Chapter 3
TAMSYN
IT OCCURRED TO ME THAT NO ONE HAD INVADED MY DEN before because no one was interested enough in me.
No one cared. I stirred only apathy—at best—among members of the pride.
I would forever be the one who had lived among humans, who had thought she was a human for twenty-one years, who had swallowed all the lies about dragonkind while making room for more.
They’d been brought up together. They were family. Brethren.
I was the outsider.
Funny, considering I was born an outsider. It had been my role in my old life, and here again, in this new world. It just kept finding me.
Apathy had not carried Vetr here to me, however. The tendons in his throat worked as he faced me, grating out, “What was that back there?”
I swallowed thickly, imagining my own throat working in a quest for speech—and not imagining how I looked wearing only my under tunic before him. I remembered Fell and how he, too, had looked like this—impossibly big. Larger than life.
“I don’t know what you mean.” Then, recalling myself and that he was unwelcome in my space, uninvited, I squared my shoulders and reached for my dignity, struggling to ignore my state of undress—that my legs were bare from the middle of my thighs down to my feet.
“And how dare you march in here without knocking first.”
He blinked. “Knocking?” He uttered the word with such incomprehension that I wondered if he even understood the definition of it … in this place without actual doors.
I gestured vaguely, explaining, “You know what I mean … knocking, calling out, asking permission to enter.”
He pointed to the center of his chest. “How dare … me?”
He pronounced me with such incredulity, as though I could not possibly mean him, a man—or dragon—only ever accustomed to total deference and stirring awe in others.
Here, he was sovereign of this community.
They might not number more than thirty, but they were dragons.
Powerful. Destructive. As a whole, capable of taking down an army.
He was their leader and fear inspiring. Unless, of course, you were one of the skelm.
Then a bone blade to the throat, talons, fire, fangs could be expected.
Or at least before the truce was struck that could have been expected.
“Yes. You. I don’t care who you are. I’m not like the rest, who follow you blindly.
” I motioned scornfully toward the dens around us, aware that this attitude was likely the very thing that separated me from the pride, that prevented me from fitting in, but I couldn’t help it.
Try as I might, I was not one of them. “I’m not subject to you. ”
Even as the bold words popped out of my mouth, I realized that just about everyone in this pride would disagree with that.
Day after day, I followed their rules. I performed the duties assigned to me without complaint.
Except that wasn’t really me. That was some version of myself, an automaton acting out a part while I tucked myself—my true self—away, learning, transforming …
knitting into whatever it was I would become to survive and find my place.
I was done with blind acceptance simply because it was the rule or the custom or the way. I’d bowed to a king once, and what had my loyalty gotten me? The end of a whip. Forced into marriage to a reputed beast.
Stig had convinced me that the duty of a whipping girl was an honor, and I had believed in that.
As a girl I’d walked the palace gallery and stared at the portraits of those who came before me with reverence and admiration, but I had just been deluding myself so that I could live, so that I could breathe in that space, so I could continue existing with my dignity intact.
But I was done just existing.
Done lying to myself.
Sometimes I heard Fell in my head, his words swelling up inside me, searching for an escape. You’re someone. Something.
I was done bowing. Even here. The pride might function as its own little realm with Vetr at the helm, but I would no longer put myself beneath anyone. There had to be a way to survive, to carve out a place in this life without losing myself entirely.
I continued talking, asserting myself. “I can leave this place any time I want.”
“And go where?” he scoffed, a ruddy flush creeping over the planes of his face, and in that moment, I realized I’d pushed him. For him to have entered my space unannounced, unbidden, he toed an invisible edge. Somehow I had provoked him.
I held my arms out wide and then dropped them dramatically to my sides. “Anywhere.”
“So you have no idea where you might go. You’re just saying … words.” Now he mocked me.
“I’m not a prisoner here.”
Unaware of or indifferent to the storm brewing inside me, he motioned outside my den. “When you are in that arena you need to fight like it’s not a practice.”
I blinked, my thoughts realigning. He was talking about this day’s training. He was here because of what happened in the arena.
“But it is practice,” I said slowly. “It is training. That’s why we call it that,” I reminded him tartly.
