Riordan laughed at her as if they were buddies, because in public she got the merry version of him that he showed everyone else. It made her want to punch him straight in the mouth. She felt her hand flex of its own accord and somehow kept it to herself.
“How the hell is it fine?” he asked. Ha ha ha, so merry. She thought of him bleeding, and let that soothe her. “You earned yours too.”
Eiryn didn’t even look at him directly. She just made the same hideously dismissive shooing gesturing she’d made last night, pleased when she felt the murder in his gaze. She could see he was still maintaining that smile of his out of the corner of her eye, and that was almost as satisfying as punching him.
She looked at Tyr instead. “Why don’t you make yourself useful and take him somewhere so he can properly grieve the coming loss? Because you do realize he’s probably going to have to cut his braids off entirely. Unless you all want to sit around and unbraid his hair for the rest of the day like a pack of teenage girls.”
“Watch your fucking mouth,” Tyr suggested, a hard look in his dark eyes. “Or you and I can have a conversation about who’s useful right here, right now. I have a few thoughts on the subject.”
“My apologies, war chief,” Eiryn murmured in a voice that could almost have been confused for respectful, though she doubted anyone within earshot would make that mistake. “I didn’t realize you were such an expert on compliance. I’m all ears.”
It was like she wanted a fight with him after all. Eiryn knew that she was baiting him and that it was stupid. Beyond stupid. She knew she was still being an asshole, first Lyla and now this. Picking a fight for the sheer joy of it was a time-honored tradition in the brotherhood, because who didn’t like a brawl? But poking at Tyr was like picking a war. She knew the only reason he hadn’t come after her for her long-term bad attitude sooner was because Wulf had forbidden it—for his own selfish reasons. How sad that she’d imagined he was protecting either one of them. She should have known better. But now she knew the truth, it seemed neither she nor Tyr knew what to do with all that leftover animosity.
Why the hell couldn’t she keep her mouth shut for once? When Tyr was the least of her problems? Still, she couldn’t seem to do anything but glare back at him as disrespectfully as possible, raise her chin in a plainly stubborn and reckless manner, and all but dare Tyr to come at her.
For a long moment, everything was very, very still. The tension between her and Tyr practically sang out, sharp and bright into the summer morning. She felt more than saw Riordan beside her when he shifted his stance as if he was getting ready to do battle himself, and out of the corner of her eye she saw Gunnar tense as if he was, too. She had no doubt that they wouldn’t be jumping in to support her, the assholes.
But she kept her gaze trained on the man she’d blamed for her father’s condition for a long, long time. The man she’d wanted to kill so badly that some nights she’d kept herself awake imagining all the ways she could do it. The satisfaction she would feel when she finally did, the bloodier and more painful for him the better.
It was hard to let that go. Maybe some part of her didn’t want to let it go.
Because once she did, she would have to face the fact that it had been Wulf all along. And she was already so angry at him that it had interfered with her job and put her on this insane course that was already claiming her warrior’s braids and her identity. If she let go of her animosity toward Tyr, she’d have nowhere to put all of this but squarely on Wulf. And she didn’t know if either one of them would survive that.
“You want a piece of me, Eiryn?” Tyr asked, what seemed like a thousand tense years later. “I’m sick of you eye fucking me every time I turn around. You think you can step to me and survive? Bring it on.”
“Is that the war chief talking?” she retorted, not in the least intimidated. “It usually is. You do like to hide behind your title like a little bitch, don’t you?”
Tyr jackknifed up from where he’d been lounging against his woman. He never took his eyes off of Eiryn. He continued moving, rolling up to his feet with lethal swiftness, and she did the same, coming up to her full height and mirroring him until they were facing off.
At last.
Finally, she thought, and it felt almost too sharp and too pleasurable to bear, the idea that she could finally teach this insufferable asshole a few lessons. And who cared if he’d been under orders when he’d crippled Amos, then taken his title. That explained why he’d done it. It didn’t explain his lifelong commitment to being a jackass.
