Free Dragon and Phoenix by Joanne Bertin

with you all morning long. Why didn’t you just rake him over the barnacles and have done with it?”
    “Because,” Linden replied, “I understand how he feels. He’s lost you, Maurynna; lost you completely and he knows it.”
    “He never had me to begin with,” Maurynna snapped back, “save as a friend. I was never his, damn it all. If anyone owned me, it was my House. Only they had the right to order my life. And damn Raven anyway for expecting me to blithely give up my ship and follow him to Yerrih.”
    Linden opened his mouth, shut it again.
    “Don’t say it,” she warned him. “I didn’t try to get back to the Sea Mist because of the Lady’s orders. Now that I’m a Dragonlord, she is to me what Uncle Kesselandt is to House Erdon—the Head of this, my new ‘House.’”
    She stalked around the room, then stopped and rearranged the apples in the big pottery bowl with a violence that sent two of them flying onto the table. She scowled at them, then grabbed one and bit into it, tossing the other back into the bowl; she resumed prowling as if she might find the source of her ill humor lurking in a corner and squash it. All at once she stopped. “Linden, would you have made me give up the Sea Mist if the Lady hadn’t?”
    “Made you? No,” Linden had said, shaking his head slowly. “Tried to convince you to—yes.” Then, “I’m sorry, but I would have.”
    She’d walked out of their chambers at that. He hadn’t followed … .
    The last buckle was done; Maurynna swung into the saddle and gathered up the reins. “Let’s be off, shall we?”
    Boreal broke into a trot.
     
    Very well then, Lleld thought. No doubt Morlen and the other truedragons wouldn’t like it if I barge in on them. But what if I just happen to meet them as they fly north again? Just out for a bit of exercise, that’s all, and such a coincidence if I should run into them on their way home.
    She swung wide of the valley so that no one inside would see her and dashed north as fast as her wings could take her.
     
    So here she was, riding their favorite trail—alone.
    In truth, not quite alone, Maurynna had to admit. But special as Boreal was, he was not the company Linden was.
    Or usually is. How hard , Maurynna wondered, would he have tried to talk me into giving up my ship? She was perversely glad she’d closed herself off to him when she’d felt him “searching” for her earlier. She was not ready to talk to him yet. And perhaps would not be for some time. She would see.
    The trail grew steeper. Maurynna concentrated on lifting herself from the
saddle slightly to ease Boreal as he surged up the incline. That’s right; get up into a half-seat—No! Don’t stand in your stirrups , she could “hear” Linden say as he always did at this point.
    This was the worst bit of the trail—especially coming back down—but the mountain meadow on the other side was worth the trouble. In a few moments it would open before her, a green haven of lush grass and wild flowers, cupped within a circle of ridges. She and Boreal would drink from the spring that bubbled from a cleft in the sheer stone at one side, then she’d strip the Llysanyin’s tack from him and let him wander while she scrambled over the tumbled boulders at the edges of the meadow. There were imprints of seashells in some of the rocks. She had hopes of someday finding a perfect one small enough for her to take back. She didn’t feel quite so far from the seas that she loved, somehow, among these rocks; those same oceans had once been here.
    She tried not to think of how these trips usually ended when Linden was with her. Instead she concentrated on the ride. Just around this bend in the trail, and down again—
    Boreal stopped, neighing in surprise. He spun halfway around, ready to bolt, before Maurynna threw off the paralysis of astonishment that had briefly claimed her. “No!” she cried and clamped her legs around him, holding him. She knew that if Boreal fell prey