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Chapter Twelve

Oskar

Simply put, Oskar was in the hells.

Guinevere’s bottom had been nestled snugly in the cradle of his thighs for the entire ride. It was a very soft, curvy, betrothed bottom. Every movement drove him half-mad, had him gritting his teeth.

The end result was that he spent the whole day at war with his erection. He lobbed cannonballs of shame at it, struck it down with arrows of guilt, employed evasive tactics of thinking about anything— anything— else, but it kept trying to spring back up after each ignominious retreat.

By the time they set up camp for the night, he was in a bad enough mood to ride all the way to the Menagerie Coast instead and punch her father. What kind of man bartered his daughter off just for the sake of having a title in the family?

But maybe he was overreacting. Maybe this Lord Wensleydale was actually a decent fellow and Guinevere would be happy with him. She was definitely happy with his wealth and his social status—after all, she wasn’t uttering a word of complaint about her fate.

And, anyway, it had nothing to do with Oskar. He was just her escort. After he dropped her off at Nicodranas, their paths would never cross again.

So why was it that, as he lay in his bedroll and gazed up at the two moons and the glimmering stars, he had the sudden urge to wring this faceless aristocrat’s inbred neck?

Lying beside him, Guinevere was also having a hard time falling asleep. She tossed and turned in her bedroll, the only thing separating her from the hard ground. He worried that she’d be black-and-blue come morning. But it wasn’t his place to worry, was it?

“Oskar.” Her glass-bell voice spun through the night in a silver thread. “How did you come to know Mr. Jimmybutcher and Mr. Warwick?”

To say that Oskar’s first instinct was to snap “ None of your business ” would have been a lie.

He wished it was his first instinct. It should have been.

But Guinevere sounded so genuinely interested, in that polite and careful way of hers.

He remembered her holding him in the night, murmuring words of comfort, her arms catching his bitter tears.

Would she receive his past just as softly, he wondered, and why did he want to find out so bad?

What was it about this girl?

“Warwick and the Butcher used to run in the same gang,” said Oskar. “It split last year when a brawl broke out during their secretariat elections. But, when I was fifteen, I…I worked with them.”

To Guinevere’s credit, she didn’t fall into a dead faint or anything like that. She waited, silently, patiently, and Oskar’s next words came easier.

“It was a lean year. The seam Ma worked was starting to dry up. At the same time, I’d outgrown all my clothes. To buy fabric for new ones, she sold something of hers. Something precious. I was friendly with the gang back then, and we had the bright idea to steal it back.”

“And were you—er—successful?”

“Yes.” He’d put the night watchman in a headlock and punched through the shop window with his bare fist, forever earning him Warwick’s and Jimmybutcher’s respect.

The three of them had scampered off, out of Silverstreet, back into the seedy safety of the Dustbellows, the starlight pounding at their heels, and Oskar had been riding high on the rage and recklessness of youth.

“But when she found out, my mother was…disappointed.” That slow shake of Idun’s head, the way her strong shoulders had slumped—all somehow worse than anger would have been.

“She told me that what I stole had been bought fair and square. She couldn’t bring it back to the shop, because I’d end up in prison, but she said—”

And here the words hitched in his throat; here the stinging behind his eyes started up again.

He blinked furiously, willing himself to get through this with at least some of his dignity intact.

“She said that life could get hard and mean, but I didn’t have to be.

” He’d forgotten that over the last few months; he’d lost it when she died.

How bittersweet to remember it now, beneath a roof of moonlight.

“The very next morning, I went around town looking to learn an honest trade. Smithing seemed as good as any. I wasn’t that invested, but Ma looked so proud when she saw me off on the first day of my apprenticeship. ”

It wasn’t the most graceful way to end a story. It was awkward and abrupt. But it was all there was.

“Your mother was absolutely wonderful,” Guinevere said with a sigh. “I’m happy that you had someone like her.”

And that—helped, somewhat. It felt…good, and right, for Idun to be acknowledged in this way. It wasn’t that strange, after all, to lie next to someone in the dark and tell them things he’d never told anyone else. Maybe he’d been waiting all this time to say these words out loud.

“What was it?” Guinevere asked, soft and bright and curious. “The item that you, ah, liberated?”

