Lonen's Reign

by Jeffe Kennedy

  “Not soon enough,” Lonen said, trailing his fingers over her satin cheek, down the swanlike column of her throat.

  “Ah, they told you.”

  “Yes.” He lowered his brows threateningly, though his scowl did nothing to dim her radiant smile. “You might’ve warned me on one of your visits.”

  She lifted onto her toes and kissed him. “I didn’t want to upset you. It will be only a short wait. All is falling into place. Especially now that you’re healed.”

  “Come in here and I’ll cut you open again!” Nolan practically screamed. He had his hands wrapped around the iron bars, fisted as he shook them.

  With a sigh, Lonen tucked Oria against his side, at least savoring her closeness under his arm. She nestled against him, both of them watching Nolan as he flung himself against the bars, hurtling threats like a tree monkey flinging feces—filthy but without much effect.

  “What have you discovered?” he asked Oria.

  She shook her head slightly. “The enchantment is there, but it’s… slippery. I can’t think of a better way to describe it. I can sense it, get near, then it’s gone before I can get a good look at it.”

  “Maybe you need a break,” he suggested.

  She glanced up with an arch expression. “We can’t—”

  “Not that,” he interrupted. “Is sex all you think about?”

  Gratifyingly, she giggled. He ignored Baeltya’s snicker. “Let’s get out of this hole,” he said. “I’ve been cooped up for days and I want to be outside, to see the sky.”

  Oria’s face lit up. “Would you like to fly? Chuffta says he’d like to.”

  Her winged lizard Familiar—now a dragon the size of Arill’s Temple—likely put it more emphatically. Flying sounded perfect. He hadn’t been able to enjoy it the one time before, carrying the injured Alyx between him and Oria during their swift trip to make it in time for his duel with Nolan.

  “I would like that.” He ran a hand over Oria’s hip, contemplating what he might do to her.

  Baeltya cleared her throat.

  “Oh, brother.” Lonen fixed the healer with a baleful glare. “What could we get up to on dragonback?”

  Baeltya raised her elegant brows. “If you need me to explain that, Your Highness…”

  “You can come with us,” Oria invited, slanting him a quelling look. “If you’d like to, that is.”

  Baeltya’s face transformed with rapture. “Truly?” she breathed. “I’d love to fly.”

  “A threesome it is,” Lonen declared, just to laugh at their outrage. “Come along, ladies. I’m ready for fresh air.”

  And they left his treacherous brother shouting his rage behind them.

  ~ 2 ~

  “What is taking so looonnnnngggg?” Chuffta dragged out the question on an exaggerated moan of his mind-voice. Though Oria couldn’t see him—as they had yet to leave the palace—she felt him impatiently furling and unfurling his wings, dancing in place and lashing his tail. She didn’t know if she felt his body movements so vividly now because of his greatly enhanced size making every sensation larger, or because her magic had linked them more tightly when she’d used it to make him big.

  “Don’t hit anything,” she cautioned him silently. Like a wolfhound pup grown too fast, Chuffta had yet to fully comprehend his new size and how his body occupied space. Something crashed behind Chuffta and she felt him mentally wince.

  “Oops. But the Destrye have lots more trees.”

  She sighed. Hearing it, Lonen raised a brow at her as he waved away the cluster of attendants and helped Oria into the shadowcat fur cloak himself. She shook her head minutely, unwilling to explain with so many ears to hear. The Destrye in general didn’t know the extent of her and Chuffta’s abilities, and she preferred it that way for the time being. Lonen had originally insisted upon it and she’d grown to appreciate his discretion. Who knew what would come in useful in the months of war to come? Her brother Yar might have created more spies than Nolan from the men in his regiment who had emerged from the lake under Bára.

  Until the palace guard had all those men quietly rounded up for her to examine, Oria had been focusing her attention on sorting through Nolan’s chaotic and vengeful thoughts. Now that Lonen had emerged from the healers’ care, he’d likely be expediting the containment of the possible spies. She would study them, of course, but she didn’t know what more she’d find out from many minds that she couldn’t dig out of one. Especially when that one had been the primary target of whatever Yar and his cohorts had done. That was something that continued to elude her. She might have her power back—and finally the ability to manage it—but she couldn’t match the centuries of accumulated knowledge Yar had at his command in the temples at Bára.

