Page 16 of The Dragon Queen Complete Series Collection
Chapter 16
Walking into the gardens toting secateurs was a strange experience. I’d done it often, first as a young girl and then as daughter of the house. Flower arranging was one of the gentle arts I’d been required to learn as a lady, and one I’d dispensed with the moment I became a swineherd. It wasn’t just that there was little point arranging the wildflowers in the field into bouquets, the pigs paying little mind except showing curiosity as to whether the flowers could be eaten; I’d been consciously stepping away from the rituals of my old life and focussing on the requirements of the new. So walking between the gently sweeping trees, past the hedges to the main flower bed, brought back memories, so many memories.
Of Mother guiding my hand as I made my first few cuts, then showing me how to strip the thorns from the roses, the leaves from the daisies, helping me form the clutch of flowers in my small hand into something pleasing to the eye. It was as though I could feel her hand on my shoulder as I did the same now, placing roses, white, red and pink, into the same old cane basket we’d used for just this. But it wasn’t only for her that I was creating a bouquet. Yes, I gathered the roses in remembrance of Mother, because she always smelled sweetly of them, leaving dried petals in her wardrobe to scent her clothes, but then I added big blowsy peonies in various shades of blush along with a small selection of baby’s breath.
“Creating an arrangement for the table?”
I looked up to see Flynn standing there, looking like the perfect prince with his well-bred good looks.
Someone’s prince. Just not mine.
Though the bowl of meat scraps he was toting perhaps took away a little from that illusion of perfection.
“No.” I shook my head, my eyes dropping to the flowers then unable to drag them back up again. Glimmer crawled warily down my arm, sniffing at the air, cocking her head at the flowers. “I haven’t seen my father’s grave since I was banished from the estate. It’s past time for me to go and pay my respects.”
“My apologies, Lady Pippin.” I heard the regret, the shame in his voice so I finally looked up, sharing a wry smile with him.
“Whyever would you? You had no idea what I was doing and your question was a valid one. A daughter of the house is responsible for the flower arrangements. Let’s hope a year scrubbing around in the mud hasn’t robbed me of my skills.”
I walked over to a nearby bench, but Glimmer started crooning, then craning her wavering neck to take a look at the bowl, the two of us laughing as we set down our burdens and set about feeding the little terror.
“Slowly, little queen…” he murmured to her as she gobbled down the first few scraps. “Everything we have is for you, so have patience.”
“She’s been without for so long.” I blinked, not sure where the words came from, but come they did. “She was trapped in the egg for some time.”
“Trapped?”
A sharp squawk from Glimmer had us focussing back on her, ferrying more meat to her open jaws.
“I… felt her, before she was born. I thought it was a dream, but…”
“The dragons were bloody restless.” Flynn stared into my eyes with a slight frown. “They were adamant the girl we were looking for was here. We couldn’t work out why they were so determined. In theory, multiple girls could bond with the baby queen. Usually the most socially suitable candidates are presented first, then they keep working down the line until they find a match, so the dragons shouldn’t have been that focussed on staying here. We were ready to fly off after we presented the egg to your stepsister and the other noble girls of the district.”
“Arabella,” I corrected in a tight voice. “Call her Arabella.”
“I can think of a lot of names I’d like to call her,” he said quite frankly, his forehead wrinkling. “The little wench slipped into my bed on the first night, hoping for a roll in the hay or something.”
Glimmer stopped her incessant gorging for a moment, fixing Flynn with a golden eye, then letting out a comical little growl. I felt a hot rush of what? Possessiveness?
“I felt the same way, Lady Glimmer,” he said, performing a funny little seated bow to the dragon, which seemed to placate her. “A man likes to be asked, at the very least.”
He winked at her, then continued.
“But the dragons wouldn’t fly. They remained resolutely grounded, making clear we needed to widen the search. But you say you dreamed of Glimmer?”
“About a lot of what happened the night I bonded with her. Glimmer felt trapped, was giving up hope of anyone helping her free of her egg. She kept reaching out and reaching out.” Real pain coloured my voice and Glimmer made an anxious little cheep in response. “I saw myself lifting the egg, then dashing it to the ground – me, not Arabella – and I saw a baby dragon trying to get out. I saw her.”
I’d set the flowers down on the bench, so my hands were free to scoop up the little dragon. She curled within them, both of us somehow of the same mind as I tucked her up against my chest. She needed to eat more food, I could feel the spiky thread of her hunger, but right now our two hearts beat in time at a frantic pace.
“That is… unprecedented.” Flynn frowned slightly. “But well above my pay grade.” He shook his head and then smiled, something I think he did rather a lot when faced with a difficult thing. “We’ll see what the prince makes of it when he arrives. That’s what I came out here to tell you. A bird arrived from the capital. He’ll be here in a few days.”
I forced my lips to move into a smile, then grabbed more meat scraps, glad to focus on feeding my dragon, rather than thinking about my future. Glimmer ate and ate until her belly was swollen, then she clawed her way up my shirt and slid inside the open neck, finding a secure place to sleep curled around my stomach.
