Page 33 of The Dragon Queen Complete Series Collection

Chapter 33

I was in a world of pain when I got out of the saddle back at the keep. So much so I found my legs crumpling up and giving way beneath me. The trip from my estate had been sedate, indeed, compared to this. We’d soared back and forth, up and down the allotted coastline, but didn’t see any more ships. Before I could hit the ground though, strong arms grabbed me and I was swept up into Ged’s arms.

“The tanner’s son saving the fair lady.” Draven smirked as he performed an exaggerated swoon. “They’ll be telling your story down on Cheapside, performing it on stage with a boy for?—”

“Highness, the general has asked to speak with you before you return to the palace,” Brom said, staring placidly at the prince even as he interrupted him.

Draven’s mulish expression betrayed his reaction, but nothing more than that. He slapped his gloves against his thigh and then nodded sharply before turning to go.

“I can walk—” I started to say.

Glimmer had crawled out of my jacket and was now sitting on my stomach, chittering and crooning to Ged.

“I’ve carried many a lad downstairs whose legs have given out,” Ged told me.

“They’re usually tossed over your shoulder like a sack of grain though,” Flynn said with a measured look.

“He drops them on the mess tables like a sack too,” Soren observed with a small smile.

“Really, I can?—”

“Shh.”

Ged’s voice was low and gentle and perhaps that’s why my mouth fell closed, right up until we walked into the mess hall. I began to protest again, especially as everyone turned to stare, though perhaps that wasn’t at me.

“Intercepted several ships from Athaxia,” Brom said to the quiet hall. “They’ll be dining with the god of the seas tonight.”

That broke the silence as tankards were raised and cheers went up around the hall. Ged set me down on a bench seat, Glimmer clambering onto the tabletop, sniffing around at the dishes placed there before us.

“Uh uh, you greedy thing,” Nancy, the serving maid from before, told my dragon, ignoring her hisses when she yanked the platter of lamb roast away, but replaced it with a dish of raw meat. Glimmer regarded her with all of the poise of a born queen before deigning to shove her snout into the bowl.

“So how was your first patrol, Pippin?” Flynn asked me. “I told Brom that Ged’s incapable of teaching a woman anything.” The man in question picked up a roll and threw it at Flynn’s head, but he just snatched it out of the air and put it on his plate, smearing it with butter. “If you’ve need of a better teacher?—”

“As if you’d do any better,” Ged shot back before turning to me. “Wet around the ears. He’s fast.” Flynn preened at this. “Too fast, hey Nancy?”

By the sound of several men’s laughs around the hall, this comment obviously had… another meaning to it.

“As if I’d be telling tales, living with you lot,” Nancy replied, pouring out glasses of wine for everyone. “But if her ladyship?—”

“Pippin,” I corrected.

“If Pippin ever wants… inside information, she can come and talk to any one of us maids.” She winked at me. “We have the truth of the matter, not these blustering fools.”

“Now, Nancy…” Ged began to say, but my attention was drawn to a man who approached our table, a slightly bedraggled bouquet of flowers in his hand. Men began to chatter the closer he got, though the flower bearer didn’t seem to care. He moved with that kind of eminently masculine style of lope, all ease and confidence.

Right up until he appeared before me.

“And what do you want, Martyn?”

All the humour was stripped from Ged’s voice and I felt him shift closer as he stared the man down.

“Not here to see you,” Martyn replied, eyes narrowing, but all of that hostility washed away when he looked down at me. He was tall, so very tall and with long blond hair that looked like it needed a good comb, his eyes bright blue. “My lady?—”

“Pippin.” I let out a huff of breath. “Can a message be sent around or something? It’s Pippin, just Pippin.”

Just Pippin knew what this was, lady or no. I’d read about it in books, been prepared for it by my father, but that didn’t make this any easier. I dragged my eyes down, not able to look at his face, so instead I saw his hands, big, capable, broad hands, fiddling with the faded purple ribbon wrapped around the bunch of flowers.

“Pippin then. These are for you.”

I knew what to do. I’d been schooled in exactly how to graciously receive a token of admiration, but that abandoned me now. I just stared as he offered the flowers, the chatter in the background seeming to get louder the longer I waited. Take them! a sharp voice said inside my head and that’s what forced my hand up to accept the gift.

“Lilacs?” Flynn plucked the bouquet from my hands and then made a face at the smell. “We can’t have them in our suite. Terrible smelling things.” He tossed the bouquet onto the table to the sound of my protest.

“Bugger the flowers then,” Martyn said and his rough voice caught my attention. I stared up at him and he stared back, moving closer. “I just wanted to bring you something. A gift.”

