Chapter 9
TAMSYN
STIG HAD MARRIED A TRUE ROYAL PRINCESS OF PENTERRA.
He was given the wife whom King Hamlin and the lord regent had done everything in their power to deny Fell. Stig was good enough for a royal princess. But not Fell. These facts dropped into place, one after another, in my mind. The irony of these realizations left me shaken.
Stig, the Terror, responsible for so much suffering, shared my sister’s bed.
I pinched the flesh of my arm, twisting my skin viciously, trying to wake myself from this nightmare. It did no good. I was awake and she was here.
Alise. Sweet, pure Alise … Stig’s wife.
How could she be bound to such a man? It was an absurd, cruel joke.
It couldn’t be true. And yet as she sat across from me, sipping wine and delicately cutting and chewing the roasted pheasant on her plate, her beringed fingers glinting in the candlelight, jewels bobbing in her ears, the evidence was irrefutable.
“I am so glad to see you, Tamsyn. I’ve been out of my mind with worry about you. We all have.”
It took me several moments to reply, and then I could only echo: “We?”
I turned that over in my mind curiously.
My father? My mother? I doubted they had been out of their minds with worry for me.
They knew what they were doing when they gave me to the Beast. They knew he could do whatever he wished to me, and after the deceit played upon him, it stood to reason whatever he wished could include all manner of horrible things. Even death.
Still, they had done it. Sacrificed me. Fed me to him.
Used me as always. I was in their lives to serve, as an old plow mule serves a farmer in the field.
They might have scratched me between the ears and fed me and sheltered me, but at the end of the day, I was no more than a tool to be exploited in the business of their lives.
Alise misconstrued my meaning. “Yes.” She nodded, cutting off another bite.
“We’ve been sick with dread that you were dead.
When word reached us of what happened, I took to bed for weeks.
” I suppressed the urge to ask her what story she had been told.
“I was quite cross with our parents for permitting you to marry Dryhten and sending you north with those barbarians.”
I could believe that of her, and I was struck again by the irony.
Many things had plagued me since I left the City.
My life had been one trial after another.
Amid all that, I had never been worried about her.
I’d imagined Alise safe and pampered and cossetted as always, fixed in her comfortable life in the palace, away from magic and menacing shadows.
I had not imagined her here, bound to someone more demon than man.
She motioned with her fork to my plate. “Are you not eating?”
Food would not sit well in my rioting stomach.
The serving maid returned to the tent then, a basket full of fragrant, buttered rolls in her hands. She placed them between us. I reached for one, forcing myself to eat.
Alise nodded, satisfied, and cut another bite for herself. “You look quite changed, Tam,” she said, speaking around her food.
“Am I?” I asked, tensing. I didn’t know what I expected her to say. That I looked more … dragon?
“You look older.”
“I am. A year older. As are you.”
A wife now at seventeen. A perfectly typical age to wed. Many were even younger when they married, especially among royal families determined to forge alliances through their offspring. And yet, to me, she was still young. Too young.
My gaze slid to the large bed covered in a brocade counterpane. Absurd. It loomed there as though this was a finely appointed chamber and not a tent amid the wilds of the Borderlands. I forced my attention away from the bed and thoughts of Alise and Stig together in it.
She had not missed the direction of my gaze. A pretty pink stained her cheeks. “I mean to say you appear more … mature,” she said, correcting herself.
I swallowed. The sweet bread stuck somewhere high in my chest, refusing to go all the way down. “Marriage will do that to you. Take you from childhood to adulthood in a blink. How long have you and …” I stopped myself, unable to say his name in conjunction with her.
She smiled indulgently, understanding. “We married a month ago. It was a beautiful wedding. I was very sorry you weren’t there.”
I envisioned it. Alise, an ethereal bride making the same momentous trek to the chapel that I had, amid the deafening cheers and flowers tossed to her in tribute and celebration.
I could see it all so clearly, like something from a dream …
because I had lived it. Except Stig had been the one waiting for her at the altar.
That part of my vision was when the dream turned to a nightmare.
“I wish I could have been there,” I said. To stop it. “And you are happy?”
She blinked as though the question unsettled her, and that was telling. As was her fading smile.
