Page 38 of The Dragon Queen Complete Series Collection

Chapter 38

“This way, lass.”

Soren’s voice was a rope of strength tugging me forward now that I was clean and dressed. But it seemed to me we were heading the wrong way.

We arrived at the open door of the suite and the first thing I saw was Glimmer. I lumbered forward and she launched herself from Flynn’s arms, damn near flying to get to me. I hugged her tight, her usual string of strange sounds growling louder and more frantic as she burrowed her head into my chest.

What came from her was fear and anger and pain and need, all tumbled over and over until the emotions tangled up, becoming just a deep discontent. Not for the first time I slid my finger down her spine, her small scales feeling so smooth. She nestled in tighter, seeming to need more, so I gently stroked my hand along her whole body until I heard a gentle purr.

“She felt it.” Flynn didn’t pull his punches, looking very pale. “Glacier tells me Glimmer felt everything that…” He looked up at Brom. “Why the hell did he do this to Pippin?”

“The political landscape has changed greatly since the crown prince died,” was Brom’s only reply, his arms crossing his chest. “But not so much to warrant this kind of behaviour. The punishment completely and utterly eclipsed the severity of the offense. Ged should’ve stepped in though. As proctor, it falls to him to keep cadets from going too far.”

Except as far as all of us had known, we hadn’t. It had appeared the prank had been a common one before now.

“Where is Ged?” I asked.

“Sit down, drink some water and have something to eat,” Soren said, ushering me over to the table where they had set out a meal and a large carafe of water for me.

“I will, but not here,” I replied.

“Lass—”

“I’m not going to hide away in my room. I’m not.” I stared at each one of them, making clear my intent. I was slow to anger, but when I was? I didn’t back down. And I wasn’t going to start doing so now. “I’ll go to the mess hall and eat where everyone else does. Lunch is over, it will be largely empty, but I won’t hide. I won’t. Now, where is Ged?”

Serving out his own punishment, it appeared. When he’d heard about mine, when Cloudy showed him how it was going for me, he wouldn’t stand for it. He’d stormed into Draven’s office and when he was removed from there, he started making a fuss in the mess hall. He was sitting in a cell right now, awaiting his sentence.

“What?”

My voice was sharp, loud, but as we walked into the mess hall, I forced it to quietness.

“Insubordination,” Soren said bluntly and while he frowned at that, I got the feeling it was the punishment, not Ged, that made him angry. “He’ll sit and stew in a cell until he gets his lashes. The prince himself has to dole them out. Sit here, Pippin.”

He chose a table close to the entrance and I admit, I sank down into it gratefully. I grabbed a carafe and sloshed water into a glass, guzzling it down before going to refill it.

“Slowly.” Brom’s hand reached out and stopped mine. “It won’t help if you drink it too fast. You’ve depleted your reserves and probably have an awful headache.”

I nodded, frowning when I felt tears pricking my eyes, the movement both stopping them from falling and causing more pain.

“Of course, she has.” Nancy appeared at our table with concern in her eyes and she just shook her head before depositing a mug in front of me. “Drink that up. You’ll bloody hate me when you do, but drink it anyway. It’ll help the head and everything else that ails you.”

I sniffed at the mug, jerking my head back at the smell of it, but she just stared me down, looking the picture of a concerned mother. Mine had done the same, when I came down with a fever or a sniffly nose. She’d forced horrible tinctures down my throat, following them with a spoonful of honey, then put me to bed. I nodded to Nancy, drinking and keeping on drinking, even as the acrid taste hit my tongue.

“Bah!” My gut jumped and rebelled, ready to eject this noxious brew, but I took one shuddering breath after another and managed to keep it down.

“Now plenty of water, slowly. She needs a cup in her hand for the rest of the day,” the serving woman told the riders, no allowance made now for their rank.

“She will,” Soren promised. “I’ll see to it personally.”

“But you must have lessons to attend with the cadets.”

“No classes for the cadets right now,” Flynn said with a wry smile. “They weren’t happy when they saw how Draven responded to the prank.”

“Prince Draven,” Brom corrected.

“But that punishment? He thought he was teaching them a lesson, marching you through the keep looking like you’d been rolling in a dung heap.” I winced at that. “But it did the opposite. You took the fall for the others.”

“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said as I buttered my bread and took a tentative bite. Glimmer crooned to me then and somehow that made sure the mouthful stayed down.

“Well, that engenders a certain degree of camaraderie among cadets,” Flynn said. “Remember when we got caught stealing the old general’s drawers and hoisting them up the flagpole.”

