by G. A. Aiken
“Mother hates them. Would love a chance to kill them all.”
“Exactly. She wants war, but I’m hoping I can prevent that.”
“Do you really think it’s wise to get between Mother and her love of carnage?”
“This has to stop. First she used the Northlanders to get her war, now she’s aiming at the Irons.”
“Or she’s right and they’re aiming at us.”
Keita shrugged. “I guess anything is possible.” She frowned at the screen. “What are you doing back there, luv?”
“It’s very bright. I feel like I can be seen for miles.”
Keita raised her hands to the ceiling. “Why? Why do you all question me?”
A long sigh came from the other side. “If I didn’t know you were his sister before…”
“Come! Let us see!”
After several moments, the warlord’s daughter stepped out from behind the screen, and Keita clapped her hands together. She did have an eye, didn’t she?
And when she heard her brother’s sharp intake of breath, she knew she wasn’t the only one who thought so.
True, it didn’t make Dagmar Reinholdt any less plain of face, but it brought out her eyes and her eyes were stunning.
Keita moved closer to Dagmar, pulling the skirt of the gown out for the full effect. “You look almost perfect,” Keita told her.
“Almost?” Gwenvael repeated in disbelief.
Keita stood behind Dagmar again and removed her head scarf. She grabbed a brush from the dressing table and swiped it through the Northlander’s hair until it fairly glowed, the locks reaching to her small waist. “Now she looks perfect.”
Keita pushed her in front of the mirror again. “I know the bodice is a bit low cut,” she said, quickly placing small flowers she’d brought with her into Dagmar’s hair before the Northlander could tell her to stop, “but I know my brother’s taste. Figured I’d throw the lusty bastard a bone.”
“It is a lovely gown, Keita,” Dagmar said. “Thank you.”
“Of course. An average grey gown for the day-to-day is absolutely fine, sister, but you don’t want anyone at important royal dinners thinking you’re a servant as well.” She winked at Dagmar in the mirror and received what suspiciously appeared to be a smile in return.
Keita turned Dagmar to face her again and removed the spectacles from her face. “Can you see without these?” Keita yelled.
“No,” the warlord’s daughter snapped, her smile vanishing as she snatched the spectacles back and put them on again. “Nor am I deaf! Is there something wrong with your family I’ve not been alerted to?” she asked.
And Keita replied with pure honesty, “You’ll have to be much more specific than that, I’m afraid, Lady Dagmar.”
Ragnar glared at his brother and cousin. “You’re going to make me go down there alone?”
Meinhard pointed at his leg. “Still healing.”
“Shut up.” Ragnar looked at Vigholf. “And you, brother? What’s your excuse?”
“I’ve been disfigured!” he yelled, pointing at his hair. “What more do you need?”
“For you to stop being such a girl,” Ragnar muttered.
“What?”
“Nothing.” Resigned to sitting through an entire meal with self-important Fire Breathers, Ragnar walked out of the room—making sure to slam the door behind him—and headed down the stairs.
They’d placed him and his kin on the third floor, far away from the family rooms, which was fine with him. He made it to the second floor and walked down the hallway to reach the next set of stairs. A door opened, and Ragnar stopped, allowing the occupants to go by him.
Gwenvael walked out, the smile on his face fading when he saw Ragnar. “Oh. You’re attending dinner?”
“I thought about allowing myself to starve to death,” Ragnar replied, “but decided against it.”
“Lord Ragnar.” Keita slipped past her brother and latched on to Ragnar’s arm. “As always you have perfect timing. Show him,” she said. But when there was no reply, she released Ragnar and stalked back around her brother, and into the room. Two seconds later a flustered and embarrassed Dagmar Reinholdt stumbled into the hallway. Ragnar could only assume she’d been pushed.
“Does she not look lovely?” Keita prompted after taking his arm again.
Surprised at The Beast’s new look—and knowing exactly how uncomfortable she was with it from her expression—Ragnar replied, “Lovely.” He took Dagmar’s hand and kissed the back of it. “Very lovely.”
Dagmar gave a small laugh. “Why, thank you, my lord.”
