“Ow! Viperous female!”
“You’re lucky I didn’t add blades to the lid so that they’d remove your fingers altogether.”
Sucking on his wounded body parts, the Fire Breather said around them, “As much as you love what I can do with my fingers? You’d only be hurting yourself in the long run.”
Dagmar slashed her hands through the air. “And now we’re done!” She grabbed the tin of cookies and held it to her chest.
Gwenvael snorted and leered, his eyes focused on Dagmar’s chest.
“Like that’ll stop me.”
Not really wanting to see any of that sort of thing, Ragnar stood and said, “I guess I’ll be—”
“Why are you here, Lightning?” the Gold asked.
Ragnar had thought Keita’s moods and whims were impossible to follow. But this dragon…Ragnar had no idea how Dagmar tolerated the bastard.
“Your mother sent for me,” he replied.
“Are you her puppet warlord chief now—ow!” He grabbed his forearm and glared at his mate. “Pinching? Now we’re pinching?” In even less of a mood for a fight than for leering, Ragnar confessed,
“She asked me to pick up her sister Esyld in the Outerplains.” The couple stared at each other for a moment before slowly focusing on him.
“Why did she want Esyld?” Dagmar asked.
“And you dragged her here?” Gwenvael demanded.
“I have no idea why she wanted to see Esyld,” he told Dagmar. “And I didn’t drag her anywhere,” he explained to her mate, “because she wasn’t there to be dragged.”
“She’s gone?”
“And has been for some time. Your mother seemed concerned about that. As did Keita. Perhaps you should talk to them about it.”
“I’m talking to you, Lightning.”
Ragnar smirked at Gwenvael. “Challenge me if you dare, Ruiner.
Although I’m sure Keita will miss your presence greatly. She seems fond of you.”
“That’s enough,” Dagmar said softly. “From both of you.” She gestured toward the door. “Let’s return to your brother and cousin, my lord. And then we can talk to Keita.” The two males continued to glare at each other until Dagmar added,
“Please don’t make me get terse.”
Ragnar could see from the Gold’s expression that he understood—as Ragnar did—that Dagmar’s terse was equivalent to a dragon army destroying an entire continent. They gestured to the front door and said to Dagmar together, “After you.”
Chapter Eighteen
“Here.” Talaith shoved the bundle into Keita’s arms. “Say hello to your newest niece since you couldn’t be bothered to come and meet her when she was born.”
“I thought you weren’t mad at me,” Keita complained, barely glancing at the child.
“And when, pray tell, did I say that? You fly off in a pouty princess rage and leave me, Dagmar, and Annwyl to deal with all that gods-damn brotherly whining that followed. You’re lucky I didn’t lock you in a room with those three.”
“It’s not like I lived here, Talaith. All of you rarely saw me anyway.”
“Very true. But your brothers have always been in contact with you.
At least once every few moons or so. But this time…nothing.” Wearing simple black leggings, a sheathed dagger tied to her right thigh, black leather boots that reached her knees, and a rather large grey cotton shirt, Talaith dropped into a chair. Considering how she dressed and, to a degree, how she acted, it amazed Keita that Talaith, Daughter of Haldane, was one of the most beautiful females she’d ever met. “And why is it that we haven’t heard from you exactly?”
“If you must know,” Keita said, holding the blanket-covered baby in her arms but staring out one of the windows and the bright sky just out of reach, “I guess I was embarrassed.”
“I didn’t know any of you were capable of being embarrassed.”
“Only the females have that issue,” she said without much thought.
Talaith laughed, and, as Keita glanced over to smile back, an impossibly tiny brown hand touched her chin. Something strong and electric shot through Keita’s system, and she immediately focused on the babe.
Wide violet eyes gazed up at her from a tiny brown face surrounded by curly silver hair. Not in all her years had Keita seen anything quite so beautiful. Quite so…clear. Yes. That was the word for it. Clear. Pure and clear and untouched by centuries of anything.
Voice thick with emotion, she said, “She has Briec’s eyes. And his hair color.”
“Aye,” Talaith agreed, watching Keita closely. “She does. And you do know what that means for the rest of us, don’t you?” Keita winced in sympathy, knowing exactly what it meant. “It means that as far as her father’s concerned, she’s the most perfect child ever to walk the world if for no other reason than she came from his loins?” Talaith briefly raised her hands. “Now you see what you’ve left us to deal with all this time. For that alone, we should oust you from the family ranks.”
Grinning, Keita asked, “Has my brother been completely insufferable?”
“He’s always been completely insufferable. Now he’s also intolerable.” The displaced Nolwenn witch rested the heel of her foot on the chair and wrapped her arm around her bent leg. “He adores that child as wolves adore the moon. All day, every day, we all hear about how perfect she is. ‘Look how she perfectly squeezes my finger. Look how she perfectly throws up her breakfast. Look how she perfectly shits her diapers.’ It’s endless!”
