28. Tamsyn

28

Tamsyn

I F THE CITY WAS DAY, THEN THE BORG WAS NIGHT.

It was alive and bustling and packed to capacity, but with none of the brightness of home. Sunlight didn't penetrate the thick canopy of cold fog. Even when we arrived in the middle of the day, a perpetual gloom hung about the chaotic network of cottages and buildings nestled among rolling dips and valleys that slid into a basin at the foot of the Crags, where the fortress sat—a great curled, sleeping cat. The Borg. The calm before the storm. The ice before the thaw.

The sky was unseeable, unknowable here, to the eyes of man. There was no distinction between clouds and fog. Both came together, like two bodies of water converging, the boundaries of each lost, erased and blurred.

I tilted my head and looked up, seeking a glimpse of what I knew was there. Fat white flakes drifted down and fell like gossamer on my upturned face, tangling in my lashes, but I could see nothing beyond those clouds. Not the snowcapped summits I knew to be there. The Crags, waiting and watchful.

Our horses knew they were home. They quickened their pace with a surge of energy, speeding toward the sprawling fortress. It was not quite a castle. Definitely no palace. Not as I was accustomed. More timber than rock. There was a moat with dark waters and a series of heavy steel gates—defensive measures for this place, this sentinel of the Borderlands.

Once we were spotted, people poured out to cheer our return. The voices rolled like thunder over the air, and snatches of conversation reached my ears... words. A word.

Dragon.

The news had reached them. Fell's warriors had spread the information. I felt a little sick at the knowledge, but, of course, they would want to warn people of danger.

They'd thought we were lost. Victims to the dragon. Now, riding through the streets like conquering heroes, they believed we had survived. We were a miracle manifested in flesh.

Pointed stares along with pointed fingers were directed at me, and I didn't know if it was because I was the new Lady of the Borderlands or a survivor of the dragon. I suppose either was cause for attention.

We waited at the barbican for the final gate to be lowered so we could cross into the interior.

Fell looked over at me. "You're home now, Tamsyn."

I struggled to smile and then faced forward again, gazing at the hulking fortress. Beyond the stronghold, rising into the air was the rocky facade of the mountain range. It felt deceptively close, as though I could reach out a hand and touch it.

"Tonight you will sleep in a warm bed with fresh sheets and more pillows than you can count," he promised.

He had been this way since we reunited in the skog. Solicitous and gentle, as though he was trying to make amends. All of them had been especially cordial and attentive to me: Fell, Mari, Magnus, and Vidar. Gracious, I was sure, because I saved them from the huldra.

"Sounds wonderful." And I meant that. I would enjoy it.

It had been a long time since I'd slept indoors. A lifetime since I was beneath a roof, in a bed, beside a crackling fire in a hearth. Upon leaving the skog, it had taken us another week to reach the Borg.

The drawbridge settled with a rattle of chains and a foreboding clang. Our small party started across it, and I couldn't help lifting my gaze one more time to the jagged mountains hovering over us. Even with the high crests obscured by cloud and fog, they were massive. Irregular patches of black rock broke up the expanse of silvery white snow.

The fortress, immense and sprawling here on the ground, sat small in the shadow of the Crags, and I wondered what was up there, who, even now, was, perhaps, looking down at us... watching.

The peaks were stubbornly, teasingly out of sight, miles and miles away, tucked into those clouds, but I had already seen them in my panicked flight through the sky. They were imprinted on me. I could see them still when I closed my eyes, tattooed on my memory.

As we rolled with clattering hooves into the belly of the beast, the lion's den, the heart of my enemy's lair, the mountain stared down at me not as an intimidating thing. Not a hard, cold, and punishing palisade. Not a daunting ridge repelling the faint of heart, summoning only the most adventurous or desperate to climb its slopes and angles in the quest for riches and glory.

It didn't feel like such a forlorn or scary sight to me.

It felt inviting, a welcoming haven, and strangely familiar.

It felt like home.

I HAD NOT seen my reflection in several weeks.

I had never been one to pay a great deal of attention to my looks. I wasn't like Feena, a creature of vanity, who constantly needed to assess herself in the mirror. Besides, I had always been told how very unpalatable my appearance was... especially my regrettable hair.

