by G. A. Aiken
“This is wonderful,” she said, pivoting in a circle. When she’d spun completely around, she found Lady Morfyd whispering to the queen and the queen leaning against the wall so she could be held upright while Her Majesty howled in laughter.
This was almost as bad as her first meeting with Gwenvael.
“We’re done, Lady Annwyl,” one of the servants said.
“Good. Have food sent up and—” She took a long look at Dagmar before adding, “Fannie.”
“Right away.”
The servant left and Morfyd helped Annwyl to one of the chairs. Once the queen sat down, she said, “I have to say, Lady Dagmar, and I mean this very deeply…I love you.”
Now Dagmar was beginning to panic. “Uh…my lady—”
“The bit with the forefingers. I thought he was going to break a blood vessel.”
The laughter started all over again, so badly that Morfyd had to sit on the floor and Annwyl kept trying to stop.
“We’ve got to stop, I’m about to have an accident.”
“But the look on his face!”
“That was the best part!” Then Annwyl started laughing all over again.
That’s when Dagmar understood. They weren’t laughing at her. Not at all.
There was a knock on the door, and a woman at least a decade older than Dagmar stepped in. “My lady? You asked for me?”
“Aye, Fannie.” Annwyl wiped tears from her face and took a breath. At least now she was no longer crying from sadness. “This is Lady Dagmar Reinholdt. While she’s here, I want you to help her with what she needs.”
“Of course.”
Annwyl relaxed back in her chair. “Tell her what you need.”
Dagmar had no idea what to ask for. Ask for too much or the wrong thing and she could alienate Annwyl. And considering the monarch nearly snapped Dagmar’s neck for using her proper title, this was a far bigger risk than she’d imagined.
Dagmar stared at the kind-faced servant, and Fannie leaned back a bit so she could examine Dagmar closely.
“Water for a bath, fresh clothes, and I believe food is already being sent up,” Fannie suggested.
Dagmar nodded in agreement. “That’s fine.”
“Wait.” Annwyl pointed at her. “I thought you told Gwenvael you had bags. Should I send someone to—”
Wincing, Dagmar shook her head. “Uh…I was…I was just being rude. I don’t have any bags.”
The four women glanced back and forth among them, and then, the laughter started all over again. Only this time Dagmar happily joined in.
Gwenvael walked into the queen’s bedchamber. Fearghus sat at a desk, writing. Éibhear on the floor with a book in his lap.
“Does no one care that I’m not dead?”
Éibhear looked up and smiled. “I care.”
“You don’t count.”
Fearghus spoke to Gwenvael without pausing in his self-important scribbles. “Why are the servants telling me you brought back a trophy from the north?”
“She’s not a trophy.” He sat down on the bed. “She’s more a toy for my amusement.”
Éibhear snickered until Fearghus glared at him.
The eldest of the siblings placed down his quill and turned in his chair to focus on Gwenvael. “I know I’m going to regret asking, but what the hell is going on?”
“You’re right. You’re going to regret asking.”
The door opened and Briec walked in. He saw Gwenvael and slammed the door behind him. “Thanks for the warning about Izzy, you idiot.”
“I did warn you, but you were too busy doing the Briec-Talaith form of oral sex to hear me.”
“Well, if you thought she was mad before…” he announced to the room.
Fearghus rested his elbows against his knees. “What happened with Izzy?”
Briec went face down on the bed, mumbling something into the fur covering it.
“What?”
He lifted his head. “I said, ‘she was playing Run and Jump.’”
Fearghus cringed. “And Talaith saw her? Gods.”
“You forgot the best part,” Gwenvael added. “She was playing Run and Jump with Celyn.”
Briec buried his head back into the bedding while Fearghus sat up straight, scowling. “That dirty little bastard.”
“My thoughts exactly, brother. I say we go out there and kick the shit out of him.”
Éibhear let out a bored sigh. “Who cares?”
Gwenvael looked at Fearghus, Fearghus looked at Briec, and Briec’s head popped back up off the bed.
