by D. E. Morris
Killian's answering smile was a small one. “Of course not.”
Uncertain of what else to say or do after a moment of awkward silence, Kenayde looked toward a passage inside with purpose. “I should find a fire to sit by. My fingers are nearly half-frozen.”
“I must see to preparations for my journey as well. Have a blessed day, Princess.” With as deep a bow to Kenayde as he'd given to Ashlynn, Killian excused himself and disappeared down one of the many stairways that led to the lower levels of the castle. Kenayde let out an exasperated sigh and shook her head, then hurried inside out of the cold.
~*~*~*~
It was rare that a day was quiet enough for Jaryn to be able to get anything done without some sort of interruption. On the best days he could have almost an hour to himself before someone or something popped up to demand his attention. He learned last year that there were a few precious weeks when winter was leaving and spring was approaching that all tended to be calm. Soon enough there would be the issue of contract re-negotiations for grain and cattle and land disputes from family members who lost fathers and brothers during the coldest months. It was non-stop and exhausting, keeping him busy from the moment he opened his eyes in the morning until the moment he could shut himself in his rooms with Ashlynn. By the time summer came they would both be so worn out that they would need a holiday. Last year it had been Tasarin and Luella's wedding, but they had not even begun discussing possibilities for this year
He was alone in his office, his chair pushed back so his feet could rest atop his desk, a fire snapping merrily behind the grate. There was an open book in his lap, but his head was lifted and his gaze was far away, already thinking about where he and Ashlynn could get away to be alone with Lochlainn for a time. If he closed his eyes he could almost imagine the heat from the fire was from a summer sun, and the silence meant he was surrounded by nature and little else.
Without warning, the heavy doors of his office were pushed open and the sound of familiar footsteps pulled him from his reverie.
“Has there been any word yet?”
Jaryn opened his eyes in time to see the doors swing closed behind Ashlynn. She untied the cloak around her neck and tossed it onto a nearby chair. “Goodness, it's so warm in here. How can you stand it?”
“It helps me pretend I'm somewhere the cold isn't.” He closed the book in his hands and set it atop the desk, righting himself so his feet were on the floor. Ashlynn looked calm enough, but there was something he could sense, an unspoken tension he felt as soon as she'd entered. “Are you all right?”
“Fine.” She strode across the room and opened a window, a cold breath of air rushing into the room. Jaryn jumped to his feet and closed the shutters as soon as she moved even an inch away from them.
“I am as anxious for the change of seasons as you are, but it's still freezing out there!” He watched her sink onto a couch on the other side of the room and pick up an old journal that had belonged to Nir, her birth father, flipping through the pages without reading them. Jaryn's brows came together, her disquiet prompting him to cross the room and sit beside her. “What is it, my love? You've been unhappy all winter and it seems to have gotten worse these past few weeks.” He brushed her cheek, stilling the turning pages and making her set the journal aside. “Are you feeling well?”
“No.” The answer was almost a whine and he had to fight not to smirk. “I'm not well; I feel sick all the time. I hardly felt this way with Lochlainn, yet I am told this is normal, that my pregnancy with him was an easy one. I am exhausted from doing nothing. I am told to eat, but food is...” She made a face and shook her head. “And I am so tired of being stuck inside. I want the windows and the doors open. I want to see green grass and hear birds again.” With open palms, she lifted her hands. “I want to walk in my gardens again and not worry about tripping and falling, cutting myself on frozen things.”
“It has felt like a rather long and difficult winter,” Jaryn agreed. He took her hands and kissed them gently. “Which is why I'm still angry with you for going out there so late by yourself. You could have seriously hurt yourself.” Though his words were chiding, his expression was anything but. “You're still healing, Ashlynn, and now you have a babe growing inside you to consider as well.” Wordless, she nodded. “I know you're tired of being cooped up. You want to fly and be free. I know how deep that desire runs within you. If it weren't for the baby, I would feel terrible that you don't have that freedom right now.”