But now, sitting at the dressing table, I stared hard at myself, appraising, searching. As though I could find the truth etched there, like words writ upon the page... or like the erosion of wind upon a mountain.

I turned my face slowly in one direction, and then another, staring at it from every possible angle, seeking the evidence of what I now understood to be my new and dreadful reality. I was grateful for the privacy in which to conduct my self-examination.

Upon entering the fortress, I had been escorted to this chamber. It was far bigger and grander than the one I had left behind in the palace. The stronghold itself may not have been as lavish as the palace, but clearly they had given me far superior sleeping quarters.

Shortly following our arrival, Fell had excused himself. Obviously, after such a long absence, he had several matters demanding his attention. That was hours ago. I imagined I would not see him until tomorrow, if even then. Now that we were here, Fell would not stand around pandering to me. He would have better things to do.

I'd dined alone in the chamber, enjoying a fine meal of roasted pheasant, vegetables, and warm, crusty bread that I generously slathered with fresh butter. I fell upon the food as though it was the only meal I had eaten in the long weeks since leaving the City. And while it was not, it was certainly the best meal.

The chamber had its own dressing room with shelves and armoires and a lounge and a vanity table with a gilded mirror. The table was littered with all manner of combs and brushes and little bottles of scented oils and lotions.

It was the mirror, however, that held my focus—or rather my reflection in it did. As I sat there, I searched for changes. Differences, small or large, nuances that pointed to that thing I had become.

I looked like me. Same red hair. Same fiery amber eyes, if not a little brighter, a little wild. Feral. And perhaps I appeared a little— a lot —bolder. My expression gazed back at me almost in defiance, ready for a challenge, ready for battle. Was it the dragon inside me? Or was it simply a consequence of the past several weeks, when I had been put to the test on so many different levels, inured to conflict... even eager for it?

I wanted to believe that what happened with Arkin was a one-time occurrence, that I would never turn again. That I could live out the rest of my life here in relative peace, just a person, a woman. A person who never hurt another person. Who possessed not the will nor the ability. As calm and mild as a summer breeze.

I grimaced. It all sounded so wonderfully normal. Normal. And I knew that was the one thing I wasn't. Perhaps I never had been.

I gripped one of the small bottles of scented oil, flexing my fingers around the glass.

It was so wretchedly unfair. For a brief moment I had thought I could have it. A normal life. A husband who made me feel things. Good things. Exciting things.

I had thought I could have the kind of life that Stig had shown me the day he walked me through the portrait gallery, introducing me to the previous whipping boys and girls, explaining how they had all gone on to live full, meaningful lives.

I'd dared to hope, to believe that I might have a family. A real family. My own family. A family no one could accuse of not being truly mine. These things had circled around and teased me, tickling like a feather, tempting me since the night Fell and I had married, since we departed the City and started north. Since he said the words: We can try to get on.

But no. That was never to be my destiny. That teasing feather had been snatched away. In its place was the hard slap of my existence striking me across the face.

I gasped as the small bottle exploded in my hand.

It shattered.

I had shattered it.

Opening my trembling fingers wide, I stared down in dismay. I gripped my wrist with my other hand, trying to stop it from shaking so violently. I did not realize I had been gripping the glass so very hard.

As the aroma of crushed roses in oil drifted on the air, I examined my palm. Amid the broken shards of glass, my fingers and palm were smeared with a glossy purple fluid. I had not realized the oil was dyed.

Frowning, I shook the glass off my palm, letting the pieces fall onto the dressing table. Reaching for a handkerchief, I blotted at the wet purple shimmer, attempting to clean my hand. And that was when I saw the cuts. Several little gashes marred my skin like random flecks of mud.

One gash in particular was deeper than the rest, and glistening purple leaked thickly from the opening like blood.

I wiped harder. Not like blood. Blood.

This purple shimmer was my blood. It came from me. Out of me. Not human blood.

Not human. Not human. Not human.

The words repeated like an awful mantra, a poisoned vine growing, winding, twisting, sprouting a devastating path through me.