Gwenvael yanked his mate’s arm back. “I swear by all the gods, I’m going to tear that Lightning’s arm off and beat him to death with it.”
“Don’t be surly, Gwenvael,” Keita chided her brother, and they began to head toward the stairs. “You don’t look very handsome surly.”
“I always look handsome,” her brother argued.
“Isn’t my brother adorable?” Keita asked Ragnar.
“No. Not even a little.” Ragnar glanced down at where Keita’s hands clutched his upper arm. “So has the game begun?” he murmured, so only she could hear.
“And I thought you knew, my lord.” She smiled. “The game is always being played.”
It was a quiet dinner tonight. The Cadwaladr Clan had remained at the lake since the rest of the kin were beginning to show up. Keita didn’t mind. It was easier to get caught up with her brothers without the distractions of her aunts, uncles, and cousins. She even had the chance to spend time with Fearghus’s twins. Talwyn was proving herself to be her mother’s child by challenging anyone and everyone with her training sword—who gave her that bloody thing anyway?—and Talan crawled into Keita’s lap after he finished eating, buried his face against her bodice-covered breasts, and dropped right off to sleep.
At that point, everyone—even Ragnar—looked at Gwenvael, who quickly denied any involvement. “It wasn’t me! I didn’t teach him that.”
“It seems more like the boy is taking after his father.” Briec took his own babe from his mate’s arms. Whether he was doing it to give her a rest or annoy her was anyone’s guess and impossible to tell with those two. “You do seem to have a fetish, Fearghus.”
Now they all looked at Annwyl. Unlike everyone else, she hadn’t dressed up for dinner, but wore what she’d worn all day. She also wasn’t paying attention, her gaze focused on her lap. When the silence continued, she finally lifted her head. “What?”
“You’ve got a book under there again, don’t you?” Dagmar accused.
“What if I do?” Annwyl slammed the book onto the table. “What of it?”
“We have a guest,” Dagmar snapped back.
Annwyl glanced at Ragnar and shrugged. “So?”
“Despite the fact you tried to kill his brother and cousin—”
“I told you I didn’t know who they were!”
“That’s a lie. You could at the very least, your royal worship-ness, give him the respect he deserves as Chief Dragonlord and representative of the Northland dragons. Is that asking too bloody much?”
“When I’m this bored…yes!”
“Uh…excuse me,” Ragnar interrupted and, dying to see what he’d actually say, Keita turned in her chair to look directly at him.
“Yes, Lord Ragnar?” Dagmar asked, attempting to keep her voice calm.
“Well…” He reached under the table, pulled something out, and slammed it onto the table. A book. “All right. Fine. You caught me.”
Dagmar’s back, already painfully straight, managed to straighten more. “Ragnar!”
“I’m sorry. I was bored, too. It was all this chatter about relatives I didn’t know, never intend to meet, and couldn’t care less about. So I smuggled in a book.”
Queen Annwyl, human ruler of all the Southland territories and one of the most feared warriors to ever live, pointed her finger across the table at Dagmar and screamed, “Ha!” Then she raised her fists in the
air and cheered, “Yes! Yes! Yes!”
“Oh, shut up!” Dagmar looked at Ragnar. “You do understand, my lord, that I am trying to train her on basic etiquette?”
“I’m not one of your dogs, barbarian!”
“No, you’re not. Because my dogs are smarter.”
Annwyl gasped. “Savage beast!”
Ragnar had to admit he was intrigued. He’d never seen Dagmar Reinholdt get into a verbal argument with anyone. Not one that involved actual voice raising. And he remembered clearly how she was around her sisters-in-law. A catty, vicious group of hags who took delight in making her life miserable. Too bad for them doing so was near impossible because Dagmar didn’t care. She didn’t care what they called her, she didn’t care how they treated her, she didn’t care if they liked her or not. All Dagmar cared about was the safety of her people and of her father, The Reinholdt himself.
