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Chapter Twenty-Two

H arm couldn’t tear his gaze away from the pleading in Val’s deep brown eyes. The rest of her posture remained stiff, the hard expression frozen on her face.

But her eyes betrayed her. She was giving up everything—her home, her Wild Hunt band, her realm—to follow him to the Human Realm. He’d be an utter cad if he asked her to give up her friends as well.

Besides, friends who were loyal enough to follow her to a new realm were the kind they needed on their side. Even better if those friends were armed to the teeth. Especially for when they faced King Hendrik.

“Of course they can come. If”—Harm shot a stern glare at the five mercenaries—“they are willing to follow the laws of Tulpenland and listen to your orders.”

He might be the prince of Tulpenland, but these were Val’s mercenaries. She would be their leader, not him. And he was quite all right with that .

“Val’s our Wild Hunt leader. Of course we’ll follow her orders,” one of the female fee?n spoke up.

“But I can take Acurru, right? I can’t leave him behind.” The spokesman fee gestured toward the turquoise dragon at his feet.

Harm resisted the urge to sigh. “Yes. After all, we’ll be taking a sometimes-three-headed dog with us.”

He gestured to Daisy. The movement drew the dog’s attention, and she promptly sat on his foot, peering up at him with her ears slicked back in that particularly cute way of hers. Harm reached down and ran a hand over those soft ears.

“And my pet giant snails?” One of the male fee?n who hadn’t spoken until then lifted a crate where two snails the size of large cats left green slime marks on the wood.

“The snails too.” Harm pinched the bridge of his nose. The staid Tulpenlanders would have conniptions when he returned.

Oh, well. He’d made his choice when he married Val. If he had to abdicate and Gijs became the duke eventually, then so be it.

Assuming fifty years hadn’t gone by, and Gijs wasn’t already the duke.

“If that’s settled, perhaps some introductions would be in order.” Harm glanced from Val to the five mercenaries. “I’m Harm from Tulpenland.”

He didn’t give his full name nor his official title. They’d learn all of those eventually. But he was learning. Don’t given more information than necessary when here in the Fae Realm. Or Realm of Monsters, as the case might be.

The spokesman fee picked up his dragon, strode forward, and halted before Harm. He gave a respectful nod. “I’m Abelardo.”

The male fee with the snails was next. He grinned as he nodded. “Ignatius, but I go by Iggy.”

“Chela.” The first female mercenary stated. The second one nodded to him. “Jesenia.”

The final mercenary trundled closer. Even as tall as he was, Harm had to peer way up at the bare-chested, broad-shouldered male fee?n warrior. The massive sword the warrior held was over five feet tall.

Harm swallowed. “And who are you?”

The warrior stared down at him for a long moment, leather creaking in the silence. Then he spoke in a resonating bass. “I am Grutte.”

“Nice to meet you.” Harm forced the words out past a polite smile.

“We should leave.” Val gestured back the way they’d come. “The sound of the fighting is dying down. I don’t think we want to still be in the Realm of Monsters once a new Wild Hunt leader is chosen.”

With that, she took Harm’s hand again, and he found himself hauled across the desert. Rather willingly so.

He was less pleased about having to jump into a rift again. But at least this would be the last time.

As Val stepped into the rift, tugging him after her, he barely had time to suck in a deep breath before the squeezing, clawing, ripping feeling tore through him again .

Just when he thought the shreds of his being might disappear into the void between the realms, he was dragged out the other side. He coughed, releasing Val’s hand as he fell to his hands and knees on the burning sand on the other side of the rift. “That was just as—”

With a thump that vibrated through the sand beneath him, two huge azure dragons landed before them. Before Harm could do more than scramble upright, a large, scaled tail lashed forward, knocking Val and the other fee?n aside and curling around Harm’s waist.

He was hauled through the air, then plunked back to the sand behind the dragon. His legs buckled at the impact, and he would have fallen again if he hadn’t been held by the tail still wrapped around his torso. With the tail pinning him so thoroughly, he couldn’t even reach the sword stuffed in the magical pocket of his leather jerkin.

In a blink, the second dragon transformed into a fee?n woman with brown hair and blue eyes and wearing a blue woolen dress edged in white fur. Something about her seemed vaguely familiar, though Harm didn’t have much of a chance to wrack his brain to remember.

