Page 18 of Tusk Love

Honestly, looking at her was no great hardship. Oskar was seized by the inexplicable urge to chuckle. She was so…adorably proper. And properly adorable. “It was just gathering dust on the shelf. Ma would have wanted you to use it,” he said, and it was the truth.

“Oskar,” Guinevere said again, plaintively, her features crumpling.

He reached out and caught her by the arm, gently guiding her back into her bedroll. She didn’t resist, but she was practically shaking with fretful energy, and so he didn’t move his hand away, his loose grip as consoling as he could make it. Inwardly, he searched for a way to take her mind off her distress.

“Let me tell you about Boroftkrah,” he heard himself say. And maybe it was as much for his sake as hers. Maybe this way Idun of Clan Stormfang could be kept alive, in a fashion.

Guinevere gave a hesitant nod.

“Boroftkrah lies on the Rime Plains. It’s separated from the Dwendalian Empire by the icy Dunrock Mountains. There are no houses, just a collection of animal-skin tents, fenced in by wooden pikes. The snow falls nearly all year round.” He was speaking in his mother’s cadence, memory handed down from one generation to the next. “That entire region is called the Greying Wildlands. A harsh land of frost and alps and taiga. Legend has it that there’s a curse over the entire thing, originating from deep within the ash forest, which contains the ruins of Molaesmyr.”

“The kingdom of the northern elves,” Guinevere breathed. “I’ve read about that. It was destroyed a long time ago, in some kind of cataclysm. The survivors fled west, into the Empire.” She paused, a tentative little shadow next to him in the dark. “What prompted your mother to come here?”

“The way she explained it, there was a restlessness in her,” said Oskar. “She wanted to see what else was out there, beyond her clan’s hearth. What else she could be.” Somehow, it was easier to tell these stories to someone who had already heard the worst of the lot. “Life on the tundra was hard…but life in Druvenlode wasn’t much easier. I’ve often wondered if she regretted it.”

“Of course she didn’t,” Guinevere said quickly. “If she stayed in the Wildlands, she never would have had you.”

The sweetness pierced him, as true as any arrow. His breath hitched. Something inside him caved in.

“You’re not going to make me cry again, Guinevere,” he said gruffly. “Don’t even think about it.”

She stifled a laugh. “I should very much like to see the elven ruins,” she murmured. “And Boroftkrah, and the Frigid Depths…I should like to climb the Dunrock, even—just to see if I can. It all sounds very beautiful.”

Oskar snorted. “Beautiful?”

“In a terrifying way. All that ice and snow, at the end of the world.”

He was about to reply that he didn’t understand how something could be terrible and beautiful at the same time, when he realized that hedidunderstand. He’d seen it. Guinevere bathed in firelight, her eyes blazing, men reduced to ashes, the forest burning down.

“Tell Lord Wimpledale to take you there one day,” he muttered.

“Wensleydale.”

“Whatever.”

The next day, Guinevere announcedthat she would ride astride rather than sidesaddle.

“My lower back hurts,” she bashfully admitted, and Oskar had to gnaw on the inside of his cheek to refrain from pointing out that a change in position would hardly help someone who wasn’t used to spending long hours on a horse. She was still going to ache, and theyshould just call the whole journey off, and she should justnot get married.

She had donned a pair of fawn-colored skintight breeches for the occasion. Oskar knew that they were fawn-colored and skintight because Guinevere hiked up her skirt as her thighs spread over Vindicator’s back, revealing those breeches and the way they left very little to the imagination.

And Oskar’s imagination was the problem. Not even an hour in, he was already wondering how Guinevere’s slender, shapely legs would feel wrapped around his waist.

Adding to his dilemma was the fact that her new position ensured that her bottom was evenmoresnugly nestled against him than it had been yesterday.

Two hours in, he leapt off the horse. “I prefer to walk,” he grunted at his puzzled traveling companion.I prefer to not have my cock rear up and send you running and screaming all the way back to the Shimmer Ward.

Vindicator leaned in to take a bite out of Oskar’s nose. Oskar deftly grabbed the stallion by the muzzle, redirecting his efforts to an apple he produced from his pocket.

“You’re very good with him,” Guinevere remarked. “Do you ride often?”

“The blacksmith regularly sent me on errands throughout the Empire. I’d take his horse, sometimes all the way to the Menagerie Coast to deliver letters.” At her incredulous look, he sighed. “It was cheaper than the mail coach.”

“You’re well rid of him, then,” Guinevere huffed. “But was working for the blacksmith how you learned archery and swordsmanship?”

“Swordsmanship, yes. In a fashion.” He’d practiced with the blades on the days business was slow. He had an aptitude for it; his mother had liked to say that battle ran in his blood as it did in his long-lost father’s. “Archery was more out of necessity. I’ve been hunting since I was a boy.”

Idun’s clan had hunted the Rime Plains for countless generations.She was the one who’d taught him how to string a bow, how to skin a carcass. A story of subsistence.

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