“Then how about we make a deal?” I deliberately don’t look at Freya. She doesn’t know about this side of things. But she also doesn’t know that this is my scheme to get us all out of this bloody mess, hopefully alive. “Your court don’t trust me as a fae, and I’m a danger to you even without meaning to be. So, take me as your Blood Lover and drink from me, no commitment butmy blood, and make the clear statement to the Blood Court that Freya and I are yours.”
“I could do that anyway.”
“You could, but this way, I also promise to serve you. What do you lose with a deal like that?”
Next to me, Freya is pulling on my hand, panicking.
After all, I have already sworn to serve Aurelius and her. This way, I will also serve Lanlin.
But she should know by now that in as loosely a worded deal as this, I am not bound at all.
Neither of them knows just how powerful royal fae blood is.
Lanlin will be addicted and servingme, within days.
Lanlin’s fangs elongate on instinct. He licks his tongue over them, shaken by tremors.
He looks like he is in pain.
Lanlin’s voice is still steady, however, as he demands, “I have one condition to the deal. My Blood Lover mustn’t be weak. I expect you to be able to protect our Omega as well. Weren’t you a member of the featherglass? Then from tomorrow night, when I request it, you will train with me.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Training Ground, Blood Kingdom
Daire
I bounceon the balls of my feet on the hard-packed earth. I glance around the empty training ground outside the barracks, which lies next to Sheut’s mudbrick city walls.
It is shadowed in night. But I can still do this.
After all, Lanlin thinks that I was an ordinary soldier in the featherglass. He won’t expect a challenge from me.
My nose wrinkles at the smell of dust, sweat, and oil from the weapons. I explore the training ground, feeling how it is broken up by wooden dummies fixed in the ground for practicing strikes and formations.
Sharp moonlight lights up a stone area to the side. Smoke from a campfire stings my eyes.
I hum, twirling down the long table, feeling along it with my fingers, surprised by the laundry that hangs haphazardly over it.
Caligo, our instructor from the Shadow Military Academy, would have had a fit over this type of disorderliness. I am learning, however, that the Eternals under Lanlin have a different type of military discipline to the dragons.
One that is based on how ferocious they are in battle.
I try not to show how excited I am to be back as neither courtesan nor assassin but as a soldier again who is about to spar.
Amongst the featherglass, this was one of my favorite things, apart from drinking, dancing, and rutting.
We would gather around in a glade, and I would train my elite featherglass. I would lose myself in the moves that I learned to survive and to make sure that my child army, who I saved from the destroyed Winter Court, wouldn’t be annihilated by the dragons or vampires.
Except, for those hours, it didn’t need to be about pain or death. It could be about the beauty of fighting, along with the bond between my brothers and sisters in the featherglass.
When I was locked in the dungeons with nothing to do but stroke Five and plot, this is what I would dream Aurelius would do with me: To offer to train with me as an equal warrior.
Finally allowing Freya and me to enter the buggering Shadow Military Academy, where my back was whipped to ribbons, wasn’t the same thing.
I sniff.
Lanlin may be silent, but he gives himself away by his intoxicating scent of incense.
