Dragons and Princes - [COMPLETE]

6. Faeana

The body of young Jöra Dagur was wrapped lovingly with the finest veil. Faeana watched the fire take life from the bed of kindling upon which he rested in the boat out on the water, saw the glow upon his gray skin and the glint upon his golden ring, and the sparkle in its ruby. The water was as still as a polished steel blade but for the ripples circling the boat that carried her little brother from the shore. Ash rose on the smoke and fell from the dispersing gray into the water.

Her father stood like a statue, his steely blue eyes hard and unreadable, his fair hair braided regally along the right side of his head. Another child, he watched burn. She could not imagine losing a child she brought into the world. Her father and her mother had watched so many of their children die, and her mother was gone as well now, leaving only her father and herself.

Only Eiran and Faeana Dagur watched her brother’s body burn. They were the last of the Dagurs, and it was hard to realize that yet again. There were only two of them left. Two. And Eiran would not remarry and father more children only to watch them die as well. His heart was too beaten, too broken.

"Never again," King Eiran whispered, turning from the dying blaze as the funeral vessel sank, its last flaming tongue silenced by the pale blue water. "I will not lose another child to this war, Faeana. I forbid you to fight anymore. You will marry Patreos, and you will become queen when I give you the crown in a month." She looked up at her father. "We cannot let our name perish with us. We cannot allow the Fenrir to have this war." His word was law, and that he had spoken in that distant manner to Faeana since she was a child stung still. She could not disobey him. She could not break his heart again by risking herself no matter how strongly she felt in her need to be with her people, suffering as they suffered, rejoicing when they did. Faeana knew her father loved her, but Eiran Dagur was one of the most reserved Freyja she had ever had the honor of knowing, and he didn’t understand the cost of walling herself off from her own people.

"But father–"

"No." The word was simple, a dismissal to whatever her argument may have been. "The only choice you have in this is what man you choose to marry, Faeana. If your heart is not for Patreos, then you must find a man with whom you can share your life within the month. I should have found you a suitable husband myself, but I have not had the strength to bring myself to give you to a man you may or may not love."

When Princess Dagur’s father left with his guards, Faeana hung back, staring at her brother’s watery grave, wondering what it would be to have lived instead a simple human life. She almost cursed her own ancestor’s ill fate to have been the woman named Freyja, the first of their kind, until Fae nudged her arm with her giant nose and purred.

The Freyja princess leaned against Fae, her fingers sinking into the war cat’s gold and white fur and knotting there. Choose a husband in a month . . . That was what struck her the hardest. Her father would not take another wife after losing her mother, and he knew Faeana was hesitant to marry for fear of losing her own children to this horrid war. She thought fondly of Patreos, but imagining them as a pair set her nerves into a scatter, and she had to breathe deeply to steady them. And yet there was no other man she was so close to.

A flock of ravens took to the sky above her, and she watched the fog that crept down from the soft lines of the hills above. She knew that in the trees Freyja and frey cats alike were watching and guarding. Her feet shifted over the black river rocks as his words repeated in her mind, and she chanted her own silent prayer for peace. The war must end, I will find a way.

Faeana would not have children only to watch them die as Eiran had had to do, as her grandparents had been forced to do, and their grandparents . . . So many generations, lives were stolen, and the survivors were left to grieve in their stony, distant Freyja way, unable to shed a tear for the shame it would bring.