Chapter 40
Roderick Bryson
I’m not opening my eyes.
Not ever.
The shivering leaves and perfume of blossoming flowers stoked Roderick’s senses, assuring him that last night wasn’t but a dream.
When he dared to peek an eye open, the diamond piercing over Anya’s right brow caught a dappled ray of sun from the canopy overhead.
They were both as bare as they’d laid their hearts the night prior, entwined in each other’s arms beneath the wool blanket they shared.
Well, they’d shared more than a blanket last night.
While he’d lent himself to such pleasures before, it hardly deserved to be called that anymore.
What he did then now seemed…mechanical. Hollow.
Being with Anya was entirely new. He thought only of her, not of covering guilt or numbing pain or escaping anything, just her.
He skimmed his hands over the soft swell of her hips, memorizing the shape of her body. She was beautiful, so beautiful, even unseen.
Anya stirred. “It’s a crime to wake a sleeping Princess,” she mumbled, nuzzling into his chest.
“Punish me then,” he whispered, a sultry invitation to his tone.
Her voice started as a murmur, “Maybe I…WILL!” she growled playfully, pinning him beneath her. Blonde hair tickled his face as they tussled, laughing and teasing one another with amorous touches that quickly grew heated.
He groaned as Anya shifted her weight onto his center.
She hummed with a knowing smirk and threw her head back, golden locks glowing from the muted light emanating through the canvas overhead.
As she gathered her hair in a fist and slipped it over her shoulder, he knew he’d met his match in the battlefield and the bedchamber.
The sight of his fang marks in her neck nearly unraveled him.
He’d put those there. Him. He did that. And they’d be there forever.
She came nose to nose with him, fingering through the hair on his chest as she whispered, “If you’re good for me, I’ll show you what a real bite feels like.”
He was about to show her how good he could be when a familiar, sulfuric scent pricked his nose—and a gravelly voice popped into his head.
Great Mother.
“Yomira?” He craned his neck toward the half-open tent flap.
Anya pulled back, unsurprisingly displeased. “We’re about to wake this whole forest up and you’re thinking about Yomira?”
“No, she’s—”
Rod! The purple wyvern charged out of the tree line, unleashing a stream of happy grumbles and screeches and flattening shrubs along the way. Her wings flapped back and forth with every stomp. Anya bolted up, yanking the blanket up over her chest.
Yomira shoved her head into their tent, filling it with her signature sulfurous scent. You did it, Rod! The Princess loves you! She loves you! I saw Millie and Ellis like this once, and she told me when two folk love each other very much, they put their lips together like that, and then they—
“Woah there. I don’t need a lesson on that,” Roderick said with a chuckle, resting a hand on her warm snout. Too much information. Way, way too much.
But—
He gripped her snout with both hands, forcing her single ruby eye onto him. “What happened to the Lupus Star?”
“Is Blackbird all right?” Anya asked, panic driving her words.
The ship! The ship! Yomira backed out of the tent and straightened. I didn’t see where it went. But there was no wreckage. I had Isen check. We were so close to the shore, we would’ve seen it.
“Who’s Isen?” Roderick asked.
Anya’s worried eyes parried between Roderick and Yomira. “What is she saying?”
He’s—Yomira whipped her head back to the woods—Oh Great Mother, here he comes.
“Yomira! There you are!” The ground shook as a white dragon with a long, lean body bounded out of the tree line, with an almost fin-like tail flapping behind him. The dragon’s voice was crystal clear, not mumbling within his head like Yomira’s.
“Can you hear him?” Roderick whispered.
“Yes,” Anya said cautiously. Roderick caught her slowly reaching for her cutlass, then settle for more blanket armor. “But how?”
“It’s been thousands of years,” Roderick said. “They must’ve evolved, like those Kobolds we met.”
The dragon skidded to a stop beside Yomira.
It was nearly the same size as the wyvern, just a head or two shorter.
He rubbed Yomira’s side like a cat greeting its owner, then plopped down beside her with his forelegs tucked in front of him.
His crystalline, blue eyes stared at Roderick and Anya in turn, wide and friendly, so unlike the tales of greedy secluded beasts that Roderick had been told as a child.
“Huh. They are strange. Not Were. Not Elf,” the dragon said, tilting his head this way and that as he stretched his neck toward them, flaring his nostrils. His voice was gravelly but still held a cheerful cadence.
Yomira groaned, and her single eye actually rolled back in her head. Was she annoyed? He’d never seen her annoyed before. She was usually the source.
