My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 252

Fenris

Vane had been talking for a quarter of an hour and hadn't told us anything yet.

I knew his rhythm. I'd known it since I was a boy. He laid the ground out slow — the names of the packs, the names of the men who'd sent the riders, the dates the riders had come in, the conditions of the horses when they got to our gate. He read the names off the parchment without lifting his eyes off the parchment.

He did that when the news at the bottom of the page was bad. He'd done it the night my father died and he'd done it the night my brother died, and now he was doing it again, and his shoulders had the same set in them they'd had both other times, and his free hand was flat on the table with the thumb tucked in. I'd been watching the thumb for ten minutes. The thumb was the thing that told you.

The chamber was old. The fire at the back wall was honest enough but the room was twice as big as any fire was going to win against, and the chill went up through the soles of the boots into the long bones of the leg.

The chiefs had their hands on the table for the warmth of the wood. The wood was older than the chiefs. It had come out of one piece of black northern oak in my grandfather's time, dragged into the keep on three teams of horses across two winters, and through the middle of it there ran a dark grain line I'd traced with my thumb since I was nine. My thumb was on it now. My cheek had been in my palm for an hour. I hadn't moved.

"...same pattern, Alpha," Vane was saying. "Drelmoor, Stonefall, Brightwater, Grey Reach. All four within the last two weeks. The rider from Brightwater rode three days without changing his horse. The horse died inside their gate."

"What do they want from us?" Toren had his beard oiled again. He came to every meeting with the beard freshly done and his hands in his sleeves, because he never knew where to put his hands. "What is it these packs want?"

"They want to know what's hitting them," Vane said.

"Well, what is it?"

Vane raised his eyes off the parchment. He brought them down the length of the table at Toren the way a man brings them down on a son he has already disinherited.

"I'd be damned if I know."

Toren took the answer. He sat back. Bram leaned in instead.

"It would help, then," Bram said, "if any of those riders had a description with them. A shape. The way the things move. How they hit. If any one of those four packs had a man who'd seen a thing and could give it words, we'd know what we were walking toward."

"Right," somebody said from the far end. "He's right. A description."

Vane closed his eyes. He kept them closed for a count of three. When he opened them again they had the dry quality they got when he was about to insult a man whose father had been one of his oldest friends.

"Idiots," Vane said, conversationally, at the table.

The room paused.

"All of you," Vane said. "Don't you understand?"

"Understand what?" Bram said.

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