Justice Unhatched (The Exceptional S. Beaufont Book 5) Read online

  Sophia deliberated on the idea formulating in her head. “Maybe he liked that because it was your dynamic and he enjoyed it.”

  Evan gave her an astonished expression. “What a weird masochist that gnome has turned out to be.”

  Sophia glanced at Mama Jamba, but she wasn’t giving anything away it appeared from the tight-lipped expression on her face. “I think there’s a lot more going on behind the scenes for Quiet than we realize. He didn’t want us to know he was the Gullington. Now we do, it changes everything. It changes how you treat him, and we know he doesn’t want that.”

  Ainsley hustled through the swinging kitchen door, carrying a platter of pastries and fruit. “Apparently, he doesn’t like to be called a sneaky little toad who has ruined the last five-hundred years of my life.”

  She laid the tray on the surface of the table, sticking her hands on her hips and running a curious gaze over Evan.

  “You don’t say?” he joked. “I’m astonished he wouldn’t like to hear such sweet things. I think you’d get punished either way. I told him he was a brave soldier who had my undying respect and look what he did to me.” He threw his hands in the direction of his chest.

  Ainsley blinked at him. “What? I don’t get it. What is different about you?”

  Evan rolled his eyes. “My clothes.”

  The housekeeper shrugged. “Black isn’t your color. I have always told you that. Nor is green, blue, white, red, orange, yellow, indigo—”

  “I think Evan is referring to the fact he’s been forced to wear my cloak since Quiet stole his clothes,” Sophia interrupted.

  Ainsley tilted her head to the side. “Oh, well, whatever. It isn’t like anyone even looks at him.” She swung around and strode back in the direction of the kitchen.

  “Pancakes, dear,” Mama Jamba called to the shapeshifter.

  “Yes, I’m working on it,” Ainsley replied. “Little behind this morning since the Castle doesn’t appear to want to help me at all.”

  “Oh, for the love of the angels,” Hiker said, coming to a swift halt in the entryway. Behind him, Mahkah and Wilder peered around his large frame, trying to see what the cause of the stress in his voice was from.

  Mama Jamba nodded, looking around the table. “I know. It’s half past the hour, and I don’t have any sweet, buttery pancakes in my mouth.”

  Hiker shook his head, continuing into the dining hall. “No, I was referring to Evan wearing a cloak a size too small for him.”

  Sophia gawked at the leader of the Dragon Elite. “Excuse me. You think I’m simply a size smaller than that massive guy? Thanks a lot!”

  He narrowed his light-colored eyes at her. “Why is Evan wearing your cloak?”

  Wilder slid into the chair next to Mama Jamba, giving Sophia a pirate’s smile across the table. “Oh, this is going to be good.”

  Mahkah appeared equally amused as he took the seat next to Wilder.

  “Because I didn’t want to have my retinas burned out,” Sophia answered.

  Hiker sighed loudly and took his normal seat at the head of the table as Ainsley rushed from the kitchen carrying the tray of tea and cups.

  “Pancakes?” Mama Jamba asked expectantly as Ainsley bustled back to the kitchen.

  The housekeeper swung around, her face pinched. “What? You like pancakes? I had no idea. I’m not in here trying to make ten different dishes in half the time I normally do with none of the help I always have.”

  “Okay, then,” Mama Jamba sang good-naturedly, a napkin appearing in her hands that she set into her lap. “Then I’ll expect the pancakes next.”

  Ainsley threw her hands in the air as she burst back through into the kitchen with an annoyed sigh.

  “Will someone,” Hiker began, looking at Sophia, Evan, and Mama Jamba, “tell me what is going on?”

  Evan continued to pace. Mama Jamba hummed to herself and swayed slightly. Sophia realized the burden of explanation was going to fall on her.

  “Well, Quiet appears to be upset about the status of things around here,” she began. “Ainsley told him off for keeping the secret he was the Gullington, so he didn’t get her ready and let her oversleep—”

  “Me too,” Wilder cut in, stretching his arms into the air and yawning. “Best sleep I have had in ages.”

  Mahkah nodded, apparently having slept like a baby too.

