It was usually easiest to just agree with Beth. Besides, she might be right. Beth’s intuitive understanding of people owed nothing to magic, but she was often right about them. “Okay, I’ll go see her.”
“When?”
“Soon, okay? I want to see the dancing now.”
The singers had stopped, but a number of people had migrated to that end of the field and Lily wasn’t sure they’d be able to see. One of them turned around as they approached—Jason, the blond hunk Cynna hadn’t had a chance to flirt with earlier.
Lily liked Jason—she really did. He was impossible to dislike. But he was certain he owed her for something that had just been her job, and took every opportunity he could find to pay her back. She didn’t know how to make him quit, and Rule thought it was funny.
“Have they started?” she asked Jason.
“No, Michael and Sean decided they wanted their fiddles, but they’re back now. I hear them tuning up. You’d better get up front. You’ll never see from back here.”
She couldn’t argue with that, but his methods were embarrassing—and never mind what Beth had said. She damned well could be embarrassed. He grabbed her hand and called out cheerfully, “The Chosen’s back here. She needs to be up there.”
Sure enough, the crowd parted, people turning with a smile, shifting to let her pass. Jason pulled her forward.
“My sister,” Lily said. “I’d like her to see—”
“Your . . . oh, my.” Jason paused, his eyes traveling over Beth as a smile spread. “I can’t believe I overlooked this one. Yum.”
Beth dimpled at him. “My name’s Beth. I’m the nice sister.”
“Very nice,” he assured her, his eyes making it clear which elements he considered especially worthy. “And yet I can’t help hoping . . . not too nice?”
Lily resisted the urge to roll her eyes, settling for retrieving her hand from Jason’s grip. She didn’t think he noticed. “Jason, this is Beth. Beth, Jason Chance. Can you hit on each other later? I really don’t want to miss this.”
Beth didn’t resist. She rolled her eyes. “Well, I’m nicer than that.”
“No doubt. I’m going to find Rule. You coming?”
Beth slid a sideways smile at Jason. “I’ll catch up with you.”
Lily suspected her sister was going to miss the training dance. Oh, well. Jason wouldn’t show Beth any more of a good time than she wanted to have, and at twenty-three, Beth was technically a grown-up. Lily went to find Rule.
The violins had started by the time she reached the front of the crowd, passed there by people she knew and those she didn’t. Someone had brought a drum, which he was beating slowly. The dancers had assembled into a circle of about a dozen half-naked men, arms locked together. None of them moved. They seemed hardly to breathe.
Rule wasn’t watching the dancers. He was with them.
Lily’s breath caught in surprise. Like the others, he wore only ragged cutoffs that hung low on his hips. He was magnificently male, achingly human . . . yet in that moment she almost glimpsed his wolf hidden in the human architecture—a powerful, intense presence illumining the taut muscles and hooded eyes of the man. Friendly, perhaps, that wolf, but not tame. Not at all tame.
Someone had started a small bonfire in the center of the circle. The ruddy dance of the firelight turned the blades of Rule’s cheekbones hard, gathering shadows to make mysteries of his eyes. Then he looked up, caught her gaze on him, and grinned.
In delight, she grinned back. After a moment, she thought to look at the others in the circle—and was startled to see Rule’s brother, Benedict. He looked like the statue of some Aztec god turned flesh, his expression as calm and unrevealing as stone, his skin gleaming in the firelight.
She’d never seen Benedict join the dance before. He probably taught it—he trained young Nokolai in fighting—but she’d never seen him dance it. Why was he in the circle tonight?
Opposite Rule stood Cullen. He was the most overtly beautiful of them all, his face almost too perfect in its coined symmetry. His eyes glittered with excitement—a merry Pan or Loki about to launch some cosmic mischief.
Benedict gave a short nod to the drummer, who suddenly kicked up his tempo. The fiddles joined in with a wild opening flourish, the singers launched into the old Russian song—and the dancers erupted from stillness to fury.
The steps were simple enough. The speed and vigor of those steps flung the men into a rapid clockwise swirl that spun itself from fast to faster before snapping out into a line—and the line dipped in a wave as each man sank to his heels, kicked out with each leg, and rose again.
After three undulations of the line, those on the ends spun forward. First two men, then four, then more, flung themselves into the air as if they could take flight—and they nearly did, over-leaping one another in a dizzy pattern.
Then they began hurling one another into the air—a pair of lupi using their hands as a catapult to send a third flying, somersaulting through space, landing with a bounce to leap again or join hands with another to send someone else up. There was a pattern to it, but they moved too fast for her to pick it out. Faster than human, certainly, but also faster than she’d seen them dance before.
In a heartbeat they clicked into a new pattern—not bouncing as they landed, but catching one another to build two pyramids of five lupi each, three on the ground, two on their shoulders. The pyramids kept one man aloft like a living projectile, tossing him between them. Cullen.
He’d land on one set of shoulders, crouch, and be hurled to the other side, his body tucked up like a ball, righting himself at the last second to land on the opposite pyramid, still crouched—and be flung back.
Two times. Three. Four—and then both pyramids dissolved while he was in the air, those who’d formed them melting away into the crowd.
One man stood where five had been. Benedict. He watched, unmoving, as Cullen shot at him like a cannonball. Benedict dipped his knees slightly as he stretched up one hand.
It couldn’t have happened the way it looked. Because it looked like he dribbled Cullen—as if the curled-up ball of the man smacked into Benedict’s hand and bounced to the ground, then up into the air again, unfurling into a man only then to land lightly beside Benedict—sweaty, panting, grinning like a madman.
“And that, younglings,” Benedict said lazily, “is how the dance is supposed to be done.”
The crowd exploded—applauding, yelling. Lily heard someone call out, “Piers—for Lady’s sake!” and someone behind her was saying over and over, “Get back, get back. Give him some space.”
It was the name—Piers—that got her attention. Wasn’t that the young lupus Rule had mentioned who’d just been allowed to leave terra tradis, where young lupi were sequestered? If so, he was only eighteen, not an official adult yet. She turned, trying to see over or through people.
What she saw was Rule slipping through the crowd. She followed. He stopped and held out his arm. She stepped into that welcoming circle. He was warm and sweaty from the dance.
Another circle had formed, she realized—a circle of men around a panting, excited wolf with a brindle coat. One man was laughing. Another grinned and shook his head. Another sighed.
Lily was the only female in the circle. The only human. There were no children nearby, either. The wolf was surrounded only by other lupi . . . and her.
Piers must have gotten so excited that he lost control and Changed. For an adolescent, that was a huge no-no—because he might lose control in other ways, too. Lily was contemplating the wisdom of stepping back when Isen strode up to the wolf. He stopped, hands on hips, and shook his head. “Piers,” he said. Just that, but with such disappointment.