Page 136 of Ravenous

“Yrsa hunted the vampires down. Slaughtered every one.”

Relief shocked through Lia. She grieved for their parents, could only feel grateful Co?tin hadn’t been involved. One small mercy in a long list of horrors.

“After that,” Dagny continued, “the queen watched over the boys. Became their gods-mother.”

Gods-mother? Did that explain Arctos’s feelings toward the female? Their bond? Even now Yrsa’s gaze was riveted to Arctos.

The brawl ended with a last crash and roar. The noise drained from the room, leaving only the wheeze of the subdued and the clink of mugs beingrefilled.

The queen beckoned Arctos, and he followed her without a flicker of hesitation toward a back chamber.

He didn’t look back. Not once.

The knowledge sank like a stone in Lia’s stomach—whatever bound him to his queen wasn’t mild or distant or easily dislodged. Certainly not by a fledgling vampire with a hope of friendship in her chest and borrowed clothes on her back.

Is he in love with her?

Did she marry him off to rid herself of his affections?

Before disappearing through an archway, Yrsa turned. Her eyes swept the hall, then locked on Lia.

Cool.

Assessing.

Not hostile, not welcoming—simply taking her measure the way a queen sizes up an unexpected piece on her board.

For whatever reason, another royal has me in her sights.This powerful female could decide where Lia fit.

Or whether she fit at all.

Chapter 52Arctos

Inside Yrsa’s private chambers, she dismissed her guards with a wave of her hand. Though she promoted austerity at court, her inner domain overflowed with furs, furnishings, and paintings. As she’d explained, “At my age, luxuries are necessities.”

She sank onto a plush divan and motioned him to a chair opposite her. Without preamble, she said, “There is tension between you and Torben. Am I the cause of it?”

Arctos was so tired of intrigues that he nearly confessed every doubt pounding in his skull, hoping she would dispel them easily enough. Then Torben’s sharp warning echoed in his mind:When will you wake?

So Arctos said evenly, “He is about to become a father for the first time. He has much on his mind.”

“Yes. That would make sense. And I understand Hulda has declared it an ill-omened pregnancy.”

“I hope Hulda is mistaken.”

“Indeed.” Yrsa poured vodka from a crystal service, offering him one, but he declined. “I heard a song yesterday that reminded me of you.” In a soft, lilting voice, she hummed a few notes of a children’s song: “The Bear Cub’s Smiling Mother.” “Do you remember it?”

“I do. You used to sing it to me and Torben at bedtime.” They’d soaked upher attention even as the lyrics cut deep. Each had freshly lost his mother, and Arctos’s relationship with bears had been…complicated.

“You both feared the dark,” she said. “Afraid vampires would return to finish off your family.”

“Night was not our friend.”

“No.” Her expression softened. “You’d seen such terrors. And Torben is so close to you, he had to have felt them through you.”

Torben used to ask him to describe what Arctos had heard and seen so that he could know what vampires had done to his own parents. “I never told him a single detail, which was maddening to him.”

“I remember hesitating to stroke your brow,” she murmured. “Your wounds were still so raw.”