Read Sparks Fly: A Novel of the Light Dragons Online
Authors: Katie MacAlister
Katie MacAlister
Katie’s Guide to All Things Dragon
“T
he lady is here to see you.”
Baltic turned at the voice, obviously startled to hear it since he had been alone in the upstairs corridor. “What foolishness is this?”
The heavily varnished wooden paneling that ran the length of the upper floor of the three-hundred-year-old pub melted into a dirt yard dotted with odd wooden figures.
Baltic glared first at the wooden figures, then at the man who approached him. “Ysolde! Why have you drawn me into one of your visions of the past? And why must you include that murderous bastard in it?”
“Don’t blame me; blame my inner dragon.” I sighed to myself and folded my arms over the couple of shirts I had been about to hang up in the wardrobe, which, like the corridor outside our bedroom, had faded into the scene before us. “Although I have to say, if it’s going to make me watch episodes from your past, you might as well be here, too. Who is that? Oh, Constantine. And
look, it’s Baltic version 1.0, all sexy and shirtless and hacking away at something with a sword.”
“I have better things to do than relive unimportant events,” my Baltic, the Baltic of the present day, growled, transferring his glare from Constantine, the former silver wyvern and once his friend, later his most hated enemy, to me. “Make the vision stop.”
“I would if I could, but they never do until they’re good and ready…. Hey, where are you going?”
Baltic, with a rude word, turned on his heel and marched away. “I have spent the last twelve days chasing Thala across all of Europe and half of Asia. I have work to do, mate. You may indulge yourself with this vanity, but I will not.”
“Vanity! I like that! It’s not vanity. And you can’t just leave my vision like that!” I yelled after him, watching with a growing sense of injustice as he disappeared around the side of a small hut. “They’re valuable sources of information! Kaawa says we’re supposed to learn from them, to glean facts about what is important to us now. Baltic? Well, dammit! He left! That rotter.”
I slapped my hands on my legs and spun around as the vision of Constantine approached the other man who stood in a cluster of quintains and man-sized targets.
“Well, I’m not going to be so obstinate that I don’t learn whatever it is my inner dragon is trying to tell me. Let’s see, what do we have here…obviously, we’re in some sort of a training yard, and since Baltic isn’t frothing at the mouth at the sight of Constantine, evidently this vision is from a time when they were still friends. Hello, my love. I don’t suppose you can hear me, let alone see me?”
The vision Baltic didn’t react, not that I expected him to. The people in the visions my inner dragon self, long dormant and only recently starting to wake up, had provided
me were just that—visions of events in the past. I could watch and listen, but could not interact with them.
Constantine, clad in wool leggings and a tunic bearing a gold-embroidered dragon on a field of black, strode past the empty sword-fighting targets to the occupied one, his attitude cocky, while his face was arranged in an expression implying sympathy. “Did you hear me?” he asked as he stopped at the side of the man who was diligently hacking away at the straw and wood target with an extremely big sword.
“I heard. It is of no matter to me.”
I spent a few moments in admiration of the interplay of his muscles as Baltic continued to swing and thrust his sword into the target, his bare back shining with sweat.
“It always did make my knees weak to see you wield a sword,” I told the vision Baltic, moving around to see the front of him. His face was different yet familiar to me, his hair dark ebony then, his chin more blunted. “I like your hair the dark chocolate color it is now. And your chin, as well, although you certainly were incredibly sexy before Thala resurrected you. And your chest…oh my.” I fanned myself with a bit of one of the shirts I was holding.
“Alexei says you have no choice. He says it is the command of your father.” Constantine cocked one eyebrow at Baltic, moving swiftly to the side when Baltic swung wide.
“You look the same,” I informed Constantine. “Evidently being brought back as a shade didn’t affect your appearance, whereas resurrection does. Interesting. I’ll have to talk to Kaawa about that the next time I see her. Still, you were handsome then, Constantine. But you didn’t hold a candle to Baltic.”