“Ged got caught,” Brom said, and in that moment, I saw the man, not the wing commander. His spine seemed to soften as he leaned on the table, his lips curving in a smile. “Wouldn’t give us away though.”

“No matter what kind of… persuasion I tried to use on him,” Soren said with a smile. “Never was as proud of him as I was then. Not sure if I ever was afterwards. Little bastard.”

“You were their drill sergeant as well?” I asked him.

“It was my first position of command. I was young and they were younger so mistakes were made.”

Chuckles went up and down the table, but then they looked pointedly at my plate.

“Let me get you a fresh one from the kitchen,” Nancy said. “That’s all gone cold.”

I nodded my thanks, tearing my bread roll into small pieces and then eating them slowly as they shared some of their anecdotes.

“Brom. Milady.”

I looked up to see several riders standing before us.

“Not now, Leander,” Brom replied. “You can see that Pippin is still recovering.”

“I haven’t come about that. Well…” He looked me over, something hot flaring in his gaze when he did so, but he seemed to tamp that down. “Not right now. We’ve come about the other business.”

“There’s talk.” Another of Leander’s riders shouldered forward. “The cadets are proposing some form of protest. Being a cadet is tough, necessarily tough, and the pranks they play on riders? That was always seen as a pressure valve, a way to let off all the steam that’s building in them. We’ve always got involved in good faith, remembering what it was like to be in that position. It builds morale. But this…”

The rider seemed to see all of me just then and the look of concern on his face had me shifting on my seat, Glimmer tensing on her perch on my shoulder.

“To brutalise a woman like that and one of noble birth. If he’d tried that kind of bullshit with one of my sisters?—”

“Peace, Victor,” Brom said, then gestured for them to join us at our table. “The prince will make amends to the cadets.”

“He’ll need to do more than that to gain back their good favour,” another rider said. “They are the men who will serve him when he takes the throne.”

And throw their support behind his claim, that went unspoken.

“Then there’s Ged,” Leander said. “Gods know the man can play the fool at times, but this? People are saying the general will strip him of his proctor duties.”

“He might not want to do the job after this,” Soren said darkly.

“And who would?” Victor said. “When the lads… and the lady,” he nodded to me, “are just doing the same damned things we did when we were young, but for some reason there’s a very different outcome.”

“What’s the outcome?” I realised now that no one had specified exactly what was to happen to Ged. All of the men just stared at me. Glimmer made a disgruntled little growl, fluttering her wings. “What will Draven do to Ged?”

I found out. They hadn’t wanted me to, and it took me refusing to eat a bite more before they’d tell me.

Ged was to get ten lashes.

“Whipped?!”

We stood some hours later in what was the courtyard at the base of the keep, a battered wooden post complete with steel rings to bind the accused to. My body had surrendered, to the water in the shower, to Nancy as she helped scrub me down and then to the riders as they escorted me to the mess, but all of that was shoved to one side when I found out the rider’s fate.

“That’s the customary punishment for insubordination.” Brom watched me steadily.

“But he wasn’t even responsible?—”

“He was afterwards.” Soren’s voice was low and sombre. “He damn near tore the door off Draven’s office trying to get him to reverse his order.”

“None of us wanted this for you,” Flynn said, his usual easy-going expression absent. He shook his head, then glanced at Brom. “We half-thought Draven was just trying to scare you, ruffle your feathers. He seems to like doing that all too well.” He let out a sigh, his fingers tracing circles on the tabletop. “We didn’t think he would go that far, and then he did.”

“And now…?”

People were massing in the yard, taking position around the whipping post to watch the proceedings. The mood was quiet, tense, and Glimmer seemed to sense that, shifting down into my arms so I might hold her close to my chest.

“Ged just needs to take his licks like we all have in the past,” Flynn replied, but as he stared at the post, there didn’t seem to be any certainty there. As if in counterpoint, I heard the far off roars of several dragons from the eyrie. That just seemed to set the mood as Draven stepped out into the circle, Ged coming out moments later, escorted with his wrists bound behind his back. I couldn’t focus on him, though. The whip in Draven’s hand that had my full attention. “Thank the gods, he isn’t going to use the horse whip.”

“Can’t tear a man’s back apart for a prank,” Soren said grimly. “The whole keep would be in an uproar.”

So what were they going to do? I wanted to ask, but my tongue felt glued to my mouth, my eyes darting as I tried to take everything in, decoding for myself how this would go.

But I didn’t expect what happened next.

