever relaxed in the great hall at mealtimes. That eerie pelt of silver fur hanging like a tapestry behind the High Lord's dais always gave her the fidgets. The pelt of a colossal monster. The empty eyeholes glowed from the lamps underneath so that the thing seemed to watch her always—gaze boring into her soul. Just like the raven sharp eyes of the two lords who presided beneath it.

Her father claimed it was a warg skin, but she didn't believe him. Not really. He'd probably had it commissioned by a skilled taxidermist. Wargs couldn't be that large. Likely the Rathbones kept it in plain sight as a sign of their savage strength. That even wargs were no match for them.