by G. A. Aiken
“I think I broke my hand.”
“Don’t whine,” he said, rushing over to Elina and Kachka. “Are you two all right?”
“Are they all right?” the silver-haired one demanded as he bled heavily from his leg wound. “What about me?”
“Is all this because of me?” Elina asked, pointing at the queen.
Celyn shrugged. “Annwyl has issues with . . . family. She didn’t really get along with her father. Or her brother.” He glanced back at the silver-haired male but quickly turned away, not appearing interested in that one’s plight at all. “I had a feeling she would react this way once she found out Glebovicha was your mother.”
“Gods,” the bear said loudly, “she’s waking up!”
“Don’t just stand there, you idiots!” the gold one yelled. “Get some chains!”
“Chains will never hold her,” the brown-skinned girl nearly screamed. “Let’s make a run for it!”
“Where is Fearghus? Why are we dealing with this?”
“Again,” the silver-haired one yelled. “I am bleeding here! Are none of you going to help me?”
“Daddy, please!” the brown one chastised, shocking the silver-haired one.
“I say,” the gold one suggested, “that we give Annwyl Briec—since he’s bleeding to death anyway—and then burn the whole bloody place down around them.”
“Really?” the silver-haired one snapped. “That’s your grand plan, idiot?”
“You’d survive the flame!”
“She’d survive the flame as well, only then she’d be more pissed off!”
“Someone find Morfyd,” the bear ordered. “She can magickally bind her. That’ll hold her until Fearghus gets back.”
“Why can’t you just contact Morfyd yourself?” the one who resembled Celyn demanded.
“Because she’s blocking me, which means she’s probably with Brastias doing things I don’t want to talk about when it’s my sister.”
“I know where she is then,” the female who resembled Celyn said, charging out of the hall.
“She’s moving,” the brown-skinned woman said. “Do something!”
“I’m not hitting her,” the bear snapped back.
“I hit her.”
“You she’ll forgive.”
“Well, my hand is broken. Until Morfyd or my mother fixes it, I can’t hit her.”
The males shrugged, each one refusing to do anything, including helping the silver-haired male still bleeding on the floor.
“All of you are weak!” the brown-skinned female snarled before she walked over to the queen, who had pushed her head and shoulders up off the floor with her elbows.
“Sorry, Annwyl,” the female said before she kicked the queen in the jaw, knocking her out again.
Celyn grinned at the sisters and gave a courtly bow. “My Lady Elina. My Lady Kachka. Welcome to the Southlands!”
Chapter Thirty-Two
Fearghus walked into the bedroom he shared with Annwyl and went to the desk where he kept personal correspondence. He placed the scrolls he’d received from one of the generals regarding defenses on the outskirts of Southland territories onto the desk and removed his travel bag. He dropped that on the floor and turned to leave.
That’s when he saw Annwyl. She was in a sitting position on the bed with her arms stretched out and bound to the headboard with ropes that, he was guessing, had been mystically enhanced. Someone had also gagged her. And he quickly noticed that her eyes were angry over that gag. Very angry.
Which was when he started laughing. He couldn’t help himself!
“I swear by all the gods, Annwyl. I leave you alone for five minutes. . . .”
“May I?”
Elina nodded at the She-dragon’s polite request. With extremely gentle hands, Morfyd the White carefully removed the bandage over her eye. Then, she placed cool fingers against her jaw and slowly tilted Elina’s head back so that she could get a good look at the wound.
They’d moved into the “war room,” as it was called, and the group had multiplied. Now Dagmar and Talaith had joined them, along with Morfyd.
“I simply don’t understand,” Dagmar was saying. “Why would your mother do this to you?”
Elina gave a very small shrug since Morfyd was still examining her. “She hates me. She has always hated me.”
“Then why not just kill you?”
“I am still her child. She still bore me. To kill me for no reason would have brought curse on our tribe.”
“But asking to see the Anne Atli gave her a reason?”