Keita laughed.
“Of course you laugh. You don’t have to live with it. And what will I do if she believes him? I mean arrogance in a man is one thing, since few of us take them seriously anyway, but in a woman? And if she becomes even a tenth as arrogant as Briec, then she’ll be well on her way to becoming—”
“My mother?”
Talaith agreed with a nod of her head and a flip of her hand.
“Exactly.”
Keita walked over to one of the bigger windows so she could get a good look at her niece in the bright light of day. She was an astoundingly beautiful child and barely a year and a half old, but it wasn’t her beauty that snared Keita. Nor was it the fact that she had her father’s eyes. It was what Keita saw in those eyes for someone so young. Intelligence. Vast intelligence and kindness. A benevolence and understanding that Keita had rarely seen in adult beings, much less the eyes of a child.
“Talaith…”
“I know. I know. Those eyes stop everyone in their tracks. And it’s not the color, is it? It’s like she can sense everything you feel or will ever feel.”
“If there’s truth to that, my friend, her life will not be easy.”
“I know that as well.”
Wincing that she had to ask the question because she had not been here to witness it or help, “Was it a hard birth for you?”
“Do you mean did I die, only to be brought back from the other side by a god so that I could slaughter a herd of Minotaurs trying to kill my child?”
Laughter wiped the awkward moment away, and Keita nodded.
“That’s exactly what I’m asking.”
“Sorry. Nothing so exciting as what happened to Annwyl. Just your typical, miserable labor with lots of screaming and swearing blood oaths at your brother for doing this to me. Very similar to my Izzy’s birth.” Talaith studied the babe in Keita’s arms. “But this time no one took my daughter from me. This time I can hold her whenever I want to. She’s mine to raise as I like.”
Knowing the human female spoke of how the god Arzhela had secured Talaith’s obedience for some sixteen years by holding her now-eldest daughter hostage, Keita said, “Gods, Izzy must be so excited by this.
Her own little sister.”
When Talaith didn’t answer, Keita looked away from her niece’s intense little face. “Talaith? You have told her, haven’t you?”
“Well, like you, Izzy hasn’t been home in two years.”
“So you haven’t told her? ”
“Don’t yell at me!”
“How could you not have told her?”
Talaith rubbed her forehead with her fingers. “It just never seemed the right time.”
“Well, two years later is certainly not the right time. It’s bad enough she didn’t even know you were pregnant, but when she finds out there’s been a child and no one told her—”
Talaith slapped her hand against her leg. “You know, for someone who hasn’t deigned to reward us with her presence in two bloody years, you certainly seem aware of what’s going on. And have opinions!” Iseabail, Daughter of Talaith and Briec, Future Champion of Rhydderch Hael—probably—Future General of Queen Annwyl’s Armies—She hoped! She hoped!—and sometimes Squire to Ghleanna the Decimator, kept her head down and tried hard not to show any reaction at all. She’d learned this approach after the first time her unit had come into one of these small towns, only to find it decimated by one of the barbaric Western tribes.
When she’d first arrived as a new recruit for Queen Annwyl, the troops often went into towns just like this one, either to protect the residents or to deal with the aftermath, if they were too late. But even when they were too late, they usually found only the men dead. The women and children were taken off to be slaves, and more than once, some of the units were able to rescue them before they’d been sold at the slave market.
But in the last eight months or so, things had changed. Instead of finding a lot of dead men, they’d been finding dead everything. Men, women, children, pets, cattle, crops. Nothing had been spared. And seeing a dead child for the first time had taken Izzy by surprise, leading to silent but noted tears. By the end of the evening, after cleaning up the bodies, she’d been called in front of her commander to be told not to be “so damn weak.” Izzy knew her commander was being intentionally cold. There was no other way to get through a day when you had to put one, let alone many, corpses of children on funeral pyres.
So Izzy had taught herself to stare at something innocuous. A tree. A cart. Today it was the bushes surrounding a burnt-out husk of a house. It was strange how the house had burned, leaving the lower-left frame standing but nothing else.
Grumbling about “bastard barbarians,” her commander began to snap out orders to the young recruits. “Grab this, get that, burn them…” It was all the same.
Not exactly the glamorous battle life Izzy still dreamed of, but she knew everyone had to start somewhere and it was her dreams of earning more that made getting through the set-up of more funeral pyres for the innocent tolerable.
“Iseabail,” her commander ordered, “check the rest of the houses.”
“Uh-huh,” Izzy said without thinking, her gaze catching something buried in the dirt by the burned house she’d been focusing on. She walked over to the husk and crouched down by what was left of the bushes.