Leaning over the foot of the bed, Gwenvael asked, “What was that?”
“I said ‘who cares?’”
“You don’t?”
“No. I don’t.”
“He’s such a liar,” Gwenvael mouthed to Fearghus.
“I know!” Fearghus mouthed back.
Éibhear slammed his book closed. “And whatever you two bastards are doing, stop it.”
Dagmar soaked in the tub, her hair and body scrubbed clean. And while she relaxed in the steaming water, Annwyl and Lady Morfyd ate from large platters of food placed on the table in front of them.
Morfyd, it turned out, was another bloody dragon in disguise, and Gwenvael’s older sister. She was beautiful with long white hair and a long, lean body, easily seen once she pulled off the voluminous witches’ robes she wore and relaxed at the table in a thin pale pink gown. She was nothing like Gwenvael, however; that was clear enough. Sweet, borderline shy, and soft-spoken, she didn’t seem to have anything in common with her sibling.
“Here.” Morfyd handed her a small plate piled with food easily eaten without utensils. “A little something while you relax.”
“Thank you.” Dagmar popped a round ball of fried dough into her mouth and sighed.
Oh, yes, she could definitely get used to this.
“Minotaurs?” Annwyl asked again. “I didn’t think they existed.”
“You said the same thing about Centaurs,” Morfyd reminded the monarch, “until you got that hoof to the back of the head.”
“She snuck up on me,” Annwyl snarled between clenched teeth. And, just as quickly, her anger faded and she held up a bottle. “Wine, Dagmar?”
“Yes, please.”
The queen poured a chalice of wine, and Dagmar asked what had been perplexing her for some time. “Why do they want you dead? It’s the question I haven’t been able to get answered.”
“That’s easy—” Annwyl began, but Morfyd quickly cut her off.
“It’s vey complicated. There’s much that leads us to this point. So I will start from the beginning—”
“Fearghus knocked me up,” Annwyl blurted out.
“Gods dammit, Annwyl!” Morfyd exploded.
“That’s the main part of the story.”
“I’m not sure why it matters.” Dagmar picked up another piece of baked something or other and nearly melted away in her bath it tasted so delicious.
“Gwenvael didn’t tell you who Fearghus is, did he?”
“He’s Annwyl’s consort.”
“And our brother.”
Dagmar swallowed her food. “So he’s a…”
“Yes.”
“But Annwyl is…”
“Yes.”
“How is that possible?”
“Again,” Morfyd said patiently. “It gets very complex. If we look back at history and the beginning of—”
“The god Rhydderch Hael has been playing with my insides.”
“Gods dammit, Annwyl!”
“You’re taking too bloody long!”
“Before this gets ugly,” Dagmar easily coasted in, “perhaps we should discuss the tunnels I told you about?”
Morfyd studied her closely and asked, “Does it not bother you?”
She knew she didn’t mean the tunnels. “Bothered by what?”
“The soon-to-happen unholy birth of Annwyl’s spawn?”
“Oy!” Annwyl objected.
“Pardon?” Dagmar a
sked before popping another delicious something in her mouth.
“No offense, Dagmar, but so far every human who’s been told about Annwyl’s pregnancy without the necessary backstory has been quick to label Annwyl a whore and her babes demons. Yet you don’t seem to care.”
“Am I carrying her children?” Dagmar inquired while licking her fingers.
Morfyd raised a white brow. “Not that I’m aware.”
“Then to quote my father, ‘I really don’t give a battle-fuck.’”
Annwyl coughed up whatever she’d just put in her mouth, hitting Morfyd in the face.
“I do, however, have concerns over those tunnels, so we’ll focus on that.”
Gwenvael stretched his legs out and wiggled his toes. “I’m so exhausted. All that bloody flying.”
“Don’t sleep yet,” Briec said, comfortably sitting next to him. “You have to come to the dinner tonight, or you’ll never hear the end of if it from the aunts.”
“Do I have to?”
