The Reckless Oath We Made - Bryn Greenwood Page 0,86
to bed,” I said.
“Nay, I shall sleep there and keep the watch.” He pointed to where he’d unrolled his sleeping bag near the door.
“Well, you can sleep on the floor, but I wasn’t really talking about sleeping. What stories haven’t you told me?” When I scooted over, he sat down on the edge of the bed.
“A great many, but I would hear a tale of thine,” he said.
“I don’t know any stories.”
“Tell me how thou wast wounded.”
“You wanna hear about my wreck? It’s not very interesting.” In addition to being boring, it was kind of awful, so I told it like a fairy tale. Like Melusine.
“Once upon a time, there was this girl. Her mother was a dragon. Stop me if you’ve heard this one. One day a prince, the Prince of Merriam, came around and acted like he wanted to make her a princess. She wasn’t interested in being a princess, but she figured it might be better than being a scullery wench. So she went back to his castle with him, and for a year and a day—” That was something LaReigne had taught me. A Wiccan thing that was like marriage. Handfasting. As soon as I thought about LaReigne, I got this nervous hitch in my stomach. LaReigne was out there alone. Worse than alone. With some piece of shit who’d taken advantage of her.
“My lady,” Gentry said. He’d been sitting on the edge of the bed, but he laid down next to me. “Art thou—”
“So for a year and a day, they were together. Then the dragon’s daughter found out she was going to have a baby, and the prince got pissed off and acted like the dragon’s daughter was trying to trick him into making her a princess. Except she never wanted to be a princess, and she thought the prince was acting like a royal shitbag. In fact, she thought maybe she should just ditch the prince and keep the baby. For the record, babies are nice. Princes, not so much.
“So the prince and the dragon’s daughter had a big fight, and the prince took her . . . carriage keys away to keep her from leaving. So she hopped on the prince’s horse and rode away, and he came after her in the carriage. He rode up on her ass so close that when some other asshole swerved his carriage into her lane, she couldn’t slow down fast enough, and she got her front tire clipped and wrecked the . . . horse. Then the prince got what he wanted, because she didn’t have the baby, and he got to go home to his mommy and daddy. The dragon girl’s sister came to rescue her, and later she met a knight at physical therapy, and you know what happened next. The end.”
“But she was ne a dragon ne a princess,” Gentry said. “She was a phoenix.”
For a second I got teary-eyed, because that was exactly why I’d got the tattoo. To cover up my surgical scars and the massive stretch of road rash down my leg, but also to remind myself that I was going to rise from the ashes. I never told anybody that, and the fact that he got it seemed like the nicest thing.
“Yeah, it turned out she was a fire bird instead of a fire lizard, and she went and flew around the shitty prince’s castle and cursed him, and she was never seen there again.”
He laughed, which made me laugh. We laid there for a while not talking, until I said, “Can I touch you?”
“Yea, my lady.”
He was lying on his back, so I looked him over, trying to choose where. I picked the two scars under his chin and ran my thumb over them. Then I brought my hand back to my own space.
“That’s a dog bite, too?” I said.
“Yea.”
“So, Miranda didn’t get rid of her dogs, even after that happened?
“Nay, they weren not her dogs. She was but fifteen years old. They weren the dogs of her stepfather,” he said.
“She was only fifteen when she had you?”
“Nay, she was but twelve when I was born. I was three when the dog bit me, and she had no power to make her stepfather give up the dogs.”
“Oh my god. She was twelve?” I took back some of the horrible things I’d thought about Miranda, because that would fuck you up, having a baby when you were twelve. “Who’s your father?”