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Another shrug. Ragnar said, “Now you rest, and get well.”

“Giving orders?”

“Suggestions, alpha. After…” His expression soured. “That will be your decision. Amelia keeps coming by to see if you’re awake. I think she fears we’ll march back home, after what happened.”

“March home and do what? Hunt deer in the forest and chase our tails until the Sels eventually raze the entire continent?”

He’d meant it as a rhetorical question, but Ragnar pitched forward in his chair, face lighting up with eagerness. In a quiet, earnest voice, he said, “We could.”

Leif sent him a flat look, and Ragnar scooted forward to the edge of his chair, hands lifting to toy with the bedclothes.

“No, listen. Leif. We could. You’ve seen, now, what horrors await. The closer we get to the capital, the worse it will get. Why should we bleed and die for someone else’s country? Why shouldn’t we go and live as the wild things we are? Have a littlelife, before the end times?”

Leif frowned. Ragnar was hedonistic and pleasure-seeking, at his core. What honor he possessed was…limited. He might die trying to protect his alpha, but politics at large, it seemed, still held little appeal.

He wasn’t sure why he’d expected a change of heart.

And a part of him wondered why he himselfhadn’tchanged more; wondered why duty still dragged at him, when frolicking and fucking and living out his days as a wolf slipping through tree trunk shadows sounded so appealing.

He could get lost, he realized, in those sorts of daydreams. Staying and fighting was hard, retreating, giving in to baser urges so much easier.

Leif sighed. “No, Ragnar,” he said, firmly. “I’m staying. You may go if you like.”

Ragnar frowned. “That’s cruel.”

A wolf couldn’t stray from his alpha – just as a thrall couldn’t stray from the master who’d collared him. Ragnar had even fewer choices than most.

“Sorry,” Leif said, and watched surprise smooth the other man’s features. “But hiding and waiting until the war comes to us isn’t an option. It already came to us, at Aeres. They’d not yet finished repairs before we departed.”

Ragnar sighed, but nodded.

“How’s your leg?” He’d not known about it, but Ragnar had let it slip, earlier. A voice heavy with regret, with remembered desperation:my leg…

“It’s fine,” he said, dismissively, shifting his weight in his chair.

Leif levered alpha authority into his voice; ordered rather than asked. “Let me see.”

Ragnar’s darted, mutinous glance said he didn’t appreciate such an abuse of leadership, but pushed back his chair, tugged off his boot, and rolled up the leg of his trousers – new trousers. Secondhand, obviously, from their faded black fabric and tattered hem, but not the sand-brown pair he’d wore previously. He hiked them up over his knee, and Leif bit back a curse when he saw the hard, pink lump midway down his shin.

It had been stitched, the marks still visible as a zig-sag pair of dots across the bone, where the skin was thinnest, and where a hump of scar tissue had turned the flesh hard and shiny. The stitches would have needed to be pulled, before the rapidly-healing skin closed over them and made it impossible.

Anger flared hot in Leif’s gut – anger at the beast that had done this to his beta. Anger at himself, for not having been there to prevent it. That was an alpha’s job: to throw himself at threats, to protect his pack. He’d failed Ragnar, and that hurt as badly as the wounds pulling at his chest and stomach.

“The bone came through, didn’t it? When you fell?”

He sought Ragnar’s expression, but couldn’t meet it; Ragnar studied his own scarred leg, tracing the knot of badly-healed flesh with his thumb. “Yeah.”

“Who stitched you? A drunkard?”

Ragnar smoothed his trouser leg back down, and Leif saw the flicker of a wry smile touch his mouth. “A woman, actually – the physician was killed in the action.” He settled in the chair, and tossed his hair back with a flick of his head, gaze going low-lidded and lascivious – and teasing. Not all of his teasing was the result of machinations, or dastardly plans, Leif had learned. He liked needling at people; Erik had always thought it hid some plot, but Leif had learned he was just like that. “So the lovely Lady Leda tended to me in my hour of need.”

Leif put up a single brow. “ThelovelyLady Leda?”

“Aye.” He grinned lazily, and hooked an elbow over the chair back, so he was sprawled in his seat, the sort of pose that would have drawn the gazes of women and men alike in a crowded taproom. “She’s got this boy – was hovering the whole time, giving me the dagger gaze, very protective – but he’s a whey-faced, plodding sort. We” – he gestured between them – “could convince her to turn her gaze elsewhere, I’ve no doubt.” His grin was the sort that pulled you in to his scheming:come with me,let’s have fun.

Leif barely managed to resist returning it – because he was alive, and Ragnar was alive, and they were sitting here together, on the other side of an ordeal, and Ragnar had cried over him, and the warmth of affection was strong in his breast – and sighed instead. “No.”

“Ugh. I know you’re better because you’re beingdull.”