“When you’re under threat, you fight.” He bit off that last word like it was something hard, a bit of dried meat he was tearing off with his teeth. “You respond in kind. Nayden came at you with fire and you held back.”
I compressed my lips and shook my head. It was confusing. He was confusing. Up was down. Down was up. Everything about this place left me feeling as though I was on unstable ground, on the heaving deck of a ship in the Dark Channel with monsters lurking in the turbulent waters waiting to devour me.
“We were instructed to train in human form,” I said. “You gave that instruction.”
“And even then,” he snapped, “you failed. You have yet to master bytte.”
I flushed. “I’m working on it.”
“It’s been a year.”
“Yes, well, you’ve had a lifetime to master it.”
Ironically, he looked away, as though the sight of me, the sound of me, was too much, beyond frustrating, beyond his ability to understand. Which was how I always felt here in this world away from the world.
I was this strange and unknown variable. Not quite dragon. Not quite human. Not like the rest of them. Unable to grasp the ways of dragonkind quickly enough.
He looked at me as though he thought I would fall, break, splinter into bits that could never be patched together again.
And more than that. In his eyes, I could see that he worried that it would not just be me lost … that it would be all of them, the whole pride—because of me. I read it in the frost of his gaze. I was as unreliable and unpredictable as a squall gathering force outside the caves.
The training I’d put in this last year didn’t matter. They were not impressed. Vetr, along with everyone else, thought I was doing it wrong.
It being everything.
My indoctrination had been immediate. There had been no time to mourn Fell.
I was plunged into the ways of the pride: the inner workings, the hierarchy, the customs—to say nothing of training to fight, to work the minns, to master the art of bytte, to patrol, scout, forage, and hunt.
Oh. And how to properly fly. Evasive maneuvers in air and on land.
The only thing I hadn’t been taught was how to go on rekons and gather information among humans. I was excluded from those excursions. Their trust in me did not run so deep that they would put me back in the path of their greatest enemy.
Humans weren’t the only threat, though. There were the other dragons who considered dragonkind truly cursed. The skelm: dragons unhappy with their—our—evolution. They preferred the old ways, when dragons were dragons and not this watered-down version. The enemy was all who were against them.
Even with the truce, we avoided them. They might not attack us with murder in mind, but they were hungry to increase their numbers, so there was no stopping them from taking any youth or female they might catch roaming the Crags.
Years ago, Brenna’s sister had been caught alone and taken. It was a cautionary tale related to me in whispers when I first arrived. No one ventured out alone, and every foray must be approved by Vetr or one of his skeppars.
Vetr’s gaze pinned me in place. “Survival and the continuation of our kind is everything.”
Our kind. That stumbled through me.
I didn’t know what surprised me more. That he counted me as one of them or that he believed I had done anything that went against that principle. Like it or not, I was a dragon, too. I wanted all of us to survive. Of course I did. I didn’t want our extinction.
Vetr went on. “This world is a dangerous place. Life here is not easy.” I released a puff of breath.
Did he think it was all roses where I came from?
“If Nayden comes at you with fire, then you return fire.” His teeth flashed very white in the gloom of my den, the rainbow of light from the gems mottling his skin.
“It’s the only way to teach him that he can’t do that to you.
Don’t let him push you around. Protect yourself at all costs. ”
“Is Nayden not also … valuable?” Would Vetr be standing in front of Nayden had the situation been reversed? “Should his life not be protected, too?”
He didn’t hesitate. “Not at the expense of yours.”
I frowned, wondering why. Why should I be more important?
Nayden was a fire-breather, too. He would be instrumental in a battle, in defense. I supposed I would be, too. Eventually.
Except, presently, I was untried in comparison to Nayden, who had already been tested in skirmishes with the skelm and the packs of wolves that prowled the Crags, their hunger for dragon meat still a driving force within them.
When Vetr found me and Fell together in that cave, he had fixated on Fell—his brother, of course. Me? I was an afterthought.
Not much had changed.
Sometimes his gaze would sweep right over me like I wasn’t there at all. Which was why I didn’t understand why he was in my den right now insisting that I was someone valuable.