“Don’t whine,” Fearghus snapped, sitting next to Briec. “And yes, you have to. At the very least you need to entertain your Northland guest. And I still haven’t heard why you brought her here.”
“Because that Lightning wants her here, and until I find out why he wants her here—here she stays.”
“You just want to fuck her.”
“Yes,” he hissed at Briec’s question. “But that’s not all. She’s extremely smart and has a delightful sense of evil that I truly appreciate.”
“And you want to fuck her.”
He sighed. “Is it too much to ask that my brothers take their minds from the gutter and into the fresh air?”
“Watch your back, Gwenvael,” Fearghus warned. “She has been chumming around for twenty years with Olgeir’s son.”
“She didn’t know.”
“So she says. But at the end of the day, you have to remember, she is and always will be a Northlander. They live by a different set of rules than we do.”
“I know. They have a Code. How come we don’t have a code?”
“We can’t get you to adhere to the general rules of decency…how do we enforce a code?”
“Good point.” Gwenvael looked between his brothers. “One more time?”
They nodded in agreement.
“All right. On three. One, two…three!”
All three of them stood and as quickly dropped back down, slamming once more into Éibhear’s back. He let out a yelp of pain and tried again to struggle out from under them.
“You’re all bastards!”
“Don’t whine!” Gwenvael chastised. “Just admit that you’re crazy about Iz—”
“Shut up!”
Dagmar pulled on the much-too-large, but lusciously soft robe, belting it in the middle. She took another glass of wine from Morfyd and dropped into the chair Annwyl had vacated. “Thank you.”
“You’re very welcome.” Morfyd again studied the maps Dagmar had given her. “I’ll give these to Brastias. Perhaps he can figure out where all these lines go. Or my brother, Éibhear. He’s very good with maps.”
“I’ll help as much as I can,” she promised.
Morfyd looked up from her notes. “Tell me, Dagmar, do you talk to Gwenvael?”
“Yes.”
“Full conversations?”
“Yes.”
“And he holds your interest?”
Annwyl laughed at that, but Dagmar didn’t. “As a matter of fact, Lady Morfyd, I find your brother quite intelligent, with excellent ideas and thoughts on a range of topics. Perhaps you should find the time to have a full conversation with him before you judge what you don’t know.”
Morfyd stared at her with wide eyes and Dagmar felt a little guilty. But before she could apologize the bedroom door flew open and another woman marched in. She was a few inches taller than Dagmar and stunningly beautiful with brown skin just like the soldier-for-hire Dagmar had met. Now she’d seen two women of the desert lands in less than a week, when she’d seen none for the thirty years before that.
“I’ve been looking everywhere for you two,” the woman snarled, slamming the door closed behind her. “And anyone like to explain what the hell Run and Jump is?”
Annwyl slowly rolled onto her side, away from the woman glaring at everyone in the room.
“Waiting for an answer!” she bellowed, looking quite comfortable yet gorgeous in the plain black leggings she wore with black boots, a loose off-white linen shirt, and a thin leather tie that pulled back her long mass of black curly hair. Nothing else adorned her body except a silver chain necklace that disappeared under her shirt and a small sheathed dagger she had tied to her upper thigh.
It probably took her all of five minutes to dress every day, but Dagmar knew her brothers’ wives spent hours attempting to look as effortlessly beautiful as this woman.
“Well…” Morfyd gave a small shrug. “If you’re talking about dragons, it’s a little game hatchlings play with their parents. You know, before their wings can actually carry them, when the family’s out flying. The hatchlings will run and jump from one parent to the next. I did it with mine. It was fun, but it also helps the hatchlings learn how to fly because very often you’ll catch the wind and you learn to coast.”
“Right,” the woman said, her smile not fooling Dagmar at all, “fun and a learning experience.” That’s when she leaned down and screamed into poor Morfyd’s face, “And that’s why my daughter is doing it with your family!”
Morfyd’s eyes grew wide. “Oh.”