“There was talk for me to wed the king of Meru.” She grimaced. “He’s as old as Papa, though. And the Isle of Meru is so very far away.”
“Are you happy?” I pressed.
She reached for a roll and tore the crusty bread in half with defiant force. “Stig is young and handsome and solicitous. He’s the Border King now. This puts him in an excellent position. Papa will likely name him his successor. He is very kind.” Stig, the king of Penterra. I resisted a shudder.
She still had not answered my question.
The one thing I knew to be true of Stig was that he would accord a princess all due deference.
He would treat Alise like every inch the royal she was born, handling her like spun glass.
He would not break with that custom. As his lady wife, she would be given every courtesy.
He would be to her as he was to me … before I became a blight in his eyes.
“He would only ever be such to you,” I replied, subdued, careful not to spark a disagreement with her. I did not want our short-lived reunion fraught with unpleasantness. Because our time together was fleeting. Stig would be back soon.
I inhaled sharply at the thought of what was coming. At the storm bearing down, at the cruelty and brutality steeped in its winds, ready to consume me.
“He is charming, as you know. I feel quite lucky.” Her voice shook a little on this last word.
“You’ve yet to say you’re happy.”
She leaned back in her chair, her blue eyes snapping, an exasperated look on her face—the kind of expression she usually bestowed upon Feena and Sybilia but not me.
“And are you happy, Tam? What are you doing here?” She gestured around us with a flick of her elegant fingers.
“What happened? Where have you been all this time? Where is your husband? I thought you dead!” She slapped the arms of her chair.
“I’d resigned myself to your death.” She stopped and swallowed, the delicate lines of her throat working as though it were a struggle.
“A much more logical conclusion than what Stig would have all of us believe. Stig has these wild notions—”
“I know, I know,” I interrupted the barrage. I couldn’t bear for her to say it, couldn’t see her expression when she said the words—when she uttered dragon.
I didn’t want to lie to her. Of course I would, though. I had no other choice.
I’d never kept anything from Alise before. You never had a secret to keep before. Not like this. Not one that would affect so many.
“Do you?” She shook her head, her gaze fastened on me, searching.
“Why did you disappear? Have you been … hiding?” Her voice was laden with confusion.
She was desperately trying to understand, and she never could.
Never would. I needed to make certain of that.
I had trusted and revealed myself before.
A grave mistake that I would never repeat.
I inclined my head slightly. “In a manner, yes.”
“I want to understand. I’m sure Stig is only confused. He was gravely injured. That can … alter a person. Perhaps it clouded his perception—”
“No, my sweet.” A deep voice rumbled across the tent like the suddenness of thunder. “I am not confused. I made no mistake. That is a dragon sitting across from you. Move carefully away from her, Alise.”
The storm had arrived.
My gaze whipped toward the opening of the tent. Stig stood there, his sword at the ready as though he was prepared to launch it across the space at me.
I had not heard him enter the tent despite being braced for his return. Alise held all my attention. Several soldiers stood just behind him, their wide eyes on me.
I assessed him, impressed despite myself.
There was no evidence of his injuries from our long-ago day in the woods.
One did not survive a wound like the one Fell had caused him, but somehow …
he had. In fact, he looked quite hearty as he stared down at me, wild-eyed. Hearty if not a little unhinged.
“I would never harm my sister,” I said indignantly.
“Oh, Stig, must you do this?” Alise pleaded, her voice shaking, her eyes suddenly wet with a sheen of tears. “Lower your sword.”
“Do not fret yourself, my sweet,” he said, attempting to soothe, stepping deeper into the tent, his gaze and sword unwavering on me. The soldiers followed him, their bone swords also pointed in my direction.
Stig moved to Alise’s side, and I resisted the impulse to put myself between them. They had been married for a month now. I was no barrier. I wished I could be, but I was too late for that. Alise was his wife now, and I felt that as my own failure.
Stig took her hand and guided her up from her chair, positioning her behind him, putting himself between us, as though I was the danger, the Terror. As though she needed protection from me. “Take her outside,” Stig commanded his men with a single nod at me.
I was seized by both arms and yanked from my chair.
Alise spun around to face Stig, flattening her palms against his chest. “What are you going to do to her?”