The Wolf and the Highlander (Highland Wishes) (17 page)

“
Would they nay bring me to your king like you’re doing?”
she’d asked while eating her cold venison.

“
I would like to hope so,”
had been Riggs’s reply.
“But I’m not willing to take any chances with you.”

“
There really are no women outside of Chroina,”
she’d said in a tone as grim as the expression on Riggs’s face.

“
Only you.”

Desperate men made for dangerous men. It was by the grace of the saints she’d wound up with a decent one.

As much as she hated to admit it, from all Riggs had told her, Chroina really did seem the safest place for her. And if she was going to Chroina, she might as well live in luxury at the palace. ’Twould be the highest price she’d yet earned for her body: privilege and possession in exchange for becoming the bedmate of a king. ’Twas a far better price than she’d thought any man would pay for her again.

Of course, the king could very well take one look at her limping gait and scarred face and refuse her. In that case, mayhap Riggs would keep her after all.

“Come on,” he said. “We have a lot of ground to cover. I want to arrive with enough strength to flee with you if things go badly.”

Her neck prickled with the foreboding in his tone. “If any man tries to steal me from you, I’ll stab him in the eye.”

“Good.” He wiggled his fingers again, inviting her to climb on. “It’ll be best if we arrive soon after the men come in from their day’s work. They’ll be too weary and too intent on their beer to look twice at a man and his son traveling to Haletown for a doctor.”

She scrambled onto Riggs’s back, hugging his muscular hips between her thighs. He wrapped his hands under her knees. With her arms locked in front of his throat, she felt fairly secure.

The position might be undignified but ’twas not without its merits. Warmth from his back seeped into her stomach and breasts. Her nose dipped into the curls brushing his collar. His woodsy scent would make her drunk if she let it. But what she appreciated most was the way she’d be able to use the strength in her arms to support some of her own weight, saving Riggs from having to work so hard. It made her feel useful, clinging to him instead of lazing about in his arms. Speaking of arms...

She eyed the tear in his shirt, beneath which, his blood-stained
bandage could be seen. His wounds were healing remarkably quickly, but they were still tender. “Does it hurt, holding me like this?”

“No. Hold on.” A powerful thrust of his legs brought him to standing. Axe tucked in his belt, he set off to the east, following a branch of the valley that wound between two wooded hills. He wasn’t even limping
from the wound in his calf. Either Riggs was exceptionally hearty or there really was fey blood in him. ’Twould also explain how his people lived so long if they’d been made from immortals.

“Tell me more about your people,” she said. “
You mentioned the youngest female is eighty-three. And she’s still within breeding age. I canna imagine such a thing. And how is it your wounds heal so quickly? Is it your fey blood?”

“I don’t heal quicker than anyone else.”

She snorted. “Three days ago, you were gored in the thigh. Two days ago, you were ravaged by wolves. Today, you’re walking about as if you’d never been injured at all. A human would be limping from those wounds at best, lying in bed with blood fever at worst, especially since you’ve not had the bites cleaned properly.”

He shrugged a beefy shoulder. “They are minor wounds.”

“Not to one of my kind, they wouldn’t be.”

He grunted, a sound of mild interest.

“How auld are you?” she asked.

“Sixty-three.”

“What?” she shrieked.

Riggs flinched. “Not so loud, lady, your mouth is right by my ear.”

“Sorry. But sixty-three? My da was only fifty-three when he died, and no person in their right mind would have considered him young. You canna be sixty-three. ’Tis impossible.”

He turned his head enough that she could brush his cheek with her lips if she’d wanted to. His hair had become damp with perspiration, and a bit of his ear showed through the silky black strands.
The tip was pointed.

She had an urge to stroke the hair away so she could trace the shape with her finger. Why didn’t it bother her, that foreign shape?

“How old do I seem to you?” he asked, drawing her attention from his ear to his cocksure grin.

How sad that he’d never had a woman. A man like him, handsome, virile, kind and capable, should be fending them off with sticks. “I wouldn’t put you a day over thirty-five.”

“A pup becomes a man at twenty-five. A thirty-five-year-old man is barely into his beard. Do you know how old King Magnus is?”

“I’m afraid to ask.”

“Seventy-five.”

“Most humans are considered blessed by the saints if they live to seventy-five,” she said quietly. Riggs’s people were much different from hers. “I take it, King Magnus isna auld.”

“He’s in his prime. He’s strong and fit and wise. He’s a fine ruler, and a fine man. You’ll like him.”

She scoffed.

“You will. All the ladies like King Magnus.”

“I’m sure they do. He’s a king.” Wealth and position used to draw her eye too. Not anymore. She’d be happy to live out her measly short human life in a cozy cabin in the woods with a hearty, rugged wolf-man. Too bad the one she’d had her eye on didn’t want her.

“A
good
king,” Riggs insisted.

“Have
you met him?”

“No. But in the fifty years he’s sat the throne, he’s led fairly and done much for Marann. He revised the lottery so almost any man could afford a ticket. He’s brought Larna under submission. No other king or queen before him has been able to do that. And he’s expanded the archives started by his mother, Queen Abigail. With so few people left, many trades were in danger of being lost, but King Magnus has collected a vast library of records so all trades can be relearned. He’s never given up hope.”

She harrumphed noncommittally. Of course Riggs would want her to like his king, so he’d talk the man up. She’d reserve judgment until she met him. “You mentioned the lottery yesterday as well. How does it work?”

