like to come in for a few minutes? I can promise you that no one will hold you prisoner or otherwise harm either of you.”
“I do not wish to enter the silver wyvern’s house, no,” Baltic said somewhat stiffly. He looked at me. “Are you speaking to me yet?”
“No.”
He sighed. “My mate is making a futile attempt to punish me, but she will follow my desires in this as in everything and not enter—Ysolde!”
I pushed past him into the house, glancing around the cool hallway. “I’d love to chat for a bit, May. Hello, Gabriel. We’ve come for a visit.”
“No, we have not! For the love of the saints, woman, I just finished telling the silver mate that we did not wish to enter!” Baltic stormed in after me. “Why do I speak if you will not heed my words?”
I raised an eyebrow at him.
“No,” he said, answering the unspoken question. “I am a wyvern! I do not need to explain to you, my mate, the one who says she loves me beyond all else, the one who has promised to obey me, my every move.”
“Obey?” May asked, her eyes widening with mirth. “Oh, dear.”
Gabriel’s lips twitched in an otherwise somber expression.
I kept the pleasant smile on my face despite the desire to whomp a certain dragon upside his handsome, if annoyingly stubborn, head. “We’re having a little argument. Baltic feels he can go traipsing off who-knows-where without bothering to tell me, and I feel he can shove his head up his—”
“Ysolde!”
“You are welcome to our home despite the current situation between the weyr and you,” Gabriel said, clearly fighting a smile. He gestured toward the room from which he had just emerged. “Would you care to sit down?”
Baltic opened his mouth to say no, but I shot him a look that promised no little amount of retribution in the very near future, and he, no doubt sensing he’d pushed me about as far as he could without me exploding into a million bits of frustration, wisely opted to humor me.
“Where’s Jim?” May asked as she had a few words with the woman I remembered as her housekeeper.
“We dropped it off at Drake’s house,” I said, tightening my lips at Baltic.
“Oh?” She looked from me to Baltic, who was engaged in glaring at Gabriel. “Was there some sort of trouble?”
“Not if you call the fact that Baltic barely slowed down, let alone stopped, so I could say hello to Aisling and good-bye to Jim trouble. Which, incidentally, I do.”
“Demons can’t be hurt by merely bouncing off the pavement,” Baltic said with a sniff.
May’s eyes widened even more. Gabriel seemed to have some sort of a coughing attack.
“Look,” I said as I faced Baltic. “I admit that it might have been a mistake to release it from its inability to hear anything we said, especially since I was not speaking to you at that time, and it picked up on that immediately. I also admit that its innuendoes and incessant whipcrack impressions were extremely annoying, not to mention offensive, and no, it shouldn’t have told you that you could wear its kilt because clearly I wore the pants in the relationship—which is totally untrue, and I have no desire to emasculate you like it hinted—but you could have let me come to an actual complete stop rather than just pushing Jim out of the car as I slowed to park. For one thing, that was rude, and for another, Jim’s kilt flipped up, baring everything while it was sprawled all over the sidewalk, and if I could possibly go
May gave up the fight and whooped with laughter, Gabriel joining her.
“I knew you would not be able to resist speaking to me,” was all Baltic said, smiling smugly.
“Gah!” I yelled, then marched out of the room, tossing over my shoulder, “May, can I have a few words with you?”
“About Ysolde’s agreement with May regarding her help with the release of your lieutenant . . . ,” Gabriel said as we exited.
“What agreement?” Baltic asked.
I closed the door on what was sure to be an eye-opening conversation for Baltic, turning to May to ask, “I’d like to check on Brom quickly, but after that . . . do you have somewhere that we can be private for a few minutes?”
“Certainly. No one goes into the study.” She opened a door. “I’ll wait here for you.”
“Thanks, May.” I hurried down the dark, narrow passage that led to the tiny back garden, pausing just outside the door to smile at Brom as he squatted on his heels, one hand gesturing as he chatted, the other stroking the head of what must have been the stunned bird. Maata was next to him, nodding her head as he expounded some point or other, looking up with a genuine smile as she noticed me.
“Sullivan! Maata found a bird that hit the window, but it’s not dead. She says it’s a wren, but it needs a few minutes before it can fly again. Are we going right away, or can I watch the bird?”
“We have a few minutes. Good afternoon, Maata. How’s your mother?”
She looked startled for a moment, then answered politely, “Well, thank you. Have you . . . er . . . met her?”
“In a manner of speaking. Five minutes, OK, Brom?”
“OK.” His head bent over the bird again, and a brief hope flared that he might shift his morbid interest in making mummies from deceased animals to the care of live ones. “You just never know with him,” I said aloud as I entered the study.
“Baltic?”
“Brom. Is it too much to hope he’d become a vet? I would think that was a nice, normal, beneficial profession. There’s not much of a call for the ability to mummify things these days.”
She smiled. “We’ve enjoyed having him visit, mummy fascination and all. What was it you wanted to talk to me about? Something to do with Baltic?”
“Tangentially, perhaps. I’d like to try to summon the First Dragon.”
She blinked at me in surprise.
“I tried doing it myself, but my magic . . . well, you know about that.”
“Yes, I know.” Her lips twitched.
“So I got to thinking about what was different when I summoned him before, and your suggestion about having dragons around, and discounting things like stress and unhappiness with the weyr being collective asses, I decided the difference must be you.”
“Why me?” she asked, looking startled at the idea.
“You have a tie to the First Dragon.”
“Yes, but so do you.”
“Exactly. We both have a relationship with the First Dragon, and perhaps your presence is needed in order to make a connection with him. Are you willing to give it a try?”
“Right now?”
“If you have the time, yes.”
She hesitated for a moment, then nodded. “All right, but we should probably be as fast as possible. Your wyvern isn’t the most . . . er . . . conversational of all the dragons I’ve met.”
“That’s the understatement of the year,” I said, standing up and shaking out my hands while mentally clearing my mind.
“What should I do?”
“Just stand near me, as you were during the
“Ready,” she said.
I took a deep breath, pulling hard on Baltic’s fire as I spoke the words. “Light exists within me, darkness I left behind, on my left hand sits that which was made, on my right sits that which has passed. Bring forth your grace that we might—by the rood! That was quick. Er . . . hello.”
Before the last of my invocation had been spoken, the air in front of us began to collect itself in a shimmery sort of swirl that quickly solidified into the form of a man who despite his human appearance was quite obviously not human.
