Chapter 26 Irena
IRENA
I follow Valen and it feels like we’re going around in circles for a while but at last he finds a little clearing hidden by a stand of trees. The trees are much shorter than the ones in the forest—which is to our backs—and they hide us from sight of The Slaughtered Lamb, which isn’t that far away.
My stomach growls again, but this time I don’t bother apologizing for it, since Valen seems to think it’s not rude.
Back in Court, it’s considered disgusting to let anyone know you’re hungry at any time.
The fine ladies of the Nobles will barely eat anything—even at a formal banquet where there are so many courses and dishes you can’t count them all.
They wave away the servants, insisting they want nothing but clear broth.
To admit to being hungry is considered coarse and crude—a common, lower-class attribute.
Of course, though eating in public and admitting hunger is considered disgusting, one can always have the Kitchen send a tray to one’s room afterwards. Which is mainly how I managed not to starve and ended up with a much fuller figure than is considered fashionable.
But Valen doesn’t seem to think there’s anything wrong with me being hungry. In fact, he produces the makings of a halfway decent meal from the burlap sack he took from the smokehouse.
There’s the sausage he stole, of course, as well as a stale loaf of bread and a rusty iron frying pan that looks extremely heavy—though he handles it as though it’s light as a feather. He also found a bottle half full of wine that smells all right when I pull the cork and sniff it.
“Someone must have been having his lunch out in the smokehouse and got called away,” Valen speculates as he moves around our campsite, gathering branches for a fire. But when he starts to break some of the lower branches off the trees that are sheltering us, I put a hand on his arm.
“Don’t!”
He frowns and then, apparently seeing the worry in my eyes, his expression softens.
“Why not? We need firewood. Unless you’d like to eat the sausage cold.”
“No, I don’t want that, but we don’t want to make the trees angry either,” I tell him.”
“Make the trees angry?” Now he clearly thinks I’m going mad.
“I’m serious!” I say and tell him what I overheard from red-beard before Maud’s husband attacked me.
He frowns.
“So the trees bleed, do they?”
“I don’t know if these ones would,” I say, pointing at the shorter trees. “But we’re close enough to Thornmere that I’d rather not take a chance.”
“What you heard was just a lot of superstition, Princess,” he tells me.
But he wanders a little further, finding fallen branches instead of breaking them off, which I’m grateful for. It might be just superstitious nonsense that red-beard was spouting, but I’d rather not take a chance—especially not at night.
But when Valen piles all the wood in the center of our campsite along with some dry moss and leaves, I see a problem. We have all the makings of a good fire, but no way to start it.
“Did you find something to make a fire with in the smokehouse?” I ask anxiously.
He gives me a wolfish grin.
“Did you forget who you’re with, sweetheart?”
Then he leans forward, and I see his eyes glowing red again. His throat glows too and then he breathes onto the dried moss and leaves and wood. A small but powerful flame comes from his parted lips and lights the pile at once.
I stare at him, surprised.
“So…you can do that even when you’re not in your dragon form?”
He shrugs.
“Sure. Not all Drakes can—it’s not easy to do a partial Shift and let that part of me out enough to breathe fire without changing completely. I worked years to get the control to do it.”
I think to myself that I bet this little trick would have scared Maud into letting me keep my dress. But then, I suppose the situation might have escalated and turned into a life-or-death altercation.
I’m still upset over losing my dress and cloak though—without my dress, how will I prove to the Sorceress that I’m a princess she ought to help? I simply don’t look the part wearing nothing but my shift and panties!
Valen gets the fire going, then leaves me for a little while to scrub the rusty iron frying pan in a nearby stream. He’s gone long enough for me to think that every rustle from the forest is a monster…or possibly one of the patrons of The Slaughtered Lamb coming to find us.
I shiver and huddle closer to the fire. What if he decides to just leave me here and go?
Could I stop him with the ring if I didn’t know he was Shifting?
Is there some kind of distance limit between the ring and the collar?
