Page 123 of Spar of Hearts

After Roderick repeated the wyvern’s words, Anya smiled. “Blackbird is going to have a field day.”

He shut the tent flap to change. Anya shimmied on her dress, then turned around, presenting the back of her bodice to him. He tied the threads almost instinctively, tracing the contours of her shoulder blades as he worked his way up. He could get used to this. Slowly waking up beside her, starting their morning with a healthy dose of passion, tying her bodice…minus the scaly, winged interruption. Soon, he’d even bring her breakfast and tea in bed. Something with mulberries of course.

“Wait.” He paused in the middle of shoving his arm through a sleeve. The memory of Anya spitting out the mulberry pie came to mind. “If the maiden at the masquerade was you, what about the pie?”

“Pie?” Anya asked, drawing her hair up into a perfectly messy bun.

“I had my suspicions that you were her.” Roderick slid his arm the rest of the way through. “So after your drunken tirade—”

Anya put a claw up with an air of academia. “I prefer ‘stress-induced imbibement.’”

He flashed a fanged smile at her. “Fine. After your ‘imbibement’, I put you to bed, cleaned the kitchen, and baked a mulberry pie to put my theory to the test.”

Anya burst out in a barking laugh, doubling over in an effort to stifle it. He watched her in bewilderment. He’d never seen her laugh so wholeheartedly. After a solid minute, she swiped a tear from her eye and straightened.

Her face morphed into a serious expression as she held his face with both hands. “I have something very, very important to tell you.”

“Go on,” he said, his words squished by her grip.

Anya’s golden eyes bore into his as she spoke. “That pie. Was. Terrible. The worst thing I’ve ever eaten. It was slimy and sour and salty and dry all at the same time. Astounding, truly. A waste of mulberries.”

Roderick chuckled. It made sense now. “I see. I suppose I can’t be great at everything.”

Anya started buttoning his shirt. “When we’re back in Balcott at the berry festival, you owe me a proper pie.”

“Aye aye, Captain.”

Anya tilted her head, humming appreciatively. “Captain. Hm. I like the sound of that. Better than Princess, anyway.”

Roderick traced his fingers over the fang marks on her neck as Anya continued to button his shirt with endearing, fumbling claws. The gesture was so simple, yet so intimate. No one had ever done this for him before. And even after only a single day as her mate, he knew no one had ever loved him like this before either. The lingering high of their impassioned night together and the imminent close of their mission made joy bubble over in his heart as the possibilities for their future unfolded.

As Anya reached the last button, he stopped her hand and pulled her in for a lingering kiss.

Once fully dressed and concealed in cloaks, they shouldered their packs and donned their new weapons. The long sword he’d bought was clunky compared to his old rapier, but the weight on his hip was reassuring. He’d felt bare without it. A satisfied smile spread across Anya’s face as she admired the cutlass she’d picked out, then sheathed it at her hip. He made a mental note to buy her a bouquet of blades when this was all over, and test every single one with her.

They stepped out into the sunlight, where Roderick held the map open while Anya scrutinized it.

“We should head straight to the capital.” She poked a claw on the parchment over the capital city of Solenergi, represented by a sun with the outline of a crescent moon hovering over a castle. “We can land on the outskirts of these woods, then walk the rest of the way and request an audience using a messenger hawk.”

“And when we go to pick up the message, who do you think will be waiting for us? The welcoming committee?”

Anya was a skilled negotiator. Roderick couldn’t deny that. But she wasn’t a miracle worker. Aquillas wanted nothing to do with Valeria, and the glacial wall was essentially thousands and thousands of miles of one message:

Stay the hell out.

“If we slink around like criminals, they will treat us as such. But if we—”

Roderick put up a hand as a familiar sound caught in his ears. “Do you hear that?

A prickle crept up his spine as a clicking echoed in the distance. It was faint, random, but somehow orderly, and growing fast, almost like…

Hooves.

They jumped apart as an arrow zipped between them at lightning speed, lodging itself smack into the ridgepole of their tent. In an impossibly quick, fluid motion, Isen disappeared into the treeline.

Why couldn’t Yomira have chosen a more fearsome mate?

They whipped in the direction the arrow had come from, where Henrik crested the hill atop a thick-legged stallion, clad in chain mail and leather bearing the Aquillan crest, arm still positioned from the shot.