Chapter 201: Coastal Alphas

Chapter 201: Chapter 201: Coastal Alphas

~Lila~

The Bjornvik runner ate in the kitchens before he slept. I let him. A message that had ridden hard through the dark deserved bread and a cot before it deserved a queen’s full attention, and the hunt had left the whole keep loose-limbed and loud in the yards.

By the time the eastern sky started to pale, the fires from the night’s return had burned down to coals and the young wolves who’d made the full circuit without disgrace were still telling improved versions of their runs.

I washed in cold water, changed into clean layers, and found Magnus already in the map room with a cup of something hot and the runner’s sealed strip on the table between his hands.

"You didn’t open it," I said.

"It’s addressed to you." He pushed the cup toward me. "Also I wanted to watch your face when you did. You’re prettier when you’re irritated with coastal Alphas."

"I’m always irritated with coastal Alphas."

"Exactly."

I broke the seal.

Harald Bjornsen wrote the way he spoke—short, practical, no decoration. A coastal freighter out of Bjornvik’s lower docks had left on a routine timber-and-salt run three days behind schedule already, and had not been seen at the expected marker on the eastern water road. Weather had been clear. No wreckage reported along their own cliffs.

He wasn’t asking Frostfang to invent a navy. He was asking whether our inland scouts had heard anything from the wolf roads that fed the coastal track, and whether I would receive his son Nils if Harald sent him north with fuller counts and a request for coordinated eyes, not banners.

I read it twice, then handed it to Magnus.

He scanned it, jaw working once. "Missing ship. Clear weather. He’s being careful not to say the word he’s thinking."

"Raiders. Or a bad bargain that went quiet. Or a crew that took the cargo and kept sailing." I took the cup and drank. It was bitter and hot. "He wants eyes, not a rescue party. We can give him eyes without turning the keep inside out."

"Erik’s scouts?"

"Erik’s scouts on the inland approaches that feed that stretch of coast. Quietly. And yes—Nils can come. Harald’s never sent his son north for decoration. If he’s offering Nils, he’s offering someone who can actually count."

Magnus set the strip down. "You’re handling this like weather."

"It is weather. Coastal weather. We don’t own the sea and I’m not going to pretend we do." I met his eyes. "What I’m not going to do is ignore a neighbour who asked cleanly instead of turning a delay into a grievance."

He held my gaze a moment longer, then nodded. The argument that could have become larger stayed small. We had gotten better at that.

---

Sigrid found me in the outer yard while the keep was still shaking off the hunt’s leftovers. She had a slate under one arm and the look of a woman who had already rewritten three lists since dawn.

"Astrid and the boy with the twisted leg are on Johan’s course at first light tomorrow," she said without greeting. "Johan has opinions. Astrid has excuses. I’ve told them both that opinions and excuses burn the same in cold weather."

"Good."

"And Halvar asked whether the north ridge will be marked the old way next hunt, or your way again."

I paused while a pair of apprentices hauled a sled of butchered deer toward the stores. "Halvar can mark the north ridge any way he likes when he’s the one calling the horn. Last night the draw had the sign. That’s the whole philosophy."

Sigrid’s mouth tipped. "I’ll translate that into something that doesn’t make him feel corrected."

"You usually do."

Anders Holm crossed the yard toward us, cloak open, hair still damp from a wash. He waited until Sigrid had finished her next note, then tipped his head to me.

"I’ve put two pairs on the inland tracks that feed the Bjornvik water road," he said. "No banners. No questions asked loud enough to travel. If a freighter’s cargo walked inland instead of sailing, we’ll smell it. If it didn’t, we’ll know that too."

"How long?"

"Three days for a proper loop. Five if the weather turns." He glanced at Sigrid, then back. "You want Nils Bjornsen given a real room when he arrives, or the polite kind?"

"Real. He’s not a decoration."

Anders nodded once and moved off. Sigrid watched him go with the particular assessment she reserved for people she had decided were useful.

"He’s quieter than your mother’s Betas," she said.

"He’s quieter than most people."

