My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 303

Jace

Mina dressed me for it with the care you give someone who doesn't yet understand he should be afraid.

She'd come to my room before the light was full, a bundle of dark wool over her arm, her hair bound back off her face, severe, nothing like the woman who'd been teasing trader stalls a day ago. She laid the clothes on the bed, took in the southern coat I'd put on out of habit, and shook her head.

"Not that. Wool. You'll be standing out in the cold a long time." She worked the fastenings at my throat herself, brisk, her hands sure on them. "And listen. Whatever happens out there, you have to remain composed, don't make a sound. I know I've said it before, but I'm saying it again because you won't want to do any of it when the time comes."

"You're not selling it well."

"I'm not trying to sell it." She smoothed the wool flat against my chest and stepped back to take in the whole of me. "There. Now you look like you might belong here. From a distance. In a bad light."

I wanted to ask what I was about to see. I'd asked twice and gotten the same answer, that I'd see when I saw, and by now I understood the not-telling was a kindness. So I took her hand off my chest and held it instead.

"You'll be next to me?"

She placed a hand on my cheek. “Of course…I’ll be with you.”

* * *

They held it in the courtyard where I'd stood frozen two days back waiting on an Alpha. Overnight they'd remade it.

The snow was cleared to bare stone in a wide ring. At the center sat a basin, sunk into the rock itself, the size of a small room, and fire fed it through vents cut in the stone beneath. The water in it moved. Not a boil yet. A low heavy roll, edge to edge, throwing steam off the top in a sheet that climbed and went to nothing in the cold. The pack came in around it. Hundreds. They came without talking, which was wrong, because a crowd that size makes noise and this one made none, and the only sound in the whole courtyard was the fire working under the rock and the wind off the wall.

Mina set me at the front, against the edge of the cleared ring, and stood at my left shoulder.

"It's starting," she said, barely a breath. "Don't talk now."

An old man came out onto the stone.

He was small, bent, bare-armed in a cold that should have finished a man his age. White paste covered his face from the hairline down, dried and split at the creases so the dark skin showed through in cracks. Small bones hung at his throat. He carried a black iron bowl against his hip in both hands, and he didn't look at the crowd once. He had the flat purpose of a man going to a job he'd done a hundred times.

He set the bowl on the rim of the basin. He dug a hand into it, brought up a fistful of something dark and ground fine, held it over the rolling water, and let it fall.

The water took it badly. It hissed where the powder went in, a long wet hiss, and the steam coming off it turned from white to a dirty yellow and stopped climbing, rolled out low across the stone toward our feet instead. The smell reached me a breath behind it. I won't clean it up for you. It was rot and hot fat and something chemical underneath that scraped the back of my throat and put water in my eyes, and I was forty feet off.

The old man dragged his fouled hand down his own chest, a dark smear through the white paste, and he spoke. His voice came out of him too big for his body, cracked and carrying.

"Hörg vekr. Blóð vekr. Sá sem ferr í vatnit ferr einn."

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