“Yeah! ‘Oh’!” She turned toward Annwyl. “And I blame your fat ass for this, you pregnant sow!”
“Me?” Rolling back to her other side, Annwyl faced them. “How is this my bloody fault?”
“She’s out of control and it is your fault.” The woman threw herself into a chair and said in a mocking, childlike voice, “‘They say I can go to war. They say I’m really good. I want to be the Queen’s Champion one day.’ Your fault!” she finished in her own healthy yell.
“I haven’t watched training in three months, how is this my fault?”
“Brastias speaks for you now, does he not?”
Annwyl pursed her lips before slowly stating, “He is in complete charge of my armies until I can mount my war horse without him whinnying in terror, yes.”
“Then it’s your fault! Because he says she’s ready to go to war and so she wants to go.”
Morfyd leaned forward a bit, her hands clasped in front of her. “Perhaps—”
“Shut up, scaly!”
Morfyd leaned back in her chair. “All right then.”
Finally, the woman caught sight of Dagmar, her dark eyes raking over her before she said, “Talaith.”
Dagmar had no idea what that meant until Morfyd cut in, “Sorry. Talaith, Daughter of Haldane. This is Dagmar Reinholdt. Of the Northland Reinholdts.”
Ahh. Talaith was her name.
Talaith focused her lethal gaze back on Morfyd. “Are there Reinholdts in the south?”
Morfyd’s eyes narrowed dangerously. “Not that I’m aware of.”
“Then don’t embellish!” she screamed.
“I’m not!” Morfyd screamed back.
Suddenly Annwyl sat up, one hand on her belly, a cry exploding from her lips. Immediately the women stopped bickering.
“Gods, Annwyl. What’s wrong?” Morfyd demanded.
Green eyes turned to them and Annwyl sneered, “Nothing. I just wanted the two of you to shut up. You’re going to make us look bad in front of the barbarian!”
The silence that followed was awkward, to say the least. And lasted a good thirty seconds. Until Morfyd spit out that first laugh, and then all of them followed suit. They couldn’t seem to stop either. Even when Gwenvael walked in, stared at them all for a bit, and then walked back out, slamming the door behind him, they kept right on going.
Chapter 19
Gwenvael returned to Dagmar’s room several hours later when he was sure his sister and
brothers’ mates were gone. She was stretched out facedown on a bed she was way too small for, her long hair, now clean and smelling delightfully of flowers, hanging over the side and nearly touching the floor. Her freshly washed body was covered only in a robe, and one small hand was balled into a fist, resting by her mouth. The other hand rested by her hip, palm up, and her spectacles were on the side table across the room.
She also snored, but only a little.
He walked around the bed and crouched down by her head. Reaching out, he gently brushed her hair off her face, smiling at how innocent she looked. Not at all like the manipulative little barbarian he’d been traveling with for days.
“Dagmar.” He said her name softly, gently, his fingers petting her cheek. He liked how her skin felt under his fingertips. “Dagmar,” he said softly again.
And, when she didn’t answer, “Dagmar!”
She snapped awake, head and chest off the bed, her eyes immediately open and alert. “It is not a lie!”
“Sorry, love,” he said softly again. “Did I wake you?”
Rolling her eyes, Dagmar dropped back to the bed. “Go away.”
“No. You were mean to me, and I want reparations.”
“You want—what are you doing?”
“Getting comfortable,” he explained while crawling onto the bed and over her until he’d draped himself across her back. Once in position, he sort of dropped on top of her, and he enjoyed the sound of air abruptly shoved out of her lungs.
“Get off me!”
“Not until you apologize and make me feel better. Much better.”
She tried to drag herself out from under him, but he wouldn’t budge, making sure all his weight stayed on her back.
“Apologize for what?”
“For being mean to me in front of my much-loved kin.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Gwenvael bounced his lower body up and down, causing his groin to slam against her ass.
“Stop! Stop!”
“Take it back.”
There was a long pause, and then what suspiciously sounded like a giggle. “No.”