Page 32 of Hexes & Heartstrings (Shifters of Bastion Keep #2)
Sunday evening, Bruin sat down in the Great Hall to a simple dinner of soup and freshly made sourdough bread.
Though the beef stew had looked hearty and smelled amazing, Rosemary had intercepted him with a spoonful of the vegetarian option, a seasoned potato soup, and he'd immediately changed his decision.
From his seat at one of the long tables beside Russell and his coven, he saw that many of the guardians that had been injured from their run-in with the nautilus spirit were well on their way to recovery.
Word was that the beast was hunkering down, recuperating, and Marka said that they'd go out full strength in a day or two.
For now, several small teams cycled out on patrol, keeping an eye out for it to resurface, just in case.
Bruin was playfully feeding a tolerant Russell a slice of bread when the garrison troops staggered in after what had apparently been an all day affair of training. He saw Ivar sink into a seat, pale in the face and sweating, and most of the rest of them weren't much better.
Come to think of it, they'd trained hard yesterday, too. Were they not being given days off at all?
"Hup!" Bruin said, getting to his feet. Quick as he was, he was still no faster than Russell or Rosemary as they all went to help get them silverware and water while some of the guardians limped to get their food.
Bruin was checking over some heavy bruises on the newest recruits and thinking he might want to fetch his pipes for a community soothing charm until normal shifter healing did its job, when Lady Yi and her cohort arrived. They looked about as dirty, but hardly as tired as the others.
"What's this?" Lady Yi demanded, striding over.
Most of the genial nature of the Great Hall seemed to be silenced as she approached.
She stared over Bruin's shoulder at several of the seated garrison troops before sliding her gaze past him, ignoring him as she'd been doing the last few days.
"If you're too lazy to pour your own water, what right do you have to consider yourself guardians? And you."
As several from her pack stood looming behind the seated garrison guardians, Lady Yi strode over to Isabel, the dwarven recruit. Russell was beside her, his head tilted in confusion as he held a tray of food. Lady Yi looked down at what Russell held.
"Isabel, tsk. A brimming bowl of stew and three slices of bread? Do you really think you deserve all that after today's performance?"
Bruin looked over, seeing the portions. It actually looked a bit less than what Russell's stepmom ate, the times he'd had dinner together with her, and even Bruin knew that dwarves required extra carbs for their metabolism, especially someone exercising so much.
"I did today's training, same as any other," she said, staring down at the table.
"But you didn't finish the run," Lady Yi said in a sweet tone. "So no, you didn't do the same training as any other, did you? Unless someone else saw something I didn't?"
A couple of her pack snickered. "No, my lady. She was huffin' and puffin', but needed help towards the end."
Lady Yi nodded, then casually laid her hand beneath the tray Russell held, and with a burst of shifter strength sent the bowl of potato soup flying. And as Bruin watched—
Light surged through Bruin's bare feet.
—the food from the community meal—
Left foot, step, right foot, step, then make a circular sweep across the floor.
—splashed wastefully against the ground.
And gesture with the hands like so .
Bruin almost closed a fist, wanted to close a fist, but instead flattened his hand, and with a sound like a whip crack the willing stone floor of the Great Hall heaved violently up in a wave, creating a barrier to separate Lady Yi from her victims.
Someone swore, and Bruin thought it sounded like Auguste. There also seemed to be a lot of benches being pushed back as shifters moved, and he saw someone dash up the stairs.
There was so much adrenaline pumping through him that his hands were shaking, but he circled the table and bent down to pick up the empty bowl and dirty slices of buttered bread.
He set the bowl gently back in front of a frozen Isabel, then stood between Russell and Lady Yi.
The Lady scoffed from the other side of his barrier and began to turn away.
"What the fuck is wrong with you?" he asked loudly, gesturing for the floor to return to its normal place. He gave it a few pats with a bare foot by way of thanks.
She stopped her turn to give him an unimpressed lifting of her eyebrow, looking at him directly for the first time since Benjamin's healing incident where Lux's caution had been proven right, and herself wrong.
The surrounding guardians were shifting into their werebeast forms, starting with the empathic canines that were more sensitive to the rising emotions.
"Watch your tone."
Before Bruin could snap back, Rosemary moved beside him, the keys on her chatelaine clinking.
