Page 54 of The Thornwyck Rose

Seren stroked his hair. “Ragnar,” she paused, not knowing what to say or how to say it. So instead, she pulled a small carved wolf, worn smooth with age, itssnout lifted to the sky. It fit in her palm like a river stone.

“I thought of my father today,” she said, voice low. “He carved one like this for me when I was your age. Said the wolf knows when to wait and when to strike. He taught me to listen to the wind before I moved my feet.”

Ragnar gave a dry, brief laugh. Then winced.

She placed the wolf carving into his palm.

“I want you to have my wolf.”

He looked at her, confused. “But I’m not?—”

“I love you,” she said. “You’ve told me your father calls you little wolf, and you protected a child when it would’ve been easier to look away.”

He held the wolf a little tighter. “My father did nothing.”

“Lord Henry ordered him to do nothing. Henry did it to teach you both a lesson. If your father had acted, you and he would’ve been executed alongside the evening meal.” Seren sighed.

But Ragnar shook his head in disbelief. “Well, either way, I disappointed him. That’s why he is not here.”

“No, Ragnar. He loves you so much. He took a chance and asked Lord Henry to see you tonight, but Lord Henry denied him. Your father wanted to be here, and I’m sure he’ll come if he can sneak away. But right now he has to be with Lord Henry.”

Ragnar blinked back tears.

“I’ll always protect David,” he said.

“I know,” she whispered, brushing a damp lock of hair from his temple. “But let me remind you of something, Ragnar. You’re not just here to protect him. You’re here to learn what power is.And what it isn’t.And right now, you have none that will save your life. Just as this wolf knows to wait, strike, and move, you will have to learn how to build your power and learn how to survive just like your father, just like me.”

He nodded, quiet again.

“This world is not kind, Ragnar.” Her eyes misted. “As much as it pained me to see Bertrand hit my son, I could donothing but let it happen because that is the way of the world. Until those in power determine otherwise, that will be life, and to go against it will earn you lashes or worse, and the one you are trying to protect will have no one to love them.”

Ragnar sniffled and gripped the wolf harder.

“You have to choose what you will stand for and make what you stand for count for something.”

“I stand for David and Aveline and Vala, you and my father and Baldwin,” Ragnar said. “No one will hurt you. Not if I can help it.”

She stroked his hair off his forehead. “And we don’t want to see you in pain either. Choose your battles, for it may be your only one.”

Outside the attic window, wind shifted through the trees as Seren finished tending to Ragnar’s wounds while he pondered the thought she’d left him with.

Seren dabbed a salve into the broken skin with slow, even strokes, as if gentleness could undo what the lash had carved. Ragnar gritted his teeth but didn’t flinch. His eyes were fixed on the darkness outside.

Somewhere below, a guard laughed too loudly.

“Do you miss it?” Ragnar asked after a moment. “Your home?”

She looked to the narrow attic window, to the hills that rolled into the Welsh borderland far beyond.

“Yes,” she said. “But more than the place, I miss the feeling that we belonged to the land and not the other way around. That it remembered us.”

“Tell me something about it,” he said.

“The fields were red in spring. My father’s voice would always echo off the stone. My brothers—I have three of them—they would always wrestle. They’d get hurt, and my mother and I would have to tend to their wounds.”

She paused, relishing the memories. It had been so long since she’d thought of home. “I remember waking up to wolves howling in the distance like songs in mourning. I was afraid of them, but my father made these carvings,” she said and pointed to the one in Ragnar’s hand. “Told me they runin families just like ours. He gave me ten of them to give to my children.”

Ragnar’s eyebrows popped. “And you gave this one to me?”