  “Must be nice,” Sophia remarked, shaking her head.

  “You aren’t sleeping?” Hiker asked with concern.

  She shook her head. “No, not really. Been up since three this morning.”

  “Interesting,” Hiker said, combing his hands over his beard.

  “Not to me. Just annoying,” Sophia disagreed. “Anyway, Evan, who is really trying to test the strength of my cloak, had all of his clothes taken by the Castle for being nice to Quiet.”

  Evan paused his pacing. “You really think he doesn’t like me being nice to him?”

  Wilder pointed over his shoulder toward the entrance of the dining hall. “You could always try the novel approach of asking him yourself.”

  Standing squarely in the archway was Gullington Quiet McAfee, the groundskeeper for the Expanse, but more importantly, the all-encompassing and powerful source of the Dragon Elite’s home.

  The gnome was who kept the Barrier in place over the Gullington. He was the Cave where the dragons lived. He was Expanse all around them, and The Pond to the North and the Castle where the dragonriders rested. He was their home, and based on the expression on his face, he was pissed.

  Chapter Five

  “Quiet, what is the meaning of all this?” Hiker began, throwing his meaty arms wide. “You didn’t wake Ainsley up, took all Evans clothes, won’t let Sophia sleep, and I swear the three of us had a bloody awful time trying to rouse.” Hiker shook his head. “It took everything I had to get out of bed this morning when I realized the time.”

  “If you hadn’t thrown that bucket of water on me, I’d still be asleep, sir,” Wilder said, throwing his fingers through his chaotic dark hair, which Sophia realized was wet.

  “On the bright side, you’ve now had your weekly bath, so there you go,” Evan joked.

  Quiet didn’t appear obligated to offer an answer to the leader of the Dragon Elite as he strode into the dining hall and took a seat next to Sophia.

  Evan peeled back like he was afraid the tiny gnome would assault him. “Not that I’m complaining, great and noble Gullington. I was just wondering if you might know where all of my clothes are?”

  “Oh, keep your pants on, would you?” Wilder joked with a laugh. “Let our groundskeeper eat without being bothered with your constant nagging.”

  Quiet’s eyes skirted to the pile of pastries in front of them and sighed as if disappointed to find no one had touched them and left him with only scraps.

  “Haha,” Evan said without amusement. “I’d ask to borrow a pair of your pants, Wilder, but we all know yours would be much too small for me.”

  “I have got a sock you can shove in your—”

  “Enough,” Hiker boomed, interrupting Wilder. He leaned forward, rapping on the table in front of Quiet. “What is going on? Why are you acting in this peculiar way?”

  “I don’t think he’s acted in a peculiar way,” Sophia observed. “It’s only that we know it’s him now, whereas before we subscribed the behavior of the Castle to some unknown entity.”

  Hiker sat back. “Will no one else at this table speak unless your name is Quiet?”

  Ainsley hurried from the kitchen, a platter of pancakes in one hand and a plate of bacon and hash browns in the other. She narrowed her eyes once she spied Quiet. “There he is, the reason I’m working double-time this morning. I had to actually fry the breakfast foods myself, and S. Beaufont saw me with my hair an atrocious mess.”

  Hiker threw a contemptuous glare at the elf.

  “What?” Ainsley spat. “You said for no one at the table to speak, and I’m clearly not at the table.”

  Sophia was
highly amused that Ainsley hadn’t even been in the room when Hiker had made his declaration, but that was always the way with the housekeeper. She always chimed in on conversations she wasn’t even present for.

  Sliding the tall stack of pancakes in front of Mama Jamba, Ainsley stared daggers at Quiet, who had his stumpy hands in his lap and his cap pulled down low over his eyes, making his expression unreadable. “You didn’t get me ready this morning, Quiet.”

  “You stole all my clothes,” Evan declared angrily.

  “You nearly put me in a coma,” Hiker fired.

  All eyes at the table landed on Sophia, but she merely shook her head, unwilling to join in against the groundskeeper. Instead, she reached over and grabbed the biggest pastry on the top of the stack.

  “I don’t know about you all, but I’m starving,” she said, taking a large bite.