“That mimics the way their mothers would care for them,” Flynn said, eyeing the lump in my shirt with an indulgent smile. “To her, that’s what you are right now. Mother, father, protector, teacher…” His eyes seemed to take in the tailoring of my shirt, the cut of it, slowly moving upwards until he met my eyes, then he flushed, seeming to realise that staring at a gentlewoman’s shirt was not appropriate. “It’s the way we bond with them. We supplant the natural social structure of wild dragons, replacing it with our own. You have become everything to her.”
I nodded, unable to think of a thing to say, while being uncomfortably aware of the need to, instead busying my hands with the flowers. I picked up bloom after bloom, placing them together, then staring at the arrangement before starting all over again. Colour, shape, repetition, contrast, texture… I could hear my mother’s voice inside my head as I worked, the shape, the structure of the arrangement finally coming together.
Flynn didn’t have to follow me once I’d tied the blossoms together. He didn’t have to trail after me as I walked out of the gardens, past the fields where the dragons and cattle drowsed, past the outbuildings, to the cemetery at the back of the estate, surrounded by wrought iron fencing that needed a paint. He didn’t have to open the gate for me, ushering me forward, nor come to stand beside me as I stopped in front of Mother’s, then Father’s grave. But he did.
Cecily would get no headstone laid for her here, neither would Arabella, and I took a vicious kind of comfort in that, but that quickly faded. I dimly heard the burbling background noises of a busy farm as I stared and stared at those invulnerable marble gravestones. My father’s name and birth and death had been inscribed into the white marble, my mother’s the same and I traced the words with my eyes. I could hear Father’s voice in my ears, his hand on my chin as he tipped it up so I would meet his eyes.
“I will always be proud of you.”
Thinking back, I now saw a depth of love, an intensity I had taken for granted. I was everything to him back then, but…
“Why?” I whispered the word, not even audible to Flynn, only me. “Why?”
Why bring Cecily and Arabella into our house? Why replace my mother with that woman? Why let them run riot across our estate? Why indulge them at every turn? Why give blasted Arabella poor little Lassie to brutalise? Why? Just why ?
Questions I’d never be able to have answered now, no matter how much I might deserve them, because that’s what happens when people die. The conversation ends with them, leaving the living to either move on or go mad.
The sharp green smell of crushed greenery filled my nose as my hand gripped the bouquet tight, forcing me to step forward and lay the bouquet down, or trash it entirely. The bright colours were stark against the white stone, blood red, blush pink.
“Milady…?”
Flynn held out a folded cotton square with a faded initial embroidered on it. I just stared at it, uncomprehending, until I blinked and realised why he had proffered it. A tear rolled down my cheek, then another. I shook my head, the world going blurry until a hand took mine, raising it up and then pressing the clean fabric into it. I dabbed at my eyes as I’d been taught, but that lady-like gesture wasn’t going to cut it. The dam of misery I’d worked on keeping strong every day had broken, and out it all came. Great ugly hacking sobs, my face screwing up into a rictus of pain, were only made worse by the raging sense of shame that came with them. I was making a damn spectacle of myself and in front of a royal rider.
“Milady… Oh, milady…” I felt him come closer, plucking the handkerchief from my fingers and trying to wipe away the tears, failing utterly because nothing could staunch this deluge. “Pippin…”
Arms went around me and I was drawn closer. Glimmer, asleep in my shirt, a hot, oblivious presence between us, helping to maintain some sense of propriety. But that took nothing away from the feeling of being touched, of being held. Of finally, finally , having some kind of gentleness directed my way.
I’m horrified to admit that I sagged into his arms for a good few moments. Part of me, the rational, practical part, was screaming silently for me to pull away, describing in detail the shame of what I was doing. But there was something breathtakingly selfish about me in this moment that grasped at comfort, not caring where it came from. So for a few shuddering breaths, I drew in the warm musk of his scent, the comforting weight of Flynn’s arms, his body, and I refused to feel guilty for it.
Until the moment that I did.
“I am so very sorry—” The stock response babbled out, tripping off my tongue, just as I’d been taught.
“Don’t be.”
And for a moment, I felt a flush of pleasure. His voice was warm, his smile kind and his armour didn’t look to be any worse the wear for my outburst. His handkerchief however… I offered it back with a hopeless look.
“Keep it,” he assured me.
“I’ll have one of the laundresses clean and press it and return it to you,” I replied, shoving the sodden square into my pocket. “I should have?—”
I was about to burble something else just as embarrassing, but his hand clapped down on my shoulder in the way men do with their fellows. I blinked as I felt his grip, his fingers giving my shoulder a rough squeeze before pulling away.
“You’re better now?”
Was I?
Perhaps not yet, but I would be. I nodded, then prepared to give the appearance of being better before I actually was, if that would mitigate the shame I still felt.
Later I would realise that this was the moment when I reclaimed what I was, who I was. Pig was dead, swallowed up by dragons, just like Cecily and Arabella had been. Lady Pippa had been revived from the mud like some bedraggled phoenix and in the process had become Pippin. And Pippin? She was prepared to shoulder the responsibilities, the power of being a lady once more, because she was never going to be pushed down into the mud again.