Page 91 of Golden Queen (Idrigard #1)
Lithia might have been a prize worthy of razing a fortress, but she was nothing special in terms of the harem.
Each of them was more beautiful than the next—and strong—as Preahjiin required them to be.
They were a little army all their own—trained with sword and axe and bow—dedicated to their leader above all else.
Preahjiin’s ship sidled up alongside his own, and he finally spied her tall form on deck. She was waving and pointing forward.
Refaedon followed her gaze and saw the harbor coming into view over the waves. Relief washed through him to finally be at the end of their long journey.
That relief was quickly followed by a knot of dread at what he was sailing into—a marriage, if his father got his way.
The whole damned armada was little more than Prince Refaedon’s wedding party, come sailing across the seas to retrieve his bride—some gods damned princess in the middle of the gods damned Godsgrass Kingdom.
He had an unwilling image of her in his mind. Not the princess he was slated to marry, but the dark-eyed goddess who’d infested his dreams since the day he walked into the Black Fire Mountain as a boy and walked out a man—with the wrong fucking name.
Refaedon shook off the thought, stepping to the railing on the starboard side of his ship.
He saw a form gliding through the water, just below the surface.
He could see one of the great red eyes of the creature as her snout broke through the surface, revealing a massive head covered in bony spikes.
He made a calculated decision about his arrival onto the shores of this continent.
Prince Refaedon would not arrive in Windemere arranged on the deck of a ship—like some courtier waiting in a receiving line.
He stepped lightly off the side of the ship and landed neatly on the great black wyvern as she shot herself up and out of the waves.
Refaedon slid down the beast and held tightly to her massive neck with his thighs. He felt her muscles move beneath him as she beat her wings to take him higher.
The water flew off her scaled body in sheets, the spray kicked up soaking his face and hair.
He shook his head to clear the water from his eyes and whooped with exhilaration at the rapid ascent into the sky.
Below him, he could see the shapes of the beast’s brethren similarly breaking the surface of the dark water.
Some of his own compatriots, the elven soldiers of Penjan, followed his lead. He saw his ghostly-white Lieutenant, Codus, leap off the ship and onto the back of his own beast with a triumphant shout.
Bedlam followed him, her much smaller form disappearing off the side of the ship just before the wings of her wyvern burst out of the water, launching them both up into the sky.
Cries of primal conquest rang out through the harbor as the Penjani Armada led the Black Fleet into port. They sailed just behind a hundred wyvern riders, their beasts snapping their jaws in expectation of feasting.
The water around the ships was teeming with other creatures as well—great sleek, black whales, massive hammerhead sharks—all escorting the fleet through the dangerous waters of the Thyella under the control of the shadow walkers below decks.
Refaedon saw a thirty foot long, vivid green sea snake gliding through the water, its fat body forming a repeating ‘s’ shape as it swam just below the surface of the dark waves.
A wyvern with a wingspan double the size of his own mount, its scales a deep red, with a fiery yellow-orange blaze along its back from snout to tail, pulled out in front of the group.
Preahjiin sat clutching her beast’s long neck with her massive legs, her heavy black sword held high in one hand and her silver-headed morning star in the other.
She gave him a wicked grin as she flew past, her usual primal need to be first spurring her on, just as it had on the day they were born.
Preahjiin was born second, but it had been a close thing. The witch-wife who attended the birth swore that she had tried to pull her brother back into the womb so that she could enter the world first—as the heir of Penjan.
After Refaedon was born, she had come screaming from their mother’s womb so violently that the poor woman nearly died.
That same witch-wife had insisted any time the wet nurse tried to feed the two babies together, the newborn Preahjiin would fight and scratch to claw Refaedon’s eyes out.
They eventually had to separate the children because the instinct had never left his sister to fight him for her place in the family.
She spent the ensuing years making sure the mistake of coming in second was never repeated, pushing to outdo him at every turn.
Refaedon was never sure how much of the old witch-wife's story to believe, but he was certain the part about Preahjiin screaming from their mother’s womb violently was nothing but the truth.
She had come into the world violently, and she swore to go out the same way—in pursuit of the blood and glory of battle.
Refaedon followed his sister as they flew to the ripe land spread out before them. He could see the gently flowing golden grasses of Windemere. They were laid out before them like a golden tapestry ready to be shot through with bloody stitches.
He didn’t mind being second to Preahjiin.
Refaedon was Guardian of the Black Fire, the first in many generations.
That was something his brutish sister could never manage, no matter how many more men she killed, castles she razed, or whether she was first as the army of the Shadowlands sailed into Fairway Bay for the sacking of the Godsgrass Kingdom.
Refaedon wasn’t interested in conquering this golden land before him anyway. He had come to Windemere with one goal in mind, and it had nothing to do with a princess, or the godsgrass, or even that fucking prophecy that sent his father to the ends of the earth.
He was in Windemere because he knew she was in Windemere. That dark-eyed creature who was fated to end him; fated by destiny to be the fall of the House of Beradur.