“And here I thought compliance was infinitely more boring than this.”
Wulf’s voice cut through the tension like one of the blades neither Tyr nor Eiryn had drawn—yet. Though they both had their hands on their weapons as if it were a foregone conclusion. He sounded half-asleep and faintly amused, yet Eiryn knew before she even turned to look at him that he was neither.
Sure enough, the raider king was fairly bristling with repressed violence. Or maybe not so repressed, for a change. It poured off of him in waves as he stood there, barefoot and bare chested, wearing nothing but a pair of trousers, his blond braid wet in a way that suggested he’d been swimming and hadn’t stopped to towel himself off. It was obvious in every hard line of his lean, muscled, faintly tanned form. It seemed to sing out, brutal and fierce, from the tattoos that wove patterns down his dominant arm and stamped an extra ring around the sigil on his chest, marking him the king he was.
The deeply furious king.
He didn’t look at her. His fierce blue gaze was hard on Tyr, who growled something beneath his breath, shot one last dark and murderous glare at Eiryn, and then stalked off down the beach.
Eiryn decided to chalk that up as a victory. Which was a lot easier to do if she ignored the look she could feel Riordan training on her. It was currently searing the side of her face, but she managed to avoid giving him the satisfaction of reacting to it.
“I’m not sitting around here with my thumb up my ass for what’s left of the summer,” Wulf continued, his hard gaze moving from Gunnar to Riordan, then to Eiryn, as if the other women weren’t there. Because he was spanking the brothers who were meant to serve him, not the women who served then. It was as merciless as that set to his mouth. “If there’s something to be learned about compliant bullshit that will help you two do what needs to be done, great. If not, why am I standing on this beach wasting my time breaking up dick-measuring contests between brothers?” He kept his hard gaze on Eiryn. “Do I look like a fucking referee?”
Helena cleared her throat, which brought Wulf’s furious glare straight to her.
“We’re just getting started,” she said, with admirable calm in the face of the raider king’s rage. She even smiled.
It was more than a little surprising, when most people collapsed into puddles at Wulf’s feet and begged him not to hurt them. It forced Eiryn to rethink her kneejerk assumption that the war chief’s woman was soft and pliable and all about backhanded persuasion, the way Alynna had been. Maybe Helena wasn’t a warrior. But maybe she was like the camp girls, who were tough as hell in their own ways, because they had to be or they’d be swallowed whole by the voracious brotherhood.
Maybe it was long past time Eiryn stopped judging everyone else so harshly, for that matter. Maybe then she wouldn’t get herself into situations where she was one second away from a pointless fight with Tyr or all set to take out the warrior braids she’d earned in too many battles to count while she got ready to play compliant for the winter.
Just a thought, she told herself sarcastically.
“Then I suggest you start,” Wulf said softly. To all of them.
He tilted his head in unspoken command and Gunnar got to his feet, though not without tugging at his woman’s collar before he left her, some silent message passing between them. Visibly. Maud inclined her head and smiled at her hands in her lap.
Eiryn didn’t even try to understand that shit.
Gunnar, meanwhile
, eyed Eiryn a little too closely as he stood.
And maybe she was going to start her less judgmental, less aggressive campaign tomorrow, because she glared straight back at him, refusing to back down an inch or even so much as avert her eyes.
“That piece of shit old man is not worth your blood,” he told her in his low, scratchy voice, a kind of certainty in his smoky blue gaze.
“The old man is my blood.” Eiryn let her gaze move to Wulf, too, temper stamped all over him like the summer sun that licked over his skin. “It’s fine if neither one of you cares what happened to him. No one asked you to care. Certainly not me.”
“I care,” Wulf said with quiet menace. “In the sense that I ordered it and I care, very deeply, that my orders are followed. To the letter. A concept you seem to find difficult to process lately.”