Elina didn’t want to answer that question, so Kachka did it for her. “When Glebovicha told her she could not meet with Anne Atli, my sister insisted she would. When she did that, she was disobeying the leader of our tribe.”
“And that made it acceptable for Glebovicha to kill her,” Dagmar finished.
“Yes.”
Gwenvael, who sat next to Celyn, a few chairs over, shook his head. “Nice job protecting the Rider, Celyn. So glad we sent you instead of our father.”
Elina, shocked by such an unfair comment, pulled away from Morfyd’s skillful touch in time to see Celyn, his lips now a thin line of anger, reach his arm around his cousin, grab the back of Gwenvael’s head and slam him face-first into the hard wood table. Three times.
Then, gripping all that golden hair, Celyn tossed the dragon out of his chair and across the floor.
“Celyn!” Morfyd gasped.
Celyn gave a shrug. “Sorry. Me hand slipped.”
For several long seconds, Dagmar stared at her snarling, raging mate bleeding on the floor, her brow pulled far down on her face, before she turned back to Elina and asked, “Why the eye?”
Surprised that it was Gwenvael’s sister running to his side to help him and not his mate, Elina opened and closed her mouth a few times before she replied, “What?”
“Why the eye? Why did she take your eye?”
“She tried for neck, but I managed to move fast.”
“So it wasn’t that she joined the cult of Chramnesind and removed your eye as some sort of sacrifice?”
Elina and Kachka laughed at that.
“Our mother?” Elina asked.
“Worshipping anyone but herself?” Kachka finished.
Then they both laughed again.
Talaith now moved in to examine the wounds.
“The scarring could have been handled better, but I see no infection at all. And the healing time is amazing. This should have taken weeks, if not months, to heal. Did you do this, Celyn?”
“No,” Elina answered while rubbing her suddenly itchy nose. “Celyn saved my life, but Brigida the Foul healed my wounds.”
Morfyd, who was crouched on the floor by her bleeding and now whining brother, her hands gently lifting his head into her lap, looked up. “There’s another Brigida the Foul?” she asked.
“Gods,” Briec said, his nose swollen from where Annwyl had broken it, his wounded leg now bound where she’d stabbed him. “Who’d willingly take that name?”
All dragon eyes turned to Celyn, waiting for an answer. He sighed and Elina realized she’d said too much.
“It wasn’t another Brigida the Foul,” he told his kin. “It was the Brigida the Foul.”
Morfyd abruptly stood, poor Gwenvael’s head slamming hard against the stone floor.
“Owww!”
Morfyd and Briec exchanged quick and panicked glances.
“That’s not possible,” Morfyd said. “Brigida the Foul was ancient when our grandparents were young. Now they’ve gone to the afterlife, but you’re saying Brigida still lives?”
“She still lives. And there’s something else. . . . The twins and Rhian are with her.”
The room was still for a long moment. Until Briec broke the silence first with a bellowed, “What are you saying about my perfect, perfect daughter?”
Celyn was sure he’d have to fight the rest of his cousins until Talaith took the bandages from Elina’s hand as
the Rider tried to rewrap them around her own head.
“No, no,” she said. “You can’t use those. They’re dirty from your travels. I will get you fresh bandages.”
She turned to make her escape, but Briec slammed his hand down on the table. “What do you know, woman?”
“Don’t woman me!” the Nolwenn witch snarled back.
“Talaith!”
She rolled her eyes. “Rhian and the twins are fine.”
“I could give a battle-fuck about those twins.”
“Daddy!” Izzy admonished her adoptive father.
“What?”
“The twins are kin as much as Rhian is.”
“Those two vipers can take care of themselves just fine. But my sweet, perfect daughter—”
“Can handle herself quite well,” Talaith cut in. “Leave them be.”
“With Brigida the Foul?”
“I don’t know who that is and stop yelling at me!”