Yet it could only mean one thing for Dagmar to unleash vicious insults and barking rage at the obviously insane human ruler who bored easily—that she was comfortable. Not comfortable in a sitting-in-a-soft-padded-chair-after-a-long-walk way. But comfortable enough around these humans and dragons to reveal her true nature and thoughts while trusting that Annwyl’s insults would go no further than “barbarian” and “savage beast”—words and phrases Dagmar would only take as compliments.
Focusing on the queen, Ragnar watched her chant “Boring! Boring! Boring!” over and over again while Dagmar tried to explain how visiting nobles and dignitaries should be treated during meals. Dignitaries and nobles that he sensed did not visit too often. Obviously the human queen ran her court very differently than the Dragon Queen ran hers. In fact…he took a quick glance around the enormous Great Hall. Nope. Just this small group and the servants. No nobles or dignitaries anywhere in sight. For some reason the realization made Ragnar like the human queen.
Like a true warrior, Annwyl had scars. Lots of them. On her face, hands, arms. He was sure there were more under her sleeveless chainmail shirt and leather leggings. She also brandished the marks of her Claiming by Fearghus with great pride, wearing no bracelets or armbands on her forearms to hide the branded dragons she had there. She didn’t seem to have the same issues as Keita did about being Claimed and he was finding it harder and harder to dismiss Annwyl as just another insane monarch.
Ragnar leaned forward a bit to look at the book she’d slammed onto the table. He studied the cover and laughed. The queen’s green eyes turned to him, and he could understand how anyone’s first impression of her was of someone insane. It was that scowl combined with those wild green eyes and the fact that she always seemed to be glaring through her hair. But now Ragnar was beginning to see her as he’d seen Dagmar all those years ago. The warlord’s tiny daughter that he’d almost dismissed as shy and probably a little slow—until he realized she simply couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of her. Once that issue had been addressed, the real Dagmar had made her very dangerous appearance.
Finding the connection with Dagmar had been easy back in those early days. He’d brought her a puppy he found. It was the equivalent of handing some a gold-filled cave.
With Annwyl it was even simpler. He held up his book. She scowled at it, read the title, and then grinned. And gods, what a grin!
“Isn’t his writing amazing?” she asked, suddenly eager to talk to him when only an hour before she could barely be bothered to smile and nod in his direction.
“I agree. But I didn’t enjoy his last book.”
“But didn’t you see? He wanted you to look deeper. He was challenging the reader.”
“Perhaps, but his third book is still my favorite. With that amazing line: ‘If I knew then—”
“—what I know now—”
And together they finished it: “—I would have killed the bitch when I had the chance!’”
They laughed until they realized everyone was staring at them.
Annwyl shrugged. “Gorneves, Royal Spy to the Queen.”
“A spy novel?” Dagmar asked. “You two are talking about a spy novel?”
Annwyl threw her hands up in the air. “Not just a spy novel!”
“It’s much more than that,” Ragnar argued, and when Dagmar gawked at him in disgust, he added, “I can’t read deep, meaningful, thought-provoking philosophy all the time.”
“Exactly. Sometimes you have to read about a completely amoral hero whoring and killing his way across an unnamed land in the name of the queen that he’ll always love—”
“—but never have.” Then both Ragnar and Annwyl sighed a little.
Dagmar briefly closed her eyes. “I think I’m going to vomit on my new gown.”
“Oh, no, dear,” Keita counseled. “Don’t do that. Just aim to your left.”
Now the Ruiner threw up his hands, as he was sitting to Dagmar’s left. “Was that really necessary, Viper?”
Chapter Twenty-One
Morfyd packed up her equipment, put out the pit fire, and headed back to the castle. She’d spent longer than she’d originally planned casting protective spells around Garbhán Isle and her nieces and nephews, but to be honest, she hadn’t been ready to go back. Not yet. Especially when she’d gotten word that Brastias would be late this eve. But she’d run out of things to do and knew she couldn’t stay out by this small stream much longer.
