Page 108 of Fortune's Blade

“Yes, dead, dead! He died a moment ago.”

And once again, it looked like he did not understand my words. Then he staggered and went down to one knee, and I grabbed the huge shoulders as if that would do any good, while calling for Claire. But there was so much shouting from Rathen’s tent that I wasn’t sure she’d heard.

I was about to go get her when Regin spoke again, stopping me in my tracks. “I was going to speak to Lord Rathen. I was going to . . ..” He looked up at me, and if anything, the bewilderment had increased. “I was going to save him, after he’d had a scare. He did a stupid, dangerous thing, and he had to learn, but I was going to save him!”

He grasped me by the shoulders, and if I’d felt like a twig before, it was worse now, as if I could be broken in half and he wouldn’t even realize it, not with the terrible grief I saw on his face.

“Why would you save him?” I asked. “He was your enemy—”

“He wasn’t my enemy.” He looked up at me, those brilliant blue eyes haunted. “He was my son.”

And then Louis-Cesare was there and pulling him off me, because the great body was sagging and threatening to crush mine.

Chapter Thirty-Three

So, that was how we ended up back in my tent, with Claire attempting a blood transfusion on a couple of dragons and cursing up a storm.

She and Louis-Cesare had snuck her patient out of the back of the tent while everyone was distracted, and hid him under the huge fur once they reached mine. Meanwhile, one of the guards had helped me to get Regin to the same spot, looking weirded out to see his commander so shaken. Which was good, because both of them followed my instructions meekly, like little baby lambs, despite me not acting remotely normal because it felt like I was about to come out of my skin.

“I’ll look after him until he’s better,” I’d told them man, and sent him back to help guard an empty tent. Which, if he bothered to so much as glance inside, meant that all of our asses would very definitely be grass, and damned fast.

Yet, amazingly, that was the least of our problems.

Because, after kissing his son’s unconscious face a dozen times once he discovered the truth, and hugging Louis-Cesare—which had my husband disappearing under a mountain of grateful dragon and staring at me helplessly from under one of the man’s gigantic arms—and kissing my and Claire’s hands repeatedly, which pissed her off as she was trying to help her patient, Regin had informed us that his old flame was fucking everything up.

Not only was she refusing to tell anybody anything, she was countering Rathen’s attempted alliance, many of the potential members of which liked the concept of staying out of war. And that was exactly what she was offering, selling the idea of this being a spat between two dragon lords that didn’t need to involve them. Or their blood.

And if Rathen lost the argument, there was a better than average chance that some of them might decide to take the off-worlders who were causing all this trouble to Lord Steen as a make-up gift, meaning that we needed to go. Now. But Claire wouldn’t leave her patient, who was not well enough to travel, I wouldn’t leave Claire, and Louis-Cesare wouldn’t leave me.

Not to mention that Antem hadn’t come around again, and I still didn’t know where the hell Dorina was!

“I thought you told your father that you were going back to Earth,” Louis-Cesare said, reading my thoughts while taking up a spot near the tent flap where he could see out.

Normally, having him on guard would have made me feel better, only around here . . .

Well, neither of us were looking all that butch.

“Dory!” Blue eyes flashed. “Are we staying or going? It matters if I am to make plans!”

“Staying.” I took the fur that Claire had just ripped off her patient and threw it on the other side of the tent. “At least until we find Dorina.”

“So, you lied to your father?”

“I didn’t lie. I said I promised to go and I will—as soon as we find her.”

Louis-Cesare raised an eyebrow at that.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing. It is just . . . you remind me more of him every day.”

I stared back at him. “You don’t have to be rude.”

“I’m not being rude. Do you think he started out the way he is now? He had to learn diplomacy; it did not come naturally. Unlike cunning, daring, and guile—”

“You can stop talking,” I said, as Claire thrust some plastic tubing and an empty blood bag into my hands. “And you weren’t there to hear what Antem said. There’s something going on here, something bad involving Dorina, only I don’t know what.

“And I need to. He said that Steen was trying to kill her on Aeslinn’s command before she did something that would make Odin happy—”