Chapter 4
TAMSYN
EVERY NIGHT WE ASSEMBLED FOR DINNER AT A MASSIVE V-shaped table that seated the entire pride.
It was all very civilized. Bejeweled candelabras ran down the center of the table that was set with dishes and cutlery of gleaming gold.
The menu boasted ample food. Succulent roasted meats and vegetables swimming in savory herbs.
Cheeses and berries. Crusty baked bread soft at the center, served with freshly churned butter.
Sweet puddings and pastry. It would do the royal table at Penterra proud.
Dragons took mealtime very, very seriously. Their—our—appetites were immense. Since I had manifested into my dragon, I ate, consuming food as I never had, as though every morsel was as necessary to me as air to a body.
We all had our designated seats, determined long ago, before I arrived.
There was an established hierarchy. A complex society existed in this place with its perpetual mist that hugged every jagged peak and cliff, filled very hollow, chasing through deep and ancient tunnels, reaching us in our caves, encircling us …
smoky tendrils twisting around our ankles and calves where we sat even now.
Vetr took his position at the head of the V-shaped table, a strategic location that allowed him to see every member of his pride. Even me, located much farther down the table where I had been consigned.
Room had been made for me when I arrived, but by no means did I occupy a position of esteem. Clearly, it was a held belief that I belonged on the lowest rungs of the hierarchy.
If Fell had not gone off on that first night and gotten killed, would he have been seated near his brother at the helm of the group?
I could envision it so clearly. They would have embraced Fell and taken him into the inner circle, perhaps even made him a skeppar.
Room would have been made for him. He was Vetr’s kin.
Blood. The missing piece. The long-lost brother finally home.
Perhaps I wouldn’t be relegated to this seat if Fell was here.
Perhaps I would be up there near Fell and Vetr.
Perhaps. Perhaps. Perhaps. All pointless wonderings.
Even this, my place somewhere near the bottom, felt like a courtesy to Fell’s memory and nothing to do with me personally.
At least I was not seated at the very ends of the table. I tried to wrap myself in this consolation. Those last few seats were reserved for the very youngest of the pride. At least I was positioned above the children.
If I wanted to move up the ladder, I would have to earn my place—which I was beginning to suspect would never happen. After my conversation with Vetr, I knew what it would take.
We need breeders.
I reached for my glass of verdaberry wine and took a hearty swig. Thirteen-year-old Bodin, an onyx dragon who, despite his youth, was a pile of brawn and muscle and oozing vigor, sat beside me. He ignored me as he talked to his friend, Mats, another onyx on the other side of me.
The two adolescents talked over me, through me, perpetually, chronically.
At every meal. As though I did not exist. Though their indifference was not the worst thing I had to endure—it beat the occasional sneering question directed at me, which always felt like a trick, a trap staged for the amusement of others.
A question ready to snap its jaws shut and pin me down …
because no reply would ever be right. And I knew that.
The others often looked at each other with laughter in their eyes when I didn’t know something they considered fundamental. Anything I said opened me up to embarrassment and ridicule, but I still asked my questions. How else was I to learn?
What are verdaberries?
What is a clarion dragon? An onyx? A visiocrypter? A hypnos?
How many minns are there?
I didn’t know anything, and they wanted me to feel that. To make me stew in my ignorance and feel my lack like an aching bruise.
I was grateful for Kerstin. As much as she filled my ears with inane chatter, she was a distraction … and, admittedly, a welcome fount of information. Much better than surly Bodin, who behaved as though something contaminated had been dropped down beside him.
I never had to speak much around Kerstin.
I could simply listen, eat, drink, and stare ahead, watching everyone else, tracking, clocking everyone’s activities and movements and words.
This was what came of finding myself alone in a world where the monsters were real—what came of finding myself one of the monsters.
“Ugh. Look at the way they fawn over him,” Kerstin groaned, as though physically in pain.
I picked at the food on my plate, placing it in my mouth and chewing without my usual appetite. They all ate with gusto, heaping their plates high, but after my conversation with Vetr, my stomach sloshed with bile.
I didn’t need to look up or ask Kerstin to explain her remark. It was familiar mealtime commentary. Estrid and Gudru vied for Vetr’s attention like they did every day. They weren’t subtle as they dug their elbows into each other’s sides and hissed at each other like a pair of snakes.
