Aidan immediately turned to the queen. “Lord Bercelak is leaving your side?”

“I want this done, Aidan. They’ve been destroying my lands, now our mountains. Burning the forests, salting the earth. And next they’ll go for our water supplies. We can no longer afford to go back and forth with them. Another year of this and we’ll have nothing left for all of you to come home to.”

“At this moment,” Ghleanna explained, “King Gaius is using his legions to push Salebiri’s troops back to their soil. Then we close ranks around them—and crush them. Once we’re done there, we take out Salebiri at his home front, leaving nothing behind.”

Brannie nodded at her mother’s words. “Good.” She glanced at Aidan and said, “We need to get back and—”

“No,” Ghleanna cut in. She jerked her thumb at a surprisingly quiet Keita. “You go with your cousin.”

Brannie reared back as if she’d been slapped.

“I’ll do no such thing.”

Black eyes locked on black eyes. “You’ll do as I order you to.”

“No. Not on this. I will not risk my troops—Mum! Ow! Stop it!”

Aidan cringed watching Ghleanna the Decimator grab her daughter by the hair and walk off with her.

“Excuse us a minute,” she growled at Rhiannon.

“Take your time.”

Once the two She-dragons were a bit away from them for privacy, Rhiannon smirked at Aidan and asked, “Do you plan to disobey any orders, dearest Aidan?”

“Who? Me?” He snorted. “I like my hair just where it is, my queen. On my head.”

“It does look lovely there.”

He smiled. “Doesn’t it?”

* * *

Brannie tried to pull away from her mother without hurting her, but Ghleanna gripped her the same way she used to when she had to separate Brannie from her brother Celyn.

“Mum!” she barked again. “Let me go!”

Her mother abruptly released her, sending Brannie back-first into the trunk of a very large oak.

“What do you think you’re doing?” her mother demanded.

“What am I doing? Trying not to get in a brawl with me own mum. That’s what!”

“When you’re given an order—”

“But, Mum—”

Her mother held up one blunt, angry finger. And it was so angry.

“When you’re given an order by a superior,” she said again, “you bloody well follow it.”

“Even when I know it’s wrong? Even when I know it’s a waste of my bloody time?”

“Who are you to say it’s wrong?”

“You want me to follow Keita. I love my cousin, but—”

“Ren has disappeared.”

“Ren? Ren who?” Ghleanna raised a brow, and Brannie guessed, “Ren of the Chosen?”

Ren of the Chosen was the youngest offspring of Empress Xinyi, the dragon ruler of the Eastland Empires far across the seas. When he was much younger, he’d been sent to Devenallt Mountain by his then-ruling father. From what Brannie had heard, no one had known what to expect from any Eastland royal, much less one related by direct bloodline to the Chosen Dynasty.