He grabbed one of the surcoats and put it on. It pulled tight over his chain mail–covered chest but there was nothing they could do about that. There were only a few other surcoats that were bigger and those would have to go to Uther and Caswyn since they were much larger than Aidan.

Good thing Éibhear wasn’t here. They had enough trouble finding leggings to fit that body. And his chain mail shirts took twice as long to make as everyone else’s.

“He’s so ridiculously big!” she exclaimed to the air.

Aidan looked around. “What are you talking about? And to whom?”

“I’m talking about Éibhear and his chain mail shirts.”

Aidan gave a small smile. “Your mind just . . . wanders away, doesn’t it?”

“All the time. Got me in so much trouble during my training.” She picked up the rest of the surcoats and started walking back to the castle. “The Warrior Trials were a nightmare. For a whole year I at least had to pretend that I was listening . . . when I really wasn’t.”

Aidan stopped, gazed at her a moment. “It took you a year to become a Dragonwarrior? A year?” He threw up his hands. “I never heard less than a decade. Minimum.”

Brannie rolled her eyes. “Me mum took six months, and to this day I haven’t heard the end of that shit.”

Aidan nodded and admitted, “Your mother frightens me.”

Brannie patted his shoulder before she walked on. “She should.”

By the time they reached the castle doors, Uther and Caswyn were awake. Uther’s arm was still in a sling made of cloth but his fingers could now move a bit. And Caswyn was grinning ear to ear, his human color back to normal.

“What a great healer!” he announced loudly, taking the surcoat from Brannie. “I haven’t felt this wonderful in years! I could take on a . . . take on a . . .” Words faded away as he struggled to pull the surcoat down over his chest.

He stopped when it wouldn’t go past where his nipples would be under the chain mail.

Cringing, Brannie dropped the surcoats to the ground and sorted through them, tossing the obviously too-small ones aside until she found a few that looked—hopefully—big enough.

She handed one to Caswyn and he again struggled to get the garment on.

Brannie and Aidan joined in to yank the surcoat down the dragon’s human chest. It took some time and a lot more energy than they’d thought it would. But once it was done, he was tucked in there.

“Can you breathe?” she asked.

“Enough.”

Uther’s took a bit less time and Caswyn accused him of having a bigger surcoat than his and for his mate to give it to him. “You stingy bastard.”

As the two bickered, a happy and vibrant Keita swept out onto the steps.

Wearing a red velvet dress covered with a red velvet robe, she spun in a circle, and asked, “Isn’t this beautiful?”

“Compared to what?” Brannie asked. It was a nice dress, but she felt the need to be difficult.

But, as usual, Keita ignored her, taking another spin. “Breeton-Holmes’s adult daughters left me a divine wardrobe to choose from.”

“Good thing they had to run for their lives and leave their family home and all their belongings.”

Keita stopped posing in her finery and stomped her bare foot. “Are you blaming me for this?”

“You drew the Zealots here, Keita. What if you hadn’t made it here in time to do what you were planning?”

“But I did make it on time. I’m very good about timing.”

“Since when? You’d be late to your own funeral pyre if we weren’t the ones forced to carry you there when your time comes.”

“Already planning for my death, cousin?”

“Have been for quite a while now.”

“All right,” Aidan said, quickly stepping in between them. “Perhaps we should get on our way. The Port Cities aren’t around the corner, you know.”

Keita lifted her skirts and, with a toss of her royal head, walked around her cousin, making sure to brush up against her as she did.

Brannie had her fist pulled back when Aidan caught her hand and held it in both of his.

“Why are you torturing us?” he asked Brannie. A question that confused her so much, she was distracted from Keita being a bitch.

“What?” she asked Aidan.

“Why are you torturing us?”

“How am I torturing you?”

“You’ll get yourself killed—”

“By your own cousin,” Uther tossed in.

“—which means we’ll be alone with her—”

“Eventually she’ll decide to kill us, too,” Caswyn added.

“—and you won’t be here to protect us.” Aidan shook his head. “Is that what you want for us?”

Brannie thought on that a moment before answering with a firm “Yes. It is.” And she walked off, hiding her smile until she was sure they couldn’t see her face.

* * *

When Aidan first marched out with Her Majesty’s armies at the beginning of this war, he’d known that his whole goal in life was to keep his Mì-runach brethren alive by not letting them get into too much trouble with the rank and file of the regular army. A general who was used to having his or her orders followed without question never appreciated the disdain with which most of the Mì-runach took those orders.

At first, trying to watch out for all those Mì-runach had been troublesome but, as time moved on, he’d been able to focus on just two. Sometimes three. Uther, Caswyn, and occasionally Éibhear.

He hadn’t worried too much about Éibhear, though. He was, at the end of the day, still a prince and, more important, the favorite youngest son of the queen. He could only get into so much trouble. And Éibhear’s mate, Iseabail, had calmed his now-famous temper. She knew how to keep him busy when he got in a mood simply by having him deal with entire forests. Aidan didn’t know what it was, but that dragon loved to take down trees. And he was damn good at it, too.

Uther and Caswyn, however, seemed to make it their goal to irritate the higher ranks of the queen’s army until Aidan had feared they would end up ass first on a standing pike. Eventually, though, it seemed that Branwen had made it her personal business to deal with the pair. And she was much easier to distract from their foolishness than some of the harder generals.

Still, on his worst day interceding between a pissed-off general and the unruly idiots he loved as brothers, Aidan had never been so overwhelmed, so terrified of the outcome, as he was trying to keep two She-dragons from killing each other.

He’d admit, his mother and older sisters were . . . well, horrible beings. Plotting, deceitful, and terribly, unbelievably, bigoted. If one was not of equal royal stature or greater, one was not to be spoken to with even a modicum of respect. And yet . . . he’d rather stand between them and the unwashed masses asking for bread than deal with Keita the Viper and Branwen the Awful when they didn’t get along.

What made it worse? Unlike true enemies, they had no intention of fighting. Instead they kept slapping at each other like two human girls fighting over the last piece of dessert at a family meal.

Which meant that, with Aidan attempting to keep them apart by staying between them, he was getting hit. Constantly. And their human hands hurt his frail human skin. He’d rather face the claws of a bear than the punches and slaps of these two angry She-dragons.

At the fifth hour, when he finally could stand no more, he bellowed, “That is enough!”

Their small party stopped and the two females glared at him in surprise.

“I am covered in bruises and scrapes because you two can’t put your differences aside for five minutes! I’m sick of it!”

“She—”

“It was her—”

“I don’t care!” he barked. “Now I’m going to say this once and never again. If you two bitches don’t settle down—”

“Settle down?”

“Bitches?”

“—and act like you have some common sense, I’m going to—”

Aidan’s words ended abruptly when both Keita and Brannie put their hands over his mouth. At first, he assumed they were both going to kill him. Poison from Keita. A quick blade across the throat from Brannie. But, he realized, they weren’t focused on him. They were looking off into the nearby trees.