Ashlynn rested a hand on her stomach, eyes downcast. “It isn't safe.”
“No, it isn't. You have to know that we're all feeling a bit like caged birds – or dragons. We all want to feel the warmer weather. It will be here soon enough. You just have to be patient.”
Ashlynn rose and paced to the wall behind Jaryn's desk, her face raised to the large map of all seven Celtique Nations and the surrounding lands. “You never answered my question.” Glancing over her shoulder, she repeated the first thing she said upon entering the office. “Has there been any word?”
“None, and I doubt there will be anytime soon.” Jaryn shook his head. “Lest we forget, we were not the only country forced to endure this winter.”
“Before the ports froze there were several companies of Ibayish troops gathering near their borders, as well as rumors of Ibayish families here in Siness banding together.”
Jaryn nodded. “Yes, but when that first snowfall left us buried under over a foot of snow, they took that as a sign of how hard this winter would be and disbanded or went home.” He returned to his desk to pull out a ledger for Ashlynn to look at. “We've barely made it through with enough to keep everyone in the kingdom fed, and our crops were good last year. I don't know how Ibays could have survived these past months without significant losses. Connor is a young king, but I imagine he was smart enough to see what a waste of resources it would be to fund an army to try to overthrow a kingdom doubly powerful as his own.”
Ashlynn frowned down at the numbers she read. “We will all have to consume a little less before this year's crops can be harvested.” She made a face. “I want the guards to be fed well despite our slight shortage.”
Jaryn looked at her with question. “Are you worried Ibays will suddenly attack? Love, many ports are still blocked with ice, and-”
“I'm worried that we will be pounced upon the moment any weakness is shown.” She met her husband's look of confusion with a wrinkled brow. “I know there is little our men can do about him, but there is still Merrik to worry about.”
“I've not forgotten.”
“We've holed ourselves up here for months, thinking just because everything is covered in white and sparkling with beauty that nothing could possibly come against us or harm us in our own home. We are not safe here. We cannot sit back and think because we are in a tall castle with thick walls and men at our doors that we are invulnerable.”
Thrown off by her sudden shift in demeanor, Jaryn shook his head. “No one said that.”
“No one has to say it. I see it in every complacent face I pass in the halls. Everything seems so much better – so much more hopeful – in the light of day. We have all accepted on some level that, simply because we had a quiet winter, we are no longer in danger, and nothing could be further from the truth. The lion is always still and quiet before she pounces.”
“All right, all right. Well, what do you want to do about it then?”
“I don't know.” Ashlynn looked tired as she walked away from the desk. “Not that I could do anything if I wanted to anyway. Everyone is always walking on eggshells around me as though I am some delicate thing, ready to fall over and break at the slightest breeze. My hormones don't help...” Turning, she fixed her husband with a weary pout. “Can't we just disappear for awhile and let everything sort itself out?”
Chuckling, Jaryn rose to stand before her. He slid an arm around her waist and pulled her close, his free hand tucking a stray hair behind her ear. “I would be lying if I said I was
n't longing for the same thing.”
With a quiet whimper, Ashlynn leaned forward to rest her forehead against Jaryn's chest. “I think we did this the wrong way. I should have given up my title and run away with you, not the other way around.”
Her complaint brought laughter to his lips. “Oh yes, now that I could see; you sitting by my side while I sang songs to drunken crowds night after night.”
Looking up once more, she gave a thoughtful grimace. “Maybe there is some kind of happy medium between the two?”
“Not one we could realistically live, I'm afraid.” He kissed her downturned lips. “We do need a change. I agree to that. Why don't you go rest and let me think of something? I'm meeting with your father in a few minutes, but after that I will make it my mission to find us some respite from our day to day dreariness.”
“Maybe I can talk Kenayde into playing the harp for awhile. I know it calms her to play and sing. It may do her as much good as it would do me.”
“That sounds like an inspired idea. Everyone feels better when there is music echoing down the halls.”
