Page 36 of His Realm

But what if he didn’t? What if Varic was forced to use modern weaponry, and they barricaded themselves in and used innocent people to make sure we⁠—

“Your mind is running.”

“It is,” I confessed.

“I need you to remember something, all right?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t tell the Noreia, my people, that I have power. As the draugr, the one who protects and punishes in the king’s name, they can feel my power when it rushes over them.”

“But—”

“And I can stand outside and send that power through rock and stone and steel and whatever else stands in my way.”

I had felt that power myself in small waves and seen the different forms he became. That was the part that couldn’t be scientifically explained like the double canines or the blood mutation. In Varic’s line, the line of Ascalon, there was a power that the prince inherited from his father where he literally became the incarnation of the wolf of Maedoc. Originally, Varic explained that the power transferred from father to son, leaving one, entering another, when the son grew stronger than his sire. No one wanted to say that, to put it so bluntly, but that was the truth of the matter. Varic told me that the prince assumed the mantle of the wolf when he became the defender of the laws, the one who made certain all the rules were followed. But what actually happened was biological.

Everyone descended from Ascalon possessed this trait. One of the things I explored during my time in the palace was the transformation of the wolf. Before Isabella retired to her island, I asked her to accompany me down into the archives, and we hunted through the rooms in the hypogeum together.

“Oh, darling, here,” she’d said, having found several scrolls on one side of the room on small stone shelves.

She went through them and read and translated for me. As I suspected, though Varic and his father said the wolf of Maedoc was only in their specific bloodline because Magnus was the firstborn son and Messina had been his, it wasn’t true. The wolf form existed in the entire family.

Varic believed that if Cassius hadn’t died, he would have never become the wolf, but the fact of the matter was, he would have. Messina had become the wolf of Maedoc because he was so powerful. Cassius had as well, but so had Varic.

“I was told that Messina used to become the wolf, but once Cassius could, he stopped,” I’d told Isabella.

“But that makes no sense. The change is biological, not magic. I know the difference.”

Yes, she did. She was a druid, after all.

“So Messina no longer shifts because he’s not strong enough to after years of inactivity, but he could, if he wanted to, but it would take a lot of work.”

“That’s correct. But why on earth would he want to?”

I shrugged. “I have no idea. More importantly, why would Varic tell me something different?”

“I’m sure Messina made Varic believe it was a passing of the torch, that the power left Cassius when he died and passed to him.”

“It sounds magical that way, like a rite of passage.”

“Yes. But I know my son, and deep down, he knows the truth.”

“Then someday, when Varic is older, the trait will hopefully be triggered in his son or daughter just as it was in him.”

“Yes,” she agreed.

“But that means that Decimus should have been able to transform into the wolf. His sons too. Gaius as well, and his son, Andreas.”

“And Julia, the king’s sister, as well as her son, Marcellus, when he yet lived.”

Marcellus had died the same night Nerilla had, and though he was the reason Dae-Jung had come into my life, I had never grieved him.

She nodded, folding her arms on the thick stone table. “And yet, I’ve only ever seen Messina transform, as well as Cassius, and Varic.”

“I wonder what it takes for the gene to be triggered?”

“Perhaps that part is magic,” she said playfully.