“My father does not control my life,” Baltic snapped, his breath ragged now as he continued to swing at the vaguely human-shaped target. “Nor does Alexei.”
I settled back against one of the targets, prepared to watch and learn what I could from the vision.
“He is our wyvern. You owe him your fealty,” Constantine said, stiffening. “You must do as he says. You
must
meet the lady.”
“Do not lecture me, Constantine,” Baltic snarled, turning on him. Sweat beaded on his brow and matted the dark hair on his chest. Constantine took a step back when Baltic gestured toward him with the sword. “You are Alexei’s heir,
not
the wyvern himself, and I do not take well to being ordered about.”
“Pax!” Constantine said, throwing his hands up in the air in a gesture of defeat. “I did not come to argue with you, old friend. I wanted simply to warn you that the lady had arrived, and Alexei is expecting you to do your duty and claim her as mate.”
I had been idly wondering to myself when exactly this moment had taken place—judging by the comments, it predated not only my own birth, but even the time when Baltic had been wyvern of the black dragon sept—but as the two men argued, I had a sudden insight.
“This is about the First Dragon’s demand I redeem you, isn’t it?” I asked the past Baltic. “This has something to do with whatever it is I’m supposed to accomplish to erase the stain on your soul. But that was due to the death of the innocent, and this…
a mate
?”
It took a minute before Constantine’s words sank into my brain, but when they did, the hairs on the back of my neck rose. I stalked forward to the two men, glaring at the former image of the love of my life, uncaring that this was only a vision. “You were supposed to take someone else as a mate? Who?”
“I’ve told Alexei of my decision,” Baltic said, snatching up his discarded tunic and wiping his face with it before sheathing his sword. “I have not changed my mind.”
He turned and started up the hill of what was obviously the outer bailey of an early stone castle, stopping when Constantine called after him, “And what of the First Dragon? Will you defy him, as well as Alexei? You are his only living son, Baltic.”
“I know what I am,” Baltic snarled, and continued walking.
“The lady wants you. The First Dragon is reported to desire you to take her as mate. Alexei has commanded it in order to avoid a war. Do you really think you have a choice in the matter?”
The word that Baltic uttered was archaic, but quite, quite rude, and ironically, one his present-day self had spoken just a few minutes before. I watched his tall, handsome figure as he disappeared into crowds of dragons going about their daily business, my eyes narrowing as Constantine suddenly smiled.
“Why do I have the feeling that you know something?” I asked him.
He didn’t answer, of course. He just continued to smile for a few seconds; then he, too, strolled off toward the upper bailey, leaving me alone in the practice yard.
“Who was she?” I bellowed after them, achieving nothing but the venting of my spleen. “Who the hell was she?” No one answered me, of course. Drat them all.
“Well, I’m not going to stand for being left clueless about important episodes from the past yet again. I’ve had it! I’m going to find out what’s going on if it kills me. Again. Which it won’t. Oh hell, now I’m talking to myself while in a vision. How pathetic is that?”
I looked around me, trying to figure out where exactly I was. It was fall, judging by the color of the leaves on the trees in the little town that straggled down the hill below me. Behind was a large mound flattened at the top, bearing a circular stone and wood tower, all of which was surrounded by a tall wooden stockade. “Motte and
bailey castle,” I murmured, racking my frequently incomplete memory for the time period of such structures.
All I could remember was that they were popular well before the century I was born. I took a deep breath and marched up the hill to the tower keep, automatically moving around people and objects that weren’t really there, all the while muttering to myself about dragons and their stubborn ways, with an emphasis on one ebony-eyed wyvern in particular.
The stone and wood keep wasn’t much to look at, not nearly so grand as my father’s stone keep had been. I paused before the door to the main tower where I knew the keep’s owner would reside, and considered who might live there. “Has to be the black dragons, since Constantine mentioned Alexei. And Baltic wasn’t yet the heir, which means he probably slept in the garrison with all the other soldiers and unmarried men.”