  The gnome’s eyes flickered up to meet hers, a strange expression in his gaze. He muttered something she couldn’t make out before reaching over and grabbing his own pastry from the stack.

  Ainsley threw her hands in the air as she backed for the kitchen. “Oh, that’s bloody great! We confront you for being a calloused jerk, and you lavish her with compliments for treating you like there’s nothing different about you. Very bloody well. Just see if I dust the cobwebs this century. I might not even scrub the floors properly anymore.”

  Hiker shook his head. “When have you ever scrubbed the floors properly?”

  Mama Jamba, who didn’t seem to have heard a word, licked her fingertips and smiled across the table at Hiker. “You should eat, son. You were asleep for nearly twelve hours.”

  “Yeah,” Hiker growled, piling hash browns onto his plate. “That’s what I was trying to get to the bottom of. I can’t go to sleep at night, not knowing when or if I’ll awake.”

  “Sir,” Evan said, still standing, “Since you are built like a real man, could I borrow a pair of trousers from you?”

  “No,” Hiker spat, picking up his fork and knife and going to work on his food, although his gaze was still on Quiet. The gnome had polished off his pastry and seemed to be studying the platter in front of him, deciding which one to go after next.

  “But sir,” Evan complained.

  Quiet reached for a large croissant, but Sophia cut him off, getting to it first and stealing it from him. Everyone at the table but Mama Jamba gasped at the risky move. Sophia had punished Evan for bullying Quiet like this when she’d first come to the Castle. He’d done it to Quiet to be mean. Sophia was doing it to test a theory.

  Right on cue, as she took a bite of the croissant, the gnome as old as the Dragon Elite and just as powerful, smiled up at her. She grinned back and winked at him.

  “I don’t know why you’re waking me up early or what secrets you want me to hear, but I’ll keep doing it,” she said in a whisper to him. She knew the others could hear her, their dragonrider senses making them privy to the quietest sounds. Sophia looked at them. “The rest of you, well, if you don’t want to oversleep or lose your panties…” She glanced back at Evan, “then stop tiptoeing around Quiet. He doesn’t like it, obviously.”

  Ainsley threw open the kitchen door and stomped over to the table, another tray of breakfast food in her hands. “I gave him a right piece of my mind, I did. I’m not sucking up or tiptoeing. Even so, that repugnant jerk is making my life hell, more so than usual.”

  “I wouldn’t say I have ever tiptoed a day in my life,” Hiker complained.

  Sophia nodded. “Then figure out what he’s been trying to tell you. Both of you.”

  Hiker seemed to consider this before he cut into his food, but his strength was too much for the ceramic plate and it broke, sending bits all over the table.

  “Damn, Hercules,” Evan said, shaking his head. “Maybe you need to lay off the Wheaties.”

  “And maybe you need to stop watching modern television with this one,” Hiker suggested, throwing his chin in Sophia’s direction.

  “She is right, though,” Mama Jamba agreed. “You all have to redefine your relationship with Quiet. He is in charge of the Gullington.”

  “He is the Gullington,” Mahkah corrected.

  Mama Jamba shrugged. “It’s semantics at this point, love. My point is, he has an important role to do. I gave it to him long ago. He is the perfect person for the job, and you might not always like how he carries it out. I dare say, most of the time, you’ll not even understand his methods, but I trust him implicitly. Figure out how to live under his roof, or you’ll suffer.”

  Evan pressed down Sophia’s cloak, suddenly uncomfortable. “Tell me about it. It’s quite drafty in here.”

  Hiker stood and glared at his broken plate and ruined food. “I’m going to be in my office. You all will join me there when you are done eating.” He narrowed his eyes at the gnome, who was polishing off a third pastry, seeming to ignore the conversation at the table. “Quiet, you might want to be treated the same, but that’s a mighty big hope for someone who has us all by the reins. It’s too lofty of a wish to ever consider we will treat you differently, knowing you are so powerful.”

  Mama Jamba giggled like she’d just remembered a joke.

  “What is so funny?” Hiker questioned.

  “Oh, nothing, son,” she said, wiping her mouth. “Just ironic the most powerful magician in the world would somehow think he wasn’t going to be treated differently now that rumors are circulating about his incredible strength.”

