Chapter One
BRIGID
Maggie's eyes widened as the dragons' screaming flight overhead rattled the walls of my cottage.
"Don't fidget, Mags," I murmured, once again blowing an impulsively shorn lock of auburn hair out of my eye, ignoring the rallying cry of change in the sky above my thatched roof.
"You know what that means, Miss," Maggie said, fussing at a tear in the skirt of her smock.
I kept my eyes on her ankle as I massaged the salve and gently encouraged old bones and weary muscles to turn under my hands. I did know what it meant, although I was too young to have ever heard the betas roar in unison before. Lachlan Feargus had risen as alpha when my mother was still a girl, had nearly matched with her for his second rut—although that might've been another of Mother's tall tales—until he met his omega on a quick trip to Skybern. And from Skybern to Grave Hills, Omega Feargus had remained at our alpha's side, and for many years after. Lachlan had doted on his omega and seemed quite in love with her, sometimes to the exclusion of his care of the hills, or so the betas claimed.
Omega Feargus had died in the spring. Our alpha withered at the loss.
And now he had reunited with her.
My hands worked, rubbing strong circles around Maggie's ankle, turning her shin, stretching and soothing muscles that tended to want to tangle and tighten, shortening the old keep maid's stride. I wondered what it was like to have been so cherished by the alpha, to have held a man so tightly in one's grasp, shared him with no other. Sweat dripped between my breasts, and the salty, overripe scent of myself made me snort.
Omega Feargus had been a beautiful woman, with a black sheet of hair that draped down past her hips and warm brown skin that gleamed, always smiling up at the ruddy and redheaded bear of an alpha who beamed proudly at her side.
I was certainly no comparison for such a jewel of a woman. Perhaps I had been once, freshly of age, cheeks still full of youth, and smiles for everyone. But no, I had a beak for a nose—that had always been the case. The years had hardened and chipped away at me, my cheeks sharpening and hollowing, my body losing its softness for the strength it needed to survive…on my own.
"Who do you think it'll be next?" Maggie asked, her hands twisting in her lap.
"It hardly matters," I thought aloud, and then realized the source of Maggie's worry. "I'll fix you up, Mags. You know that keep like the back of your hand. Whoever rises, he'll see that straight away," I offered.
I wasn't sure that was true. The alpha's keep was huge, and Maggie was wearing herself down, running through its halls from morning to night. I doubted she was keeping up with the other humans she worked alongside, but it had been her home since she was a child. At the very least, it would break Maggie's heart to be cast aside. At worst, it might leave her homeless.
"Perhaps it'll be the little lord. He couldn't covet the role as alpha while his da lived, but now…" Maggie mused.
I smirked at the thought of Torion Feargus being referred to as "little" by anyone, let alone Maggie, who barely reached my own chin. But the alpha's son had likely been raised under Maggie's eye, and while he was a giant like his father now—and as handsome as his mother—I suppose he must've been a child once.
"Would he make a good alpha?" I asked Maggie, just to keep her talking.
"Aye, I think he might. Bit of a scamp, he is. But I think his heart still belongs to the hills, like his father's did before it caught sight of the omega."
"He'll have to take an omega himself," I pointed out. "Perhaps it will be captured then."
"Perhaps. But if she's a good girl from these parts, then…it won't be so bad."
I hummed indifferently. Some of the locals—especially the local dragonkin—had taken it personally when Lachlan had chosen an omega from outside the territory, and blamed her for our alpha's attention straying away from the care of the Hills. Personally, I thought men had a tendency to be inconsistent. Omega Feargus had just been lucky enough that it hadn't beenherthe alpha had lost interest in.
I shiveredas I rose from the river, wincing as I ran over the rocky edge and twiggy slope, up to the large boulder where I'd laid out my things. The dip had done me good, and not just because I'd started to smell. I'd grown indulgent with myself, cooped up in my cottage too long, forgetting what the sky lookedlike as I busied myself turning the last of my dried stores into salves and teas and tinctures. It would be time to start gathering new growth soon, and then I would be out of my cottage more than in, but it was past time for me to shake the winter bear off and remember how the world's embrace looked and smelled and felt.
I dried and dressed, taking my time on the rock to let its heat sink in and thaw the rousing chill of the river, lifting my face up to the sun, knowing the freckles that had faded would brighten again at the attention—freckles I'd worked so hard to hide when I was younger.
I was tying up my boots when the neigh of an indignant horse coming from beyond the brush froze me. Someone was at the cottage. The only reason for someone to arrive this close to evening was if it was an emergency, or if they were so at their own leisure that they didn't have to prepare someone else's dinner. And other dragonkin were rarely the folk who came to knock at my door.
A little bead of dread—the one I always carried with me—snarled and grew in size, zipping nervously from the pit of my stomach, racketing through my heart, and then lodging itself in my throat.
He would've traveled for the flight,I thought, worrying my lip between my teeth as I tried to double check every bit of me, from my soaked and tangled hair to the buttons rising up the back of my dress. Nothing I could do between here and my cottage would change the obvious. That my clothes were wearing thin, and there were lines creasing my forehead that never seemed to smooth away. That I was thirty-two, not seventeen, and my age had never mattered anyway. I'd never been beautiful enough, even at my best.
With a humph of irritation and a shake of my trembling hands, I marched toward the tangled brush of young oaks andsnarling blackberries. There was a small opening marked with two rotting posts, just barely keeping the wild growth back enough for me to pass through, and I made it to the border of my property when the horse I'd heard rounded the corner of my cottage.
"Lightning," I greeted, and the proud white gelding warned me from my approach with a haughty head toss. "It's my house you're haunting," I volleyed back, forgetting my own nerves for a moment in the face of my old adversary.
"Brigid?" a muffled voice called from inside my cottage.
I stiffened. I supposed it was too much to hope that the horse had found its way to me without its master. I took a moment to brace myself, to steady my breath and harden my heart, to buck my chin high and refuse my gaze a wince, and then strode forward.
