“Or I wouldn’t have married you,” he finished.
“Yes. Doors that were previously closed are beginning to open. The Red Guard guy is coming after ignoring us for months. The county sheriffs think that we are a lovely couple. Explain the problem with the Pack, so I’ll understand.”
“No.”
“I’m not asking for your thoughts and secrets. Just for facts. I’ll learn them anyway. Normally I’d pounce on a chance to explore your weaknesses, but right now I just want the Pack thing to go smoothly. I worked too damn hard for it. A three month-long bidding war, four trips to the Pack to woo them, almost ten thousand in extra herbs planted.”
“Did you go yourself to woo the Pack?”
She laughed. “Because I am so sweet and charming?”
He gave her a dark look. “Your people are eating out of your hand.”
“They are my people and I love them. They’ve proved their loyalty beyond anything I had a right to ask. There is no limit to how low I will sink to keep them safe.”
“Interesting choice of words.”
She faced him. “Accurate. I will do anything for them.”
“Good.” His smile was like the flash of a knife. “I’ll use it against you later.”
She rolled her eyes. “I’m so scared. I’ll have to go and find someone to sex me up right away just to keep my composure. Tell me, how did all this start?”
He didn’t answer. She strolled next to him.
“Roland found out he had a daughter,” Hugh said.
“I know the story,” she said. “The immortal wizard woke up after hibernating through the centuries of technology just before the Shift. He set about rebuilding his empire from the ruins of our modern world. He gathered necromancers and made them into the People. He hired an army and set a warlord to lead them. And he swore off having children, not sure why.”
“They always turn on him,” Hugh said.
Just like you? Maybe he had turned on Roland. Maybe not. There was something wistful in the way he said Roland’s name.
“He fell in love in spite of himself,” Elara continued. “And he had a daughter, but his wife ran away.”
“He tried to kill the child in the womb,” Hugh said.
She stopped and glanced at him. “What?”
“It didn’t work. Daniels is hard to kill.”
Elara recovered. “And then her mother took her and ran away with Roland’s Warlord.”
“He raised me,” Hugh said.
“The Warlord?”
“Yes. His name was Voron. He’d trained me since they found me in France. Then Kalina, Daniels’s mother, decided she needed his help, and it was all over. One day he was simply gone. That was her power. If she wanted to, she could make you love her.”
So his surrogate father had abandoned him to be with his boss’s wife and their child. That had to hurt.
“It didn’t last,” Hugh said. “Roland tracked them down eventually and killed Kalina. Voron escaped with the child. I thought Voron would come back, after her magic wore off, but he never did.”
“After Voron left, what happened to you?”
“I became the Warlord. Later Roland found out that his daughter survived.”
“How?”
Hugh shrugged. “She started using her magic. Daniels isn’t a subtle type. I could’ve brought her to him, but he wanted her to come to him, voluntarily, which was a lot more complicated. By that point, she had decided that Curran Lennart was her one and only. As long as they were together, inside the Pack’s Keep, I wouldn’t have made any progress. I had to get them to turn on each other.”
He was describing it matter-of-fact, in a detached voice.
“You lured them out of the Keep?” she guessed.
“Yes.”
“How?”
“Panacea. I wanted a lot of distance, so I went to Europe, to the Black Sea. I had a castle there, a quiet base for Middle Eastern operations. There are a lot of potent old powers in Arabia. Best to stay out of their way, on the outskirts.”
“Did Lennart and Daniels come?”
Hugh nodded.
“What was it like meeting her?” Elara asked. “What was Daniels like?”
“You wanted just the facts, remember?”
“Did she like your proposal?”
“No. We danced around for a while. Sparred once.”
“Is she good?”
“Yes.”
“Better than you?”
“Faster. Voron taught us both. It was like fighting myself. She’s a killer. If you take away her sword, she’ll pick up a rock. If you take away the rock, she’ll kill you with her hands. She zeroes in and doesn’t let go.”
Suppressed admiration slipped into his words. Elara felt an uncomfortable pinch.
“Aside from fighting Voron, it was probably my best fight,” he said.
“You fought Voron?”
“I killed him.”
She stared at him. “Why?”
“Roland wanted him dead.”
So his second surrogate father ordered him to kill his first surrogate father. And he obeyed. Either he was truly a monster or…
“Did it hurt when you killed him?”
“He wasn’t exactly in his prime.” Hugh smiled, but his eyes didn’t. It hurt, she realized. It hurt, and it haunted him still.
“Voron was bound to Roland the same way I was bound,” he said.
“How?”
“Roland pulled the blood out of my body, mixed it with his, and put it back.”
She stared at him. “How is that possible?”
“Roland’s magic is ancient. He is capable of wonders. The blood brings with it certain powers. Blood weapons. Blood wards. Long lifespan. Healing is mine alone. I was born with it. Some things I learned like any other mage can learn. But blood powers come from Roland. When Roland killed his wife, he expected Voron to come back. We all did. When he didn’t Roland purged him the way he purged me.”
“What does that mean?” she asked.
“When I found Voron, he was an old man. He had aged. He could no longer make a blood sword. He couldn’t use magic. He still had his skills, but his body betrayed him. I had waited a long time to meet him. There was a conversation I wanted to have. But he wouldn’t talk to me, and I killed him quickly, because it hurt to look at him.”
Is that what would happen to Hugh? “You haven’t aged.”
He grinned at her. “Give it time.”
They walked some more.
“I knew how that damn trip to the Black Sea would end from the start,” Hugh said. “Violence, magic, and fire. An old power got involved and broke open the mountain under the castle to release the magic of a dormant volcano. It melted the castle from the inside out. Solid stone ran like a glowing river. Beautiful, in a way.”
“What happened?”
“I knew I had to kill Lennart, or Daniels would never leave him. We fought. I broke his legs. He broke my back and threw me into the fire. The whole thing was idiotic.”
Volcanic fire powered by magic that melted stone. He should’ve been instantly burned to a crisp. “How did you survive?”
“I teleported out. Had a water anchor in a vial around my neck. There wasn’t much of me left. Roland put me inside a phoenix egg for three months. Took me another two to get my strength back.”
He’d spent three months in excruciating pain. He’d said it so casually, as if it didn’t matter.
“If it wasn’t for Lennart, I might have convinced her. She wavered.”
“I don’t think she did.”
Hugh turned to her. He didn’t want to speak about it in the first place, but somehow Elara was pulling it out of him and once he started, he couldn’t stop. The void was ripping him apart, and still he talked.