“No need to bind me,” Ged said, as soon as his wrists were free. He rubbed the skin there, then smiled. “I’ll take my lashes the same way I always have.”

I watched him jerk open his jacket, then tear his shirt up and over his head, revealing his bare chest to the whole courtyard. I was willing to bet the others didn’t rake their eyes across his muscular form like I did, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself. Not when he performed a mocking salute to the crowd, nor when his smile faded and his eyes met mine. He watched me watch him until the crowd started to mumble, then he dropped down to his knees before the post, gripping the steel rings with his hands.

“Ten lashes,” Draven said in a flat voice. “Count each one.”

Right up until the moment that Draven drew his arm back, a part of me thought this wouldn’t happen. That this was all for show, a flexing of his royal muscles, showing just how much power he could wield over us. It turned out he needed to do so literally as well as figuratively, because with a deadly accuracy, the prince flicked the whip, sending the slender end lashing across Ged’s back.

“One.”

My heart felt like it stood still as I saw the red welt appear, as Ged was forced to grind out the count. But any sense of unreality was about to be stripped from me as surely as it was from Ged. Draven didn’t stop and call it done. He just gritted his teeth and went back for more.

No.

No.

No, no, no, no.

I started mumbling this over and over, watching every damn man in the courtyard and wondering when one of them, more than one of them would step forward and stop this. But they didn’t. The general spoke to his aide-de-camp, not even really watching what was going on. And the others? They just stood and stared. A thin sound of distress rose in my throat, one that far outstripped the ones I’d made when enduring my own punishment.

Because this felt far worse.

Glimmer crawled to my shoulder, her claws digging deep and as I leant into the pain, she emitted a tentative little crooning noise.

I felt my dragon’s moods, her responses to things, sometimes just as a brush of another consciousness against mine, other times she shoved her emotions at me, overriding my own. But this? Her reaction was cautious, uncertain, like a small hand squeezing mine, trying to offer comfort.

But I wouldn’t be comforted.

“Lass, you’ve seen enough,” Soren said, putting a hand on my shoulder, but I shrugged it off, refusing to be turned away.

“I can’t walk away from this,” I told him, not looking away from Ged for a second, not as his nerve seemed to break and he groaned out each number, not as Draven grunted with the effort of wielding the whip. “He’s doing this for me. I can at least bear witness.”

“He wouldn’t want you seeing him like this,” Flynn said.

“He’ll have to tell me that himself,” I snapped.

“He’ll be going to the infirmary after this,” Brom informed me.

“And I’ll go with him.”

If they said anything else, I didn’t hear it. Not the riders, not the crowd, nothing but this. The sound of the dragons roaring in the background, their great bellows seeming to shake the very earth beneath us, creating a counterpoint to the brutal rhythm Draven had set.

And then Glimmer seemed determined to provide her own response to this.

She crooned for me at strange times. Sometimes it was obviously to soothe me and at other times I was yet to determine her intent. But now? Her little throat vibrated with a sound that far outstripped all her efforts thus far. It felt like it shook me to the core and perhaps this was a contagious thing, because the roars fell away and became something more.

I hadn’t wanted to cry. I hated to cry at the best of times, not when I was herding pigs and especially not in a keep of men. But I did right then. I couldn’t bloody stop it, not with Glimmer’s and the other dragons’ song filling the courtyard, filling me.

And everyone else in the courtyard.

I knew that they were affected too, because any chatter stopped and all eyes went to the skies, as if the answers could be found there. Even Draven paused, the whip held between lax fingers. The song went on and on, just a sonorous sound without cadence or discernible melody, but no less profound for it. I jerked free of Soren’s grip, Glimmer still singing with all of her might as we pushed our way through the crowd and towards Ged.

“Lass…” He panted out the word, barely able to look up at me. His face dripped sweat and he protested when I slid down beside him. “You can’t… I’m nearly…”

“You’re done.” I had no place, no authority to announce this, but I did so anyway, my hands reaching up to cup his face and he closed his eyes then, turning to press a kiss into my palm. “Come on, we need to get you to the infirmary.”

I got to my feet on shaking legs, sure the whip would be raised again, for me this time, but I didn’t stop. I stared into the prince’s eyes, but what I saw there surprised me.

I had expected volcanic rage, cold fury or even his usual sneering humour, not this. There was anger in his eyes, certainly, but mostly, in that small, unguarded moment, there was fear. What the hell could a prince fear, I wondered, especially one who wielded a damn whip. But as I searched his face for answers, I saw another emotion rise.

Wonder.

Pure, unadulterated and reverent wonder.