I had bled before. Granted, not often, and not for long, as I had always possessed the uncanny ability to heal quickly. Maybe not so uncanny anymore, though.

But I had bled. And when I bled, I'd bled red. I guessed I no longer did. Now that I had turned, my blood told the truth.

I glanced around rapidly, as though fearing someone else might see the evidence of what I wasn't... of what I was. Thankfully, it was still just me in the dressing room. No one else had entered.

As I studied that purple, winking with an iridescent sheen, swelling like spilled ink in my palm, I searched my memory, trying to recall if I'd ever heard anything about dragons possessing different blood. The bards had never mentioned it, but that didn't mean anything. No one was alive who had fought in the Threshing, who could give a firsthand account of fighting dragons, who could speak of their blood.

Suddenly I recalled the painting of the Hormung that hung in my father's chancery: that very detailed and graphic canvas depicting the violence of that long-ago day. I'd studied it so often over the years. It was perfectly memorized in my mind. I remembered several dragons in the midst of death, twisting through the sky with sprays of purple escaping from their massive bodies. I had not thought much of it at the time, assuming it was an artistic choice. Now I knew better. Now I understood. The artist had chosen purple for a reason.

Because dragon blood was purple.

I pressed the handkerchief firmly against my palm, applying pressure, desperate to stop the bleeding... desperate to change the blood. Desperate to change.

Desperate. Desperate. Desperate.

My hand throbbed, and for once it wasn't because of the carved X there. It was the collection of cuts and nicks from the shattered glass. The torn skin stung and tingled as the nerves worked to heal and knit the ragged edges back together.

I panted, choking back a sob. If I needed any proof, any evidence that I wasn't going to go back, that the dragon was still in me, real and very much alive... this was it.

I was the stone after the throw. It could not be taken back. It could not be undone.

I was the dragon, and the dragon was me.

Reaching this realization settled me, cooling some of my panic. I took several calming sips of air. My breathing steadied after a few moments, and I carefully peeled back the handkerchief to inspect the damage, finding only further evidence that I was no ordinary girl.

The cuts were gone. The wounds had healed. Unblemished skin stared back at me. Releasing a grateful sigh, I quickly wiped any remnants of purple blood from my hand. Finished, I rose from the cushioned bench, the soiled handkerchief clenched tightly in my fist as though I could crush it into nothingness.

I left the dressing room behind and strode purposefully into my bedchamber, walking a hard line toward the hearth, intent on getting rid of the evidence of my...

What could I call it? Aberration? Defect?

I was shaking as I tossed the stained handkerchief into the fire, trembling all over as I watched it wilt beneath curling flame. There. No one would happen upon it now and—

"Are you settling in all right?"

I whirled around, my hand flying to my throat with a muffled cry.

Fell stood there, one shoulder leaning against the threshold, that almost-smile on his lips again.

"Fell," I breathed, relief and fear at war in my heart. "I did not expect to see you tonight."

"I, too, am looking forward to a comfortable rest." He nodded to the bed with an incline of his dark head.

"You're sleeping in here?" I croaked.

In the same bedchamber? In the same bed? With me? How was that not a bad idea?

He pushed off the threshold and strode into the room, shrugging out of his leathered armor first.

"I've dreamed about my bed ever since I left home."

My face went hot. When he dreamed of his bed, was I ever in it? Were we in it together? Were we doing... things? Intimate things?

Because a dream was all it could ever be.

He moved with a fluid grace, like smoke winding through the room. I had to force myself not to stare as he finished undressing himself, stripping down to the waist, revealing all that sculpted and inked skin. Warmth buzzed in my hands. My palms tingled, longing to explore the smooth expanse of his warrior body, itching to reacquaint myself with the texture of his flesh.

I swallowed and found my voice: "I did not realize that this would be our room."

He stilled, his eyes lifting to mine, that crystal gray so penetrating I felt it like a sword cutting through me. "Is that a problem?"

A problem that I would share a bedchamber with my husband? How could I admit such a thing?

"No. Not a problem at all," I lied.

Just a huge problem. Terrifying and appalling that I should share such close quarters— a bed! —with a man I was vastly attracted to when I knew nothing about this body I inhabited and what wild and dangerous thing it might do next.

