Truth be told, I was quite tired of running up and down long flights of stairs and starting to wonder whether I really needed to see a portrait of this woman alpha anyways, not when there was written proof, however brief, of her existence. But Beatrice was in motion, and I followed, partly embarrassed to admit I could barely keep up with her and partly afraid she might find the portrait before me.
My thighs burned, and I was making a galling amount of noise, huffing and puffing my way up the narrow spiraling stairs, always watching Beatrice's skirt disappear out of sight. When I thought I was near to fainting, near to falling backwards and toppling my way back to the hall, near to sitting down on this exact step to wait for Ronson to come and find me and fly me about—up or down, I didn't care—I finally heard a door creak above me.
"Aha!" Beatrice's voice curled its way to my ear. "This looks more like it."
And with that, I regained my last reserves of energy and hurried up after her.
The air was hazy with dust, light falling through two opposing stained glass windows with simple diamond patterns in a mismatch of colors, painting the large rectangular drapes of sheets. Beatrice hadn't touched a single one, and she stood at the center of the room, smiling and waiting for me.
"I assumed you'd like to do the honors," she said.
I really liked this woman.
"Thank you," I said, nodding. I was breathless and my legs were trembling, and my pretty new dress now clung damply to me in uncomfortable places, but I smoothed my skirts with clammy hands and stepped forward.
The first few portraits I uncovered were fairly typical—an alpha standing alone along a cliffside, or perhaps with an omega at his side, sometimes even a child. I grunted as I pushed aside a family portrait that Beatrice examined in the shifting light of the windows.
One after another, I uncovered a painting, frowning to find another man, another pair of wings, another dragon on the skyline. She had reigned for one hundred years. Surely. Surely there'd been a portrait. Or had that been a line too far for the preservation of history? Had her portrait been destroyed? Was she only one of the women in the many I'd already uncovered?
"Mairwen, there is…something curious in these," Beatrice murmured behind me.
But I was busy lifting another sheet of linen, pausing halfway to see a solitary figure in an enormous brocade skirt filling the frame, gilded with beads and pearls and a belt made of lattice gold and huge rubies.
"Beatrice," I hissed, jumping up to throw back the curtain of linen, marveling at what I found.
The portrait was very old, the style of figure stiff and simplified, but the subject was undeniable. Beatrice gasped behind me, stumbling closer, and together we stared at the woman in the frame.
The woman…with wings.
"Alpha Falk," I murmured, finding the broach over her chest with the Falk family crest. She'd kept her own alpha mate's name and crest, instead of whatever family line she'd been born into.
"She is…she was… Mairwen, are those wings…symbolic?" Beatrice asked, her eyes wide and lips remaining parted.
I shook my head. "I don't know. But…how?"
An answer was impossible, so for a long stretch, Beatrice and I remained standing together in silence, staring up into the hard and mischievous eyes of the woman in the portrait. What had her first name been? Had she kept the name Falk because she was mated, whatever that meant, or because she loved the alpha who chose her, or simply for the sake of her rule as alpha?
Had she been able to fly?
I smiled as I studied her. She'd not been very pretty, I noticed. Not by today's standards. Her face was quite round and her shoulders very broad. There was no hint of a bosom in the image, and her waist was almost squared to her chest. But she looked clever. She looked like the kind of woman who could rule as alpha—a concept I hadn't ever considered before today.
Her wings were a warm shade of brown, and they took up most of the background of the portrait. It was obvious the intention was to show them, to show that she'd had them. They had the most detail of any piece of her, even of all the jewelry, the leathery texture so carefully transcribed in paint, the glow of a sunset bleeding through the wing on the right.
"Mairwen, look," Beatrice said gently, tiptoeing closer, raising a hand up to Alpha Falk's throat.
I frowned, inching up to join Beatrice, squinting at the slight discoloration of her skin, little pink and silver highlights at the curve where neck met shoulder.
"Is that…is that a bite?" I asked, almost whispering.
"I'm not sure," Beatrice admitted, taking my hand and drawing me back, turning me to face the other portraits. "But she isn't the only one with the mark."
It took me a moment—my head was still spinning at the discovery of Alpha Falk with wings—but finally I caught a glimmer on the throat of a young and pretty woman smiling cheerfully at the side of an absolutely terrifying alpha. I hurried closer, hunting their clothes until I found a family signet ring on the alpha's hand. Blue stone, rose marking. Alpha Grimshaw and his mate.
My hand rose up to press over my chest as I rushed to the next portrait, no mark on the woman's throat this time. Alpha Brand, who'd chosen a handful of omegas to rut with, without any mention of a mate.
And the next, marked, bitten. Alpha Unger. His mate was recorded as having established the first schools for young women on the island, both human and dragonkin.
The bite marks. They were mating marks.
I couldn't recall every family crest—my head was spinning too fast—but I knew enough to confirm a few more of the portraits, until the sun started setting outside and the room we stood in grew dim. Ronson would return soon. He would take me back to the nest with him, all eager and hungry. He would…
My cheeks were warm as I turned and found Beatrice watching me, her gaze on my throat, at the curve of my shoulder, where curved dark bruises marked my skin. I resisted the urge to lift my hand and cover the marks, it wouldn't do any good now.
"We should…we should cover these back up," I rasped out.
Beatrice glanced at the portraits that surrounded us, lingering on Alpha Falk, glowing in the last rays of the day. "For now," she murmured.
Yes, I thought. For now.
OceanofPDF.com
Chapter Twenty-EightMAIRWEN
Ronson rumbled beneath me, his huge plated body pointing toward the high peak ahead of us. We were reaching our destination after a long, cold morning of flying. We'd stopped briefly in Grave Hills, in an open valley that Ronson said belonged to their new alpha, just long enough to eat the food Cook had sent us with—what I'd considered an insane amount but Ronson explained as necessary.
"Flying as a dragon works up a dragon's appetite," Ronson purred to me, his eyes stroking over my shape from my seat on the picnic blanket. Niall had cleared his throat to remind the alpha we were not alone.
I squinted my eyes through the foggy shield of my helmet, watching the mountain grow with a good bit of relief and a dash of mourning. Ronson had been right to warn me about flying long distances. It was bitterly cold through the air, even against the many layers I wore, but mostly it was exhausting. I braced and bent with Ronson's flight, using muscles I hadn't known I possessed, not to mention the incredible ache in my thighs, stretched around the wide nape of a dragon's long neck. I'd been given a seat and stirrups to lock my feet into, but even at our resting point, I'd barely been able to dismount, let alone do so with any grace. Now, after what Ronson claimed would've been another two hours of flight, I was fairly sure he would simply have to transform and leave me to drop to the ground.