I told you on the way here, she grumbled, they’re descended from Weres and Vampires.
“How did you get here?” Roderick asked.
I flew through the storm but got lost and washed up in the nest of the coastal dragons. She huffed through her nares, then backed out the tent and looked at Isen. But I needed to find some anyway.
The dragon tipped his head in greeting. “And that’s where she met me. I am Isen of Bairseech, Yomira’s mate.” He crossed his front legs and dipped low, then puffed out his chest with pride.
Yomira scrubbed her face with her winged arms, huffing nares betraying her fluster. Roderick couldn’t resist the chance for a friendly tease.
“Oh, I see.” He waggled a brow. “So this was the hush-hush ‘wyvern business’ you spoke of.”
An impossibly quiet screech came from Yomira as she nodded, still hiding behind her wing arms. It’s the way our kind solidify an alliance.
After Roderick repeated the wyvern’s words, Anya smiled. “Blackbird is going to have a field day.”
He shut the tent flap to change. Anya shimmied on her dress, then turned around, presenting the back of her bodice to him.
He tied the threads almost instinctively, tracing the contours of her shoulder blades as he worked his way up.
He could get used to this. Slowly waking up beside her, starting their morning with a healthy dose of passion, tying her bodice…
minus the scaly, winged interruption. Soon, he’d even bring her breakfast and tea in bed. Something with mulberries of course.
“Wait.” He paused in the middle of shoving his arm through a sleeve. The memory of Anya spitting out the mulberry pie came to mind. “If the maiden at the masquerade was you, what about the pie?”
“Pie?” Anya asked, drawing her hair up into a perfectly messy bun.
“I had my suspicions that you were her.” Roderick slid his arm the rest of the way through. “So after your drunken tirade—”
Anya put a claw up with an air of academia. “I prefer ‘stress-induced imbibement.’”
He flashed a fanged smile at her. “Fine. After your ‘imbibement’, I put you to bed, cleaned the kitchen, and baked a mulberry pie to put my theory to the test.”
Anya burst out in a barking laugh, doubling over in an effort to stifle it. He watched her in bewilderment. He’d never seen her laugh so wholeheartedly. After a solid minute, she swiped a tear from her eye and straightened.
Her face morphed into a serious expression as she held his face with both hands. “I have something very, very important to tell you.”
“Go on,” he said, his words squished by her grip.
Anya’s golden eyes bore into his as she spoke. “That pie. Was. Terrible. The worst thing I’ve ever eaten. It was slimy and sour and salty and dry all at the same time. Astounding, truly. A waste of mulberries.”
Roderick chuckled. It made sense now. “I see. I suppose I can’t be great at everything.”
Anya started buttoning his shirt. “When we’re back in Balcott at the berry festival, you owe me a proper pie.”
“Aye aye, Captain.”
Anya tilted her head, humming appreciatively. “Captain. Hm. I like the sound of that. Better than Princess, anyway.”
Roderick traced his fingers over the fang marks on her neck as Anya continued to button his shirt with endearing, fumbling claws.
The gesture was so simple, yet so intimate.
No one had ever done this for him before.
And even after only a single day as her mate, he knew no one had ever loved him like this before either.
The lingering high of their impassioned night together and the imminent close of their mission made joy bubble over in his heart as the possibilities for their future unfolded.
As Anya reached the last button, he stopped her hand and pulled her in for a lingering kiss.
Once fully dressed and concealed in cloaks, they shouldered their packs and donned their new weapons.
The long sword he’d bought was clunky compared to his old rapier, but the weight on his hip was reassuring.
He’d felt bare without it. A satisfied smile spread across Anya’s face as she admired the cutlass she’d picked out, then sheathed it at her hip.
He made a mental note to buy her a bouquet of blades when this was all over, and test every single one with her.
They stepped out into the sunlight, where Roderick held the map open while Anya scrutinized it.
“We should head straight to the capital.” She poked a claw on the parchment over the capital city of Solenergi, represented by a sun with the outline of a crescent moon hovering over a castle.
“We can land on the outskirts of these woods, then walk the rest of the way and request an audience using a messenger hawk.”
“And when we go to pick up the message, who do you think will be waiting for us? The welcoming committee?”
Anya was a skilled negotiator. Roderick couldn’t deny that. But she wasn’t a miracle worker. Aquillas wanted nothing to do with Valeria, and the glacial wall was essentially thousands and thousands of miles of one message:
Stay the hell out.
“If we slink around like criminals, they will treat us as such. But if we—”