He nodded as though satisfied with my response, and we readied for bed in silence.

I slipped beneath the heavy covers, clinging to my side of the bed like it was a raft at sea, hoping I had chosen the side he didn't sleep on but not about to ask. I didn't trust my voice not to crack or quiver.

By the time he slid in beside me, his heavier weight dipping the mattress, my eyes were closed and I was doing what I hoped was an admirable job of feigning sleep.

I could see nothing behind the blackness of my eyelids, but I heard everything: every pop and crackle of the fire, every rustle and shift of his big body inches from mine, the slow, even cadence of his breath. I even imagined I heard the steady beat of his heart beneath his skin.

It was a torment.

I waited, my chest clenched and pounding.

I was on fire. A great, devouring pyre.

Every muscle, every line of my body strained, as tight as a white-hot wire, braced for his touch, for the weight of his hand to fall somewhere, anywhere on me, equal parts dread and longing burning through me.

I couldn't do this. We couldn't do this.

Oh, I knew I would be receptive. There was no doubt. The fire seething in me was for him. I would definitely be into it... into him.

But I didn't know how my body might react, what I might reveal of myself. There was a cauldron boiling in me just beneath the surface, under the skin, and I feared what might happen if it bubbled over.

I worried that if I was too overcome with emotion, the fire might find a way out, like how water always found the tiniest cracks in a dam. With Arkin, it had been fear and rage that did it. Fear and rage to such an intense degree... I had never felt like that before. I did not know what to expect in the event of lust and passion. Those were new emotions for me, too.

Just being alone and this close to Fell made me feel all sorts of wild and dangerous things, like I was falling from a great height with no idea if the landing would break every bone in my body.

I was seized with the image of the bed on fire. Literally. On. Fire. Fell trapped within, kindling for the flames. Because of me. Bile rose in my throat, and I felt the overwhelming urge to gag at the thought of doing to Fell what I had done to Arkin. No. Never.

I squeezed my eyes tighter until I saw dancing spots within the blackness. There was absolutely no way I could fall asleep like this—this full of want and longing and fear.

That was the last thought I remembered before sleep took me.

WHEN I WOKE, the air was a bruised gray.

I blinked several times, wondering what had roused me. A... feeling. A sound. A movement in the chamber. It was still early. I had been looking forward to sleeping late and not having to drag myself atop a horse at the first hint of dawn on the horizon.

Gradually I became aware that I was no longer clinging to the edge of the bed. I had shifted some time during the night, rolled in my sleep to the center of the bed, dipping toward that heat-radiating body, that beckoning hearth.

Fell's arm draped over my waist, holding me flush against him. Our legs were tangled, heavy limbs comfortably entwined like braided rope. My mouth rested on his shoulder, fanning warm air against his skin, which might have been why I was acutely aware of the fact that my breathing had changed, coming faster, louder, fogging his bare flesh with moisture.

And his breathing was not a slow and even cadence either. It was a rasp directly in my ear, weaving through the web of strands.

"Tamsyn." The sound of my name was a rough growl on the air. I felt it like a touch, like the stroke of calloused fingers over my body even though his hands were firmly planted elsewhere—one a burning, throbbing imprint on my back and the other tucked beneath his body in the bed. "Did you sleep well?"

"Like a rock," I said, my lips brushing him as I spoke, and I couldn't stop myself, couldn't help myself from doing the most natural thing. I parted my lips and kissed him there, open-mouthed, tasting the slope of his shoulder, letting my tongue slip out for a lick of salty-clean skin.

His breath caught, and I made a low hum of satisfaction. I lifted my lips from his shoulder to find his face much closer than before. The chamber was murky, but it did not hide the startling frost of his eyes pinned on me. Nor the flare of his nostrils as though he was inhaling the scent of me. Nor the way his lips parted on a breath as though he was on the verge of saying something. Or doing something. Something like—

He kissed me hard.

This moment, his closeness, his smell, his taste. Warm and clean with all the smells of the outdoors, of wind and snow and saddle leather.

The temptation was too much. I opened my mouth with a moan to meet the hot thrust of his tongue.

