He pulled her hand up to his lips with a grin that had been a part of the reason she had kissed him so long ago, a kind of expression that pushed aside any possibility of anything being wrong with the world. He kissed the rings on her hand, and they rippled around her fingers in a single, simple wave at the touch. Ziem was happy to see her, no matter what the reason. “You’re still a princess to me.”
She reached out with her other hand to caress the rings in his eyebrow and then her fingers trailed down to the piercing in his ear. “Gods, I missed you.” They had been good friends for a long time and she was crushed when they exiled him. She and Nick hadn’t become close friends again until years after Ziem was gone.
He smiled at the touch, glad to know that his continued interest wasn’t just one-sided, and stepped back with a final squeeze of her hand. “Back at you, baby.” He reached down to the shorts he wore as he stepped back, and they dropped as he turned away. Ziem shifted into a blonde wolf with fur so light it was almost white, then picked up his shorts in his teeth and ran off through the compound.
Aura couldn’t help but stare as he ran off. She shook her head as she went back into her hut. What was she doing? What was she thinking? It would be better for Ziem if he kept his distance, and she knew it. All she could feel, though, was the fact that when he was close by, the world wasn’t crashing in on her. Someone cared. Someone she cared about didn’t hate her. It was enough to make her smile as she retreated into her room and fell back into her bed.
IV
Coren and Alina were the last to arrive at the impromptu meeting ground in the middle of the wilderness outside of Geneva. Their servants hadn’t yet deemed the Council Chambers themselves fit for business after the devastation that had been wrought there weeks before, and so they were still at one of Coren’s country estates by a lakeside as their temporary base of operations.
The huge lawn sloped down from the house to the side of the lake with a small beach of pure white sand and a stone pier that Alina had made for Coren once upon a time. At the moment, she was walking at his side as they went to join the rest of the Council members gathered on the wide, open lawn. They were seated on improvised thrones that Marc, Alina’s younger Stoneborn counterpart on the council, had made for all of them, and the message they carried was not lost on the other council members. They were still meeting on Alina’s terms, and therefore, Coren’s.
Teresa was drinking from a large glass very slowly with a glare on her face as Coren finally made an appearance. Just because he and Alina were the leaders didn’t mean that they should leave the rest of them waiting for over an hour. “Busy day?” She said bitterly and with a bit of a growl.
“All recent days have been busy, Councilor. Or they are for the rest of us who aren’t simply sitting back and watching events unfold for their amusement.”
“Amusement? You think I’m amused by everything that has happened? All the wolves that have died?”
“Considering you have consistently avoided committing any of your own fighters to the defense of this city, yes, it seems likely that amusement might be one of your prevalent emotions at the moment.” Coren snapped with uncharacteristic anger in his voice, as if the rest of the Council wasn’t yet aware of just how much he despised his younger counterpart in representing the Oceanborn. “Tell me, Councilor, what have you been doing to counteract the situation with the Ironborn?”
“My efforts were within this council itself, in warning you of the consequences that would follow a rejection of the Ironborn. The action of this Council was taken against my advice or consent. Why would I sacrifice my own people to a battle I did not choose, in which I knew most of them would die?”
Gregor, the male Fireborn representative, jumped in next, the grass at his feet actually turning black immediately everywhere he walked. “I’ll tell you why you wouldn’t. Because you’re a damned coward and you don’t deserve the seat your ass is taking up, Teresa. You counseled us to let the two Ironborn candidates just walk out of here. That they would just slink back to Spain and wait upon our pleasure. And we can all see just how well all of that worked out.”
Marc chimed in next, standing next to Gregor and imposing in a very different way. “They won’t be satisfied with taking back the Ironborn princess. No matter what rumors keep circulating, they’re going to keep gathering other vermin until they’re ready for another attack.”
Teresa growled louder. “Well, maybe you should have just given them the fucking seats that they wanted and then we wouldn’t have bloodstained hands and a huge problem on our hands! They have met the demands of the old law! And they obviously have a force that we could have used. Don’t sit there and preach to me about bad decisions.”
Isela didn’t want to hear the argument escalate. She just wanted to hear what they were going to do about it. As one of the oldest, she just spoke firmly and calmly as she looked over at Coren. “They took Zara. She knows too much. What are we going to do to get her back?”
Coren’s answer sounded bored. “Zara knew too much about what they have already taken. Her use to them is in specifics, and in how well she knows each of us, not in military strategy. All the same…” He stepped into the center of their seats so that he could address all of