  “Are you mad at me?” Chuffta asked the question meekly and she realized she’d been too deep in thought to reply to him. Another change with her improved control: she shielded so well that Chuffta no longer “heard” her surface thoughts unless she directed them mentally.

  “We’re on our way,” she reassured Chuffta. “We had to stop for warm gear. It’s winter and even colder in the air. And we have to walk to where you are.”

  “I miss being in the same place as you.” Chuffta sounded a little forlorn, and lonely. “I didn’t know I’d miss riding around on your shoulder. Remember how I’d twine my tail around your arm?”

  Yes, because it had been only a couple of weeks before, but she kept the amusement out of her mind-voice. Derkesthai had a different perception of time, and Chuffta was a young member of a long-lived race. That hadn’t changed just because he’d grown huge. “I miss having you close, too.”

  She really did. Sleeping alone in Lonen’s big bed while he recovered had made her realize she hadn’t been entirely without company since she was seven—except for those horrible few days when Head Healer Talya had isolated her in an attempt to “save” Lonen from her enchantment. It would have been a great comfort to feel Chuffta’s solid little body curled up against her. A price for everything, she supposed. Chuffta had wanted to be big—and she’d wanted it for him—and neither of them had given thought to how that would separate them.

  The problem was, the way the solid fortress that was the Destrye palace sat at the base of the immense tree that housed Arill’s Temple, a winged creature of Chuffta’s size couldn’t easily approach. Even if they cleared a flight path for him, there was nowhere for him to land. The Destrye used every handspan of ground inside the moat around the city to keep out the Báran golems.

  The haphazard shelters piled up around the palace and temple grounds like sands blown into dunes against city walls, and even the pathways between them were so narrow in places that she, Lonen, and Baeltya had to sometimes go single file as they walked out to cross the moat and meet Chuffta. The Destrye, glimpsing their king, cheered and bowed—and quickly cleared the way—but it was slow going.

  “How can it be taking so long?” Chuffta demanded.

  “Where is Chuffta?” Lonen asked at the same time, his disgruntled tone so like her Familiar’s that she had to laugh.

  “Outside the moat,” she explained, waving forgiveness to a woman who babbled apologies as she pushed a cart full of wood out of their way. Oria raised a brow at Lonen’s incredulous expression and gestured at the crush. “Where else did you think we’d put him?”

  “I hadn’t thought,” he admitted. “I’m so used to having him always right there.”

  “See?” Chuffta said, pouncing on the words as if they proved his point. “I should be with you. All the time.”

  “I don’t know where else he’d fit,” she explained to them both in some exasperation.

  “Isn’t he cold outside?” Lonen furrowed his brow in concern.

  “Yes. I’m cold allll the time.”

  Oria mentally rolled her eyes at him. “He’s fine. He generates so much heat at his size that he can’t get cold.”

  “Easy for you to say.”

  “That’s not fair to Chufft
a,” Lonen pointed out. “You know how he loves to sleep by the fire.”

  “Right! This is not fair to me, Oria.”

  Oria harnessed her impatience with both of her boys. “Where inside is big enough to put him?” They’d emerged from the warren of shelters that blocked the sky and stood poised on the edge of the wide moat while guards jumped to extend the bridge for them to cross. Chuffta stood on the other rim, tail lashing, his white scales iridescent in the winter light, gleaming where the surrounding snow glittered. He curved his neck in coy welcome, his triangular head elegant and green eyes bright as small suns.

  “Holy Arill,” Lonen breathed. “I’d somehow not entirely absorbed how truly huge he is now.”

  “He may have gotten bigger,” Oria admitted. Not that she’d worked any magic to do it, but he seemed larger to her eyes, too. Perhaps he was just filling out, like a quickly growing adolescent boy getting his height first, then packing on muscle.

  “He’s beautiful,” Baeltya said in reverent tones. “I mean, you were always a handsome creature, Chuffta, but now you are a true wonder.”