She trudged back to the castle and, after taking a deep, fortifying breath, headed up the stairs. The dinner was already winding down, which she was quite grateful to see. Walking into the Great Hall, Morfyd smiled, nodding at her kin and their guest. She wasn’t surprised to see that only one of the Northlanders had made it to dinner. The one with the broken leg—uh, Meinhard…I think—would need the night for her Magick and his natural power as a dragon to heal that damage. And she knew the other one—Vig-something or other—was still morbidly embarrassed about his hair. Not that she could blame him. Although she hoped the Northlanders would be far from here when Annwyl received her new helm. She’d already handed the braid of hair over to her blacksmith and told him to add it.
Morfyd rested her hands on the back of Gwenvael’s chair and smiled. “How was everyone’s meal?”
“Did you eat yet?” Talaith asked after everyone agreed the food was delicious. Her ability to mother seemed innate some days, as she always checked up on all of them to ensure they’d eaten, slept enough, and spent enough time with the children. “There’s more than enough—unless your brother plans to unhinge his jaw again and inhale what’s left.”
“I was starving,” Briec returned, “after a whole day of putting up with you.”
“Putting up with me?” Talaith demanded. “Putting up with me?”
“All right,” Morfyd cut in, her hands raised. “Perhaps we can table this next Talaith–Briec argument to a time when we don’t have guests.”
“But we were so looking forward to another one of their arguments,” Gwenvael muttered.
“Quiet, snake,” Talaith shot back. She pushed her chair out and stood. “I’ll get you something to eat,” she said to Morfyd.
“Oh, don’t bother.” Morfyd waved her off. “I’m not hungry.”
“Are you sure? It will only take me a moment.”
Actually Morfyd was starving, but she had other plans for this evening with her mate in their room, and sitting with her family, eating cold food wasn’t one of them. But she wasn’t about to go into any detail on that in front of her brothers and, more importantly, Chief Dragonlord of the Lightning dragons, Lord Ragnar.
“No, no. I’m fine.”
And that’s when Morfyd heard it. A sigh. A soft, annoyed sigh. Her gaze moved to where her sister sat between Lord Ragnar and Éibhear. And, as timing would have it, caught her sister at the midway point of an eye roll.
“Something wrong, sister?” Morfyd asked sweetly, already tired of Keita’s presence in her home.
“No, no. I’m fine.”
“Are you sure? It seemed there might be some issue? Something you’d lik
e to discuss?”
“Sisters,” Fearghus said low, the warning in his voice clear.
“It’s all right, Fearghus. I’m just trying to find out if there’s something I can do to make my precious baby sister’s stay here at Garbhán Isle all the better. I do hate to see her unhappy.”
“Unhappy? Me? Oh, no, sister! I’m deliriously happy.” Keita ran her hands through her dark red locks before adding, “Although you might want to get off that sacrificial pyre…we need the wood.”
“What does that mean?”
“‘Oh, no, Talaith!’” Keita mocked her in an annoyingly high pitch that sounded nothing like Morfyd’s voice. “‘I don’t want to eat. Just let me starve in my virginal white robes. You all go on without me. Honestly, I’ll be fine—if I don’t die first.’”
“That is not what I said, nor what I meant.”
“Oh, really? Because that’s what it sounded like to me, my Good Lady Dragoness of Suffering.”
“Come now, sister,” Morfyd lashed back. “Don’t be so jealous.”
“Jealous? Of you?”
“Of the fact that there are others who care about me, who like to take care of me. But I don’t want you to worry. I know for a fact there are many who care about you. Even now I’m sure there’s a bed set up in the middle of the barracks with a line of soldiers wrapped twice around the building, waiting just for you.”
Keita stood up fast, her chair slamming hard to the floor, while Éibhear caught hold of their no-longer-sleeping nephew before he could tumble to the ground.
“Keita!” Fearghus snapped.
“What is it, sister, that really bothers you?” Keita asked, ignoring Fearghus. “The fact that I could pleasure every one of those soldiers in a way you couldn’t even dream…or that your precious Brastias might be at the head of that line?”
To be honest, Morfyd didn’t remember much after she let loose that roar.
Ragnar was so busy wondering if there was, in fact, a line of soldiers waiting for Keita that it never occurred to him to grab her. Besides, why would he have to? She was a royal, after all. Trained in the fine art of etiquette, proper poise, and all that.