Oskar did hesitate then. He didn’t want her to feel bad. That in itself was a shock—that he cared as much as he did. But he’d come too far to lie to her now.

“It was the flask of perfumed oil,” Oskar admitted. “The one that smells like tangerines. Ma brought that with her from Boroftkrah.”

Guinevere bolted upright. Catha and Ruidus cast the panic on her face in sharp silver relief.

“ Oskar! ” she wailed. “You should have—oh, gods, I am mortified.” She wrung her dainty hands together, her plush bottom lip quivering.

“I am so terribly sorry, I wasn’t thinking—I—how can you even stand to look at me—”

Honestly, looking at her was no great hardship. Oskar was seized by the inexplicable urge to chuckle. She was so…adorably proper. And properly adorable. “It was just gathering dust on the shelf. Ma would have wanted you to use it,” he said, and it was the truth.

“ Oskar, ” Guinevere said again, plaintively, her features crumpling.

He reached out and caught her by the arm, gently guiding her back into her bedroll.

She didn’t resist, but she was practically shaking with fretful energy, and so he didn’t move his hand away, his loose grip as consoling as he could make it.

Inwardly, he searched for a way to take her mind off her distress.

“Let me tell you about Boroftkrah,” he heard himself say. And maybe it was as much for his sake as hers. Maybe this way Idun of Clan Stormfang could be kept alive, in a fashion.

Guinevere gave a hesitant nod.

“Boroftkrah lies on the Rime Plains. It’s separated from the Dwendalian Empire by the icy Dunrock Mountains.

There are no houses, just a collection of animal-skin tents, fenced in by wooden pikes.

The snow falls nearly all year round.” He was speaking in his mother’s cadence, memory handed down from one generation to the next.

“That entire region is called the Greying Wildlands. A harsh land of frost and alps and taiga. Legend has it that there’s a curse over the entire thing, originating from deep within the ash forest, which contains the ruins of Molaesmyr. ”

“The kingdom of the northern elves,” Guinevere breathed. “I’ve read about that. It was destroyed a long time ago, in some kind of cataclysm. The survivors fled west, into the Empire.” She paused, a tentative little shadow next to him in the dark. “What prompted your mother to come here?”

“The way she explained it, there was a restlessness in her,” said Oskar.

“She wanted to see what else was out there, beyond her clan’s hearth.

What else she could be.” Somehow, it was easier to tell these stories to someone who had already heard the worst of the lot.

“Life on the tundra was hard…but life in Druvenlode wasn’t much easier.

I’ve often wondered if she regretted it. ”

“Of course she didn’t,” Guinevere said quickly. “If she stayed in the Wildlands, she never would have had you.”

The sweetness pierced him, as true as any arrow. His breath hitched. Something inside him caved in.

“You’re not going to make me cry again, Guinevere,” he said gruffly. “Don’t even think about it.”

She stifled a laugh. “I should very much like to see the elven ruins,” she murmured. “And Boroftkrah, and the Frigid Depths…I should like to climb the Dunrock, even—just to see if I can. It all sounds very beautiful.”

Oskar snorted. “Beautiful?”

“In a terrifying way. All that ice and snow, at the end of the world.”

He was about to reply that he didn’t understand how something could be terrible and beautiful at the same time, when he realized that he did understand. He’d seen it. Guinevere bathed in firelight, her eyes blazing, men reduced to ashes, the forest burning down.

“Tell Lord Wimpledale to take you there one day,” he muttered.

“Wensleydale.”

“Whatever.”

The next day, Guinevere announced that she would ride astride rather than sidesaddle.

“My lower back hurts,” she bashfully admitted, and Oskar had to gnaw on the inside of his cheek to refrain from pointing out that a change in position would hardly help someone who wasn’t used to spending long hours on a horse.

She was still going to ache, and they should just call the whole journey off, and she should just not get married.

She had donned a pair of fawn-colored skintight breeches for the occasion. Oskar knew that they were fawn-colored and skintight because Guinevere hiked up her skirt as her thighs spread over Vindicator’s back, revealing those breeches and the way they left very little to the imagination.

And Oskar’s imagination was the problem. Not even an hour in, he was already wondering how Guinevere’s slender, shapely legs would feel wrapped around his waist.

Adding to his dilemma was the fact that her new position ensured that her bottom was even more snugly nestled against him than it had been yesterday.