The dragon holding him gave a low growl, fire licking around his jaws. Val drew her sword, standing at the front of her cluster of mercenaries, all of them dropping into fighting stances as if they thought they could fight off two dragons. Although, Grutte’s massive broadsword looked big enough to whack the head off a dragon.

The female fee —dragon?—stepped closer to him, placing her back to the others. She held out her hand to him, then uncurled her fingers to show him something small and red resting on her palm. “We’re here to rescue you. How are you bound? If it’s a captive binding, we can take off right now. If you’re blood-bound, things will get more complicated.”

“Uh, neither?” Harm stared at the little red flower she held. A wild fae primrose. Just like that flower the strange human man had given him at the faerie market.

These dragons were a part of the Primrose League. He could trust them.

If they didn’t flambé his wife and her friends first.

Harm hurriedly shoved the leather cuff up his arm to show the gold line. “I have a marriage binding. That’s my wife.”

At the same time, Val pointed her sword at the other dragon’s face and shouted, “Let my husband go!”

The dragon swung his huge head around, and his slitted eyes focused on Harm. When he spoke, his lips peeled back to reveal fangs nearly as long as Grutte’s sword. “Is that true?”

“Yes!” Harm held up his arm to show the other dragon the golden line from the marriage binding. “I was fully willing. As was she.”

When the dragon swung his head back to Val, she had stowed her sword in her pocket so that she, too, could shove the leather cuff out of the way to reveal the matching golden line around her wrist. She then drew the iron knife and held that up, pressing the flat of the blade to her forearm. “This is an iron knife. Clearly I’m immune. ”

The dragon stretched his head forward, and Harm tensed as the dragon’s huge maw got far too close to Val. Yet Val remained unflinching as the dragon sniffed the blade in her hand.

With a puff of smoke into Val’s face, the dragon withdrew and shook his head as if he’d just snorted pepper. “Yes, that’s iron, all right.” The dragon released his tail’s grip on Harm.

Harm steadied himself and tugged at the now even more tattered remnants of his bloodstained shirt.

In a blur, the dragon shifted into a fee?n male with brown hair and blue eyes that matched the female dragon- fee . He flashed a grin that was only mildly less toothy. “Sorry about that. The Wild Fae Primrose sent us to rescue you.”

“I remember you now.” Harm waved between the two dragons. “You were at the Dragon Moot. Taran and Tora, right? You bargained for me.”

“Tried to bargain for you.” The female, Tora, grimaced and gave a flick of her hair.

“We didn’t succeed.” The male, Taran, crossed his arms. “So we tracked you to Warlord Zaya.”

“Then to the desert.” Tora took up the thread the moment Taran stopped for a breath. “We’ve been flying overhead for an hour now.”

“Trying to decide if we should follow through a rift.”

“But we didn’t know which rift would lead to the right Wild Hunt band.”

“Not that we couldn’t take on a Wild Hunt by ourselves. ”

“But we didn’t want to miss you and risk that you’d be killed before we got there.”

“Quite convenient that you popped out right where we were patrolling.”

“Saved us a lot of trouble.”

Harm coughed to interrupt. “Pardon the question, but are the two of you twins?”

“Yes.” Tora smiled, flashing brilliantly white teeth. “How did you guess?”

“We are obvious about it.” Taran elbowed his sister.

“Though we aren’t quite up to finishing each other’s sentences.” Tora jabbed her brother in the ribs with a finger.

“Not for lack of trying.”

“All right then.” Val marched forward to Harm’s side. Daisy stuck so close to Val’s heels that she nearly tripped Val several times.

The rest of the mercenaries hung back, as if waiting for Val and Harm to finish the negotiations before they made a move.

When Val halted next to Harm, she laid a protective hand on his arm. “As you can see, he doesn’t need rescuing. So we’ll be on our way.”

“We can help with that.” Taran gestured from himself to his sister. “Unless you want to walk hours across the scorching hot desert.”

As it was late afternoon, they had several hours of heat remaining before the desert cooled for the evening. Yet even if they walked the whole night through a monster-infested, rift-filled desert, they wouldn’t cross the whole Court before morning .

“We’re fine.” Val’s grip on Harm’s arm tightened, as if she was preparing to drag him across the desert again. She’d gone all prickly and stiff in that way of hers.

