Page 46 of A Kiss of Flame

Barith was surprised to hear it but remembered he'd left his phone upstairs in his room. He'd not bothered to take it to Kamár since newer technology rarely worked in enchanted places. If they had called, it couldn't have been more than twelve hours ago, which wasn't nearly long enough for his mother to send his sisters after him. Not that his mother cared about what might or might not be rational.

"Why?" he demanded, crossing his arms over his chest. Based on their demeanor, it was clear no one was dying or dead.

Cat stuck her hand directly into a box of his favorite chocolate cereal. "It's a feckin’ mess," she snapped before shoving several dry puffs into her mouth and talking through her crunching. "Mum's deal is starting to go foul right here at the end, and she wants to remind the Ceanadach horde who has the upper hand. Ye being absent during your courting isn't exactly putting on a good show."

"My courting is nothing but a show," he reminded them bitterly.

Jude turned to look at him, and he couldn't help but tense under her scrutiny. "What if it is?" she challenged, her blunt words striking him deeply. "The point is, mum—all of us—need you back home. The horde needs you back home. Ye've spent centuries faffing about, doing whatever suited you, and mum left ye alone, but this is your duty, Barith. Yer a dragon and a McCroy—even if it doesn’t seem like ye wanna be either anymore.”

The shots landed square in his chest like a perfectly shot arrows. Cat stopped mid-chew, raising her brows in surprise, waiting to see how he would respond. Barith's blood began to boil as he glared down at his little sister, who merely glanced up at him as if he were nothing more than a pants-less worm.

Barith had long accepted that he wasn't exactly like other dragons. He didn't eat, sleep, breathe, and bleed solely for his horde and its legacy. Most dragons didn't care to leave the comfort of their hordes or venture out into the world unless they had to. He doubted all four of his sisters had spent more than a year outside his homeland over their lives. Being accused of hating who he was always stung, but he was beyond being goaded into retaliation anymore. He knew who he was, even if his family didn't.

"If the agreement has gone foul," he told Jude, trying to be reasonable, "there's nothing I can do to fix it. Callum Ceanadachknows what he's signing up for, and if he and his horde have changed their minds, that's on them. I think the deal is all shite anyway.”

Cat choked on her cereal, and Jude's face lit with restrained shock. "I knew ye haven't—cough—said that to Mum's face," Cat managed to get out between wheezes. Of course, Barith hadn't. He wasn't an idiot.

"It doesn't matter what ye think," Jude declared, little sparks flaring from her mouth. "Ye need to come home. Your Queen demands it." A cold chill ran up Barith’s spine.

There had been a day a long time ago when their mother had said the same thing to him:Your Queen demands it.It was also the day he'd left the horde, unsure if he'd ever return. His mother, Queen Eithne, had been angry, and she’d hurled her status at him like a weapon to force him to do something she knew would cause him pain. He hadn't been her son in that moment—just a subject. And as a good member of the horde, he'd done what she’d asked; then he'd left. She hadn't tried to stop him. They'd barely spoken for centuries after, and even now, their relationship was strained.

Barith took one hulking step forward and glowered down at Jude. "The Ceanadachs aren't fools," he told her, still trying to make her understand. "They want to join our horde as equals, and the queen will never let them as the agreement stands now. Callum wants assurances, and he's willing to make her squirm to get them. She wants this too bad, and he knows it."

His mother had the higher ground regarding sheer numbers and wealth, but dragons were dragons—stubborn traditionalists with a propensity to be greedy. Callum, the leader of the Ceanadach horde, knew his mother wanted the deal done, and he was going to squeeze her for whatever he could get at the last minute, just because he could.

"It would be for the good of both our hordes," Jude snarled, sounding far too much like their mother. "If the Ceanadach can't see that, they are fools!"

Jude was brilliant and far more involved than any of his other sisters, save Flòraidh, in the politics of their horde. But she suffered the same flaw as the others: they were too deep to see the whole picture. Blending their hordes would mean they would have one of the largest hordes out of all the dragons, but for what purpose?

Barith had questioned the deal and its value in passing to Flòra and several of his mother's advisors—none had paid him any attention. He'd spent too long away from the horde to have a voice. All he was suitable for was to fulfill his duty and mate like a good little dragon lad, just as his Queen and mother demanded and tradition dictated.

He breathed long through his nose to steady his rising pulse. "The blending of hordes is pointless," he said outright. "None of the Folk give two shites about our traditions, infighting, and archaic politics. We might as well be dinosaurs. The only way the Fae, the mages, or any of the others will take us seriously is if we finally put all our petty shite aside and form a proper alliance. Not just between hordes, but between dragons like we had in Sylthëa."

Sylthëa, or the Other Lands, was inaccessible to humans. It was a place that existed like a parallel world to the mortal realm. At one point, the dragon hordes had been parts of a larger tribe that had shared those lands with the fae, but over time and war, petty squabbles, and land trading, the dragons had all but lost any claim to their native lands in Sylthëa. The tribe had ceased to exist, and the hordes had all fractured across the mortal world. Sylthëa was now entirely in control of the fae as it had been for long centuries.

"Sylthëa?" Cat snorted. "You’ve been spending too much time out in the world, brother, if ye think we're ever going to have a dragon utopia.” It grated how quickly his sister pushed the idea aside like it were some childish pipe dream. “Just come home,” Cat continued, “and get mum off our backs, mate with the Ceanadach woman, and we can all go on with our lives, hm?"

"You marry her," Barith snarled back before thinking.

Cat narrowed her gaze at him and slammed her cereal box on the counter. "Is that what this is about?" she snarked. "Why yer running off again? Ye don't like the lass?"

Barith's blood began to pound in his skull. It was like he was talking to a bloody wall. "That's not the damned point," he hissed.

"It is the bloody point," Jude declared, glaring daggers at him. “We all know how much ye hate the idea of tradition, but you and Sera Ceanadach will be the first to be mated under our blended banners. At least yer mating will mean something to the horde.”

Cat grunted in agreement. "Aye, the rest of us will probably be mated off to other Ceanadachs just to sweeten the pot. Mum's already in talks for Flòra and me."

His stomach turned. He hadn't thought his mother would make such quick work of mating off his sisters. He'd hoped she'd be satisfied with him for at least a little while. But this was the way of things, and the flippant nature in which Cat talked about being mated spoke as much. It was tradition, expected, and they all knew it—so what was the point of hoping for anything more?

"This isn't just about you," Jude reminded him sternly. "It's about all of us. It's time to be done with this, once and for all. It's time for ye to come home."

“Yer just mating the lass,” Cat added as if it would ease him. “It’s not a death sentence.”

Barith swallowed his rebuttals like glass. His mother had always accused him of being a hopeless romantic, too much like his father. It was why he’d always hoped to find his true mate. He’d seen how his father and mother had held love for each other but had never truly been in love. It was the way of things for dragons. And maybe he was a selfish bastard, but he wanted more than a comfortable arrangement, even if his sisters didn’t. He wanted to give his mate more than a lifetime of passive love while he distracted himself with lovers on the side, as was customary on both sides. He wanted real love. True love.

"Skaal'Syr en'Rhaelor," Cat said in draconic—Blood of the Sun and Sky.The mantra of their horde was meant to soothe, but all it did was make his heart ache and his blood surge with anger. Jude said the mantra, and Barith felt forced to follow suit, as was the custom.

Barith looked at his sisters and felt he was being torn in two. There was the world he’d been born into and the world he’d found all on his own. He loved his family more than anything, and he loved being a dragon, but he wasn't sure if he was ready to give up himself simply because tradition and his Queen demanded it.

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