by Zoe Chant
Royal Guard Tiger
by
Zoe Chant
Copyright Zoe Chant 2017
All Rights Reserved
Table of Contents
Chapter 1 - Tristan
Chapter 2 - Poppy
Chapter 3 - Tristan
Chapter 4 - Poppy
Chapter 5 - Poppy
Chapter 6 - Poppy
Chapter 7 - Tristan
Chapter 8 - Poppy
Chapter 9 - Tristan
Chapter 10 - Poppy
Chapter 11 - Tristan
Chapter 12 - Poppy
Chapter 13 - Tristan
Chapter 14 - Poppy
Chapter 15 - Tristan
Chapter 16 - Poppy
Epilogue
A note from Zoe Chant
More Paranormal Romance by Zoe Chant
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An excerpt from Royal Guard Lion
Chapter 1 - Tristan
Tristan had been a member of the Royal Guard for ten years. He had served on the king’s personal guard detail for most of that time. He had seen the king asleep and awake, in anger and joy, and in a grief that came dangerously close to madness.
Like every guardsman, he had come perilously close to failing in his duty to protect the king in the last several months. Princess Signy, newly come to the kingdom from America, where she had grown up unknowing her Valtyran heritage and royal status, had been the key to foiling the First Minister’s cowardly plot against the king. None of the guardsmen had seen it, or understood what they were seeing, until it was nearly too late.
Tristan was the only one summoned to an audience with the king after the official ceremony recognizing the new Crown Prince and Crown Princess.
All had come right, it seemed. The princess was betrothed, and her mate, Kai, was to rule the kingdom by her side when the king finally passed from the throne. The villains had been routed—the scheming First Minister, Otto, had fled with his nephew Nikolai, and the traitorous guardsman Peter was under lock and key. Tristan had been the one to secure him while Kai got Princess Signy to safety; the cut he had taken from Peter’s dragon claws no longer required a bandage, thought it had left scars across his cheek and the side of his throat.
By all rights, Tristan was a hero, nearly as much as the new Prince Kai. He should have nothing to fear of a private audience with the king he had served so long and so faithfully. Kai had been a friend of Tristan’s for years, and Princess Signy seemed to like him well enough. Only a few hours earlier, while he stood as a ceremonial guard over the luncheon celebrating Kai’s investiture as Crown Prince, she had cast him smiling looks.
Still, under the cool, expressionless mask he had cultivated long before he entered the Royal Guard, Tristan could not help fearing that some punishment was about to fall upon him.
Well, if it was, he would stand and take it. He was the king’s man, and had renounced all other ties to serve the king as a member of the Royal Guard. If the king saw fit to punish him—and surely, if he were to be rewarded, it would be a public affair—he would accept the will of the king.
Tristan was taken aback when he stepped through the door of the king’s private office and discovered that he was, in fact, far from being alone with the king. Not only were Princess Signy and Prince Kai in attendance, but also Princess Signy’s mother and stepfather—Mary and Frank Zlotsky, since Princess Mary had declined to retain the title she had from marrying Princess Signy’s father, Prince Alexander, who had died twenty-three years ago.
Tristan bowed, feeling a confusion that he knew his face and posture would not betray to those around him. “Your Majesty. Have I mistaken the time?”
“Not at all, Tristan,” the king assured him. “I thought it simplest to assemble everyone most closely concerned with the mission I am to assign you, at my granddaughter’s request.”
Tristan looked at Princess Signy, who was giving him the same smiling, thoughtful look he had seen on her face that morning. Tristan—along with Kai, who had been his brother guardsman until just days ago—had been sent out on a special mission by the king only a couple of weeks earlier. They had gone to America, to find Princess Signy and to guard her until her return to Valtyra.
Perhaps he was only to go and retrieve some things for Princess Signy? Or escort her parents somewhere? Though he had thought they intended to stay in Valtyra until the royal wedding, which was scheduled for just a few days from now.
“I serve according to Your Majesty’s pleasure,” Tristan assented quietly, with another small bow.
“It’s my little sister,” Princess Signy explained when Tristan had straightened up.
She glanced toward her mother and the stepfather who had raised her since she was a toddler, and clarified, “Half-sister, of course. Poppy Zlotsky is her full name—she just turned twenty-one a couple of weeks ago, and I haven’t seen her in nearly a year. She’s been backpacking, hitchhiking, just... wandering, I suppose. She let us know a few days ago that we might not be able to reach her for a while, and now we can’t find her or get in touch with her. She knows how to look out for herself, obviously, but...”
Princess Signy’s voice faltered away to nothing, and she looked over to Prince Kai, who gripped her hand firmly in his.
“Otto and Nikolai are obviously a danger,” Kai said briskly, as he would have spoken to Tristan when they were both still guardsmen, assessing some threat. “If they try to get hold of her for leverage, or mess with her head the way they did with Peter’s...”
Tristan allowed his face to show a faint wince, a tightening around his eyes and upper lip. He felt his new scars pull a little as he did.