“Thank you, Martyn,” I replied, finally remembering the pleasantries required. “They are lovely. I personally quite like the scent of lilacs.”

His reaction was instantaneous, all that intensity relieved by a dazzling smile.

“Well then, I came over here to see if you’d be interested in sitting with my wing for dinner.”

I opened my mouth before I even thought of what to say, knowing that I needed to say something. But before I could, Ged did. His arm wrapped around my shoulders and he tugged me in as close to his body as he had on dragon back.

Except right now there was no real need.

“Pip sits with us,” he growled at the other man and Martyn’s eyes hardened exponentially at that.

“Seems like she can choose to go wherever she damn well wants, until she’s earned her stripes and is assigned a wing,” Martyn shot back.

“I’ll bring you some roses from the market,” Flynn promised me. “This flower seller I know has some that are the most beautiful shade of apricot.”

“Brom, we need to—” Soren started to say.

“I know.”

I blinked, the quiet that crept over the table feeling as palpable as a gentle breeze on my face. The wing commander threw down his bread and then jerked himself to his feet.

“I thought I could at least have my dinner first, but it appears not. Martyn, you’ll return to your table.” The other man’s expression grew darker. “Pippin will take your token back to her room and she’ll consider your offer, once I’ve had a chance to talk to her about the way things are. If she accepts, she’ll join you at your wing’s table when it suits her.”

The other man nodded more slowly then, but some of his anger had bled away.

“Yes, sir.”

“Flynn, stop talking about flowers. Ged, let go of the girl. You don’t own her.”

This was true. I was relieved for Brom’s intervention, but at the same time I missed the heavy reassuring warmth of Ged’s arm.

“Nancy, make us up two plates and have them delivered to our suite. I don’t trust these two not to devour every choice morsel you bring out.”

“Right you are,” she replied and then bustled away to do just that.

But when Brom turned to me, I felt like a naughty child, even though I’d sat there quietly not saying much of anything. It was those hazel eyes. They seemed to see, sense, everything and then he nodded.

“Pippin, we need to go for a little walk.”

He held out a hand, and I found myself moving automatically, rising to my feet and grabbing it with my own. I went to pick up Glimmer, but he shook his head.

“I’ll look after your beastie,” Soren said, moving up the table to sit by Ged. “She’ll be back in your room when you’re done with the commander.”

I trusted Soren, any of the men on the table, to look after Glimmer, but she let out a sharp trill when she saw me moving away from her. I sent out what I hoped were reassuring thoughts, even as I felt very little of that confidence myself. I allowed myself to be drawn out of the crowded mess hall, feeling everyone’s eyes on us until Brom opened a door and led me up to a darkened battlement.

“You don’t have a father or a brother to do this,” he said, staring out into the near darkness. A thin slice of sun hovered on the horizon, about to be swallowed by night. “Or an uncle or a cousin, so the responsibility falls to me.” Brom turned then and that’s when I felt our differences. I was tall, but he was so much taller, the line of his massive shoulders dark against the fading sky. “We told you about our lives, how a rider must live.”

He wasn’t talking about their bond with dragons, nor how they cleaned their beasts’ teeth, I was willing to bet. The words, hard, spare, containing all of the emotion they kept locked away, came back to me in a rush.

“Alone.” That’s all I could squeeze out.

“Alone,” he agreed. “Though not really. We have a brotherhood here, a family of sorts, complete with some dysfunctional relationships, just like a blood family. That’s what a rider gets when he walks away from the family he was born into. Camaraderie, loyalty, good, strong men at your back to help you to get through anything life might throw at you.”

“But no wife.” My voice felt too sharp, too precise, but then I frowned. “No children?”

Obviously the riders had sex with those serving women who were responsive to them, but how did they avoid clogging the keep with unwanted children?

“No children,” Brom confirmed. “The women here all take a herb to prevent pregnancies, something I’ll be instructing Nancy to provide for you, if you wish to take it.”

“But that’s not what you brought me out here to talk about.” My mind began to race. “Conversations have been had. Decisions have been made… about me?”

“We have no wives, no sweethearts, because we can only give a woman a small slice of our hearts.” His nails raked across his leather clad chest. “Our dragons fill ours, and then when the queen dragon goes into heat…”

I started as something occurred to me, and I searched his face, as if that would confirm or deny it.

“I might want to stay faithful to a lass, give her my heart, cleave my body only to hers, but all of that goes to hell the minute the queen rises. A fever hits us, sweeping all thought, all regard away and leaving only…”

“Need.”

