“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.
Curiosity getting the better of her, Izzy dug her hand into the dirt and caught hold of the strip of red leather. She pulled it out and brushed at it, trying to see the emblem.
“Iseabail! Daughter of Talaith! Do you hear me? ” In the back of her mind, Izzy knew she should be jumping at her commander’s bellowing, but she didn’t know how. To say she’d been through more than most of the recruits was kind of an understatement, and after facing down gods, dragons, and, most terrifying of all at times, her mother, some bellowing unit leader who could have the skin stripped off her back for insubordination really didn’t worry her much.
“Commander?” she said, running over to him. “What do you make of this?”
The commander, always annoyed Izzy didn’t jump in terror at a mere word from him, snatched the leather from her hand. He wiped at the emblem with his thumb, his scowl suddenly fading away. “Where’d you find this?” She pointed. “Over at that house there. In the dirt.” The commander slapped the leather back in Izzy’s hand. “Take this to the general.”
Izzy grinned. “Can I get a horse?”
“No!” he bellowed back. “You cannot get a horse. You haven’t earned one!”
“I was just asking,” she muttered.
Bringing two fingers to his lips, the commander whistled.
Izzy shook her head. “No. Please, sir. No.”
Her commander leered at her. It was the one way he knew to get to her. The one thing that set her teeth on edge. Because it was the one thing Izzy had absolutely no control over.
“Enjoy the ride, Iseabail.”
Before Izzy could beg more, the dragon’s tail wrapped around her waist and lifted her out of the small town. As always, she screamed when that happened. Begged to be put down, because she knew exactly what would happen when they arrived at their destination. Because it happened to her at least once a day now. Sometimes more, rarely less.
Yet the cruel beast holding her was no different from all the others who did the same to her—heartless and relentless, thoroughly enjoying the pain she suffered. And usually—family!
“No!” she begged, as she always begged. Especially when she saw the expansive camp that belonged to Annwyl’s troops, right outside the Western Mountains. “Don’t!” Izzy tried again as they flew through the camp.
“Please!”
“Hold on!” was the only warning she got before the tail pulled back and then flicked forward, tossing her through tent flaps and inside the tent.