  Hiker’s mouth twitched with annoyance. “You are talking about me, aren’t you?”

  Mama Jamba elbowed Wilder. “He’s pretty obtuse, isn’t he?”

  Wilder shook his head. “I’d prefer not to weigh in on this, actually.”

  “I don’t see how anyone will know about my powers,” Hiker argued.

  “Yes, because there weren’t representatives from the House of Fourteen who witnessed your incredible display of power,” Mama Jamba told him.

  “Liv Beaufont?” Hiker questioned. “She won’t talk.”

  “No, she won’t want to make the Dragon Elite, the organization she’s been lobbying for, that her little sister is a part of and who has constantly met restrictions from, seem like it shouldn’t be threatened anymore,” Mama Jamba said, rising from the table.

  Hiker considered her for a moment. “Okay, well, fine. I need time to absorb all this. As I said, the rest of you are to come straight to my office after you finish breakfast. I have assignments to make.” He turned to face Sophia, his eyes briefly flicking to Quiet, who was gnawing on a piece of bacon. “I want a private word with you when you are done.”

  Sophia rose immediately, her eyes meeting Wilder’s. His usually playful expression dropped as worry sprang to his gaze. “Yes, sir,” Sophia answered. “I’ll follow you up now. I’m all done anyway.”

  Hiker nodded and marched from the dining hall. Sophia gave Wilder a tentative expression before following the most powerful magician in the world to his office, worried he knew her secret and was going to punish her for it.

  Chapter Six

  It wasn’t that Sophia was afraid of Hiker Wallace as much as she was…no if she was honest with herself, really honest, she was absolutely terrified of the Viking. He’d absorbed his twin brother’s powers when he killed him.

  It wasn’t like when Sophia absorbed her twin Jamison’s powers when he died at birth. That had made her more powerful as a magician for all of her life. Hiker had absorbed the powers of a five-hundred-year-old dragonrider.

  Thad Reinhart’s powers had always been legendary, and now Hiker possessed all of it, along with his own. It had been very difficult for Wilder to get Hiker to embrace his new strength. Now that he had, there seemed to be other issues unrelated to the initial concerns surrounding guilt and frustration.

  Controlling the power was incredibly difficult for Hiker, as Sophia had witnessed at the breakfast table. She knew all too well, large amounts of power could corrupt people or make them irrational, especially when they disc
overed news they didn’t like so much. Like two of his dragonriders were romantically involved, spending hours together regularly, not doing one of the three main activities Hiker encouraged, namely training, resting, and studying.

  Hiker was quiet as they strode through the Castle to his office. He didn’t say a word once they were inside the warm study, the fire making the only noise in the room as it crackled.

  Every one of the Vikings’ movements seemed deliberate as he strode over to the Elite Globe and ran his hands over it, making it rotate in the large, intricately decorated stand.

  “This globe can tell me a lot about my dragonriders,” Hiker began, his words carefully chosen. “For centuries, I have relied on it to tell me their locations and status or confirm their deaths. It’s never, ever wrong.”

  Sophia tensed and held in a breath as she considered her exit strategies.

  She could probably run faster than Hiker for a little bit. Maybe Quiet would take pity on her and help with her escape, throwing down things in Hiker’s path, slowing his progress and giving Sophia a chance to survive his deadly wrath.

  Sophia saw the different red dots on the Elite Globe when Hiker’s fingers paused over Scotland, where the whole of the dragonriders were located. Five riders and their dragons were all that remained in the world.

  He lifted his gaze, a sober expression in his eyes. “What I can’t understand is why it’s suddenly changed.”

  “It has?” Sophia asked, rising on her toes to get a better look at the Dragon Elite Globe.

  “Yes, but only for two dots,” he stated, a speculative glare in his blue eyes that seemed to cut through her.

  Sophia remembered something she read in her father’s journal before giving it over to Liv and Clark. The pages were full of Theodore Beaufont’s wisdom. Some of his thoughts were complex and profound, blowing Sophia’s mind, but most of his ideas were simple and peaceful. Like when her father had written simple words on one page that came to her now: