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For instance, he was honest enough to admit that he was not a good person. He’d never claimed to be.

But he couldn’t claim power now, either. Not with Leif’s authority wrapped round his neck, tighter than any torq could hope to be. Not when a single growl made his spine want to bow, and his head to dip. Not when the urge to please his alpha was so intense he felt sick with it, at times, and delighted by it at others.

He wasn’t a good man…but he was an owned man.

And contrary to what Erik thought, he wasn’t a heartless one. His heart was as pulpy and tender and easy-to-hurt as anyone’s, but he’d learned to hide that. To ignore all its bruises and pangs. Heart didn’t keep you alive in the Wastes. It didn’t keep you whole when the Sels had you by the shorthairs, promising a life of which you’d never dreamed in exchange for your cousin’s head on a platter.

It got him into trouble sometimes, though, that heart, despite his best efforts.

Turning someone hadn’t been part of the plan. His magic was what gave him a leg-up in life, a new advantage over the mere men who looked down on him, and called him traitor.

But Leif had been irresistible that night. Bathed in dancing firelight, breath steaming, young, and golden, and magnificent under the moon, sword brandished against the whole pack of wolves that had closed in on him. On four legs, firmly in his wolf mindset, blood on his tongue and lust for more in his veins, Ragnar had indulged. The chance to sink his teeth into the perfect prince, to take something that Erik loved and corrupt it, make it his own, had proved too great.

The irony of the way it had all worked out felt like an appropriate payment for his actions.

He was a bad man, but one who wore another man’s collar. A thrall to a prince who’d proved to be so muchmorethan Ragnar had expected, and one who would have slowly suffocated beneath Erik’s iron fist. Ragnar was a man with a heart…standing beside a seemingly unconscious woman on a battlefield, while chaos reigned, and men shouted, and died, and arrows zipped overhead.

He couldn’t very well stand there and donothing.

The stallion snorted and rolled his eyes, pawed at the ground so that Ragnar was forced to take a step back. “You want at them, don’t you, boy? I do, too.” He risked stroking the beast’s neck, and earned another snort, but not a strike. That was something.

He patted it on the shoulder, and felt the heat and steam of sweat. He was foaming at the mouth, tugging on the reins as his ears swiveled between his mistress – standing statue still, hands folded, eyes closed, lips moving soundlessly – and the action.

Ragnar wanted to shift – skin prickling with urge, fangs long in his mouth, nails dark and claw-like. But the torq choked him each time he tried to, sent unpleasant shocks throughout his body. He could have pushed through the pain…but the torq’s magic did more than shock him. Save a few skin-deep changes, his body refused to shift. When he threw himself at the change, he rebounded, as though off a stone wall, and nothing happened.

He gritted his teeth and tried with all his might – but no. Nothing but a flare of pain, and a momentary, blinding headache that disappeared the moment he stopped attempting to shift.

“Fine,” he muttered. “I won’t. I’ll…”

What, he didn’t know. He’d not been entrusted with so much as a knife since his collaring.

He glanced at Amelia again, frozen, murmuring to herself, hands folded like an etching of a goddess.

“Bloody snap out of it,” he growled, but she didn’t.

He turned back toward the melee – just in time to see a massive, gilded warhammer slam into Leif’s ribs and send him flying.

It was a blow sympathetically echoed in Ragnar’s chest, a rough shock of startlement chased by fury that pushed all the air from his lungs, and left him snarling nastily.

That was his alpha, batted aside like a weak kitten, and the man who’d done the battering wasn’t going to live to see him get back up again. And Leifwouldget up. He had to. Even if Ragnar had to carry him across his shoulders for the rest of the journey.

A tug on the reins in his hand drew his attention, and he turned to find the stallion trying to back away from him, eyes rolling, nervous, suddenly. Ragnar stepped in close and laid a hand in the center of his forehead. “Shh, shh. Easy now. You listen to me, yeah? I’m not scared of you, horse, even if you’re damn near as big as that dragon. We’ve got a common goal, you and me, and you’re going tocooperate. Understand?”

The stallion eyed him a long moment, then exhaled noisily and leaned into the hand on his face. Let Ragnar scratch, briefly, behind his ears.

“There’s a good lad.” He turned to Amelia, and drew the sword off her hip. “Thank you, darling, I’ll try to return it in good nick.” Then he stuck his left foot in the stirrup, and swung aboard.

~*~

Lord Náli proved to be finer-featured and prettier than Amelia had expected, despite Oliver’s written description of him as “foppish as a Southern lordling.” Still distinctly Northern in dress, but his hair was a gleaming sheet of platinum done up in front in intricate, beaded braids, and he wore a massive diamond around his throat; it winked where it rested on the breast of his gray tunic.

He also wasn’t nearly urgent enough, given her current predicament.

“Yes, yes, lovely to meet you, too,” she said, and earned pale brows lifted in disapproval. “I don’t have time for that. I need to know how to close the portal.”

He frowned. “What portal?”

“I dunno. A big black hole in the middle of the air. There’s soldiers and purple drakes coming out of it, and–”