Eiryn didn’t flinch at the threat laced through his words. It was as clear as day on his face, backed up hard by that pissed-off look in his eyes. She lifted her chin and, for once in her smart-mouthed life, bit her damned tongue.
Literally bit it. Hard.
Wulf waited a moment, as if he was waiting for her to break. But she didn’t, somehow, and eventually he turned and started walking back down the beach toward the campfire, as dangerous weaponless and wet as whole battalions of lesser men. It took Eiryn a moment to notice that Gunnar still stood there in front of her, his gaze hooded when it met hers.
“I should never have told you,” he said bluntly. As close to an apology as she’d ever heard her distant older brother come.
And there was a part of her that agreed. A weak, pathetic part that had preferred the comfort of the lie, with the war chief right in front of her to blame. It was better than this miserable, black fury that she thought might tear her apart from the inside out. If it didn’t get her killed first, with this sudden complete inability to choose her battles wisely.
But only a weakling preferred hiding in a lie, no matter how unpalatable the truth.
“Too late for regrets on that score,” she told her oldest blood brother, and it was a measure of the morning that her tone wasn’t as harsh as it could have been. Which didn’t mean it was sweet or obliging. “You took great pleasure in telling me, if I remember correctly. You wanted it to hurt. But hey, you got what you wanted, didn’t you? That’s all that matters to you, I know.”
“You don’t know shit.” Gunnar’s voice was gruffer than before. “Listen to me.”
She let out a crack of laughter that was in no way infectious, or anything close.
“I’ll pass, Gunnar. I can’t think of anything I want to do less than listen to more of your crap, and that includes cutting off my braids.”
“I didn’t ask.” His hard mouth curled slightly in one corner, and those blue eyes of his that were so much like Wulf’s looked smokier than usual, set against his dark hair and beard. “Take this from me, if nothing else. You don’t want to hold on to people whose only role in life is to mess with your head. Amos has been nothing but bitter for years. Why play into his hands? Why make your life harder? You’re not getting anything out of it. He is.”
“Our father—” and she might have emphasized that second word, fighting hard to keep her voice even, “—lives a grim little life in a dinky little cabin on the ass end of the eastern islands. He’s not getting a damned thing out of it except older and more crippled.” She rolled her shoulders back and kept her hands visible and near her weapons, in case he got any ideas. Gunnar was nothing if not unpredictable. And she couldn’t seem to stop talking. “You and Wulf hate him. Great. Congratulations. But you don’t know him like I do.”
Eiryn had no idea why she was defending him. Amos was not a nice man. He’d been an awful father. He wasn’t good in any sense of the word and he’d been nothing remotely like good to her. But she couldn’t bear to agree with Wulf and Gunnar on this topic. She just couldn’t bring herself to do it. It seemed like too much of a betrayal—not of Amos, but of herself. It seemed like lying down and dying on command, surrendering herself entirely, and she couldn’t do it.
She was a fighter. That wasn’t merely what she did. It was who she was.
It was all she was.
“You don’t know him at all,” Gunnar said quietly, after a moment that made her think he, too, could see all kinds of things in her she’d rather die than admit were there. Or share. “You never will, and he wants it that way. Think about that the next time you’re goading the war chief into a battle neither one of you can win.”
Then he walked off after Wulf, leaving Eiryn standing there with three women staring at her. And Riordan a little too perceptive and thoughtful to one side, to make it all that much worse. She couldn’t deal with the women, so she focused on him.
“I’m sure you have something to say,” she snapped at him, belligerent and hard. “Because when don’t you?”
She expected him to snap back at her. Get his hackles up. Keep their endless fight going the way he always did. She could acknowledge that maybe there was a part of her that liked it. It was comfortable, that endless war bubbling right there beneath the surface. It was as dependable and inevitable as the winter rains.
But instead, Riordan confused her completely by doing nothing of the kind. He shook his head, his dark eyes serious and something else she couldn’t quite identify. Something inside of her shook slightly, making her feel oddly weak on her own feet, and she told herself she didn’t want to identify it.
