My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 329

Sera

He took me down through the keep by the servants' stairs, the narrow ones at the back that let out near the kitchens, with the cold getting into the stone the lower we went until the last flight had frost on the rail under my hand.

He wouldn't tell me what the gift was. I asked twice. The first time he said wait and the second time he didn't say anything, which with him is the same as a locked door, so I stopped asking and let him lead me by the wrist through a house that had emptied itself of everyone who wasn't riding.

The cold got to me first. It was the kind that makes you breathe through your mouth so it doesn't ache your teeth.

Then the noise, a lot of horses and a lot of men not talking loud. Somebody laughed and cut it off fast. It smelled of horse and the grease they rub into the hide, and under that the iron smell the cold has up here, the one you taste more than smell.

The whole ride was already gathered.

I don't know what I expected.

Not this certainly.

Twenty-some horses saddled and stamping, breath going up off them in the dark, and the men already mounted or close to it, dark shapes made bigger by the same layered hide Fenris was wearing, torches jammed into the snow throwing everything orange and moving.

It was one thing to sit on the bed and hear him say twenty. It was another to stand in the door of my own house and see a war leave from it.

I was still taking it in when I found Jace.

He was off to the left, near the front of the column, already dressed for it. Already in the gear, a borrowed rig a size too big cinched down over his southern coat, somebody holding a horse for him by the bridle.

Yvara stood at his shoulder. She had the look of a woman who'd done a thing and was waiting to be told she'd done it right.

He wasn't happy. Even across the yard, in bad light, I could read that much. He stood how you stand when a thing has been decided over your head and you're doing the math on whether fighting it costs more than going along with it.

His jaw was working. He caught sight of me in the doorway and something crossed his face that I chose not to name, and then his eyes went back to the horse, the horse being the more useful thing to attend to.

"You already recruited him?"

Fenris followed my eyes. For a second he didn't answer, and when I glanced up at him he was frowning, which on Fenris is a whole conversation.

"No," he said. "I hadn't gotten to him yet. I was going to pull him out on our way through the gate."

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