The Sergeant and the Lieutenant chuckled good-naturedly at their gag as we moved away, continuing up the aisle. As we moved off, I said over my shoulder to Lieutenant Kaleen, “Four times the brains makes for four times the fun on honeymoon night, Ma’am!”
“Honeymoon night... ” Saya said in my ear. “Did I hear you correctly?”
“Yes, please tell us what you have in store for us, Dragonmancer Noctis,” Elenari said from my other side, grinning widely.
“Flights by moonlight to some deserted mountain shack, where none can find us?” Saya growled. “Where we can hunt for our dinner and spend the evening feasting and fu—”
“Alas, no,” I said, cutting Saya off before she could plant an idea in my head that proved impossible to uproot. “As far as honeymoons go, this one is probably going to be less of the bog-standard and more of the bellicose, if I’m honest.”
“Well, you know that we’re not your conventional ladies,” Elenari whispered into my ear, her breath as warm and inviting as a shot of whiskey.
“That’s probably why I’m so smitten with the pair of you,” I said, grinning.
“So, what do you have in store for your new wives?” Saya asked.
I put my arms around the shoulders of the two beguiling and ravishing ladies. “Well,” I said, keeping my voice low and winking at Claire the Seer, “how lucky would you pair of hotties feel hearing that I’ve booked us a steamy few nights at Galipolas Mountain, with an all-access tour to the Subterranean Realms?”
The two women—my wives—smiled at me. They were not comforting smiles, not for any enemy of the Empire. They were the sort of smiles that made the balls of brave men shrivel to the size of raisins.
Chapter 6
We left for Galipolas Mountain the morning after the wedding.
The sun had barely washed the eastern horizon with the very first shimmer of pink when we took to the air. The sky was an inky, navy swathe up near the heavens, lightening to a metallic silver where it met the saw-toothed peaks of the mountains.
I doubted there was anything in the world that could compare with setting out on an adventure through the mountains at the crack of dawn. The world seemed a simpler place somehow, prehistoric almost. The mountains loomed majestic in the background, every which way I looked, like the silhouette of the spiny back of the mother of all dragons.
The air was completely still, the wind having not yet awoken, and the scent of the pines was thick in my nostrils. I took a deep, slow breath and exhaled contentedly. My sharp dragon-enhanced hearing could detect the distant chatter of the rushing river as it made its way from the glacial heights above and flowed out to the sea.
Elenari, Saya, Tamsin, Penelope, Amara, and Renji came with me. We were all Rank One dragonmancers, with the exception of Renji and Tamsin, so I had been worried that they would not be allowed to follow me on this quest. However, the Overseer, being a shrewd and foreseeing woman, had allowed any who were keen to join me. I imagined that she was savvy enough to know that she’d be saving herself a headache if she tried to object to my colleagues coming along to share in the escapade.
We were taking to the air for the trip, but not as we usually did. Our destination, Galipolas Mountain, was too far for dragonmancers of our level to fly all the way on dragonback. The journey would have used up too much mana. Even if we had made it there without stopping to regenerate our mana, it would have left us with very little to use in battle, had we arrived to face a fray of some kind.
This meant that we would all be taking a ship aboard one of the Viking-esque longboats, which my squad usually used to ferry themselves to battle behind me.
As much as I loved the thrill and the peace of flying on the back of a dragon, I was quite looking forward to cruising through the air at a more of a leisurely pace. It would give me a chance to hang out and chat with my new friends in an environment that was not the classroom, sparring fields, or battle.
In actual fact, the ship that we ended up boarding to make the day-long journey to Galipolas Mountain was larger by far than the swift little longship that my coterie usually traveled in. The sky-vessel was big enough to have a spacious deck from which we all could enjoy the beautiful views of the surrounding landscape, as well as a large set of interior cabins. These below deck suites were exclusively for me and the other dragonmancers, while our coteries were required to stay on deck and keep a lookout for potential enemies.
After watching the sun rise over the mountain tops from the prow of the flying vessel, I went below in search of a cup of coffee or lightning cider. Elenari and Saya accompanied me.
Together, we sat in a quiet, secluded booth; delightfully overstuffed couches set around a mahogany coffee table.
The last twenty-four hours had been a bit of a whirl. This was saying something, seeing as my life felt like it had been a non-stop white knuckle ride down the most insane rabbit hole of all time ever since I had found myself plucked from Earth by Elenari and brought here. There was though, something specific that had been playing on my mind.
“Girls,” I said to Saya and Elenari, when we had settled ourselves, “there’s something I’ve been meaning to chat to you about.”
“You can talk to us about anything, Mike,” Elenari said, looking at Saya.
Saya nodded in agreement.
I took a sip of lightning cider. “I, uh, I
