The general, who I would later be introduced to as His Majesty, Tadhg Ryan, Mountain King of the Irish Bears, had turned to face her and roared,“HALT!”
The river of bears had come to an immediate stop, like soldiers playing freeze tag.
And he and Sadie had rushed to each other through the sea of standing bears. But instead of kissing, as I’d often seen Da and Maem do when they thought I wasn’t watching, he’d ripped off his forearm armor and offered his crooked bare arm to her with a formal bow of his head.
To my shock, Sadie had offered him her forearm, too, placing it directly against his mouth.
I’d thought it was some sort of strange bear greeting—until they bothbit downon each other’s forearms, hard.
I’d spent the week getting answers to the questions I had back then, learning about the Irish Bears’ culture—from their praise of three serpent gods to their practice of bond-biting, which established a psychokinetic mental link. No mating heat required, like with us wolves.
But I never forgot that invasion. Mostly because of my mother’s sudden expulsion of pent-up air and the happy smile that followed…relief that Hamish hadn’t killed Sadie with his shotgun and, therefore, hadn’t signed all our death warrants.
“I remembered,” I told the sons of those two bears, twenty years later. “When you all left with Sadie without hurting anyone... that was the last time I saw my mother smile. She never got over my da, Alban, not coming home from Ireland. Neither did I.”
A somber silence fell over the table at the mention of the battle that had estranged the Sister Queens of Scotland and Ireland forever.
Until the Shadow Princess told me, “My own da says that time is only a construct of the Big Laptop. Whether you got a short sentence or a longer saga with your father, the love meant the same.”
A poetic sentiment, to be sure, but I couldn’t help the flare of resentment inside me. Someone who’d had twenty years withthreefathers would never understand the pain of losing the only good one I’d ever known less than two months after I started calling him Da.
“If you’ve had enough to eat, Dorie, we should probably get going,” a voice said behind us.
We all turned to see the Queen of the Irish Bears, often referred to as the acronym HMSQ by her ten children and subjects alike, standing beside the oldest of her three High King sons.
By tradition, the throne was ascended when the inheriting king or queen turned twenty-five. So in just over five years, Sadie’s reign would be ceded to the Shadow Princess, the flirtatious Mountain Prince, and the High Prince with steely gray eyes and a white streak in his loose curls standing next to her.
But dressed in one of her infamous strawberry-patterned gowns, paired with one of her three crowns, she stood every inch the queen today.
In fact, I suddenly felt underdressed. She’d told me specifically to wear comfortable pants and a light tee. She’d even gifted me a thick, cozy, Irish-knit green sweater cardigan, saying, “It might get quite cold on your trip.”
I stood up immediately and curtsied, as I’d seen so many of her subjects do throughout my week here. “Your Majesty,” I said with a bow of my head. “Should I change into something more formal?”
“No, do not worry yourself, Dorie,” she answered with the same gentle tone and eyes I remembered from when I was a child, curious about the bear chained to my bed. “You are perfect just as you are.”
Less than an hour and a kiss from two of Sadie’s three kings later, we were on the road in a vehicle that the Shadow King—the still-unmet royal I’d privately begun referring to as theInvisible King—had designed and built for long-distance travel using the extraordinarily advanced technology the royals referred to as “god tech.”
It looked like one of the golf carts the kingdom used to get around, but it was wheel-less and sped along on what felt like a soundless cushion of smooth air, heading toward the Irish Wolves’ kingdom on the opposite coast.
The Queen of the Bears, I’d learned, had gone into estrus more times than any queen in the kingdom’s history—and had also managed to earn a psychology degree. Though she refused to call herself a therapist formally, she was known throughout the kingdom as the person to turn to when you had an emotional problem you needed help with.
So asking her what to expect when I met Aunt Naomi seemed like a natural conversation-starter for the trip.
“Well, you won’t have to deal with ten princes and princesses asking you questions, like you did with us.” Then she sobered and added, “There’s only the Wild Princess and the Sea Princewith her now. The City Prince went to live in Dublin with his father after their parents split.”
I jolted. This wasnotpart of the intel I’d received since arriving in the Bear Kingdom.
The ad hoc welcoming committee of princes and princesses that had shown me around seemed more concerned with teaching me how to use the god tech and having me memorize poems in Irish I was supposed to recite to Naomi, but which, according to the High King himself, I wasabsolutely notto say out loud, not even in a whisper, before meeting the Queen of the Irish Wolves.
“Is Aunt Naomi no longer with the last remaining king?” I asked.
“They tried, for the children’s sake,” Sadie said. “But I heard you talking about how your mother never got over the loss of Alban Scotswolf. Well, Naomi never got over the loss of her Sea and Wild Kings, either. And you should know that’s made her a bit…”
Sadie paused, searching for the most judicious way to phrase what came next.
“…not always kind. I know this is a lot to request coming from the bear who hasn’t spoken a single word to your beloved Granni since my Mountain King rescued me from Faoiltiarn, but you will have to pre-forgive her for her particularly acerbic tongue.”
Once again, I found it hard to believe that this unfailingly kind and warm female could be estranged from the Granni who’d not only stayed and made Hamish’s last years worth living, but also gotten our family through the worst of our pain over losing Alban.