Leaning up on her toes, Ashlynn kissed her husband's cheek. “Thank you for putting up with me.”
“Only because you're carrying my child.” She swatted him playfully before he let her go, then pulled the doors open to leave just as Wessely approached. “Good morning, Papa.” She kissed his cheek in greeting. “Make sure my husband keeps his promise to me.” Glancing over her shoulder to Jaryn, she quirked a brow at him, then disappeared down the hall, leaving Wessely to stand in his confusion until Jaryn beckoned him in.
“I feel I may be missing something.”
Smirking, Jaryn sat at his desk. “Just ignore her. Please, sit.” As Wessely took up the chair across from Jaryn's desk, Jaryn picked up the book he'd been reading and turned to the last page he'd looked at. “I was going through your brother's notes in the margins of his personal copy of the scriptures, and I found something interesting.” He placed the book on the desk and turned it around so Wessely could see it, pointing to a handwritten paragraph that spanned almost the entire length of the thin margin. Leaning forward, Wessely took the book for himself and read quietly. “Have you seen this before?” asked Jaryn.
After he finished reading, Wessely shook his head. “I have no recollection of reading it before, but I have gone through this book from cover to cover only a few times since it came into my possession. I recall many insights Nir took note of, but this one escapes me.”
“He was talking about how many times the number twelve came up in the scriptures. I believe that number at the bottom, the circled one, is his final tally.”
“One hundred eighty-seven?”
“Yes. He said he wrote down each passage in one of his journals every time he came across one, and I've read through some of them and looked up said passages, but I haven't found even a quarter of them yet.” Jaryn paused to pull five worn leather-bound journals from a desk drawer. “They go all the way from beginning to end.”
“There are several different numbers that reoccur in the scriptures. Considering how many times seven is used, as well as forty, I struggle to see the significance.”
“He notes that as well, however...” With a grin of excitement and mischief, Jaryn took the topmost journal and flipped to a page with a bent corner. “Read this.”
Wessely swapped the scriptures for the journal and read aloud. “Twelve is obviously an important number to the Great Dragon. There were twelve original tribes, twelve disciples, twelve jewels in His crown, twelve gates of pearl in the new earth with twelve angels to watch over them. It makes sense, then, that there would be twelve dragons. They were the guardians, the ones meant to continue on generation after generation, their mission being to spread His fame. My wife is one of six. Where are the others?” Wessely was silent for a moment, rereading the note and glancing over underlined passages and other notes. When he finally looked at Jaryn, there was a look of concentration on his face. “Nir wondered if there were twelve Elementals.”
“It would appear from other entries I've read in various journals that he did more than wonder. He and Siobhán were both actively seeking out evidence of the other six, the ones who were either thought to have disappeared or were forgotten by some all together. He noted that while she had never met any of them, Siobhán firmly believed they did exist, though no Elemental alive then had really known them. Not even Cavalon, who had been alive for generations even at that time. They stopped looking when she found out she was pregnant with Ashlynn, which was almost to the day of Tadhg's first siege of another kingdom.” Jaryn's brow furrowed. “Right before they found out they were going to be parents, their search had been aggressive. They were not shy while going about their quest. In fact, before Ashlynn was born, it seems they came face to face with Tadhg himself. Tadhg told them to let it go, to give up their search for the other six or he would not only make war against Siness, but all Gaels and dragons in the Celtique Nations. Because of this, Nir wrote about an underground movement to keep all magical creatures safe. He feared dragons and Gaels wouldn't be enough to satiate Tadhg's bloodlust.”