Peter insisted—truthfully, as far as anyone could discern—that his treason had been well-intended. Otto and Nikolai had convinced Peter that it was Princess Signy who plotted against the king, and that she must be stopped by any means necessary, before she was able to consolidate her power. Peter had believed, when he saw Kai break ranks with the other guardsmen to dance with the princess, that she would soon use Kai to strike against the king, and so had attacked first.
Tristan could imagine what Otto might make of Princess Signy’s younger sister—she was obviously resourceful, to have made her way alone in the world for so long as a young woman. If Otto persuaded her that Signy had been kidnapped away to Valtyra, held prisoner under some wicked enthrallment, and only her sister could free her...
“I see,” Tristan said. “Of course.”
Kai nodded. “Hopefully he’ll have at least as much trouble finding her as we will. And he might overlook her entirely, since she’s...”
Kai looked apologetically toward Princess Signy and the Zlotskys before he finished, “Human.”
Princess Signy was human herself, of course, or she would not need a mate to rule the kingdom of shifters after her grandfather. Her father, Prince Alexander, had been a bear shifter like the king.
Many shifters thought that of humans as less than shifters—particularly those of a more conservative type, the Valtyra is for Valtyrans kind, who meant by it, Valtyra is for shifters. Never mind that even in the most ancient shifter families human children were born in practically every generation. Never mind that those humans were every bit as Valtyran as their brothers and sisters, or that there were certain ancient strains of magic, vital to the kingdom, that only humans could perform. Valtyra was ruled by shifters, and in the eyes of some shifters that would always mean that humans were something other, something less.
Tristan had been familiar all his life with that kind of thinking. He had rejected it along with his family’s name when he entered the Royal
Guard. He had had to, because even ten years ago, when Princess Signy had never set foot in Valtyra, it had been well known that the royal family included a human princess. She had been foreign-born and as good as lost to them, but nonetheless it was known that she would be protected by the Royal Guard if they ever found her.
Tristan nodded now to Kai. “A weakness we may benefit from, if our enemy underestimates Miss Zlotsky.”
Kai smiled, a bright, open expression that suited the lion prince, and nodded back. “Yes, indeed.”
“So we come to your mission,” the king put in.
Tristan focused on him, snapping to attention.
“You are to locate Miss Zlotsky by any ordinary or magical means that may serve. No expense is to be spared. If you must call on foreign assistance, you shall have my backing. If you require support from your brother guardsmen, requisition them as you need. You shall have command of any you select to bring into Miss Zlotsky’s guard detail. Though she is not royal in herself, yet she is family to the Crown Princess—much loved, and to be protected the same, by my order as king.”
Tristan bowed more deeply than he had yet. “As Your Majesty wills.”
He was already thinking of a dozen avenues of inquiry—he would have to get as thorough a history as Princess Signy and the Zlotskys could provide of Miss Zlotsky’s movements, and any particular friends or associates, any more distant family she might call upon or favorite places she might visit...
“And we’re pushing the wedding back a little,” Princess Signy added, snapping Tristan out of his thoughts.
Kai groaned—not real protest, but a show of frustration, as he sat there with his arm around his mate. Tristan knew very well that they were not in that much suspense for the wedding night. He had, briefly, shared a hotel suite with them in America, after they recognized each other as mates.
Very briefly. The lobby had been extremely well-patrolled that night, and Tristan had had plenty of time to reflect on a decade of nearly total celibacy. While guardsmen were not required to forego sex entirely, Tristan had never gotten the knack of taking it lightly. A serious relationship would mean the end of his service, and while Tristan supposed it was still possible that his mate might turn up somewhere, nothing less was worth it to him.
Nor, in honesty, did he expect that someone as reserved and remote as himself would be worth the trouble to anyone who did not recognize him as her mate. He did not have Kai’s bright, cheerful charm; he did not even stumble over himself and blush the way many of the younger guardsmen would, in the presence of an attractive woman. He was simply stone, as immovable as the mountains, and had been for a very long time. He wasn’t sure he would know how to be anything else even if he did meet his mate.
Still, watching his best friend’s bliss made him wonder what it would be like if he had the chance to try.
“I’d really like Poppy to be there,” Princess Signy went on, quite unaware of Tristan’s thoughts. “But Lady Teresa says if I put it back more than two weeks it will throw off the entire social calendar and she’ll make us wait until next year. So I understand if it’s not possible to find her in time, of course, but... you’ll try, won’t you?”
The princess gave him a dazzling, hopeful smile, and Tristan glanced from Kai to the king and thought that he might have been right the first time. He was being punished.
“I’ll do everything in my power, Your Highness,” he said, letting none of his trepidation show.
“And you can’t force her to come back,” Mrs. Zlotsky said, speaking up for the first time. “She won’t listen, you know, and she’ll hate it. You have to convince her to come—make her think it’s her own idea, if you can.”
“But don’t tell her everything,” Princess Signy added. “I mean—I’d like to explain some of it to her myself, you know? About Valtyra, and being a princess, and everything.”
“But you can’t lie to her,” Mrs. Zlotsky put in, and her husband and Princess Signy both nodded quick agreement to that.
Tristan nodded along with them. He was definitely being punished.
