“My guess is that General Zirkander wasn’t, ma’am.”
Sardelle nodded. “His mother has confirmed this for me. She told me about how she struggled to keep him under control when his father was gone—and also when he was home—and that he drove her to drink a few times. I may have to take up a beverage stiffer than tea once mine are both ambulatory.” She tilted her chin toward the baby.
“How long until babies learn to walk?” Trip figured Sardelle’s had a ways to go, but one of his siblings was almost a year old, or so his surrogate mother suspected. Nobody knew their exact ages for certain since that hadn’t been included on the plaques. Only a couple had been labeled with names.
Trip hadn’t seen enough of the eldest boy to know if he could walk yet. He’d spent most of his time interacting with little Zherie. Sardelle had volunteered to take care of her alongside her own two, so she was always here at the house. Trip sensed Tylie out back with her now, perhaps showing her the monkey.
“Usually by the time they’re a year or so. But crawling commences before then.” Judging by Sardelle’s face, that was when the trouble began.
Trip wondered how trying his mother had found him. Maybe she had expected him to be unusual, given his origins, and had been prepared for it. Or maybe she had spent a lot of time asking Trip’s grandparents for help.
He’d finally found time to send them a letter a couple of weeks earlier to update them on the mission, the parts he was at liberty to discuss, and he’d decided to tell them about the babies too. He wasn’t sure the army wanted the word getting out about them, but they were his siblings. He figured he had the right to tell his family members about them.
Out on the rug, Marinka flopped down next to a toy box and began extracting blocks to play with. One of the surrogate mothers placed her squirming charge on the rug, and the little boy demonstrated crawling. Marinka, probably uninterested in all the babies invading her house, ignored him. She did pat the cat when she sashayed past on the way into the kitchen, ignoring four wrestling kittens along the way.
Trip spotted the fish puzzle he’d made and was inordinately pleased when Marinka selected it. Had she tried the puzzle yet? Was she old enough for puzzles?
A knock sounded at the door, and Sardelle waved it open with a nudge of power. One of the mothers, a curly-haired woman in her twenties who had two boys but had lost her last baby in childbirth, walked in carrying a four-month-old girl.
“Hello, Mladine,” Trip said. “Are you all right?”
Her eyes were tight, and he sensed distress from her. He checked the baby, and she seemed fine.
“Yes, Telryn. Thank you, but…” Mladine looked to Sardelle. “I took the children to visit my parents at their little dairy in the countryside up north. A silver dragon flew over the area yesterday and destroyed the neighbor’s silos. He ran out with a shotgun. I don’t know what he was thinking it would do, but he was determined to protect his property and fired at the dragon. It swooped back down and…” She glanced around the room. The children weren’t paying attention, but the two other mothers had turned to listen. “He didn’t make it,” Mladine said.
“We’ve been hearing the reports of trouble,” Sardelle said grimly, “especially in the rural areas. They largely seem to be stealing livestock, but when people object… it gets ugly. And sometimes even when people don’t object, from what I’ve heard.”
“Were you—is your family all right?” Trip asked, hesitating to come forward and peer at the baby. He didn’t want it to seem that his little sister was his only concern and he didn’t care about Mladine and the rest of her family.
“Yes, we stayed out of it, but it was terrifying. My husband stayed behind to help.” Mladine must have noticed him checking on his little sister, because she stepped forward. “Do you want to see her, Telryn?”
He nodded and peered into the blanket wrapped around her, finding the baby alert and curious. Her small hand made gripping motions in the air, and Trip stuck his finger into her grasp. She seemed to find this delightful. He found it sweet and shuddered to think about what would have happened if that dragon had taken offense to Mladine’s family’s dairy rather than the neighbor’s silos.
“She’s been grabbing her own feet a lot lately,” Mladine said. “Newly discovered body parts.”
“Does she need a fun toy to grab?”
“Careful, Trip,” Sardelle murmured before he could grow too excited at the prospect of designing an interesting grasping toy. “They’ll all be here tonight. You don’t want to promise too many toys.”
“I can make them quickly. It’s not a problem.”
He smiled at Mladine, and she smiled back. If the surrogate mothers thought him odd for being half-dragon, or having an overly developed interest in building things, they had been too well schooled to show it.
“Have a seat, Mladine,” Sardelle said. “My students should have some snacks for us soon.”
“Should I be relieved you don’t make me prepare snacks as part of my training?” Trip had seen Ylisa and Ferrin cracking eggs and manipulating stirring spoons with their minds.
“I wasn’t sure if you would consider it beneath you. Though knowing how to make cookies and tarts is a good skill to have. Even if I didn’t acknowledge that until I was a mother myself, and someone with frequent winged houseguests who enjoy sweets.”
When Mladine sat down, the other two mothers quizzed her on the dragon. Trip listened as the story was relayed in more detail and grew troubled.
Something needed to be done. Nobody would be safe as long as dragons were marauding in Iskandia. His siblings wouldn’t be safe.
He vowed to change that.
3
Trip smoothed his uniform, tucked his cap under his arm, and scraped his fingers through his short hair, aware of the guards at the solarium door eyeing him surreptitiously. He wasn’t sure if it was because he looked too young to have been invited to this important meeting at the castle or if it was because there were rumors going around the capital that he was a powerful sorcerer. He decided to hope for the former, since the latter had resulted in a write-up in a newspaper and a couple of old ladies on the street making superstitious gestures at him for warding off evil spirits.
When he’d envisioned journalists writing about his exploits, it had involved heroic flier battles in which he saved the country from certain doom. Not articles that speculated about his heritage and suggested that dragons had sent him to live among humans as a spy.
He hadn’t received much better treatment from the guards at the front gate, who had patted him down before letting him enter the castle, and told him he would have to leave his sword with them. Trip had been mortified when the guards abruptly changed their minds, saying he could go right in and that he and his sword should have a nice day.