The Wolf and the Highlander (Highland Wishes) (31 page)

When Neil finished, the only sound on the plain was the stirring of the grass in the wind. The whole camp had stopped to listen.

He didn’t raise his head. Propriety required he wait for the king to address him. Instead, he fixed his gaze on the king’s fine doeskin shoes. The wind shifted and Anya’s scent teased him. The king had touched his mate.

He heard ringing in his ears.
Mate. Protect.
He curled his hands into fists to keep from strangling his liege.

“She tells the same story,” the king said. “We’ll discuss the dead Larnians further in my tent. They were within their rights according to the old treaty to track a woman brought across the border. If I’d thought they’d ever get their filthy paws on another woman, I would have dissolved the damn thing. As for you, trapper.” He paused. The silence grew heavy. Everyone awaited his fate. “You may rise.”

Relief rolled over him, even as he fought the urge to throttle the man. He stood and looked at the king’s chin.
Don’t lay hands on your king. Don’t lay hands on your king.

“Congratulations. You’re the first man in a millennium to be blessed with a lifemate.”

He chanced a glimpse of the king’s eyes. They were hard, angry. But his tone was civil.

“And you’ll be the first commoner in history to enter a breeding pact with a king.”

The ringing in his ears turned to pounding. “Breeding pact?”

“It will be the first of its kind. Traditionally, children from a pact would legally belong to all pactmates equally. Bloodlines were not teased out,
since it was often difficult to do so, as you can imagine. But, as king, it is imperative that my heir be of my blood. Therefore, I will have exclusive breeding rights to Anya until she gives me an heir. Then you’ll have breeding rights until she bears a child for you. Then me again and so forth. Because you rescued her from the Larnians and delivered her safely to me, I will forgive your indiscriminate mating with her. That is, provided she does not get with child from it. If she does, the child will be yours when weaned, and you will forfeit all future breeding rights to her. You’ll have a chance to read the pact before signing. My runner is drafting it as we speak.”

The king wanted to share Anya.

All the air burst from his lungs like he’d been winded by a mace to the gut. Rage and confusion jumbled his thoughts, but he managed to spit out, “Why? Why do you want her? She’s barren. Didn’t she tell you?”

The king
lifted his chin. “She’s my miracle. What’s a closed womb to the goddess who gave us life?” Challenge sparked in his eyes. The look was a double-edged sword. One edge rebuked Riggs for doubting the goddess the king had publicly devoted himself to since childhood. The other edge dared him to protest.
Give me a reason,
the look conveyed.
Say the wrong thing and I’ll let you rot in prison while I claim sole rights to her.

If he and Anya were truly lifemates, it would hurt them both to be separated. The king had the power to separate them, yet he claimed he wouldn’t do so. Riggs bit his tongue until the taste of blood bloomed in his mouth to keep from giving the king reason to change his mind.
“Of course, sire,” he choked out.

“Be glad, trapper,” the king said. “For, I have taken the lesson taught by Aine and Gregor to heart. Even though breeding rights will belong exclusively to me for the first term of the pact, your lifemate will be given access to you whenever I do not require her presence. However. If she comes to me with the scent of your seed anywhere on her person, I will consider it a breach of contract. You will forfeit all future breeding rights to her.”

Riggs’s throat felt thick. His face burned with indignation. Another man thought to tell him what he could and couldn’t do with his mate. Intolerable! But to say so would be to damn himself and Anya. He swallowed the rage, forcing it deep, where it wouldn’t offend his king, soon his fellow pactmate.

Acceptance numbed him like icy lake water. “May I see her?”

The king inclined his head, giving permission. “Of course.” A smirk Riggs didn’t understand tilted the king’s mouth. Then he walked away with his guards, leaving Riggs with Neil and a half-dozen gaping soldiers that quickly found things needing their attention.

“He’s not himself,” his uncle said. “I’ve never seen him so vicious. Never. Tread carefully, son. Tread carefully.”

He didn’t need to be told he was on thin ice. What pissed him off was that there was no reason for it. None. The king shouldn’t want her. Riggs had done nothing wrong, damn it.

He stalked away from Neil and rounded a low hill. Anya sat on the ground, her fists curled in the tall grass, her face angled downward. Four guards stood around her, two of them knights. One knight kept his eyes glued to her as if she might try to run. The other three faced outward, protecting her from attack. The salty scent of her tears stung his nostrils.

Ignoring the guards, he strode to her, met her there on the ground and hauled her up against him. The sight of her eyes swollen with crying, yet sparking with anger, undid him even as the missing pieces of him filled in with a glorious burst of sunshine to have her in his arms again.

“Oh, Anya, sweet Anya. What happened? What did he say to you?” Had the king told her about the pact? Was she so thoroughly bound to
him
that the thought of another man touching her upset her this much? She didn’t deserve this.

She spoke, but he didn’t understand her. Her gemstone. It was gone.

“Did the king take it from you?”

She shook her head, not understanding. Then she thumped a frustrated fist on his chest and pressed her forehead to his shoulder with a fresh wash of that salty scent.

He’d never had a treasonous thought until that very moment. He’d believed King Magus good and wise, but only a very cruel man or a very foolish one would steal from a lady he claimed was a miracle.

He held Anya tightly and soothed her with long strokes of her silky hair. Resting his cheek on her head, he glared in the direction of the king’s tent.

You can make her yours on paper, but she’ll never belong to you. You don’t deserve this treasure.

Early evening on the second day of riding with King Magnus’s party, Anya gaped at the stories-high wall of mortared stone stretching as far as the eye could see to the north and the south. It was the first thing she’d seen when they’d emerged from a thin, hilly wood onto a road lined with ruined buildings and abandoned mud huts like the ones she’d seen in Valeworth. With crenellated towers and iron spikes jutting outward like jagged teeth, the wall itself appeared impossible to penetrate. That was before she’d noticed the sun reflecting off a shining ribbon of water at the base of the wall. A moat.