"Quiet’s fine. As long as it isn’t empty." She tucked the slate under her arm. "The hall’s asking whether you want the hunt feast formal tonight or the kind where people sit where they fall."

"The kind where people sit where they fall. We already did formal when we didn’t lose anyone."

"I’ll tell the kitchens."

She left. The yard kept moving around me—sparring on the packed snow, someone arguing over a damaged bridle, the ordinary noise of a keep that had worked hard and intended to eat well. I stood in it long enough to feel the difference between ruling a crisis and ruling a morning. The second one still surprised me sometimes.

---

Nils Bjornsen arrived near midday, which meant Harald had put him on the road before the runner had even finished speaking to me. He was twenty-four, broad in the way of coastal work, with salt still ghosting his cloak and a leather case of counts under one arm. He bowed the correct amount and no more.

"Queen Lila. My father sends respect and a headache."

"I’ve met both." I brought him into the smaller chamber off the map room, Magnus present, Anders at the door. "Tell me what the runner didn’t write."

Nils opened the case. Charts. Crew list. A sketch of the freighter’s usual coastal markers. "She was heavy with timber and salt. Crew of fourteen, all Bjornvik. Captain’s been on that run for six years. No debts we know of, no enemies loud enough to name. Clear skies. The marker at the split rock should have seen her mast. It didn’t. We’ve walked our own cliffs. Nothing."

He looked up. "Father doesn’t want Frostfang ships. We don’t have the right to ask for them. He wants to know if anything inland moved that shouldn’t have—cargo without a crew, men with Bjornvik salt on their boots, talk in the road dens. And he wants it quiet, because the moment we shout missing, every opportunist on the water starts having ideas."

"We’ve already put eyes on the inland approaches," I said. "You’ll have what they find. In the meantime you’ll eat, sleep, and not start a rumour in my yards."

Nils’s mouth moved. "Father said you’d be direct."

"Your father once told me I was too young to hold a border. He’s been correcting that opinion for three years. I try to return the favour."

Magnus made a low sound that might have been amusement. Nils almost smiled, then put the papers back in the case with careful hands.

"I’ll wait on your scouts," he said. "And I’ll keep my mouth shut in the yards."

"Do that."

Anders took him to a real room. The headache remained on the table in the form of a coastal freighter that should have existed and currently didn’t. I didn’t dress it up as a war. I didn’t dress it up as nothing. I put it in the same category as weather and bad roads—real, watchable, not allowed to eat the whole day.

---

The feast that night was the right kind of loud.

Long tables. Meat from the hunt. Bread still warm from the ovens. People sat where they landed—warriors with apprentices, Sigrid with Johan arguing about Astrid’s form, Erik Lund half-asleep upright after the night’s scouting, Astrid herself at the far end looking like she’d swallowed a lesson and hadn’t decided whether it tasted like growth or humiliation. Halvar raised a cup in my direction once from further down the table. I returned it. The earlier edge between us stayed where it belonged: acknowledged, not sharpened.

Magnus ate at my shoulder, stole food off my plate when he thought I wasn’t watching, and eventually gave up pretending when I stole it back. Someone started a story about a Winter Moon Hunt from before I was born. Someone else corrected the story. The correction started an argument that didn’t need a verdict. I let the noise wash through the hall and felt, for a stretch of ordinary hours, that Frostfang was not a problem I was managing but a place I was inside.

Later, when the tables had thinned and the younger wolves had dragged themselves toward sleep, Magnus walked me up through the quieter corridors toward our rooms. The keep settled around us in familiar creaks and distant voices. He closed the door, barred it, and leaned his back against it for a moment, watching me.

"You’re different after a hunt," he said.

"Different how."

"Less like you’re holding the walls up with your shoulders. More like you remember the walls were here before you and will be here after." He pushed off the door and came closer. "It looks good on you."

"Careful. That almost sounded like tenderness."

"It was."

I reached for him. He met me halfway. The kiss landed with the ease of long practice and the heat of a day that had been full of other people’s needs. His hands found the edge of my tunic. I got his belt undone and laughed once against his mouth when it stuck.

"Shut up," he muttered, smiling.

"Make me."