At first, trying to watch out for all those Mì-runach had been troublesome but, as time moved on, he’d been able to focus on just two. Sometimes three. Uther, Caswyn, and occasionally Éibhear.

He hadn’t worried too much about Éibhear, though. He was, at the end of the day, still a prince and, more important, the favorite youngest son of the queen. He could only get into so much trouble. And Éibhear’s mate, Iseabail, had calmed his now-famous temper. She knew how to keep him busy when he got in a mood simply by having him deal with entire forests. Aidan didn’t know what it was, but that dragon loved to take down trees. And he was damn good at it, too.

Uther and Caswyn, however, seemed to make it their goal to irritate the higher ranks of the queen’s army until Aidan had feared they would end up ass first on a standing pike. Eventually, though, it seemed that Branwen had made it her personal business to deal with the pair. And she was much easier to distract from their foolishness than some of the harder generals.

Still, on his worst day interceding between a pissed-off general and the unruly idiots he loved as brothers, Aidan had never been so overwhelmed, so terrified of the outcome, as he was trying to keep two She-dragons from killing each other.

He’d admit, his mother and older sisters were . . . well, horrible beings. Plotting, deceitful, and terribly, unbelievably, bigoted. If one was not of equal royal stature or greater, one was not to be spoken to with even a modicum of respect. And yet . . . he’d rather stand between them and the unwashed masses asking for bread than deal with Keita the Viper and Branwen the Awful when they didn’t get along.

What made it worse? Unlike true enemies, they had no intention of fighting. Instead they kept slapping at each other like two human girls fighting over the last piece of dessert at a family meal.

Which meant that, with Aidan attempting to keep them apart by staying between them, he was getting hit. Constantly. And their human hands hurt his frail human skin. He’d rather face the claws of a bear than the punches and slaps of these two angry She-dragons.

At the fifth hour, when he finally could stand no more, he bellowed, “That is enough!”

Their small party stopped and the two females glared at him in surprise.

“I am covered in bruises and scrapes because you two can’t put your differences aside for five minutes! I’m sick of it!”

“She—”

“It was her—”

“I don’t care!” he barked. “Now I’m going to say this once and never again. If you two bitches don’t settle down—”

“Settle down?”

“Bitches?”

“—and act like you have some common sense, I’m going to—”

Aidan’s words ended abruptly when both Keita and Brannie put their hands over his mouth. At first, he assumed they were both going to kill him. Poison from Keita. A quick blade across the throat from Brannie. But, he realized, they weren’t focused on him. They were looking off into the nearby trees.