I let him in. He kissed and took and gave. And I was there for all of it. Devouring him back.

My hands went everywhere. His shoulders. His neck. His face. Fingers diving through his hair. In a flash, our embrace became frenzied and wild and fierce. Too quickly. Heat gathered in my chest and spiraled, working its way up through my windpipe.

His hands did their own exploring, traveling from my shoulders, down the slope of my back—which tingled and pulled with a pressure that set off alarm bells in my head—to cup my bottom. His fingers dug into my soft flesh, pulling me higher, tighter against him, until our hips met. Until I felt the hard prod of his cock against my aching, clenching core. And I knew what he wanted, because I wanted it, too.

I gasped into his mouth at the same moment I felt a rush of steam escape my nose.

He felt it, too, lurching back, clearly as shocked and bewildered as anyone whose skin got too close to a hot stove.

His hand flew to his face.

I was off the bed in an instant, hand over my mouth in horror, feeling the telltale heat there, the fading warmth from the steam still moist on my fingers.

He rubbed at his face. "What was that?"

He was looking at me and already thinking, already trying to understand... seeking the most logical explanation. Thankfully. Because me... a dragon? Not logical.

"D-did you... bite me?" In his mind, he was reassigning that flash of pain to something else. Something that made more sense.

"I... I... I am sorry," I choked out lamely. "I got carried away."

I shook my head wildly, not about to confess that I had singed him. Thankfully, it had been brief and not very severe... not so severe that I'd left a mark, a burn that could be pointed at for what it was.

It was a nightmare. My fear made real—that I would lose control. That I would somehow manifest into my dragon while in proximity to him. I could have hurt him. Maybe even killed him. The image of Arkin's corpse filled my mind.

I took several staggering steps back from the bed, babbling between my fingers, "I... I am sorry. So sorry."

Fell extended a hand to me as though cajoling a frightened animal. "Tamsyn. It's all right. I don't mind. Come back to bed."

I shook my head roughly. "No. I can't do this... I can't do this with you."

He lowered his arm back down, a raw stillness coming over him, a frown marring that beautiful face of his. "You can't?"

I motioned between us. "This. I can't be with you this way."

There. I'd said it. I could not explain why, but I'd said it.

Even in the almost-dark, I could detect the hardening of his features, the icy curtain dropping over his gray eyes. "I see. You're my wife, but you don't want to... be a wife to me."

I stared at him in mute frustration. He was drawing his own conclusions. Inaccurate conclusions.

Of course I couldn't correct him, but the truth was more than complicated. It was dangerous. I wasn't fool enough to tell this man, the Beast of the Borderlands, what was happening to me. That he shared his bed with a monster. I could hardly even form the words in my head. Saying them out loud to him was an impossibility.

"Yes," I agreed. "That's how I feel."

He nodded tightly. "Understood. I will not offend you with my advances again."

I wanted to cry, to weep from the unfairness of it all. I could see the door slamming shut over his expression, the frost of his eyes growing colder. He was gone from me. Any softness, any desire he felt, I had just killed it... doused the warmth in him like a fire burned out.

FOR THE NEXT week I did little more than sleep. Waking to eat and do the bare necessities, but then returning to my bed—our bed—for leisurely naps was the safest form of existence.

I told myself it was my body recovering from the long journey. I told myself it wasn't despair. It wasn't mourning. It wasn't avoidance. It wasn't the loss of a marriage before it even had a chance to begin. It wasn't the death of it, the burying of it—of us and what we could have been—beneath dirt and rock like any other corpse. It wasn't evasion of this new world, this new life I found myself inhabiting. This new thing I found myself to be.

I told myself all of this.

And I was a liar.

Fell joined me every night. He had not taken a room of his own, and I assumed it must be for the sake of appearances. He was the Lord of the Borderlands. He was master here, and he had a reputation to protect. He couldn't look as though he spurned his wife and marital obligations. So we slept together, not looking at each other, not touching, not talking after we put out the light.

And every night I was afflicted with the same torment.

My body burning up on the inside, my chest squeezing, my skin pulling and tingling and vibrating and humming with a song only I heard... aroused beyond measure by the husband I could never have.