“She’s one of our great-great-great-aunts,” Morfyd replied. “Although at this point, we should probably just call her our ancestor. That’s how old she is.”
“So?”
“Dragons live for centuries, Talaith. Not eons.”
“What about those Immortal dragons?”
“They survive by eating their own. Is that what Brigida is doing?”
“I don’t know what she’s doing. But knowing my daughter, I doubt she’d align herself with someone who did. She’d find that in poor taste.” Talaith blinked. “No pun intended.”
“Everyone in the Cadwaladr Clan feared Brigida. Many of them thought she’d aligned herself with the less-balanced gods. And her impossibly long life suggests there’s truth to that. What I’m saying, Talaith, is that she’s dangerous.”
“Well, you two met her,” Izzy pointed out. “And have no family members telling you about how terrifying she was since you were born. What did you think of her?”
It took a moment before the Steppes sisters realized that Izzy was talking to them. Celyn glanced at Brannie, and they grinned at each other, already anticipating what direction the discussion was about to take.
Kachka asked Elina, “Why do they stare? Are they planning our death?”
“No,” Elina replied after removing more cloth from the pouch tied to the belt around her waist and wrapping a fresh bandage into place. “They ask our opinion.”
“Our opinion? Why? Is it trick? So they can plan our death?”
Brannie quickly looked in another direction and Celyn dropped his head.
“I do not know.” Elina looked at Talaith. “Do you plan our death?”
“No, no!” Talaith exchanged confused glances with Morfyd and Izzy. “We just want your opinion about this Brigida. As outsiders.”
“Oh.” The sisters looked at each other, back at everyone else.
Elina spoke first. “Everything about Brigida the Foul drips with disdain and hatred of all living things.”
“Yes,” Kachka agreed. “Evil seems to come from every pore. She clearly has great plans for the whiney little brown girl and the unholy twins that the horse gods should have destroyed at birth.”
They looked at each other again, nodded, and said together, “We like her.”
Izzy, as confused as everyone else in the room, threw up her hands and said, “Like her? How could you like her?”
Kachka answered for both of them. “She is straightforward. If she were going to kill us all, she would tell us so that she could bask in our despair and cries of suffering. Do you not think, Elina?” she asked her sister.
“I agree, Kachka.”
“That’s great,” Talaith said. “That’s so great.” Then she hissed, “You two aren’t helping me.”
Kachka stared at Talaith for a long moment, then asked, “Who are you?”
That’s when Celyn realized he couldn’t take any more. Neither could Brannie. They both stood at the same time, and he said, “My parents are near. They may want to be part of this.”
He quickly cut across the room and went out the door, Brannie right behind him. Once they were down the hall, they both stopped and laughed. Laughed so hard that Celyn slid down the wall and Brannie just stretched out on the floor, rolling back and forth. They couldn’t stop. Even when their cousin Keita walked past them and demanded, “What are you two doing?”
Bram and Ghleanna landed in the courtyard just as Annwyl came stomping down the stairs.
“I’m not apologizing!” she yelled at her mate as poor Fearghus followed her. But he was laughing and having a hard time keeping up.
Bram glanced at Ghleanna and she immediately rolled her eyes. This was why they’d come with Gaius Lucius Domitus. The Rebel King had a strained opinion of Annwyl the Bloody, and Bram had been hoping to get a chance to talk to her in private before reintroducing them. But as luck would have it . . .
“Oh, Bram, good,” Annwyl said. “You’re here.” As usual, whether they were in their dragon form or human, Annwyl seemed to see them all in one way. She simply adjusted her voice so that it could reach their ears if they were dragon.
“My queen, allow me—”
“I want to go to the Outerplains and tear the eye out of one of the tribes’ leaders.”
Good gods, this female! “Perhaps this is something we could talk about later, Annwyl. I think it’s more important that you spend some time with Gaius Lucius Domitus.”
The queen frowned. “Who?”
“The Rebel King? Of the Quintilian Provinces?”
