Last Dragon Standing (Dragon Kin #4)(68)

Keita laughed.

“Of course you laugh. You don’t have to live with it. And what will I do if she believes him? I mean arrogance in a man is one thing, since few of us take them seriously anyway, but in a woman? And if she becomes even a tenth as arrogant as Briec, then she’ll be well on her way to becoming—”

“My mother?”

Talaith agreed with a nod of her head and a flip of her hand.

“Exactly.”

Keita walked over to one of the bigger windows so she could get a good look at her niece in the bright light of day. She was an astoundingly beautiful child and barely a year and a half old, but it wasn’t her beauty that snared Keita. Nor was it the fact that she had her father’s eyes. It was what Keita saw in those eyes for someone so young. Intelligence. Vast intelligence and kindness. A benevolence and understanding that Keita had rarely seen in adult beings, much less the eyes of a child.

“Talaith…”

“I know. I know. Those eyes stop everyone in their tracks. And it’s not the color, is it? It’s like she can sense everything you feel or will ever feel.”

“If there’s truth to that, my friend, her life will not be easy.”

“I know that as well.”

Wincing that she had to ask the question because she had not been here to witness it or help, “Was it a hard birth for you?”

“Do you mean did I die, only to be brought back from the other side by a god so that I could slaughter a herd of Minotaurs trying to kill my child?”

Laughter wiped the awkward moment away, and Keita nodded.

“That’s exactly what I’m asking.”

“Sorry. Nothing so exciting as what happened to Annwyl. Just your typical, miserable labor with lots of screaming and swearing blood oaths at your brother for doing this to me. Very similar to my Izzy’s birth.” Talaith studied the babe in Keita’s arms. “But this time no one took my daughter from me. This time I can hold her whenever I want to. She’s mine to raise as I like.”

Knowing the human female spoke of how the god Arzhela had secured Talaith’s obedience for some sixteen years by holding her now-eldest daughter hostage, Keita said, “Gods, Izzy must be so excited by this.

Her own little sister.”

When Talaith didn’t answer, Keita looked away from her niece’s intense little face. “Talaith? You have told her, haven’t you?”

“Well, like you, Izzy hasn’t been home in two years.”

“So you haven’t told her? ”

“Don’t yell at me!”

“How could you not have told her?”

Talaith rubbed her forehead with her fingers. “It just never seemed the right time.”

“Well, two years later is certainly not the right time. It’s bad enough she didn’t even know you were pregnant, but when she finds out there’s been a child and no one told her—”

Talaith slapped her hand against her leg. “You know, for someone who hasn’t deigned to reward us with her presence in two bloody years, you certainly seem aware of what’s going on. And have opinions!” Iseabail, Daughter of Talaith and Briec, Future Champion of Rhydderch Hael—probably—Future General of Queen Annwyl’s Armies—She hoped! She hoped!—and sometimes Squire to Ghleanna the Decimator, kept her head down and tried hard not to show any reaction at all. She’d learned this approach after the first time her unit had come into one of these small towns, only to find it decimated by one of the barbaric Western tribes.

When she’d first arrived as a new recruit for Queen Annwyl, the troops often went into towns just like this one, either to protect the residents or to deal with the aftermath, if they were too late. But even when they were too late, they usually found only the men dead. The women and children were taken off to be slaves, and more than once, some of the units were able to rescue them before they’d been sold at the slave market.

But in the last eight months or so, things had changed. Instead of finding a lot of dead men, they’d been finding dead everything. Men, women, children, pets, cattle, crops. Nothing had been spared. And seeing a dead child for the first time had taken Izzy by surprise, leading to silent but noted tears. By the end of the evening, after cleaning up the bodies, she’d been called in front of her commander to be told not to be “so damn weak.” Izzy knew her commander was being intentionally cold. There was no other way to get through a day when you had to put one, let alone many, corpses of children on funeral pyres.

So Izzy had taught herself to stare at something innocuous. A tree. A cart. Today it was the bushes surrounding a burnt-out husk of a house. It was strange how the house had burned, leaving the lower-left frame standing but nothing else.

Grumbling about “bastard barbarians,” her commander began to snap out orders to the young recruits. “Grab this, get that, burn them…” It was all the same.

Not exactly the glamorous battle life Izzy still dreamed of, but she knew everyone had to start somewhere and it was her dreams of earning more that made getting through the set-up of more funeral pyres for the innocent tolerable.

“Iseabail,” her commander ordered, “check the rest of the houses.”

“Uh-huh,” Izzy said without thinking, her gaze catching something buried in the dirt by the burned house she’d been focusing on. She walked over to the husk and crouched down by what was left of the bushes.