“What?” Wessely raised his eyes to look at Jaryn in shock. When Jaryn only nodded confirmation, the older man flipped through several pages of the journal he held, stopping to read here and there. Eventually he put the journal on the desk and sat back in his chair, running a hand over his beard, trying to absorb this new information. “In those last years of his life, Nir and I were not as close as we had been when we were boys, living under the same roof. Of course we still wrote, and I was privileged enough to see he and Siobhán together a few times before she passed and he was killed a year later, but I had no idea they were gathering a secret army, nor that they were searching for the missing six. Perhaps I should have read more thoroughly through all of these before giving them to you. In all honesty, I knew very little about the Elementals before the girls were born and hardly gave it any thought. It was only after it was made legal to hunt Gaels and dragons that I began to take much notice, and that was only because I knew Nir's wife was a Gael. It shames me to say it now, but before Ashlynn and Kenayde came to me, I cared very little about the dragons or those that could shift into them.”
“Tadhg wanted to kill the Elementals in hopes of inflating his reputation, or so the story goes. What if it was more than that? What if it was his fear of the Elementals and what they could accomplish should they band together that lit a fire in him, a desire to eradicate what could destroy him?”
Wessely could only shake his head in reply. “Would it really matter? What does any of this have to do with the present? Are you thinking of picking up where Nir left off?”
“Why not? The world is safer for the Elementals now than it was back then. With Ashlynn's help, as well as the others, we could possibly reunite all twelve of them if they really do exist.” Still Wessely said nothing and it made Jaryn momentarily second guess himself. “You think that's a bad idea?”
“I think it is an idea, neither good nor bad.” The older man gave a thoughtful pause. “Seeking Tasarin's counsel on this may be prudent; he was here while Nir was on the throne and would certainly have heard something about this.”
Jaryn pulled the journal back across the desk. “I'd like for him to see these someday. Nir's written memories may help Tasarin remember things he wouldn't otherwise.”
“You have a ship sailing for Caedia tomorrow already. Why not take them to him yourself?”
“...Ashlynn and I were just talking about taking an early holiday...”
“Luella and Tasarin are new parents and you have yet to see their child. I doubt many have seen him, he is so new. My daughter would enjoy holding a newborn again, especially with another one on the way. With all four of you together, I am certain you will come up with some sort of plan for how to proceed, should this be a path you think needs to be followed.”
The thought of a trip was certainly enticing. “Very well,” Jaryn said at
length. “There is merit to talking to Tasarin in person, rather than relying on messages that take days in between to be delivered.”
Wessely nodded, happy with Jaryn's decision. “Do not worry about Siness while you are gone, either. I know you have yet to find a suitable steward and I would like to offer myself to the throne while I am here.”
Jaryn's expression was pinched. “I can't say that I like that very much.”
“Why not?”
“Well, I mean, you are a king in your own right. Oceana may be rubble right now, but you will rebuild in time.”
“In time,” Wessely agreed. “For now, I am under the care of the high rulers of Siness and will do what I can to return the favor.”
Jaryn shook his head. “Even without your kingdom destroyed, because you are Nir's brother, it is truly you who should be high king to begin with. The crown should have fallen to you upon his death.”
Wessely simply waved a hand. “I would have had to challenge Ashlynn for it and the thought never once crossed my mind. I was happy in my small castle with a tiny kingdom to rule. It is for this reason I feel I would be better qualified to be your steward than any other you might choose in your absence.”
It was hard for Jaryn not to grin. “You make a very solid argument.”
“Indeed I do.”
~*~*~*~
It was much colder at sea than it had been at the castle, driving Ashlynn inside the luxurious cabin with Lochlainn and her ladies as they sailed across icy waters the next morning.
“Poor little prince,” Zarra giggled, sitting on the floor surrounded by the pool of her heavy skirts. “He just barely learned to crawl as it is. Look at him trying as the ship rocks.”
Ashlynn looked up from the book she was reading and smiled. Her sandy-haired son was struggling to crawl between Zarra and one of her newer ladies. Lochlainn would move a few inches and fall, and though they both called to him, he would always head for Zarra which thrilled the dark-skinned young woman. She would catch him up in her arms and lift him high, then set him back on the floor and turn him to face the other girl; he would simply laugh and turn back around, pulling himself up on Zarra and giving her kisses.