It was a strange thing. They had their pick of partners—the numbers were obviously in their favor—but it was only Vetr they fixated upon, as though he were the only one worth snaring in their nets.
Vetr’s second-in-command, Anders, sat to his right with his mate, Harald, beside him, leaving Estrid and Gudru straining themselves to talk around Harald.
They pelted Vetr with questions, competing with each other to lure him into conversation.
I watched on, Vetr’s words ringing in my ears.
Estrid and Gudru were two of the five unbonded females he’d mentioned.
There was Kerstin, but at sixteen she was still young.
And then there was Erling, who was already attached to Arvid.
Those two would undoubtedly formalize their commitment to each other in an official bonding ceremony soon.
“Pathetic, aren’t they?” Kerstin said. “I think they would kill each other for a chance to share his furs. So much for female solidarity, huh?” Her shoulder bumped mine as she lowered her voice to say, “Nayden told me he spotted Gudru going into Vetr’s den late last night, and she marched back out less than two minutes later with her cheeks flaming red.
” She nodded with a chuckle that was almost too gleeful.
“He doesn’t want anything she has to offer. ”
I assessed Gudru. I couldn’t help it. She was lovely: an earth dragon with hair that shone like polished mahogany and a face that was all long-lashed, luminescent eyes and full, bee-stung lips.
Why didn’t Vetr bond with her? Especially in an environment where pairing off was encouraged, even expected.
I looked up the long length of the table, silently judging him.
He’d just lectured me on furthering dragonkind.
Did he not think to take his own counsel?
Should he not accept either Gudru or Estrid as a mate?
Get to work himself on the business of adding to the pride’s population?
As though sensing my stare, Vetr looked down the table at me, his frost-colored gaze colliding with mine. I blinked and quickly averted my eyes.
Kerstin tossed the wild bounty of her gold-streaked chestnut curls over her shoulders.
She never seemed able to tame the mass into any semblance of order.
It was a wild snarl in desperate need of a brush.
Whenever she sparred in the arena, it was a definite disadvantage.
Many an opponent had grabbed handfuls of her mane to subdue or get the better of her.
I’d heard it suggested more than once that she cut it closer to her scalp.
Not that she listened. Kerstin was charming and vibrant and only ever did what she wanted—even if that meant she was being constantly scolded by one of the skeppars or Vetr.
The girl continued talking, undeterred by my steady silence.
“I feel humiliated for them. Truly.” She paused to take a bite from a honeyed confection of cake stuffed with berries and nuts that I had never tasted the like before arriving here.
She spoke around a mouthful, crumbs flying.
“The way they treat each other when he has no interest in bonding with either one of them …” She looked at me searchingly. “You know?”
I nodded slowly because she seemed to want some kind of acknowledgment.
Then, suddenly, she pressed her sticky hands flat on the table and called out with a complete lack of decorum, “Move on! He doesn’t want either of you. Pick someone else.”
Gudru and Estrid heard her. Everyone heard her. They probably heard her in the Borg. There were gasps. Titters. Whispers. A few chuckles.
Gudru’s deep brown eyes turned hard as flint. She glared at Kerstin … and me. As though I were somehow complicit in this unfolding drama. Fault by association.
Estrid made a rude gesture that I recognized. Fuck off translated fairly universally.
Kerstin huffed out a bit of laughter, and I felt a reluctant smile emerge as I took a bite of warm crusty bread infused with herbs and slathered with fresh butter.
“Kerstin?” a voice called out, tight with disapproval. “Is anything amiss?” The words were polite, but there was a layer of steel in them. My gaze flicked to the owner of that voice: Brenna, a skeppar and the only verga dragon among us.
The skeppars were the oldest members of the pride—not to be confused with being old. Brenna was only a few years my senior, but she possessed the worldliness of someone far more veteran, and I supposed that was because she was a veteran, while I was a mere novice.
There was a chain of command in place, and orders were usually conveyed through Vetr’s skeppars: Anders, Brenna, or Aksel. Brenna was perhaps the most formidable of the three. Her green eyes narrowed shrewdly. Clearly, she had not missed any of the exchange.