Royal Wolf Box Set by Haley Weir
Chapter Eleven
“Iagree with your family,” Dex said once Holly had finished telling him about her idea to reveal the existence of shifters to the humans in Grenvich. “I think that it’s a very bad and dangerous idea.”
Holly rolled her eyes at him.
“I don’t understand why trying to have everyone live in peace together is an idea that is met with such resistance,” she said in exasperation.
“It’s not the concept that is bad,” he said. “It’s the actuality of it. Your family is right to tell you that it would end in carnage—it would, for both humans and shifters alike. If you truly want to have peace, then everyone should just keep to themselves.”
“Spoken like a true loner,” Holly said sarcastically.
“Perhaps,” he said. “But it is an honest answer. You can’t force species to coexist when they are inherently opposed to it. No more than you can force me to join a pack or become a king.”
Holly chuckled for a minute about the thought of Dex playing at being a king.
“But what if they’re not inherently opposed to it,” she said. “What if they just think that they are, and that if they could only see that there was a better way, they might embrace it?”
“That is an awful lot to risk on a ‘might,’” Dex said. ” Look, I admire your ambition and your good heart, but I fear that exposing the shifters to humans will end up getting you killed, and quite possibly getting us all killed.”
They sat together for a while longer, and then Dex escorted Holly back to the tree line of the forest where she went back through the secret corridors and into the castle. She decided to table her thoughts on the matter for now and listen to the advice that she’d been given by everyone, at least until she felt more clear about what she wanted to do.
* * *
As the winter snow began to fall in thick and blanketed sheets, the decorations throughout the city were hung and the festive preparations were still underway. While Holly was at the tavern, enjoying an ale while waiting on the tavern keeper to package up a fresh harvesting of figs for the celebration, some of the townsfolk were eyeing the queen’s presence at the tavern. Some couldn’t keep their mouths closed about it.
“You know,” one of the men across the tavern said, in a voice loud enough for the new queen to hear him. “Some kingdoms might look down upon a queen who is seen at the tavern drinking so much.”
Holly’s patience had already been waning since the last incident, and her short-tempered and strong-willed nature was getting more difficult for her to control. She tried to use witty quips to keep her temper at bay whilst still getting the point across. Most of the time, though, the humans that started trouble were the unintelligent ones, so the quips were frequently lost on their inability to even understand that they had been insulted and mocked at their own expense.
“Some kingdoms might think it strange to have a queen who has more balls than the men in its city,” she shot back.
This particular man may have been rather daft and stupid, but he understood enough to recognize the insult in the queen’s comment. The tavern keeper laughed at her cleverness, which proceeded to make the man even more angry and embarrassed. Holly smirked while she finished her ale, pleased with the clever comment she had thought up on the spot. But when she felt someone’s breath against her neck, she turned to find the man standing close behind her with mace in his hand.
Holly did nothing more than roll her eyes at him.
“I really wouldn’t,” she said.
“Oh?” he sneered at her. “And why is that? Are you afraid that the queen with the big balls is going to cry?”
Holly laughed, and the man didn’t quite know how to take it.
“No,” she said, still laughing. “I’m afraid that I will end up beating your ass so hard that you will end up with your own balls in your mouth.”
The man lost his temper immediately and swung the mace at Holly’s head. But she was a much more skilled fighter than anyone there, and she quickly disarmed and knocked the man down onto the floor.
“Like I said,” she reiterated. “I really wouldn’t.”
The man writhed in pain on the floor of the tavern until his friends came and helped him back up on his feet again. There were several glares that were shot at Holly, but she couldn’t have cared less. She made her point in the presence of these idiots—both verbally and physically. And she hoped that this time, the message would stick.
“The problem with this situation to begin with,” the tavern keeper said to her in a hushed voice, “is that the townspeople feel comfortable threatening a member of the royal family at all, especially one that is their new leader.”
He was right. And Dex had been right about it too. These human hunters in the city were too bold for their own good. They had no qualms about attacking the queen out in public, and that made them dangerous, even if they were ignorant fools.
“Agreed,” Holly said as she stood up and placed some gold coins down on the top of the bar. She took the satchel of figs that the tavern keeper handed her and prepared to head back to the castle with them.
But as Holly was getting ready to leave, one of the men caught her off guard, and as she walked toward the door, he jabbed a small blade into her side. The pain shot into her, cutting deeply through the muscle and shaving off bone. Holly shrieked in surprise, and everyone in the tavern stopped to stare at her. It was a moment of beautiful horror, as if an entire crowd of people was watching a magical unicorn be slaughtered. Some were seething with satisfaction about the destruction of something different from them, and others were staring there in a frozen horror as they watched something beautiful be destroyed. The wound wouldn’t be fatal, and the scenario was not quite so dramatic and dire, but the message was the same. There were many people who would stand by and watch harm be done in complacency. They may not inflict harm themselves, but they were quick to watch it happen without acting.
At the very moment that the man pulled his blade back out from Holly’s side, the tavern door opened and Dex walked in for a replenishment of ale. When he saw what had happened, he grabbed Holly just before she was ready to double over herself in pain. Dex was furious and wanted to tear the throats out of every man in the place without hesitation. But his first priority was Holly, so he forfeited enacting a bloody revenge on the humans involved to get Holly back to the castle and her family. When he got to the castle, Cassandra and Theo both came running to see what had happened.
Theo was outraged, and since he knew that Holly was in good hands here and would recover fine; he went to the woods to get Rubius so that the two of them could head back to the tavern and immediately arrest all of the men involved. If one or two of them “accidentally” died on the way to the dungeons, then even better.
Dex got ready to leave after having successfully delivered Holly to her mother’s care at the castle. But Cassandra saw that Dex had affection for her daughter, and so she asked him to stay. He sat in a chair beside Holly’s bed while Cassandra tended to the wound in her side. She first gave Holly a tincture to drink that knocked her out cold so that she wouldn’t feel the pain of the stitches that Cassandra would sew into her side to close the wound.
“Thank you for rescuing my daughter yet again,” Cassandra said as she smiled and worked to stitch up the side of Holly’s torso. “I understand that this is not the first time you’ve come to her aid, and for that, I owe you a debt of gratitude.”
“No, you owe me nothing,” Dex said politely.
“We shall see,” Cassandra said ambiguously. “But for now, you have my deepest thanks.”