DRAGONBLADE
PROLOGUE
Year of our Lord 1291
Castell Caergwrle
Wales
“Do they knowI am coming?”
“Aye, Sire. They know.”
“Do they know I am comingnow?”
“Aye, Sire. We sent word last night.”
It was a day of mist and rain in the mountains north of Wrexham. Visibility was obscured by the fog as it hovered just above the ground, giving the landscape an otherworldly feel. Surely Arwan, the king of the underworld, was waiting for a mortal to step inside his realm, just beyond the fog. For certain, that was what it felt like.
Monsters waiting in the mist.
The road to Llanllyr Nunnery in Wales was not an easy one. There were only four men in this escort because anything larger would have attracted too much attention. It was a man of royal blood and three bodyguards, men who had been with his father and now served him. Edward had been the King of England for several years now and every year seemed to grow more difficult, more complex.
This year had been the worst so far.
It wasn’t due to politics or the usual issues that go with the job when one reined over a vital kingdom. This year, it had been a matter of the heart, something that even the strongest men were unable to escape. Edward was a powerful king, but he was also a widower. He had a family that made him proud for the most part. Not always, but sometimes. What happened to him happened without provocation, something that closed in upon him and before he realized it, he was trapped.
Cursed.
In love.
The result of that love hadn’t been unexpected. He’d taken the beautiful Dera to his bed and he hadn’t regretted it. She was young and bright and had a way of making an old man laugh. That’s all he was—an old man to her youth. But he never saw age.
He only saw love.
Shocking that a man like him could even feel such a thing.
But he had.
Dera was one of the many daughters of Dafydd ap Gruffydd, the Welsh prince, and she was born of a liaison he had with an English noblewoman that no one could seem to name. Whoever it was had been kept a mystery. Dafydd never spoke of her and no one else seemed to know, so her mother remained an enigma. Once she had been born, she’d been raised in the Llanllyr Nunnery in Ceredigion. Dafydd and his family had long been imprisoned and scattered, and in fact, Dafydd had long been dead when he first saw Dera. She had been raised properly at that ancient nunnery and it had been by sheer coincidence that Edward had seen her whilst traveling in Wales.
That had been the day Edward’s heart had changed.
He was an older man now and he’d long thought his days of infatuation were over, but he had been wrong. Very wrong. His time with Dera had been short, but it had been unusuallypassionate in nature. When next he heard through a Welsh messenger from the nunnery, Dera was pregnant with his child. Edward was the only one who knew it, but as the months passed, he found himself on edge, waiting for word that his child had been born. He was already planning when next he would see Dera.
He simply couldn’t help himself.
In his mind, she had become something of a myth crossed with a fantasy. His mind had created her into something ethereal and goddess-like. He’d known her so short a time, and he’d loved her for so short a time, but she was the one thing in his life that gave him some happiness in a world where he’d had very little since the death of his wife. Although he knew he couldn’t marry Dera, that didn’t stop him from dreaming about her.
From loving her.
But now, that love had turned into something fearful and anxious because the missive he received three weeks ago from Wales only one word. That was all he needed to get him moving in a way that didn’t require armies or a communal decision from his advisors.
Brysiwch.
Make haste.
He had.