  He preened, happy to hear Baeltya’s words. The healer was one of the few to understand the depth of the bond—and clarity of communication—between Oria and her Familiar. Where other Destrye regarded him as a pet, or even an animal companion with the childlike intelligence of a warhorse or wolfhound, Baeltya grasped how much Chuffta understood their words.

  “He appreciates your praise,” Oria murmured. “But temper that, as his head has clearly swelled to gigantic proportions as it is.”

  “Hey! I am perfectly proportioned, thank you—and thanks to you.”

  Crowds of Destrye had gathered to observe him, and Oria worried that the press might end with some of them pitching into the moat. Dry and deep, the moat held an array of sharpened wooden and iron stakes. In their mindless advances, the golems would fall in and impale themselves, the only sure defense the Destrye had been able to find against the Báran’s puppet monsters. Short of chopping the golems to pieces with iron weapons, which exacted as great a toll on the fighter as the golem.

  The guards finished extending the bridge—a clever contraption of wooden planks that could be rolled or unrolled with a system of pulleys—and the three of them crossed. Lonen frowned thoughtfully up at Chuffta, assessing him. “What if we built another level on the palace with a roof platform large and strong enough for Chuffta to land on?”

  “Yes! Yes yes yes yes.”

  “Can you do that?”

  Lonen gave her an arch look. “I am king. I’m reliably informed I can do whatever I want to.” His gaze went to her mouth, lingering there as he considered what he wanted to do but couldn’t, lust firing hot in his mind—along with the image of her naked and under him. She had to close out his thoughts. The wedding couldn’t happen soon enough.

  “I meant,” she replied in a deliberately prim tone, intended to cool his ardor, “is it possible to do that?”

  “The structure is solid enough to bear the weight,” he replied, considering, mentally measuring Chuffta as they approached. “We’d have to clear some limbs, but we could put that wood to good use in the construction. We could build a set of apartments there for our rooms—with lots of windows, a balcony for you, and a rooftop garden for summer if you like.”

  Her heart clutched, her steps slowing. “You’ve been thinking about this.”

  “Of course,” he replied absently, then looked down at her, his granite gray eyes clear and full of love. “I promised you long ago that I’d do everything to make you happy here in Dru, to give you as much of what you left behind in Bára as I could. I’ve been mulling for a long time how to give you a balcony and garden again like—”

  She flung herself against him, cutting off his words with a kiss.

  “Can’t you kiss your mate later?” Chuffta asked plaintively. “After all, you can do that when you’re inside.”

  Laughing, she broke the kiss. “Chuffta is impatient.”

  Lonen gave Chuffta—whose head hovered barely above theirs, his breath hot as a furnace—a baleful stare. “There are words for this kind of behavior, Chuffta man.”

  Chuffta grumbled in Oria’s mind and backed off a bit. Baeltya coughed politely from a discreet distance away—though not so far that they could forget the strictures against them doing more than kissing.

  “When is the wedding?” Oria breathed.

  His hands tightened on her. “I’ll have an answer when we return, one way or another.” His mouth fastened on hers, hot and luxuriant, full of promises. She melted into it, savoring the sweetness of being with him. Their separation had felt like an eternity, and they’d had no time since to just be together. In that moment, she could regret that she hadn’t taken him up on the offer to run off into the hills with him, that she’d insisted he reclaim the throne. “I swear to Arill,” he muttered against her mouth, “if it’s more than three days from now, I’m taking you captive, tossing you over Buttercup’s back, and escaping somewhere I can ravage you at my leisure.”

  “You wouldn’t have to,” she answered. “I’d go willingly.”

  “Yes, but my way is more fun,” he said, the wickedly sensual gleam in his eyes making them glint with silvery light. “Let’s ride Chuffta into the sunset right now.”

  “It’s still morning,” she pointed out.

  “Details.”

  “And there’s our chaperone.”

  “We can toss Baeltya into the moat.”

  “I heard that,” Baeltya said in a clear voice, a ripple of laughter in it.

  Lonen heaved a heavy sigh and let go of Oria. “All right then, I suppose flying will be fun, too.”