Eiryn didn’t want this, whatever it was. This quiet moment with his eyes warm on hers, the sea air rich and salty between them, and too much summer sunshine making her feel dizzy.
She told herself it was definitely the sunshine and the rising summer heat. It couldn’t be anything else.
“I’m going to go get rid of my braids,” he said after a moment, and Eiryn thought for a crazy moment that the sun was in his voice, too. But that was yet another mad, dangerously sentimental notion in her head that one of these days was going to be the ruin of her. She knew it.
His dark gaze caressed hers. “You were right. I don’t have the patience to take them out.”
“Fine. Great.” There was no reason in the world her lips should feel numb. Or her chest should . . . hurt. “Whatever makes you feel more like a mainlander.”
There was something about the way he looked at her then that reminded her of last night on that hill, dark red and illicit—but she brushed that away as he turned. Or she tried. She told herself she was imagining things. That she needed to escape all this. The politics and the family crap and the pressures of the brotherhood. She needed a little break from it, that was all.
And she didn’t watch Riordan as he walked away.
She braced herself as if she was under enemy attack, then faced the three women sitting there on the beach. Helena, who looked like a raider woman now, in her boots and glossy braid, talking about family missions and saving the drowned Earth, but still so effortlessly pretty while she did it. Maud, who’d been convent-trained into the elegant, mysterious, odd creature who sat there with a smile forever on her wide mouth and her blue eyes dreamy, almost too gorgeous to look at directly. And lovely, offhandedly sensual Lyla, who looked sexy and available and lush in a way men wanted to lick up again and again. Three pinnacles of sweet, obliging femininity, each in her own way.
And they might as well have been a different species, because that had never been Eiryn.
She’d been different from the start. Odd and intense and never pretty, never sweet. Eiryn had been born mouthy and had never shied away from a fistfight or a shouting match. Her mother had despaired of her when she was little and had first announced, with all the bravado and arrogance in the world, that she wanted to be a brother like all the men in her family. Because the path to the brotherhood was brutally hard for anyone—but it was uphill both ways in a vicious blizzard during the dead of a bleak winter for a female. Still, that had been what Eiryn had wanted. It had been the only thing she’d wanted. And more than tha
t, the only thing she was any good at.
Not like the three women looking back at her now, who had never given themselves over to the blade, or lived whole years in so much pain there had been no point crying about it because that would only have made it worse. None of them were at all likely to get in near-physical altercations with the war chief and two family members of a morning. Or fight at all, at least not with their hands.
They all smelled like flowers and rosemary. Their hair was shiny and their skin was smooth. They all looked clean and cared-for and well-manicured, to boot. They were pretty.
The truth was, she almost felt sorry for them. They had their work cut out for them today, making a brother over into something that resembled them in any way at all. Eiryn folded her arms over her chest and stared down at them like the warrior she was and always had been.
“Well,” she said, practically drawling the word out. “I should be totally compliant in no time. Right? Piece of cake.”
It was Maud who smiled back at her, her eyes as blue as the sky above them and her smile bright and wide. Her short blond hair barely reached past her ears, curling slightly in the heat to brush her pale cheeks. She proved the rumor Eiryn had heard her whole life, that the priests preferred them impossibly pretty. Stunningly gorgeous, in fact, even with that ridiculous collar that Gunnar made her wear around her neck.
“Anyone can be compliant,” the former nun said softly. “Most people have to be. But first you have to actually want it. Or more to the point, you have to actively not want the alternative.”
“That’s a problem, then.” Eiryn shrugged. “I’m happy to play the role, but I don’t want to be compliant. Who would? It’s ridiculous.”
“It’s not a life choice.” Maud’s voice was mild. “It’s a winter. Six quick months. Think how the rest of us felt when we thought it would be our whole lives.” She smiled again, which somehow took any possible sting from her words. “I’m not trying to convert you to the church. All I mean is, you can’t be so angry about it. Not visibly, anyway.”