“Does the moat go all the way around?” she asked Riggs. It boggled her mind that a wall would encapsulate an entire city, but where would they get enough water to fill a moat if it went all the way around as well?

He looked at her with raised eyebrows, not understanding.

Och,
she ought to be used to it by now, but she still blurted things now and again, forgetting. Curse Magnus’s eyes.

She’d stuck resolutely to Riggs’s side since the king had taken her gemstone. Occasionally, she felt the king’s gaze on her, but she never looked his way. Riggs did enough glaring for both of them. Her pledgemate was none too pleased with his king. His loyalty had been abused.

Did Magnus have any idea what a gift he’d tossed away by acting like a jealous cuckold? Likely not. The man didn’t seem to consider much beyond his own pride.

Well, she had her pride too. Magnus might be the only man she could communicate with, but she refused to give him the satisfaction of going to him for any reason. She muddled her way through the simplest tasks with Riggs, making ridiculous hand gestures and using sticks to carve pictures into the earth when the party made camp in the evenings.

“Drayith,”
he said, pointing at the imposing structure they approached.
Wall.
He’d used the same word for the stone barriers demarking pastures they’d passed. He lifted his hand, pointing to one of the towers.
“Fornith.”
The moat.
“Entieth laich.”
Laich
sounded similar to
loch
. It was one of the words their languages shared nearly in common. Once she heard them in isolation, they were easy to spot.

Their tongues were not all that dissimilar. Now that she
’d gained an ear for it, she was learning rapidly. She could even say a few simple sentences.

I ride the horse
was
Meh peehirath dorchlah.

Give me more meat
was
Hat feth brahnlach meh.

Mayhap she ought to thank Magnus for forcing her to do this. She was mated into Riggs’s kind now. ’Twas time she began learning the language.

She repeated the words after Riggs.

He grinned as he kept his eyes ahead, pleased.

Warmth suffused her chest. It shouldn’t affect her so, making a man proud of her for somat so simple, but Riggs’s pride meant the world to her. He meant the world to her. And she kent she meant the world to him. Her pledgemate had gone without meat the last two days because he refused to leave her side to hunt. No man, no person since Seona, had ever been so attentive to her, so steadfast. But even Seona had left, like her mother. Riggs would never leave her. She sensed it. She
felt
it deep in her bones.

Magnus likely sensed it too. ’Twas why he behaved so jealously.

The evening they’d met the king’s party, his royal majesty of pulsating pustules had dragged her and Riggs into his tent and fairly forced them to sign his bloody pact. That was after he’d informed her that if she had come to him free of a lifemate bond with a commoner, he would have made her his pledgemate and queen. As it was, he couldn’t even take her as concubine—her association with Riggs precluded any royal title. As if she’d want to be concubine to his royal highness of piss pots.

At least the pact allowed her to be with Riggs whenever the king did not “require her presence”—a clause open to bloody broad interpretation, but the king hadn’t appreciated her pointing that out. He’d cited the case of Aine and Gregor and claimed he would honor the lifemate bond so as not to cause either one of them distress or to call into question that which Danu had blessed
.

Och,
she couldn’t believe he’d bought it—lifemates! She wasn’t even wolfkind. But she wasn’t complaining. It was the one thing keeping Magnus from taking her for himself and leaving Riggs out in the cold, or worse, tossing him in a dungeon.

Riggs would be given quarters at Glendall, Magnus’s keep. He would be given access to the king’s hunting grounds so long as he exchanged his tanning services for the kills he made. If he chose to earn coin in the king’s army, he’d be allowed. He wouldn’t be as content as he would have been at his own cabin, on his own land, being his own man, but it was far better than being a prisoner, somat the king liked to remind them was within his power, somat he would execute without compunction if they should break the terms of the pact, mainly if the king ever scented Riggs’s seed on her.

Because there could be no chance she might already be with child, a physician would examine her after a full moon cycle. If she was found to be with child, the pact would be dissolved. Riggs would take sole custody of the child when it was weaned. Anya would be permitted to visit with him and the child, but he would never again have breeding rights to her. Their visits would be under guard. Bloody waste of ink that portion of the contract was, since ’twas no way she could be with child.

“
Make the most of your time with your lifemate,”
Magnus had told her just before he’d dismissed them.
“Once I know you carry no child, I shall require you in my bed every night, all night.”

So she was to be the king’s whore. Until she did the impossible and bore him an heir.

Meanwhile, he forbade her from being with her husband the way her body yearned to be. The unfairness of it had her sitting stiff in the saddle. Her horse flicked his ears in irritation.

Forcing her concentration to the new words Riggs had just taught her, she said.
“Entieth laich”
and drew a circle in the air to indicate around.
“Chroina sumeth?”All Chroina?
If this city was to be her new home, she might as well learn about it.

Riggs restated the sentence the way it was supposed to go. She committed it to memory as a little thrill went through her at getting her meaning across.

“Ee-ah,”
he said with a nod.
Aye.
Then he said some things she didn’t understand. But he gestured
around
and made a cutting off motion. Then he said land and sea, two of the many words she had learned in the last two days. Mayhap he meant the moat continued as far as the sea. So it would be seawater in the moat. Interesting. That explained the scent of brine in the air.

It wouldn’t be long before they could speak easily to each other. Already, they were leagues ahead of where they’d been. That first night, after signing Magnus’s bloody pact, Riggs had held her close in the bedroll, whispering unknown assurances to her and kissing her gently. Her body had burned for more, and the evidence of his desire had prodded her hip, but he hadn’t tupped her, hadn’t so much as touched her in an intimate fashion.