When I was a girl living with the humans I thought of as my family, my sister and I were strictly forbidden from ever stepping so much as one toe into the soldiers’ barracks. Many were the times that we lay together in bed, speculating just what went on in the forbidden lower level of the keep, but a healthy respect for our mother kept us out of such a tantalizing spot.
Later, when Baltic and I finally found each other, and he had built Dauva (his stronghold in Latvia), I stayed out of the men’s quarters by habit. Although I could have claimed the right as Baltic’s mate to visit it, it had never occurred to me to break the rules and see just what went on in such a place. My upbringing had been too strong to overcome.
“We’ve come a long way, baby,” I paraphrased as I strode into the lower level of the keep, looking around with interest. There were pallets everywhere, stuffed with straw and strewn with items of clothing and armor. Some men were asleep on them, while others huddled in
a circle dicing, and farther into the smoky, ill-lit room, another group squatted next to braziers, clutching tankards and talking quietly to themselves. “This is somewhat disappointing,” I told the visions of dragons from the past. “Where are the racy sights of naked men doing terribly immoral things that my mother always swore were what went on down here? Where are the camp followers enticing men into lustful acts? Where are the orgies?”
“The human woman who raised you had no knowledge of dragonkin,” a voice said loudly behind me.
I spun around to see Baltic—my Baltic—in the doorway, his hands on his hips as he glanced around the room.
“Came back, did you? I knew you couldn’t stay away from the past.”
He rolled his eyes at the teasing note in my voice, striding over to me. “I returned for you when you did not come with me, as a proper mate should.”
“Uh-huh. So, which pallet was yours?”
“Why do you care?”
I smiled up at his frown. “I want to see where you curled up at night.”
“Why?” he asked again.
“Because it’s something from your past, and kind of wicked, at least according to my mother. It’s where you were naked and slept and had naughty thoughts. And speaking of naughty thoughts, just who is this female you were supposed to take as a mate?”
He grabbed my hand and pulled me deeper into the room, where a jointed wooden screen marked a separate sleeping area, affording it a goodly amount of privacy, even if it was not a closed room proper. “I did not sleep with the others. I was accorded a place here.”
“Because of your father, you mean?”
He nodded. I sat on the long, narrow bed and looked around the living quarters, bouncing slightly as I did so.
“You had a real bed, one stuffed with feathers, although the ropes holding your mattress are kind of squeaky. Is that the same chest you had at Dauva?”
“Yes. Are you done? I wish to return to the pub. I have many things to do.”
I slid my hand down the bear-fur covering of the bed, and leaned back on my elbows. “Did you entertain in this little private room, my love? Did you have girls here?”
He wanted to roll his eyes again—I could tell—but Baltic, always keeping a firm grip on how many times he gave in to that act, instead beetled his brows at me. “Do you wish to know how many lovers I had before you?”
“No. I just want to know if any of them ever shared this little love nest.”
“No.”
“Ah. Good.” I smiled and kicked off my sandals, rubbing my legs and feet along the fur in what I hoped was a seductive manner. “Perhaps you’d like to change that?”
Interest kindled in his eyes even as his lips were about to chastise me for wasting his valuable time. “Are you sure you would not prefer to wait until such time as I was with a lover?” he asked me with a completely deadpan face. “I know how it inflames you to engage in lovemaking while others are present.”
“Oh!” I sat up and slapped my hand on the skin. “I do not have kinky sex fantasies! Just because I thought it was kind of fun for us to make love with the vision version of our past selves doesn’t mean I am a swinger! I would never want to see you with another woman! Unless it was my past self…er…I wasn’t yet born at the time of this vision, was I?”
“No.”
“OK, then. It’s just you and me. In your old bed. With the guys in the garrison just beyond that screen.”
He gave in and gave another eye roll, but removed his
clothing as he did so. “I will indulge you, but only because we have been separated, and it is the way of dragons to claim their mates upon return.”