Authors: G. A. Aiken
Tags: #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Romance, #dragons
“I was unaware that The Reinholdt had any daughters.” She leaned in a bit. “How did you get here?”
“Oh. Gwenvael brought me.”
It was strange watching it. That soft, sweet, scar-covered face so quickly and brutally becoming hard and very,
very
angry.
The queen’s fist slammed down against the thick wood table, and Dagmar felt it bend under the pressure, heard the sound of it splintering.
“That idiot!”
It took her a bit, to get that bulk up and out of its seat, but she managed without any help, her rage giving her a fluidity Dagmar guessed was denied the queen at most times. Then she lumbered off, words pouring out of her mouth that made Dagmar’s brothers seem more like holy priests than the salty warriors of the Reinholdt Clan.
She sat there a moment, letting out a breath. “So that’s the Blood Queen.” She knew now the rumors were true…The woman was completely insane.
“Oh!” Her hand covered her mouth as she realized what she’d done. “Gwenvael!”
Then she was up and running.
“Is there something wrong with you? Beyond that which we already know of?”
Gwenvael looked at his sister, the piece of fresh fruit he’d just taken off her plate still in his hand. “Huh?”
Morfyd sat down at the table where battle plans and decisions regarding Annwyl’s kingdom were made on a daily basis.
“What possessed you to bring her here?”
“I had no choice.”
“What do you mean you had no choice?”
“How was I going to find out why that Lightning wants her here if I didn’t bring her with me? Of course”—he glanced around—“I seemed to have misplaced her. But I’m sure I’ll find her again.”
Morfyd rubbed her eyes and took another breath. “Gwenvael, she is the
Only
Daughter of The Reinholdt. And the Northland men are intensely, almost rabidly, protective of their daughters. And you just traipse off with one.”
“I didn’t traipse. There was no traipsing. And I don’t know why you’re so angry at—”
“Don’t speak.” She held her hand up, palm facing him. “Just don’t speak. We have to figure out what we’re going to tell Annwyl before she finds out”—the door slammed open behind them, Annwyl glowering at them both—“on her own.”
“You idiot!”
“Annwyl! My heart!”
Annwyl stalked across the room, her belly leading the way. Actually, her rage led the way, her belly right behind it. “What the hell were you thinking?”
“Well—”
“Don’t speak!” Morfyd cut in. “Just don’t speak.”
Dagmar charged into the room after Annwyl. She was out of breath and slightly sweaty. Did the woman exercise anything besides her manipulation skills?
Weak as a kitten.
“If you could just give me a moment, Your Majesty,” she panted out. “I can explain what brings me here.”
Gwenvael snickered. “She called you ‘Majesty.’”
Annwyl hit him on the forehead with the flat of her hand.
“Ow!”
“How do you do that?” Annwyl demanded of Gwenvael. “How do you convince them to take the blame for you?”
“It’s all in the hands,” he countered.
“I assure you I’m not taking the blame for anything, Your Maj—”
“Call me that again, and I’ll tear you open from bowels to nose. It’s Annwyl, you sod.”
Gwenvael saw Dagmar’s eyes narrow, her nostrils flare, and he quickly jumped in before the little barbarian could say something that would forfeit her head. “Tell them how you blackmailed me.”
Dagmar’s back snapped straight, Annwyl’s rudeness immediately forgotten. “What?”
“She’s just using me,” he explained to Annwyl. “Using me to get to you.”
Adjusting her frames, Dagmar said, “It’s time for you to stop talking.”
“I don’t want to.”
“But you will stop talking.”
“We’re on my territory now, Beast. You can’t strut around here and pretend you rule all—”
“Quiet.”
“But—”
She raised her right forefinger.
“She—”
Dagmar raised that damn forefinger higher.
“It’s just—”
Now she brandished both forefingers. “Stop.”
He gave Dagmar his best pout, which she completely ignored, turning her back on him to again face Annwyl. “Think there might be some place
private
we can talk, my lady?”
Gwenvael’s mouth dropped open. “Did you just dismiss—”
Dagmar held up that damn forefinger again but didn’t even bother to look at him when she did.
Annwyl’s grin was wide and bright. A smile Gwenvael hadn’t seen from her in far too long. “Right this way, Lady Dagmar.”
“Thank you.” Dagmar brusquely snapped her fingers at Gwenvael. “And don’t forget to bring my bags up once I get a room, Defiler.”
Annwyl fairly glowed as she followed Dagmar from the room, her smile growing by the second. Gwenvael faced his sister. “It’s Ruiner, which is a vast difference.”
“Uh…”
“So get it right!” he yelled at the empty doorway. He shook his head, fighting his smile. “Rude cow.”
His sister stared at him so long he began to worry. “What?” He brushed his hands over his face. “Is something marring my beauty? Besides these hideous scars that I received while protecting those I love?”
“You like her.”
“I like everyone. I’m filled with joy and love and—”
“No. Nitwit. You
like
her.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. She’s not even the kind of female I’d be attracted to.”
“Because she can construct and verbally repeat full and complete sentences?”
“That’s top of my list.”
Morfyd leaned forward. “Good gods…you haven’t fucked her. Have you?”
“What kind of language is that from my sister?” He wagged his finger at her. “It’s that Brastias. A bad influence. I know something’s going on there. I’ll find out.”
“Don’t try to turn this on me. You like a girl.”
“I do not.”
“You do. You like her.”
“Shut up.”
Laughing, Morfyd pushed away from the table and stood. “This is a great day in Dark Plains! I must trumpet it from the rooftops!”
“You’ll do no such thing. And does no one care that I had a near-death experience with Lightnings?”
“No!” his sister crowed, still laughing as she left the room.
“Your betrayal will not be forgotten!” he cried dramatically.
The statement would have meant more, however, if someone was there to witness it.
Dagmar couldn’t believe the room the servants led her to, with the queen and Lady Morfyd following behind—laughing hysterically. She had no clear idea what they found so amusing, but she was used to the ways of bitchy women. She’d lived with a group of them for years. Yet for her people and her father, she’d suck it up and pretend that she was no better than they were.
The room she was to use as her own for the next few days was enormous, with a huge bed, a table that could be used as a desk or for eating, a pit fire built right into the wall, several plush chairs of different styles, several straight-back chairs, a big standing chest filled with drawers that could hold anything she may have, a large claw-footed tub she couldn’t wait to make use of, and a standing washbasin.
“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 asked 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.