My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 384

Yvara

There's a particular way Fenris goes quiet that I never had to learn from anyone. I've had it in me since before I understood what it meant, the same way you know the weight of your own hand. Ten feet behind him or ten paces, I always know the second it starts. He'd gone that way an hour out from camp and hadn't come back from it, and I didn't ask where we were walking, because I already knew.

I led anyway. Off the main trail, up through frost-stiff grass and trees gone bare enough that the cold came straight through them, no windbreak left in any of it. My feet found the ground before my head caught up to why. The way they know the floor of my own room in the dark. Neither of us had come this way in two years, and somehow neither of us had lost it.

We came up through the last of the trees into a clearing gone to seed since anyone last stood in it, and there in the middle, the cairn we raised for Dimitri two years ago.

Two years does to stacked stone what neglect does to a wound. The moss had taken most of it. Undergrowth had come up through the gaps until half the pile had slumped sideways, smaller stones scattered loose where they'd fallen, and at the heart of it the one large stone the whole cairn had been built around, tipped now onto its side. Another winter or two and it would have finished what these two already had. Something broken. Something that needed fixing, and nothing more complicated than that. If I let it get more complicated than that, I wasn't going to be much use to him today.

Fenris didn't move. He stood with his hands loose at his sides, and I knew that stillness too, the particular kind, the one that comes right before he either breaks something or goes somewhere in his head I can't follow him to.

I didn't wait to find out which.

I crouched at the base and started pulling the growth out with my bare hands, not asking him, not explaining myself. Explaining myself has never once been the thing that helped him.

It took a few seconds. Then the crunch of him crouching on the other side, hands going to work the same as mine, matching my pace without either of us agreeing to it out loud. Something in my chest let go a little, the kind of relief I've learned not to examine too closely, in case examining it undoes it.

We worked like that a while. Torn roots. Cold dirt working up under my nails until I couldn't feel where dirt ended and fingers began. The smell of green things breaking, the same smell it always is no matter how many times you've smelled it. My knees went numb against the frozen ground. There are worse things to feel than cold. At least cold is honest about what it wants from you.

He got his hands on the stone, tried to set it upright alone. He tries most things alone. But you can't brace a stone that size by yourself, not on wet ground with no purchase for your feet. It takes two sides pulling at once or it doesn't move at all. It didn't move at all.

"Fuck," he said, short. Not really swearing at anything. Just needed somewhere to put the sound.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify