Chapter 13 Tamsyn
TAMSYN
brENNA HAD NOT EXAGGERATED. A brOKEN RIB WAS slow to heal.
She unwrapped my torso each evening so that I could bathe at the basin stand, then rewrapped me after I dried off, keeping all of me tight and supported, but if I breathed too hard or coughed or choked or laughed—it did happen occasionally, especially at the antics of baby Mirja—I would feel the reminder of Stig’s cruelty.
“You will bear scars,” she announced one evening as she applied a salve to my back with gently patting fingers. It was after my bath. Vetr was off somewhere. He always made himself scarce at this point in the evening.
I resisted telling her I already did have scars. Invisible wounds rooted deep. These were just the first ones visible, the first ones I would wear on the outside.
Brenna was kind enough to provide a mirror, and I twisted around to glimpse what I could. I didn’t look for long, though. The puckered, raised flesh crisscrossing what had once been smooth skin was an angry, ugly thing. I didn’t want to look.
Brenna had stitched the wounds as tightly as possible, but it didn’t matter. The closely woven stitches, the verdaberry medicine, the power of svefn—none of it had spared my body from mutilation.
“It’s fine,” I finally said. “A small thing.”
“It is not fine.” She shook her head with a disgusted tsk. “Such savages,” she muttered, and I knew she was talking about humans. I couldn’t help feeling a tugging smile at the irony in that.
“I am fairly certain that is what they say about us, too.”
I felt the gust of her breath on the back of my neck. “Well. You would be the one to know, I suppose.”
The sharp words were not uttered with malice, nor were they meant to be snide. Nonetheless, I felt the sting of knowing that no matter how much time passed, there would always be that about me, that thing, that otherness, which would set me apart.
I’d felt that awareness keenly when Vetr and the others questioned me the day after I woke from my svefn.
Vetr, Brenna, Anders, Aksel, Harald, and Arran had all crowded into the infirmary. It had been an interrogation. They didn’t call it that, but that’s what it felt like. They called it a debriefing.
Following every rekon, the skeppars and those who participated in the rekon gathered and discussed everything learned, sharing any suggestions for moving forward.
Usually, such discussions were held in the privacy of the command den, but Vetr insisted I was not yet ready to move from my bed.
So I remained in the infirmary, feeling awkward tucked beneath my furs as they all looked down, firing questions at me about my time among humans, my time in the Terror’s camp.
Reliving my experience was not especially a preferred conversation, but I understood why they needed to know.
I faced their relentless inquiries and went over everything with them: my time with Jorgen, Ari, and Frode.
Penterra beginning conscription, growing its army, sending more and more soldiers north with the intention of foraying into the Crags.
The Terror’s marriage to the king’s daughter making him only more powerful, more of a tyrant, able to rule with impunity.
The stranglehold in which Stig held the people of Penterra. I told them all that and more.
More as in Stig, Lord of the Borderlands, knew dragons existed—he alone knew that I was one—and he was determined to discover if there were more of us.
“I don’t understand. How is it he knows? How is he so certain?” Anders demanded.
He was the one asking, but it was Vetr’s stare I felt, that silvery gaze stripping past my exterior and invading where I could not hide, could not deflect or lie.
“I … He …” I struggled with the truth, with my mistake. It sat like poison on my tongue, and I fought to spit it out into the air. “I told him.”
“You told him?” Brenna looked at me as though I had just confessed to slapping a baby—her baby. It was that unthinkable. Unforgivable.
A shuddering breath escaped me. I was certain this would change their opinion of me. Vetr would not think me so courageous now.
I got the rest out past my lips, the final truth that must meet the light of day. “I showed him. I manifested into my dragon in front of him.”
Silence.
In the distance, beyond the cave, Mirja could be heard laughing, the sound so pure, bright as the tinkling of bells against the ugly shadow I had just released into the room.
It was like Stig was here now, his dark energy spilling over everything, filling every nook and cranny of the infirmary.
“We let her in here.” The growled words came from Anders, part question, part statement of fact. His lips peeled back to reveal his emerging teeth, glinting fangs too big for his human mouth. His hand dropped to the hilt of the dagger on his belt. “Among us?”
Harald covered his mate’s hand as though staying him.
The two shared a long look. Harald’s iridescent black eyes urged restraint.
I did not know what I had done to earn Harald’s consideration in this moment of shameful, damning confession—perhaps it had been forged while we were together on rekon—but I was grateful for it.
“And we plan to honor her with a feast?” Aksel mused, looking more confused than murderous.
Then it was chaos. Everyone talked at once, voices rising, climbing over each other. They gestured wildly at me as though I were some unwanted mongrel that had slipped into the room and piddled on the floor.
Except Vetr. He said nothing. Stood as silent as the first snowfall in winter, his eyes a cold wind moving over me.
“She should be banished,” Aksel suggested, his clarion skin flashing, the lustrous yellow peeking out beneath his human skin as he pointed a damning finger at me.
“Banished? For such a crime?” Anders snarled. “Come now! Execution is more fitting!”
“I did not nurse her back to health just to kill her,” Brenna protested.
“Can we really afford to lose a potential breeder for the pride?” Arran asked evenly, and I supposed I should be grateful he was not demanding my death, but his words curdled inside me like sour milk.
I did not welcome the suggestion that I should be allowed to live because of the value placed upon my womb, even if it did save my life.
“If she brings ruin and death to us all?” Anders raged, nodding his head furiously. “Yes! Yes, I say we lose her! I say we undo all of Brenna’s work and bury her in a deep, deep fucking hole.”
The vehemence of his words pulled at me like a curse, a spell cast from the lips of a wrathful witch.
I felt my eyes, already huge in my face, grow impossibly wider when he surged forward past Harald and reached for me as though he would seize me and pull me from my sickbed and fling me into that hole himself.
Suddenly Vetr was there, between us, blocking Anders from reaching me.
He flattened his hand wide on the skeppar’s walllike chest. Then, as though he had conjured a bone dagger from nothingness, Vetr pressed the weapon to Anders’s throat.
“If you succeed and throw her into a hole, it will mean you’ve gone through me to do it.
” Vetr’s flesh shimmered silver, winking in and out, the change upon him.
Anders’s responded in kind, his black skin rippling in a wave of glittering yellow.
My breath caught and held in my heat-swollen lungs.
Silence descended again.
Anders, an onyx like Harald, towered over most at close to seven feet. Vetr stood a few inches shorter but was no less formidable. Menace vibrated from him, and the air in the infirmary shifted, cooling, thickening with curling mist.
Anders looked confused. He sent a questioning glance to Harald, who answered with a swift shake of his head and eyes that seemed to convey that Anders needed to relent.
“Vetr, what she did—”
“You’ll not touch her. She was not raised in the pride,” Vetr cut in, pushing the blade a fraction closer to Anders’s neck. “She cannot be punished for what she did not know to be a crime.”
“Of course she can’t,” Brenna seconded. “Now put away your blade, Vetr. We’re all family here.”
Arran and Harald murmured in agreement.
Vetr took a step back and sheathed his dagger.
Anders still looked angry, but also uncertain. He lightly fingered his throat where a tiny drop of blood swelled on his skin. “Does ignorance of a crime negate the crime? It happened. We cannot pretend otherwise. The Terror of the Borderlands knows of her existence.”
I spoke up. “And yet no one believes him.”
Anders’s face screwed tight with impatience, his prismatic black eyes snapping.
“That does not stop him from taking his army and hunting in the Crags, does it? Looking for you. Looking for us. And what if he finds us? It will be the second Threshing. He will wipe us from the face of the earth.” He took a sharp inhalation and let that sink in.
“Just as he’s increased the bounties on witches, he will destroy all and everything with the slightest whiff or suspicion of magic.
Anything not human. Anything different. All will fall beneath him. ”
His words rang out like a dark portent. I trembled, knowing them for truth.
“The Terror will be handled,” Vetr announced. “And then the talk of dragon will fade.”
“Oh?” Brenna frowned. “You will handle him?”
Vetr nodded once, hard.
“How will you do that?” Harald asked very reasonably, possessing none of his mate’s high temper. “As a human, you will not be able to get anywhere near him … and as a dragon, well …”
Harald’s voice faded, but we all understood. If Vetr went after Stig as a dragon, it would be a spectacle and counter to all efforts to keep our existence a secret. Nothing about it would be discreet.
“He will be handled,” he said again tightly, tension feathering his jaw. “I will see to it.”