I’m not sure why I knew the answer to that. I’d had no experience to back it up, but somehow I knew.

“Need.” He nodded, taking a step forward, then stopping when I backed up. “Some women could bear that, but coupled with the feeling of always being second best? It was tried back in the early days of the dragon corps, but the sheer number of divorces meant it was ruled out. A lad who bound himself to a dragon did so knowing he would have no partner that could share his heart, none but his dragon.”

His fingers flexed, like he wanted to do something, grab something, but he held himself back.

“Because the only woman who knows what we feel, what we endure, is the queen.”

“And me.” I swallowed hard, but the lump in my throat wouldn’t budge. “I’m the one not bound to any man.”

“Not yet. The general agreed that men can declare their intention to court you, as long as you are receptive to their overtures. Martyn is just one of many about to push themselves forward, trying to catch your eye.”

“No…” I held my hands up to ward him off, but he hadn’t moved an inch. “No, they can’t?—”

“They will and a good many of them by the look of things. The general felt it was for the best. Get you married off and under the protection of one of the men. You’re not a maid to be taken without thought.”

That rankled me, though what he said wasn’t unexpected. I’d heard many a man talk about women of the serving classes before, as if they were disposable. Didn’t mean I had to like it, though.

“You’ll get offers, many offers and if anyone is making a pest of himself or trying to take liberties, you’ll come to me. I am your protector until you choose someone else.”

I snorted, raked my hand across my stubbled scalp and then began to pace. Words formed in my throat but went unspoken, because what could I say? What the hell could I bloody say to this? I’d been blithely unaware of who might see me as potential wife material before my stepmother and Arabella came to the estate, then any hopes I’d had were dashed. Even without my stepsister’s cruel analysis of my looks, I’d seen the way men fawned upon Arabella, bending over backwards to get her glancing their way. But this? I stopped my pacing and stepped forward, staring into Brom’s face and wishing Glimmer was grown. She could read his mind for me, tell me what he was thinking and whether or not this was just some terrible joke.

“But not you?” I was fishing terribly for his attention, for some sort of clue about how he felt about this. “I won’t need anyone to protect me from you.”

He answered with actions not words, striding forward, herding me backwards until my back hit the cold stone and then his hands slapped down upon it on either side of my head.

“Don’t make that mistake, lass.”

“What?”

“I can just about see the cogs in your head whirring; trying, testing every word I say, despite knowing full well it's true.” He moved forward, looming above me, a dark shadow now, not the dour wing commander. “You think this makes a difference.” His big palm cupped my head and he ran a hand over my scalp. “Like anything can take away your beauty.” My mouth opened to speak, but he pressed his thumb across the gap there. “Yes, beauty. Beautiful enough to draw a man’s eye, have him moving closer, wanting to catch your scent in his nose, to feel you shiver beneath him, because you are a terrible thing, Lady Pippa.”

His head came down, getting closer and closer, but he stopped himself from closing the gap between our mouths, even as my lips pulled free of his thumb and tipped up for him.

“A combination of complete artlessness and… hope.” I heard the pain in his voice at that last word. “There’s nothing more seductive than that.”

He pulled away from me, leaving me plastered against the keep wall, unable to move, just staring at the sky until the stars began to appear. Eventually, I peeled myself away, stumbling down the steps while my cold, stiff muscles protested, but I forced them to move and keep on moving until I reached our suite. My hand rested on the door, not sure I was ready to step inside and face whoever lurked within, but… Where else was I to go? Glimmer was in there, anyway, I could feel her.

And so was Draven.

My dragon was perched on his arm, chittering away as she peered at him, cocking her head to one side then the other, before she squawked, sensing I had returned. She jumped off his arm and ran across the table, reaching the closest chair and launching herself at me, forcing me to leap forward to catch her.

“Sweet little thing,” he told me with a mocking smile. “But eminently unsuited to bearing the next generation of dragons. She should be twice that size by now.”

I shook my head, not willing to say a thing because if I did, it would likely be treasonous.

“Sit.”

I couldn’t disobey a direct order from the crown prince, not without a head full of steam. He pushed a plate towards me, the savoury scents making my mouth water even as my guts roiled.

“You’ll need your strength. Mother isn’t happy about it, but the general and Father have agreed you’ll make a good little wife for some ‘lucky rider’.” Those cruel blue eyes seemed to watch my every movement, taking undue interest in the way I cut up my meat, then put it into my mouth. Finally he snorted and looked away. “Seems like a fool’s errand, because there are cadets who look more womanish than you, but needs must. Tomorrow you start the process of finding yourself a husband.”