“You’re a mercenary. You don’t have access to the Anywhere Doors. We do.” Tora waved from herself to her brother. “That would save you a lot of time.”

Harm stilled, meeting Val’s eyes. “I need to return home as soon as possible. I’ve already been gone too long. And these dragons are with the Wild Fae Primrose. Maybe they can walk the faerie paths.”

“I wouldn’t get your hopes up there.” Tora twirled a section of her hair around a finger.

Taran shrugged. “We don’t know that we don’t have that skill. We did well in training.”

Tora’s gaze swerved away from them. “This is our first mission for the Primrose.”

“It’s actually our parents’ mission, but they got caught up at the Dragon Moot.” Taran met Harm’s gaze with an easy smile. “But we’ve passed all the Primrose’s training.”

Harm resisted the urge to drop his head into his hand. All right, so perhaps accepting help from these dragons wasn’t such a good idea. But what other choice did they have?

He turned to Val. “I’m tired of walking.”

Val heaved a sigh. “Fine. We’ll take the dragons up on their offer.” Her gaze dropped to Daisy, who was trying to curl up on top of Val’s feet. “I suppose Daisy will survive one more dragon flight.”

Without waiting another moment, the twins transformed back into their massive dragon forms. Daisy whined and pressed against Val as if trying to disappear.

Taran lowered his head to inspect first Harm and Val, then the other five mercenaries. “Are all of you coming?”

“Yes, they are.” Harm dredged up the last shreds of his courage to face the dragon’s large, slitted gaze. Even knowing these dragons were friendly, something inside him was shaking. “Val is married to me, and these fae are her Wild Hunt. They’re all coming back to the Human Realm with me.”

“That is…highly irregular.” Tora puffed a cloud of gray smoke down at the cluster of mercenaries.

To their credit, none of them backed up, even as they coughed from the smoke.

“I’m not sure if we’re allowed to turn a Wild Hunt loose on the Human Realm.” Taran tilted his huge head, the horns running down his back winking in the far-too-hot afternoon sun.

“They’re with me. I’ve given them permission to enter my duchy.” Harm struggled to keep his knees from knocking together as both dragons focused on him. It would have been far less intimidating if they’d had this conversation while both of the dragons had been in their fae forms.

“I’m not sure you truly understand what you’re doing.” Taran snorted a cloud of smoke at Harm.

Harm coughed and waved a hand in front of his face. “Perhaps not. But I trust Val. She will keep her mercenaries in line.”

Tora bumped Taran with her tail. “We can clear it with the Primrose before we escort them all the way to the Human Realm.”

“Good plan.” Taran turned back to Harm, Val, and the mercenaries. “All right, everyone climb on. We’ll be taking you home to our mountain for the night.”

“Climb on? You aren’t just going to grip us in your claws?” Harm shifted closer to Val. “That’s what the other two dragons did.”

“You’re not prey. We’ll at least give you the dignity of riding on our backs.” Tora shrugged as she lowered herself to her belly in the sand, sticking out a leg.

“But don’t ask about saddles. We aren’t beasts of burden.” Taran, too, lay in the sand and stretched out a leg.

Harm shared a look with Val before he bent and picked up a shaking Daisy. “One more adventure on our way home? At least they aren’t trying to eat me.”

“Not yet,” Val muttered as she led the way climbing up Tora’s leg.

With his arms full of terrified dog, Harm struggled to walk up the leg, and Val turned back several times to tug him up. He settled into a seat at the base of Tora’s neck, wedging himself between two of her spikes. Val sat behind Harm and wrapped her arms around the spike and his waist, as if she planned to somehow hold Harm onto the dragon.

Chela and Abelardo with Acurru climbed onto Tora as well while Jesenia, Ignatius, and Grutte climbed onto Taran, though Taran gave a grunt when Grutte settled into a spot.

Once they were all on the dragons, the two dragons spread their wings. With a short run, the two dragons hurled themselves into the air one after the other.

Harm gripped Tora’s long, scaly neck with his legs while he clutched Daisy to his chest. The dog flailed and scratched at him, as if trying to climb up and over his shoulder, distracting him from the way his stomach remained somewhere buried in the sand rapidly disappearing below.

But at least he was finally headed home.