"Excuse you , Lady Yi," she said, scorn dripping like an icicle in a sudden spring thaw.
"Does your station preclude you from learning about other cultures?
Lord Consort Bruin is an orc, and you not only disturbed dinner, struck food out of his lover's hands as it was being served, but denied a guest their meal ?
You might as well have spat in his face! "
"This is a shifter castle, not an orcish one, and I will not allow a foreigner to chastise me."
"He's promised to the lord of the castle, hardly a foreigner any more."
"Plus, who does this?" Bruin added, jutting his tusks out. "Your everything is flawed, Lady! The way you bring strife and division, the way you push people in training to the point of injury. That's not a good exercise process! Even I know that, and I hate exercise!"
"Maybe for non-shifters, or weak guardians. I am catching them up to where they should be. Even your mate recognizes this, which is why he appointed me to this position. If you have a problem with it—if anyone has a problem with it—you can take it up with him."
"Then he made a mistake appointing you," Bruin said without thinking.
Lady Yi shifted into her weretiger form, a black-striped, orange terror. The tip of her tail was flicking back and forth, and her lips were curled back.
"You are young and upset," she said, enunciating her words with implied threat, "so I will allow you to take back your words."
Bruin looked up at her, his breath coming in long draws, but he was already a series of boulders rolling down a mountain, and had been since the first fallen pebble from when one of her pack had punched Russell.
Before he could open his mouth, however, Lux was standing in front of him, putting his hands on his chest, eyes sparking.
Bruin immediately felt the depth of white light that his coven leader was holding, realizing that the exactingly cautious Lux felt it prudent to be ready for a confrontation, but his expression was simply settled into a warning frown.
"Careful," he whispered. "You are Lord Sergiy's promised, so what you say has weight. Your words can be taken as his words. Don't commit him to something unless you're sure."
Lux studied his countenance to make sure that Bruin was taking him seriously, and then stepped aside, standing at his back like Rosemary, close enough that if he needed to, Bruin could draw white light from either of them.
With that much power, he could crush Lady Yi. Literally, even; fist of stone, not flat hand.
The words of a hex pressed against his mind, vivid and eloquent. Just speak the words.
Start with Rex Terra , then…
With effort, Bruin kept the white light he'd gathered from empowering those words. Like Lux had told him, that wasn't him.
So what would Sergiy want? How could Bruin possibly know that? They'd only been together for, what, four or five months, now?
He shifted on his feet. Maybe he should apologize.
It would be the sensible thing to do, the Queen of Pentacles thing to do.
Sergiy would be back in just a few days, Bruin could go to him and explain his fears, let him take charge.
He could even ask Marka and Markos to do the same, they've surely witnessed things too.
But glancing over at Isabel, he found that he couldn't. How much more harm would Lady Yi cause in two more days? It was intolerable. Even if there were some kind of shifter culture that venerated strength, Bruin didn't feel that it was acceptable at Bastion Keep.
Bruin's dads would tell him to stand up against injustice. But again, would that put Sergiy in a bind? How could Bruin speak for him, when he wasn't even sure he wanted to stay longer than his three-year public service?
Bruin turned back to Lady Yi, whose eyes were narrowing, and knew he had to make a choice.
He had watched Sergiy train other guardians, and he knew Sergiy wouldn't approve of belittling each other as a way to encourage each other to train.
He thought about how Sergiy treated the castle staff, treating them as aunts and uncles and cousins, and knew that he wouldn't want a guardian to be a source of anxiety or someone to be fearful of. The guardians were servants of the people of his lands, not the other way around.
He thought about how Lady Yi gave orders and commands to suit her own desires, in contrast to Sergiy's way of putting the packs themselves first, even at the cost of his own time and freedom.
And at last, turning his head, Bruin looked at Russell, saw his kind-hearted boyfriend with his hands held defensively in front of his chest and his hunched shoulders, which he hadn't done in months, but had reclaimed the habit thanks to this audacious bitch.
Bruin turned back to Lady Yi, and he let the avalanche finish rolling.
"Lord Sergiy Usenko," he said clearly, "my promised mate, made a mistake in assigning you to the position of garrison commander. You do not deserve your position, and you have betrayed his trust in you."