There’s so much I don’t know—I wish I could have read the entire manuscript that told about the magical implements instead of just that one ragged scrap…
“Don’t get so close to the fire—you’ll burn yourself.”
Valen’s deep voice makes me jump and I realize he’s back. Relief floods me—I’m not alone! But I push it down quickly. Yes, I have company, but Valen and I are still enemies, as he pointed out earlier.
He sits the pan over the fire and uses a knife with the tip of the blade broken off to slice up the sausage.
He must have found that in the smoke house as well—I have to admit he’s resourceful.
Having lived in a castle all my life, I’m not very good at foraging for myself.
I should probably get better at it in a hurry, though—I can’t expect him to take care of me during this entire quest—especially when he hates me and I hate him.
But it’s not hate I feel as I watch him fry the chunks of sausage. The firelight plays over his long black hair, giving it reddish highlights and he handles the iron skillet as though it was cool instead of burning hot.
“Does fire never burn you?” I ask, when he accidentally flips a chunk of sausage out of the pan and into the fire and then reaches right into the coals to retrieve it.
“It can’t.” He shrugs. “It’s my element—part of me the same way my Drake is part of me.” He pops the hot chunk of sausage in his mouth. “Mmm—I think it’s done.”
He pulls the pan off the fire and cuts a few slices of the stale bread. Then he toasts them in the drippings from the sausage. He piles some slices of sausage onto one of the pieces of bread and hands one to me with a mock bow.
“Here you go, your Highness. I know it’s peasant food and not nearly as good as what you get in your fancy Court, but it’s better than nothing.”
“Actually, it’s a lot nicer than what I get in Court,” I say honestly. “At least, during a banquet.”
“What?” He frowns. “I thought that Royals and Nobles ate nothing but the best of the best.”
“Oh, our chefs do cook amazing dishes, but it’s not considered ladylike to eat at a banquet,” I explain. “All you’re allowed to have is broth—otherwise everyone thinks you’re a cow.”
“What?” he shakes his head. “What kind of bullshit is that?”
I shrug.
“It’s the way things are done in my Court. Mostly because the Head Healer tells everyone it’s a bad idea for ladies to become too ‘robust.’ Unfortunately, I didn’t take his advice.”
I take a bite of the crispy, toasted bread with a meaty chunk of sausage and hum with pleasure. This really is surprisingly good—and the wine is nice too, even if it isn’t some ancient vintage that’s been aging in the wine cellar for decades or centuries.
“So they want every woman in your kingdom to be skinny?” Valen asks, making a face as though I’ve said something distasteful.
“You make it sound like a bad thing,” I point out. “Skinny is beautiful.”
“Not where I’m from. We Drakes like a woman with some meat on her bones.” He gives me a look that makes my cheeks feel hot.
“You can’t be serious,” I protest. “Your people really feel that way?”
“Of course.” He gives me that look again. “Who wants to sleep with a skeleton? Besides, a woman with curves is just more beautiful.”
We lock eyes for a moment and I see that his are glowing. I have to look away because I feel so breathless and uncertain.
To cover my confusion, I take another drink of wine.
We eat in silence for a while, and I finish my sausage toast and we share the last of the wine. Then Valen leads me down to the small stream and we wash up. I rinse my mouth, and we refill the empty wine bottle with water.
We go back to the campsite, and I settle close to the fire—too close, because a spark flies into my hair.
“Watch out!” Valen exclaims. Leaning towards me, he catches the flame in his bare hand and smothers it quickly before it can set my hair alight. Then he drags me away from the fire. “Didn’t I tell you not to get too close? Your people aren’t fireproof like mine,” he growls.
“I was cold,” I protest.
“That’s easy to fix.” He puts an arm around me and pulls me close to his big body. Before I know it, I’m basically sitting in his lap with his broad chest against my back.
“Hey! I protest, wiggling against him to try and get free.
“Hold still, Princess,” he growls in my ear. “Or we’re both going to have a serious problem.”
As he speaks, I realize I can feel something hot and hard pressing against my bottom.
Oh my Goddess…what am I going to do now?