*~*~*
Tristan was briefly hopeful that magic would be of some help, at least in finding Miss Zlotsky, if not in persuading her to come back to Valtyra without lying to her or revealing too many secrets or being too forceful or too slow. But all the best practitioners, when summoned to the palace to make the attempt, could only determine that Miss Zlotsky was not anywhere in Valtyra, and probably not in Denmark.
A search conducted with the help of the nearest sea dragons to the coast, which required Tristan to stand ankle-deep in the surf as the moon rose, concluded that she was certainly not in or under the North Sea, and probably not in any closely connected waterway.
“Though you know how it is these days, with the iron boats,” the sea dragon woman said. She stood half a head taller than Tristan. Her brown skin, several shades darker than his, was perfectly smooth, but her vivid blue hair had faded to a silvery paleness. She might well remember when iron boats were a far rarer presence in these waters. “She might not be so very far away.”
Tristan accepted that half-hopeful pronouncement as the best he was likely to get. He reported to Princess Signy and her parents that night only the better part of what all the searchers had agreed upon: Poppy was alive, and likely not more than two or three thousand miles away at most, and probably not in very great danger at the moment.
“It’s easier to find them then,” a witch of the sparrowhawk clan had explained to him. “When they’re crying out to be found—especially when you’re searching through a family tie.”
The woman had gestured to the locks of hair and drops of blood Princess Signy and her parents had contributed.
Tristan couldn’t help thinking that his own family were the last people he would wish to be found by, if he had gotten into any kind of trouble in the last ten years. He would call out for help to his brother guardsmen, maybe, or simply do everything he could to survive, to keep control of himself and do his duty.
All he had wanted from his family, for a very long time before he left, was to escape them.
He had a hard time imagining that anyone would feel the same about Princess Signy and the Zlotskys—but then his own parents had not been cruel. Not as they understood it. They had simply thought that they knew Tristan better than he knew himself, and that they knew what was best for him.
If the Royal Guard had not been the most obvious way to escape—if he had not been a shifter, wary of the human world even though he knew his wariness was mostly an echo of his family’s prejudice—would he have done what Poppy Zlotsky did, and fled to wander the world? He had been just about the age she was now when he finally left his family for the Royal Guard.
Would he have learned to be different then? To show himself more, to loosen the tight control? Or would he have become only more rigid, alone in a world of strangers?
But those questions were irrelevant, surely. Whatever he might have become in similar circumstances, he had no special kinship with Poppy Zlotsky. He had merely been assigned to find her. There was no reason to think that he understood her better than her own family did.
That was going to make it difficult to locate her when they could not, never mind somehow persuading her to return to Valtyra when he knew himself to have all the charm and allure of a cliff face, but Tristan had his mission. He would find some way to complete it.
*~*~*
Tristan spent hours studying the photographs Poppy Zlotsky had taken over the last year—most of them on her public Instagram account, and others, carefully noted and placed in the correct sequence, that she had sent privately to her mother, father, or sister.
Poppy herself appeared in a fair number of the pictures; there were selfies taken at arm’s or stick’s length, and others, usually group shots, where Poppy must have handed over her camera to a friend or perhaps a stranger.
Seeing her cheerful, sweet smile again and again, Tristan had no trouble believing that
she would be able to charm anyone she met into doing her such a service. He was also more sure than ever that he and Poppy had nothing at all in common.
Tristan tried not to see her beauty as anything other than a useful piece of information about the woman he was seeking. She was petite like her mother, short and slim with hair of a brilliant copper color that caught the light in one picture after another. Her eyes were a curious mixed hazel color, looking sometimes gray, sometimes strikingly green. She had freckles sometimes, if she had been out in the sun a good deal, dappling her pale skin. Her arms and legs, frequently revealed by sleeveless shirts and rather scanty shorts, hinted at considerable strength in her small frame—as did the many references to hiking and climbing in various forbidding places.
It would indeed be a mistake to underestimate Poppy Zlotsky.
There were a variety of other people in Poppy’s photos, but only a handful who showed up more than once or twice, and Tristan couldn’t track down anything like full names or proper contact information for any of them. He mapped her route over the last year as best he could, but many of the locations were unspecified, and some of the ones that were conflicted with the itineraries Princess Signy and the Zlotskys had written out with their best guesses of Poppy’s location over the last year.
Tristan sat back in his chair and rubbed at his eyes, burning from staring intently at the fine details in one picture after another, scrolling through endless badly-punctuated comments on photos in search of clues about location or the identities of Poppy’s... friends? Acquaintances? Traveling companions?
He needed help with this. He had been told he could requisition any guardsmen he needed, but the Royal Guard was stretched thin already. They had more people to guard, with the new additions to the royal family, and fewer men to do it with thanks to the losses of Kai, Peter, and Nikolai from their ranks, as well as Tristan himself.
And that was to say nothing of the unpleasant suspicion that lingered around several of the guards. It was impossible to know who might have had a word dropped in his ear by the First Minister, or turned a blind eye to the way the king got sicker and sicker after the previous Crown Prince’s death. Could Tristan ask any of them to help him find Poppy, and be sure he wouldn’t feed the information directly to Otto instead?