Vetr angled his head, examining me in a way that unnerved me, that felt more animal than man. I resisted fidgeting beneath his scrutiny.
“Did you attend school in Penterra?” he said at last.
“School?” I echoed, bewildered by the unexpected question.
“Yes, isn’t that what humans do with their children? Send them to schools to be properly educated by those they deem qualified to do so?”
I did not miss the sneer in his voice. I tensed, wondering at the motive behind this line of questioning.
I’d never shared my history with him, with any member of the pride. Unless Fell had divulged my past in their brief time together, Vetr did not know I was brought up in the palace as a fake princess. I could see no reason why Fell would have told him that.
“I had tutors,” I allowed. “Governesses.”
“So you were taught your numbers then? Basic arithmetic?”
“Of course.” I bristled. “Mathematics was one of my best subjects.”
“Then do the math,” he snapped. “There are twenty-nine of us. And only nine females. Ten, now that you are here. Five of those females are already bonded. That leaves us with five unbonded females.” He held up a hand and counted off on his fingers for emphasis.
“Estrid, Gudru, Erling, Kerstin, and … you.”
I stared. He counted me among them? He counted me as one of the five unbonded?
I stroked the inside of my palm. A flickering heat nipped at my fingers, refuting that.
I didn’t feel unbonded. I did not feel free or willing to bond with anyone.
I moistened my lips and swallowed against a throat that was suddenly as raw and rough as tree bark. “Are you saying that I am so very valuable because I’m …” I couldn’t finish.
He was not at a loss for words, however.
“We have many strong males. Able and willing. They want partners.” Able and willing.
He meant able and willing to bond with me.
As though I was nothing more than a body to be rutted upon, a vessel to deliver dragonlings to the great pride.
“We need you, Tamsyn. We need breeders. Dragonkind was nearly destroyed. Us. We are all that remains. I won’t stand by and watch as we fall to extinction.
” He reached out and brushed the burnt tufts along my hairline. “Your duty is simple.”
The word duty brought back a whole host of unwelcome feelings that felt like stones, each one dropping and sinking low in my stomach, pulling me down. I had not thought to hear the word flung at me again since I departed my old life.
I held his gaze, waiting.
“Stay alive,” he announced.
I turned that over in my mind.
“Stay alive,” I repeated, my lips moving numbly around the decree.
“Yes,” he said, his voice a low rumble. “You protect yourself at all costs. Even against foolish pups like Nayden. Teach him a lesson, if need be. You’re a fire-breather. Use your power.”
But that was not all of it. Not everything. He was saying so much more. I was to stay alive so that I could become a breeder. That was my duty. I fought to swallow against the sour taste coating my mouth.
Vetr expected me to be a breeder with someone in the pride, to bond and mate with one of the others who sneered at me and eyed me with distrust and relished breaking me and pushing me into the dirt every time I stepped into the arena.
No. No. No. No.
Suddenly I couldn’t breathe.
“Tamsyn?” Vetr peered at me. “Are you well?”
No. I was not. The ugliness of my fate had just been shared with me in no mincing terms, and I didn’t think the air would pass easily or freely from my lips ever again.
And yet I looked at him and lied because that was what the survivor, the warrior in me, told me to do.
There were times to fight and times to hold your tongue. Vetr not knowing me? Not seeing the real me? That felt the safest, wisest strategy for now.
“I’m fine.” A beat followed, and then I added, “Is it not time for dinner now?”
A long moment passed before Vetr nodded. For the first time since his arrival in my den, his icy gaze moved over me, assessing my state of undress. A flush warmed my face. “Yes. I will leave you to ready yourself.”
I held myself still, fury licking through me, sparking off every nerve until he was gone. Once alone, the tension ebbed from my shoulders.
I had not given it much thought when I said that I could leave this place, but suddenly my bold words did not feel like such a wild notion.
Not now that he had laid out his plans for me in ruthless detail and my freedom felt an elusive thing, a banner ripped free of its mooring, lost in the breeze, impossible to catch.
I was a creature of magic and lore, after all. Power radiated from my skin.
I could go anywhere and do anything.