  It was, and more glorious than she’d ever imagined before she could ride on Chuffta’s back. Even before, when she rode along in his thoughts as he flew, it hadn’t felt the same—the stomach-dropping dives, and heart-pounding ascents, the rush of chill air stinging her cheeks and Lonen’s arms strong around her as she sat cradled between his muscled thighs. Baeltya sat discreetly behind him, circumspect but for the occasional startled squeak when Chuffta did something unexpected.

  Between Lonen’s proximity and Chuffta’s mind filling hers, Oria let both of their thoughts and emotions stream through her like the wind of their passage, like the midday sun hot on her eyelids when she closed them, and the dazzling panorama of the forests of Dru beneath them when she looked. In the distance, white-capped mountains reared against a sizzling blue sky. Somewhere in those peaks, Chuffta’s derkesthai kin lived in a colony deep inside a volcanic cavern.

  “I’d like to go back someday,” Chuffta said, picking up on her thoughts now, with her shields so fully open. “When we’re done with war.”

  “Is that not where you were hatched?” she asked. They’d had little time to discuss the colony and what had happened to them there. Also, she’d been hesitant to ask, feeling an odd sense of intruding on something she shouldn’t.

  “Oh, no. Though I don’t remember that much about before I was your Familiar. That’s why it would be fun to go back and see those derkesthai, so I can spend time there awake!”

  Guilt assailed her, that she’d misused her magic so badly that she’d nearly killed her Familiar. Then the moment she managed to bring him out of the deep sleep she’d put him in, they’d raced away to find Lonen. “I’m so sorry, my friend.”

  “A mistake only—and one that led to good things. You mastered your sorcery, all because of me.”

  He sounded so proud that she had to smile despite the agonizing regret. “I think ‘mastered’ is a bit of a stretch.”

  “You made me big. No sorcerer or sorceress has done that in generations. We will be famous! They’ll write history books about us.”

  “Hopefully those tales won’t include a tragic ending where we die a fiery death on the battlefield,” she commented wryly.

  “They won’t. We shall be triumphant!” He tossed his head and let out a bugling roar, complete with green flame�
��which blew back on his passengers, who all ducked with cries of dismay.

  “Oops. Sorry.”

  “Something else to practice,” she noted without rancor. She could hardly hold such mistakes against him when she’d committed far worse ones.

  “That was the most incredible experience of my entire life,” Baeltya gushed as they waited at the edge of the moat for the guards to extend the bridge. She turned and curtsied deeply to Chuffta, who returned the gesture with a dramatic sweep of wings. “Thank you, sir, for the lovely treat.”

  “Tell her I’m sorry about the flame backfire.”

  Oria relayed that remark and Baeltya laughed. “I can only imagine how much practice that sort of thing takes.”

  “Speaking of which,” Oria said to Lonen. “I’d like to spend time each day practicing riding Chuffta.”

  He frowned at her. “Chuffta can practice his flaming and flying without you. We need you working on the corruption in Nolan’s mind and his men’s.”

  “Three things,” she replied. “First, Nolan’s men haven’t all been located and confined, and I haven’t been given access to the ones that have. Second—” She raised her brows at him when he opened his mouth to interrupt, and he closed it again, with exaggerated patience. “Second, I can only spend so much time in Nolan’s mind before I need to clear my own head. Third, I need to practice working magic from Chuffta’s back as he flies, coordinating mentally with him so that we can do that in battle, if necessary.”

  His frown deepened. “You’re proposing… riding Chuffta into battle, against Bára?”

  “Were you planning to leave me at home?” she asked sweetly.

  Lonen’s expression went carefully blank, his gaze opaque as he scrambled to collect his thoughts. Feeling no compunction, Oria peeked at the stream of them and found him hastily readjusting his assumptions. He had somehow envisioned her remaining in Dru, safe from harm in the mighty forests, but he realized Oria wouldn’t be able to work her sorcery from so far away, and they’d need her at Bára, as she knew the city and the people. He would learn from his father’s mistakes and not risk alienating his beloved wife by ordering her to stay clear of battle. And he’d promised Alyx and the women warriors that he’d change the laws prohibiting women from fighting alongside the men.