Sons of Ironstorm - Book 4: Griffon's Stand

Summerstorm

Slowly Moira's breathing steadied as sensation continued to cascade through her body. Duty drove the lithe Merisin, as it did every citizen of Summerstorm, perched as they were on the brink of devastation. It was duty that saw her seek out the Var Ethisdil clerics advising the king to ask to be entered into the selection process. Summerstorm needed a voice to convince the alliance of its tenuous position and how better to find that voice as a member of the Covenant and a wife of the Wielder?

Duty also gave her the strength to pass through the long cycles waiting through each stage of the selection, not knowing from one day to the next if she would be in the final group destined to stand before the Wielder and be chosen. But it didn't guide her to the clerics, to learn as much as she could about the Wielder's role. And about the man, she hoped to call her husband. 

Though Shawn had spent a great deal of time in different Aeshin'laur kingdoms training in a broad variety of disciplines, little of that time had been among the sea elf nations. The eldest daughter of the great Merisin sea captain, Steelstream, had never before seen or met Shawn Ironstorm, destined by prophecy to help save the world. While marriages took place between strangers for the sake of alliances or to heal the injury between clan and kingdom, this was one bonding she didn't want to go into blind, trusting only to duty.

Determined to learn everything she could, Moira read everything she could about the young human Wielder-to-be. And discovered each scroll, every report said much the same thing. Shawn Ironstorm was a driven man, intent on seeing his destiny fulfilled, even if it cost him his very life. Intelligent and powerful, quick-witted and determined, he seemed as great a creature of duty as she was. And that attracted the young Merisin.

Yet it wasn't until the very day of the final selection, after she had passed through the final levels of the selection process to stand with bated breath on the council room floor, that Moira of Summerstorm first laid eyes on the man she would call 'husband'. She could clearly remember even now, with lucid thought a struggle in the wake of their incredible joining, what she thought when her eyes fell on the painfully handsome human, the wave of naked desire that rushed through her, hand in hand with the aching hope that she would be chosen.

Shawn Ironstorm, Wielder of the Star Sword, was beautiful. Not merely handsome, or attractive, but so gut-wrenchingly beautiful that she ached with desire just looking at him. Those eyes, dark pools of intensity that seemed to burn right through her, those shoulders as broad as a sail boom and as powerful as a deep sea storm, and those perfect features sculpted from granite; together he was almost too much for her to stand. Adding the Wielder's power made him larger than life, a heroic god wrested from the pages of history to walk the world with mere mortals like her.

Now duty had little to do with her need to be one of the Covenant. This was the man for her, the man to not only rescue Summerstorm from the Muraan but also fill her life with everything she could ever want or need. And Moira climbed to the heights of ecstasy when she was chosen, knowing she could now realize those dreams and desires.

Climbed then just as rapidly fell when she learned she would be sharing this incredible man with ten other women. What madness was this? Had the Maker played some great jest on this young Merisin woman who's only desire was to be happy and content? How could she, the lithe, athletic daughter of a sea captain hope to compete for the affections of this beautiful god with princesses and priestesses, each more lovely than the next? She was a boy compared to them, with no hips or breasts, and certainly not half as beautiful as any one of them.

But Moira had been chosen by whatever power of providence as a wife, a selection she now questioned. And she had a duty to perform as wife to a Wielder. With duty reasserting itself, she found bare contentment in living as she now did, without a touch, without a soft word spoken, without a husband in her bed to hear her secret name and love her and no other. It was what her people and nation required of her, and what the lithe Merisin had to do to survive.