A Tale Of Two Dragons (Dragon Kin 0.2)(24)

She didn’t turn around, but she could hear another dragon moving up behind her.

“What is it, Bram?” the Queen testily asked.

“I’m sorry to interrupt, Your Majesty, but I was hoping to involve myself in this.”

“Involve yourself?”

“Uh . . . yes. Involve myself. With Braith’s defense.”

“Defense?”

“Why, yes, Your Majesty. Braith will get a defense, won’t she? Since the accusation has been against her father and not actually Braith herself. Correct?”

There was a long, painful pause, and Braith expected the Queen to order her guards to just cleave off Braith’s head. No one would exactly be surprised if she did, and the way the entire chamber became quiet . . .

Braith simply closed her eyes and waited, but in the silence, she heard something. The sound of wood striking stone and it kept moving closer.

It was curious how everyone became so silent, even the Queen. Unable to wait any longer, Braith looked over her shoulder. And that’s when she saw Brigida the Foul slowly moving across the throne room, her dragon body leaning heavily on her wooden walking stick, her left back claw dragging behind her as if unable to function at all.

As she moved forward, everyone stepped out of her way. Royals, guards . . . everyone. Braith had never seen anything quite like it.

Brigida was a Cadwaladr. Not mated into the Clan but born into it like Ailean and Addolgar and all the rest. She was, as far as Southland royalty was concerned . . . a low-born dragon. And royals didn’t move back from low-born dragons unless they needed the low borns to remove a half-eaten carcass. Yet no one approached Brigida. No one stopped her. And the Queen gazed at her with something that Braith truly believed to be fear.

“Gods,” Bram whispered to her. “This was Ailean’s idea to save you?”

Braith could only shrug, because she had no idea what the Cadwaladrs were planning. Which, at the moment, was the most horrifying thing about all this.

Addolgar looked at his siblings, but all they could do was shrug helplessly. Why their father would send Brigida to help Braith, he didn’t know. The Queen was not a fan of witches in general, and seemed to loathe White Dragonwitches specifically. No one knew why, but many suspected it had to do with her daughter, Rhiannon. Rhiannon was a white She-dragon after all. But she did not seem to have the same level of mystical power that Brigida or the few other White Dragonwitches of the Southlands had.

But, honestly, none of that mattered. Not with Braith’s life on the line.

“Come on,” Ghleanna said, tugging at Addolgar’s forearm. She headed inside the chamber, Addolgar and Bercelak following. The guards let them by, but watched closely.

Brigida was still making her very slow way across the chamber toward the Queen.

Addolgar was about to storm around her one way while Bercelak went the other, but Ghleanna caught them both by the hair and yanked them back.

“But—” Addolgar began.

“We follow,” Ghleanna whispered.

“She’s moving like a snail,” Bercelak grumbled.

“We follow,” Ghleanna insisted.

So they did . . . very slowly. Painfully slowly. Addolgar hadn’t known anything could move that slowly and still be moving.

Even stranger, though, was the fact that everyone waited for Brigida. They watched. They waited. They moved out of her way. The She-dragon was clearly feared by one and all in this hall.

Except Braith, he realized. She’d been the only one he’d ever met, even among his kin, willing to brazenly, as Brigida called it, “back talk” her.

He found something rather endearing about that. Well . . . maybe not endearing. But charming. No. Not charming.

Cute. It was cute. She was cute. Very, very cute.

“Stop staring at her!” Ghleanna whispered.

“Huh?”

“At Braith,” she continued to whisper. “Stop staring at her like you’re planning to kill her yourself.”

“Was I?”

“What’s wrong with you?”

“That is such an open-ended question,” Bercelak scoffed.

“Nothing,” Addolgar replied. “I was just thinking.”

“About what?”

“How cute she is,” he answered honestly.

Bercelak stopped. “Brigida?”

Addolgar thought on that a moment. “I don’t know if I’d call Brigida cute. Would you, Ghleanna?”

Ghleanna stopped, covered her eyes with her claws. “You two have to be the dumbest centaur-f*ckers ever.”

“Gods, you are so hostile,” Bercelak complained.

“I was thinking that,” Addolgar agreed.

Braith didn’t know what Ailean’s offspring were doing. They kept stopping and bickering. Stopping and bickering. Even worse, they kept whispering—but they were in a cave chamber . . . everyone could hear them.

And, at first, Braith thought that Addolgar was suggesting she was cute but then Bercelak mentioned Brigida . . . ?

Was this really how the end of her life would look? Really?

“You must have faith,” Bram said low, his voice managing not to carry.

“Faith? In what?”

His smile was small but there. “In them.”

Perhaps Bram the Merciful was right. The Cadwaladrs were known to successfully manage two things—fix things completely or make them a thousand times worse.