rather enjoyed watching Leo sleep.
When she agreed to marry him, she had expected to quickly become bored. To spend time on long trips. Maybe take a lover, in due course. But there was a lot to like about the Young Lion. Honesty, loyalty, courage, passion. Old-fashioned virtues, perhaps. The virtues of a really excellent dog. But virtues she was starting to appreciate. Even to admire. He was a decent man, in several ways that actually counted. Enough to make her feel almost decent when she was beside him. And that was a pleasant feeling. Certainly a refreshing one.
He shifted in his sleep, drawing the furs up around his chin. For such a strong man, such a bold fighter, he could be strangely childlike. So trusting, so optimistic, so vain. He treated the world like an implausible storybook and, though it had thus far played along, she doubted it would do so for ever. Their mothers had been right, they were well matched. The impetuous optimist and the calculating cynic. He was not weighed down with excessive cleverness, but a clever husband would only have got in her way. She was glad she had married him. The world needs heroes.
But it also needs people who will actually get things done.
She stood, and smoothed her skirts, and checked her face one more time in the distorting square of old mirror. Then she slipped out of the door and, so as not to wake her husband, ever so gently pulled it shut.
The one called Greenway was skulking in the corridor outside. It seemed when it came to Northmen, the more picturesque the name, the more of a self-regarding thug it belonged to.
He gave her a leering look up and down. “Can’t give you long.”
Gold flashed in the shaft of light from the narrow window and she pressed the coin into his palm. “Best not waste our time, then.”
She heard the blades before she saw them. That familiar scrape of steel, shuffle of feet, grunting of snatched breath.
She stepped out into a narrow yard beside Skarling’s Hall, a circle of patchy lawn hemmed in by grey stone walls, a training dummy in old mail and battered helm leaning against a rack of swords and spears.
Two men prowled the edge of the grass with shields and long sticks, bulky with straw matting. Stour stood between them, sword in hand, stripped to the waist, lean and muscular and shining with sweat, steaming faintly in the dawn chill. Savine wondered if this display of raw manliness was for her benefit. More than likely. Who understood the importance of appearances better than she did, after all?
The so-called Great Wolf sprang hissing at one of his training partners, so suddenly and so savagely Savine put a protective hand over her belly on an instinct. She had to force herself not to jerk back as Stour chopped at the shield and sent splinters flying, ducked the stick and darted under it, shoving the man against the wall with his shoulder and making him grunt. Stour caught the rim of the shield, kneed the man in the gut, then dealt his leg a vicious blow with the flat of his sword and dropped him mewling on the ground.
All done in a couple of breaths’ worth of focused violence, so that as his other training partner lumbered up, the King of the Northmen was already prancing away on the balls of his feet. Through sweat-dark hair, his eyes slid over to Savine.
“Like what you see?” He spoke the common tongue after all. But she had guessed that at the feast, from the way he had listened to her and Leo talking.
“Who wouldn’t?” She made herself step forward, around the fallen man, groaning as he clutched at his straw-padded leg. “The Great Wolf! Grandson of Bethod and rightful King of the Northmen! The greatest warrior in the Circle of the World, they say, and I can well believe it.”
“You’re almost as quick with a compliment as I am with a sword.” Stour loosed a flurry of lightning jabs at the man still standing, point gouging at his shield fast as a woodpecker and making him shuffle nervously back.
“No more than the truth.” It was a while since she’d stepped into a fencing circle herself, but she knew enough about swordsmanship to see his skill. He was even better than Leo. But even more vain, too. She wondered whether that preening arrogance would make an effective shield if Bremer dan Gorst came for him