Chapter 476: A Promise Made In Blood

"You are asking if I have a wife. My answer is that I did. It was arranged. We were married for two months before she was taken from me."

Landon’s voice cracked on the word ’taken.’ He covered it with a drink. The drink was larger than any he’d taken all evening.

"She was studying our ancestors’ runes on the ice continent. That was her life’s work. She loved it more than anything in this world, including me, and I loved that about her. I made her a portal every morning and walked her through it. Every afternoon I went back to check on her and portaled her home. I sent twelve of my best men with her. My Second in Command. My best friend since childhood."

His throat bobbed once.

"They were ambushed by Nyxar, the Eclipse King, and his forces. They were outnumbered and Nyxar slaughtered her guard including my second, and every researcher present including my wife. Male Luminari can only bond light with their fated mates, and she was not my fated mate, which meant I couldn’t feel her and had no way of knowing she was in danger. I arrived that afternoon. The same time I always arrived in the afternoons to check on her and the portal opened to silence and the smell of blood."

Nicholas caught Maddox’s eye. The eye contact was one word long and the word was fuck and both of them were thinking it at the same volume.

"So no, Shadowfell. I am not planning to take multiple wives. I buried the one I had. And I was not going to take another. Guinevere is the prophesied queen of Solveil. The men in my bloodline are bound by blood oath that we will take only one wife."

Landon shook his head. Took another long drink.

"If the prophesied queen is found while we are already married, we separate from that wife for the prophesied queen. Prophesied queen aside, if we have a chosen wife who passes away, we do not remarry. That is the cost of marrying a Solveil. The men in my line have honored that for thousands of years. Without exception. We wait for her. My father waited his entire life. He never found her. I was prepared to do the same."

His thumb traced the rim of the glass once.

"When I saw Guinevere, I could feel her light. I understood why my father spent his entire life waiting. I understood why the oath exists. I understood why every man in my bloodline agreed to one wife and no remarriage and a lifetime of waiting for a woman who might never come." He looked at Maddox. "I will give you gold, a fleet, and my sister. And in return I am asking for time with a woman who does not know that she is loved by a man she barely knows, and for the ability to protect her."

???

SOLVEIL - KING’S PRIVATE COURTYARD

Kael faked the throw. The wolf didn’t move. She looked at his empty hand. Looked at the ball still behind his back. Looked at his face. The look said: I am not a beginner, Ashenvale. Throw the damn ball.

He threw it high and far. She sprinted to the end of the courtyard, ran up the stone wall like the wall was a ramp she had been using her whole life, launched off the top, rotated mid-air, caught the ball upside down, and landed on four paws.

She trotted to Ryker because it was his turn, like nothing had happened.

Brennan was clapping with his full body. "Kael."

"I saw it."

"She did a backflip."

Ryker took the ball from her mouth. Guinevere’s wolf sat. Waiting.

"We are adding that backflip into your next Lethal Simulation run," Ryker said.

The wolf gave a single nod.

"Can she understand us when she’s a wolf?" Brennan asked.

Guinevere shifted back in a flash of white. "Yes, we can."

Brennan’s head tilted. "When you say we..."

"I am not a singular being," Guinevere explained, as if she had just told them she preferred tea over coffee.

The courtyard was quiet in a way it hadn’t been all evening. Three dragons processing the same realization at the same speed. Their dragons were separate beings too. Their dragons had opinions, preferences, voices in their heads that argued with them and overruled them and wanted things they didn’t want. They had lived with that duality since their first shift and no woman had understood it. It was a dragon thing.

And they had known Guinevere this entire time and never thought to ask that or take time to understand how the wolf duality worked. She carried the same war as them in a smaller body.

The courtyard held the moment.

Then Ryker ruined the moment.

He threw a ball as hard as he could at Guinevere without warning to test her reflexes. Her wolf ripped out of her in a flash and caught it mid-air. Ryker looked disappointed that she didn’t do a trick. A man who had nearly marked King Solveil’s cousin an hour ago was now grading a wolf’s fetch performance. The evening had range.

Brennan clapped with an enthusiasm of a man who did not understand that the Wolf King of Nyros would not want to play fetch if he asked and was already planning on asking if Nicholas’s wolf could do a backflip too.

The wolf trotted to Sterling and dropped the ball at his feet with the energy of an artist delivering a finished work to a patron who had better appreciate it.

He reluctantly took it.

"Oh lighten up. You know you want to try it," Ryker called over to him.

Sterling did not dignify that with a response. He did, however, launch it straight up as high as he could. The wolf tracked it, waited, waited, timed the descent, and leapt so high she cleared Kael’s head. She caught it at the top and landed softly behind him.

Brennan was next up.

He threw it into the pool on purpose. The wolf launched off the stone edge, caught it six inches above the water without getting wet, and landed on the opposite side of the pool. Dry. Ball in mouth. Tail going. The physics of it should not have worked and the wolf did not care about physics.

Ryker and Sterling both threw a ball. Opposite directions. The wolf caught the first. Reversed. Snagged the second.

Two balls in her mouth. Neither touched the ground. The wolf was proud. Damn right she was.

And somewhere underneath the fetch skills was a woman who did not know she was the subject of a negotiation involving more gold than most civilizations would produce in a century. She did not know that the king she had accidentally given a wolf to had been waiting for her his entire life. She did not know that the clock was ticking on the fivesome memory fog and her gaslighting career.