It took a good three minutes for me to be scanned, searched, and have an oral swab taken to determine whether I had any communicable diseases, but at last I made it into the foyer of the house, and Aisling bustled me upstairs to the nursery to see her babies.
The twins were sleeping in identical intricately carved wooden cradles, swathed with lace and filled with a number of stuffed toy dragons. I duly admired them, chatted with their nanny, a young green dragon named Grace, and reassured Aisling that I would return at a later date when the twins were awake so I could admire them as they obviously deserved.
“Drake wanted to name them both with Hungarian names, but I was adamant that I get a Celtic name in there—my family has always had Celtic names—so I picked Iarlaith, even though the pronunciation trips everyone up. Drake chose Ilona’s name. It means ‘beautiful. ’ Now, while we’re on the subject of children, tell me how Brom is doing. May said he had a grand time while visiting her and Gabriel, but I hope he hasn’t been affected by this stupid war.”
“Not—”
The door to the sitting room where we were having tea was thrown open, and Baltic stood in the doorway, bristling with indignation.
“—in the least.”
“Oh, dear,” Aisling said, eyeing him. “I hope Pál wasn’t overly zealous with his security precautions.”
“Full cavity search?” Jim asked Baltic. “Metal detector up the ol’ wazoo? X-rays and soft-tissue scans?”
Smoke swirled out of one of Baltic’s nostrils. His hair was mussed and loose around his shoulders, and he looked like he’d been grinding his teeth. He also looked like he was capable of tearing down the house with his bare hands.
“Thank you for the tea,” I told Aisling, forestalling the inevitable explosion. “I think I’ve probably pushed Baltic past his tenuous grip on patience, so we’ll be on our way.”
“Oh, so soon?” She looked disappointed. “Maybe Baltic would like to see the babies first?”
He rolled one eye over to her. She flinched. “No, I see your point. Another time, then.”
I took Baltic’s hand and leaned in to kiss him gently. He didn’t move, but his gaze, furious and, as I suspected, without a shred of patience, scorched me. “Come, my darling. I will assuage your anger on the way home.”
He said nothing, but a spark of interest flared in his fathomless eyes for a moment. “It’s going to take a hell of a lot more than assuaging, mate. You asked me about my fantasies the other day. I have one now, and it involves meting out the punishment you deserve for putting me through the last hour.”
“Ooh, punishment fantasies,” Jim said, cocking a furry eyebrow. “Drake has a lot of those.”
“Jim!” Aisling said, pointing a finger. “Out! Don’t you give me that look. I’m the demon lord here, and you just better remember that—”
We left Aisling in the middle of scolding Jim. I took one look at the dark promise in Baltic’s eyes and allowed him to escort me out to the taxi he’d engaged, wondering just what form his idea of punishment would take, and whether I should make up a new batch of caramel sauce for it.
Chapter Sixteen
Riga is an odd combination of an ancient city and a modern metropolis. It was part of the Hanseatic League, which made it a valuable port for trade, one of the reasons why Baltic chose the area to locate his stronghold. It boasted beautifully preserved historic buildings, a scenic castle, and gorgeous Art Nouveau architecture that mingled with stately elegance alongside the more mundane trappings of modern life. I hadn’t been to Riga in centuries, but even modernized, it had a strong sense of the familiar as we drove out of the now-sprawling city limits and through the tiny suburb of Ziema, headed for the forest preserve that protected the remains of Dauva.
“It really is amazing that no one developed this area over the centuries,” I mused, as I pulled off the road serving as a boundary along one edge of the dense forest that covered about a hundred acres. “You’d think they would have needed the wood, if nothing else. But no one has touched it.”
“I ensured no one would,” Baltic said as we got out of the rental car.
I stopped in midstretch. “You did? How?”
Thala, who had been forced to sit in the backseat, sniffed. I half expected her to add something really nasty, but she just smiled at me. Oh, it was an unpleasant smile, but still, it took me by surprise. “You lived here and you do not remember the protections Baltic put into place?”
After eight hours of her presence while we travelled to Latvia, I was about at the end of my tether, but if she was going to suddenly switch tactics and play nice, then I would do the same. It had taken all of my persuasive powers to convince Baltic to come to Latvia when he preferred to be elsewhere. “In a way, no, I don’t remember what Baltic did to Dauva. My memory was wiped, thanks to your sister and her bigamous husband.”
“Bigamous?” Her eyebrows rose as her gaze flickered over me. “How do you mean?”
“Gareth married me twelve years ago in order to control my manifestations of gold. Only it wasn’t a legal marriage because he already had a wife—Ruth.”
She looked as if she wanted to laugh, but she managed to control the urge. “Indeed. How very . . . awkward . . . to find yourself married to a man who already had a wife. But that must mean that your child is his?”
I closed my eyes for a few seconds, wanting to do nothing more than turn her into a pineapple, or perhaps even a toe fungus. “Yes, Gareth is Brom’s father.”
“I am his father. The other is a usurper, nothing more,” Baltic said as he gazed at the forest, his hands on his hips.
“Gareth is his biological father, but he has nothing to do with us now. In fact, I don’t even know where he is. He and Ruth have gone to earth somewhere, taking all of our belongings with them. That doesn’t matter, though. Baltic, how did you protect Dauva? Was it a spell of some sort?”
“Spells, wards, two banes, and several songs,” he said, taking my hand and leading me down a narrow path that curved around century-old trees dripping with long streamers of moss and assorted vines of ivy.
“Songs?” I shuddered as I cast a glance behind us, where Thala walked, a small smile playing around her lips as she typed something into her cell phone. “Oh, you mean the magic kind, not the singing kind. Ugh. But . . . dragons don’t do much dark magic, and you can’t sing a song over a location as big as Dauva without invoking some pretty powerful dark forces, something like a dirge, and those aren’t done except by experts. Who did you get to do that?”
“I did them, all three. I am a dirgesinger,” Thala said with a look of obvious pride, but I heard a faint thread of warning as well.
“You’re half dragon, though, aren’t you? How can you be a dirgesinger? Dragons can’t handle the sort of dark power needed to sing a dirge.”
“They can if their mother is an archimage,” she said with another of her creepy smiles.
Oy. I made a hasty readjustment of my intention to have it out with Thala about her jealousy issues. I knew she was a necromancer of some esteem, because it’s not an easy task to resurrect a dragon, as she had done with Baltic. But if she was also able to cast the most profound level of dark magic spells commonly referred to as songs, it would behoove me to deal with her a bit more carefully in the future.
Baltic held back a branch, allowing Thala and me to pass. “Most of the magic has been broken by Kostya over the last few months in his attempts to access my lair, but we have begun the process of weaving new layers of protection over the ground as we reclaim Dauva. He might hold Dragonwood, but he will never hold Dauva.”
Baltic loved Dauva beyond darned near anything, certainly more than the house in England he had built for me. I knew this, and didn’t raise an objection when he had informed me two months before that reclamation and rebuilding of Dauva would take utmost precedence in his plans. I was confident that once we had straightened out the business with the weyr, I could start to work on negotiating Dragonwood back from Kostya.