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Hail bit her lower lip. Bryn was always threatening to beat her. He had been threatening to beat her for as long as she could remember. Surely he wasn’t going to actually follow through on it.
“Told you I was going to whip you, girl. You’re well enough to talk to your friends and corrupt them with your disobedience, you’re well enough to feel this lash.”
“You’ll scare the whelps,” she said. “Waving that thing around. Haven’t they been through enough?”
“They won’t hear this, because you’ll take your punishment like the woman you are.”
“If I was a woman you respected, you wouldn’t be punishing me. You’d be praising me, or maybe giving me some pointers on how to avoid being beaten by a bearoark.”
“You want a tip on how to avoid being beaten by a bearoark? Stay the devil away from bearoarks.”
It wasn’t like Bryn to be sassy. He must have been very agitated. Hail was surprised. She had spent the last however many years annoying Bryn almost constantly. She had a private room because he didn’t trust her to not be a terrible influence on the others. They had butted heads time and time again.
The tension was greater now than it ever had been. It had been escalating since she came of age and had the birthday that usually heralded a marriage for a lyrakin whelpling. For the longest time, Bryn had been a big, safe lump of a man. But that had changed. Eighteen years of life made that change. Bryn was not just a big, safe lump. He was a large, virile man. He was exceptionally handsome, arguably at his most handsome when he was angry. Maybe that was why she liked to make him angry.
Something crackled in the air between them. Something that had to be wrong judging by the way Bryn avoided it.
“I’ve barely seen you in weeks, Bryn. You don’t talk to me anymore. What do you care if I fight a bearoark?”
His handsome brow quirked at her. “Is that the reason you did this? To get my attention? You’d risk your life just for a little time with your master?”
Now he was pitying her, and that was worse than punishing her as far as Hail was concerned. She did not want to be treated like a little girl. She wanted to be given some respect, and yes, attention.
Hail’s magic flared. She couldn’t help it. She felt threatened. She knew that what Bryn intended to do to her was going to hurt. Maybe the others accepted him as master, but Hail had never thought of him that way. Master implied a distance she had never really felt. They were closer than that, one way or another.
“I’m not going to let you punish me, Bryn. I didn’t do anything wrong.”
He scowled at her with all the displeasure in his massive body. “That last sentence is what tells me you need a whole host of thrashings, lass.”
He came toward her. She whispered something under her breath, a little charm which stopped him in his tracks.
“Really. A shield spell, girl. You use magic when you are right on the precipice of being punished for it.” Bryn’s expression was incredulous. “Drop this shield immediately.”
“Break through it. I know you can.”
It wasn’t something that could be overcome with brute force. It would require a little bit of magic. She smirked to herself, quite pleased at forcing Bryn to show his hand. The man who hated magic had more of it in him than anybody she’d ever met.
“Drop this shield, Hail, or I’ll double your punishment.”
Her smirk only grew wider as Bryn’s scowl grew deeper. She quirked a challenging brow right back at him.
“Break it, Bryn.”
“HAIL!” Bryn thundered her name. “You disobedient little wretch!”
She wasn’t going to bring it down, no matter how much he growled at her. She was going to force him to show his hand, to admit physically that he was just as magically talented as she was, if not more so. She could feel it on him, though she never quite got the full sense of it. He spent his entire life trying to pretend he hated the powers that ran through him. She didn’t understand why, and she was going to find out.
He glowered at her for a moment or two longer, but he had to have known her well enough to know that she would never back down. If he wanted to whip his disobedient whelp, he was going to have to break that shield.
Hail won the battle of wills but lost the war when Bryn cursed and came through the shield with a flash of warrior magic. He arrived on the other side more furious than ever and less than a foot away from her. She could see every annoyed line on his face.
“You know how to make a bad situation worse, lass,” he growled. “It’s like you want me to beat you.”