“I don’t know who that is. Am I supposed to know who that is?”
“Annwyl, you must remember—”
“Lord Bram,” the Rebel King gently cut in. “Don’t bother.”
Fearghus, now behind his mate, laid his hand on her shoulder. “Annwyl, why don’t we go to the training field for a bit?”
“I’m queen!” Annwyl snapped. “I should be able to rip the eye out of anyone’s head that I want to!” She glanced over at Gaius Domitus, noticed the eye patch over his right eye, and said with an annoyed sigh, “No offense.”
“Of course,” his sister shot back.
But, not surprisingly, Annwyl missed the tone and she marched off, Fearghus behind her—still laughing.
“I suggest we get the guests set up quickly,” Ghleanna offered.
“I can show them the way,” Var said, quickly sliding off Bram’s back.
Bram nodded at the suggestion and shifted to human. The others followed suit and they all quickly dressed.
Once that was done, Var led Gaius and his sister to the guest quarters that would conveniently keep them out of the castle and away from Annwyl.
With that taken care of, Bram turned toward the castle stairs and, to his great relief, saw Celyn and Brannie coming toward him. Bram had been worried about his son on this trip, but he was glad to see him back and well. Although he was back much sooner than Bram had expected.
Celyn walked up to his parents and stared at them.
“Celyn?” Ghleanna asked. “What is it?”
Then they were both being hugged. Tightly.
Bram looked over at his mate, frowning in question. But all Ghleanna could do was shrug.
“Is everything all right?” Ghleanna demanded. “Have you been hurt?”
“Nah,” Brannie answered for her brother. “He’s just glad you never hacked off bits of him because you didn’t like him.”
Horrified, Bram stared at his daughter. “What?”
While the dragons and their human kin continued to argue over Brigida the Foul, Elina walked out with her sister.
“I’m hungry,” her sister announced.
“There is always food. And servants to get it for you.”
“You enjoy this decadence, don’t you?”
“You will, too . . . in time.”
Disgusted by such a suggestion, Kachka retrieved her bow and quiver from where she’d left them in the Great Hall and walked out to hunt down her meal. Elina also picked up her bow, b
ut she just held it and walked toward the big table in the middle of the hall. As she walked, she collided with a man she hadn’t even seen.
Stumbling back, Elina looked up at him as he looked down. All she saw at first was a patch where his right eye should be. They both stared and, slowly, each moved one way, then the other.
Finally, the man asked, “Just lose it?”
Elina nodded. “Yes. And you?”
“Years ago.”
He glanced down at her bow. “You’re an archer.”
“I was. Now . . . I am not even that.”
“When I had both eyes, I still closed one in order to shoot arrows.”
“But it was my favored eye that I lost.”
“So?” he asked, shrugging massive shoulders. “You will just have to relearn what you already know.”
“Really?”
“Of course. Where are you from?”
“The Steppes of the Outerplains.”
He gave a little laugh. “Then you’ll always be an archer. I’ve seen your people in action. That’s something born in your blood. Plus you still have both arms.”
“I cannot hit side of hut, much less moving target on horse.”
“That’ll take time. But I can show you how to compensate.”
“Compensate?”
“Make do with what you have.” He nodded toward the Great Hall doors. “Come on. I’ll show you.”
“Now?”
“I was just looking for a book to read while my sister naps. But I think I’d enjoy helping a fellow one-eyer.”
Elina glanced around, suddenly wondering if Celyn would have a problem with this. Then she wondered why she should care if Celyn had a problem with this. Then she wondered what the holy hells was wrong with her.
“Besides,” the man said softly, his gaze moving to one of Celyn’s royal cousins who was coming through the doors in the back of the hall, “you don’t want to stay around here right now.”
“I don’t?”
The female, Keita was her name, stopped and focused on Elina and the man. At the sight of them, she clasped her hands together and went up on her bare toes. “Oh! I have just the thing for both of you! Don’t go anywhere!”