“Every season men can buy tickets representing each of the thirty-five women of breeding age. Drawings determine which men get the honor of trying to breed. Before King Magnus, tickets used to be priced too high for most men to be able to afford them. My sire saved for twenty years to buy a single
one. He got lucky. He won Hilda, my mother, for a season, and they conceived me. I’m one of the few men born to a commoner during that time. Now, thanks to King Magnus, almost any man can afford a ticket every season, and no one is permitted to buy more than ten per drawing. It means just about every man has a chance to breed.”

How many tickets had Riggs bought over the years? How many times had he hoped
to become as lucky as his da? She wanted to ask, but didn’t.

He headed down a gentle slope. Heat poured off his neck as he kept up a brisk walk. Soreness lingered in her arms from rowing two nights ago. Now they were doubly sore from holding on around his neck, but ’twas a welcome ache.

She considered the breeding lottery. It made sense given the state of the population, though it sounded a lot like whoring to her. Only in Marann’s lottery, men paid for a woman not for a few hours but for a whole “season.”

“A season,” she said, “Is that what
you call a woman’s fertile time?”

“It’s just a season,” he said. “You know, spring, summer, fall, winter. The drawing for winter will be soon. We may get to Chroina before it happens.”

“Ah, so the men who are chosen have two or three chances to breed in a season.”

Riggs cocked his head then shook it. “One chance. Women tend to have one fertile time per season.”

Another difference between wolfkind and humans. “For human women, it’s more,” she said.

He craned his neck to meet her eyes briefly. “Two or three?”

She nodded. “Many women have a chance each month to catch a bairn.” Made it bloody difficult on whores who didn’t wish to do so. She’d never had a scare. Most weren’t so lucky, even the very fastidious. It had made her wonder sometimes if mayhap she didn’t work right down there, even before her fall.

Riggs looked straight ahead. His back went stiff. “Have you ever...caught a child?”

“No.”

His shoulders relaxed. “You will,” he said. “For King Magnus, you will.” He nodded with certainty.

She didn’t ken how to tell him he was wrong.

“How old are you?” he asked, dragging her thoughts away from breeding lotteries and kings in need of heirs.

“Twenty-five. That’s well into womanhood if you’re wondering. Humans are considered grown at fifteen or sixteen.”

“So young.” He splashed across a narrow brook and headed up the bank into the trees. It amazed her he could tell where he was going. It all looked like wilderness to her. “How long do humans live?”

“I told you, seventy-five is a ripe auld age. I’ve kent men and women to live into their eighties, but it’s rare.”

He walked in silence a long time. Then he said, “You have about fifty years left. So does King Magnus. You’ll be well matched.”

Likely the king would discard her once it became apparent her womb was worthless as a mule without a cart. Her only consolation was that Riggs wouldn’t be around to see her inevitable dishonor. He’d be living out his life at his cabin, trapping, hunting, baking his honey-sweetened bread and eating it at his workbench, alone.

“Tell me about Larna,” she said to take her mind off the sad thought. Yesterday, he’d
told her about the war twenty years ago. At King Magnus’s command, Marann’s army had brought Larna under submission. “What started the last war?”

“
Our spies found out Bantus, Larna’s pathetic excuse for a king, had been hording women for himself and treating them like dirt.”

Bantus.
That name sounded familiar.
“Must have escaped Bantus’s harem and walked here from Saroc,”
the men she’d first encountered here had said. Her skin erupted in goose bumps.

“He had a harem of wolf-women?” she asked.

“Wolfkind women,” Riggs corrected. “But yeah. You could call it a harem. Refused to let other men try to breed with them until one of them gave him an heir. Only, none of them ever did.”

“This was twenty years ago?”

“Yeah.”

Then why would those men have assumed she’d escaped from King Bantus? “You’re sure all the women got out?”

“Positive. King Magnus appointed his cousin and second in line for the throne to govern Larna. Bantus still holds the title of king, but he can’t so much as wipe his ass without Ari reporting it back to King Magnus. Ari would have found out if there were any women remaining, and King Magnus sent spies besides. No evidence of women being held in Saroc was ever found.”

“How long were the spies active?”

“A few years,” he said with a shrug.

“So no spies have been to Larna recently?”

“No, but Ari’s there keeping an eye on things. Why?”

“T
he Larnians you saved me from mentioned Bantus. They assumed I’d escaped from his harem, and that I’d been there a long time because I could speak their tongue. Of course, I could speak and understand them because of the gemstone. I’d only just arrived. But according to what you’ve told me, they should have been surprised to find a woman in Larna. They didn’t seem surprised. They seemed delighted, like they couldn’t believe their luck.”

Riggs’s back went stiff. His hands tightened under her knees.

“You doona suppose there are women in Larna?” she wondered out loud.

He shook his head. “Impossible.” Only, he didn’t sound convinced.

Riggs hiked ever deeper into the northern foothills carrying Anya on his back. Where the western forest near his home smelled of old growth and dried leaves, the northern forest smelled of moss and clean moisture. It rained more up here. Good game up here. But there was no time to hunt today. He needed to get to Valeworth, get horses, and get out. Once he had Anya well away from the village, he’d think about leaving her to hunt. Or maybe he’d just stock up on bread in Valeworth and survive on that.

She was precious. She was worth skipping meat for.

But was she as rare as he thought?
“You doona suppose there are women in Larna?”

Impossible. Wasn’t it?

He should know. He was one of the spies who’d snuck into Saroc a year after the war ended to confirm no scent trace of any woman could be found. His uncle Neil, King Magnus’s war chieftain, had led the large-scale, clandestine effort. They’d even brought a pair of King Magnus’s finest tracking wolves, who’d been given the scents of the evacuated Larnian women. Between the wolves and the spies, every room, passageway, and outbuilding of Castle Blackrock had been searched.