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“Not nothing, Zabriel. I know where my family isn’t.”
She touches my cheek with a small smile on her lips and turns toward the stone bridge. I follow at her side, a clawing sensation in my guts. I have a terrible feeling that Captain Ashton will return with no news from the Grendu border, and the letter that I will write tonight and send to Grendu lands will turn up nothing either.
On the far side of the stone bridge, Godric greets me with a scroll in his hands. “A wingrunner unit was approached by a lone member of the Brethren by the barrier. He was unarmed, and he gave this to me, saying it was for the Flame King.”
I turn the scroll over in my hands and see that there’s an imprint in the wax seal. A triple chevron.
“That’s the High Priest’s seal,” Isavelle says. “I recognize the markings from his signet ring.”
I dart a look at her. The High fucking Priest has written me a letter? I want to hurl it away from me and have Scourge set it aflame. I open it, though it makes my lip curl in disgust to see letters written by his hand.
“Greetings to the usurper king…” I mutter as I start to read. He’s off to a great start. As my eyes follow the flourishing, arrogant script, I grow angrier and angrier. “It’s a proposal to cease hostilities between us, and a list of demands. If I surrender the capital and all the monasteries, I will be permitted to claim the southern mountain region of Maledin for my people and we will live undisturbed. An emissary will arrive in Lenhale shortly to accept my surrender. If I refuse, they will…” My jaw tightens angrily, and I have to force the words out. “…have no choice but to cleanse our parasitic presence from their homelands, beginning with our dragons.”
I ball up the missive angrily in my fists, imagining it’s the High Priest’s throat I’m twisting, and the crackling of the paper is the bones in his neck. This is the piece of wyvern shit who had my woman beaten and starved. She suffered at his hands, and he dares contemplate for a moment that I will surrender to him?
That man willburn.
Scourge has come to the other side of the stone bridge. I throw the balled-up paper into the air and he incinerates it with a blast of his dragonfire that lights us up as bright as a summer’s day and heats our faces.
There’s a short silence, and then Godric clears his throat. “One of the wingrunners is ready to return to the barrier with your reply.”
“I have fucking replied. He can go to hell.”
“And their emissary?”
I grasp Isavelle’s hand and stalk into the castle. “If that arrogant smear of shit wishes to send someone to bleat at my gates, he can waste his time.”
* * *
Two days later,I receive letters from unsettlingly intelligent silver falcons. The birds find me wherever I am and flutter to the nearest perch, offering their legs. I know before I read the tiny scrolls that the messages are from Grendu and these birds are influenced by magic.
The falcons bring me no good news from Grendu. Maledinni people haven’t been sighted across the border in Grendu. The king’s greeting to me is polite and flattering, but reading between the lines he implies that any Maledinni found on his side of the border will be immediately ejected.
“Your people haven’t changed in five hundred years,” I mutter to the falcon messenger, who pins me with fierce black eyes, ruffles her feathers, and whirrs away.
I’ve talked with Stesha about the threat to our dragons, and he’s stationed guards around the dragons’ food and water supplies, and he’s cautioned every dragonrider to be mindful of poisons, traps, and spells. The man’s temper is never good, but it’s been incendiary ever since and he barked at me that it would be wise for me to hurry up and pull down that magical barrier. Thank you, Stesha. I hadn’t thought of that.
It’s evening, and the sun has already set when Godric comes to me with the news that the emissary from the Brethren is at the capital’s gates, asking for admittance.
“What about it?” I snarl, not looking up from the map of Maledin I’m studying.
“Do you wish for him to be sent away?”
I wish for him to die by my hand, but I don’t slaughter messengers. “Let him wait at the gates until he grows tired and leaves of his own accord.”
“He’s asking after Lady Isavelle.”
I round on Godric. “He’swhat?”
“The emissary claims that Lady Isavelle is the King of Maledin’s bride. Her marriage to King Alaster was thwarted, so she belongs to the next King of Maledin. The Brethren demand that the lady is released from your captivity.”
“I’m the King of Maledin, and Lady Isavelle is not a captive,” I roar. “How dare they try to take my bride from me.”
“The emissary seems to be aware that Lady Isavelle is not…” He winces. “…wedded and bedded, as he put it, and therefore the Brethren want her back.”
Wedded and bedded. I suppose that’s the human term for mated and married. Of course they would put them in the wrong order, expecting marriage before a couple has pledged themselves to one another, the barbarians. Isavelle and I have not married because her designation hasn’t emerged, and I’m not a fucking monster to force my knot on her before she’s ready or even wants me.
There’s no point explaining the complexities of Maledin wedding traditions to these ignoramuses, and I don’t care if they understand or not, but the wedding takes placeaftermating, not before.
