Book 6: Chapter 8
Wrangling enough free time to go have a talk with ornery dragons wasn’t difficult, but it was tedious. There’s always something to do in running a government and after returning home from an important trip to find things going sideways that was more true for Kay than ever. Everyone wanted a meeting with him to update him on progress, get his thoughts on what they should be doing, or just schmooze. The schmoozers were moved as far down on the list of priorities as possible, but the people who needed to make reports or ask for direction had varying levels of importance and meetings needed to be arranged correctly. That was where having competent subordinates made his life easier. Amanda was especially skilled in prioritizing what needed to be dealt with first and after the first few meetings with some of his Ministers and chunks of the representatives from Avalon’s Parliament were over Kay had a stretch of time set out to speak with Murunel and her family.
No one really knew where Murunel was from, all she’d said about it was that she was from “the west”, which wasn’t helpful for figuring out customs, means of address, and what kind of refreshments to lay out for visiting dragons and their spouses. Murunel had never made a point of mentioning anything as being especially desired or despised, so Kay eventually overrode everyone and had a normal spread of drinks and foods laid out. He wasn’t all that concerned with Murunel’s relatives being happy with their reception or not. They’d shown up as part of an invading army and whether their objectives were much more positive than any of the rest of the army’s that was still a big black mark on their record.
The three of them came in as a group, with Murunel in the lead. She gave him a big smile as she walked through the door and looked like she was going to come around and give him a hug before pausing. She turned her head slightly to glare at the man walking behind her, and quite obviously debated if giving Kay a hug was worth dealing with her relative being annoying. She eventually decided it was and walked past the chairs set out for visitors. Kay pushed himself up to return the hug.
“It’s great to see you.”
“You too. Thanks for holding things together while I was gone.”
“I didn’t do too much,” She glared over her shoulder again, “I was too busy keeping hold of this idiot to put too much work in. Amanda and Cindy did a vast majority of the heavy lifting.”
“Well you did a good job too, even if they were carrying the brunt of it.” Kay gave her a look that was meant to convey that keeping an angry dragon from running around taking that anger out on nearby bystanders was an important and valuable job too. He thought she got it based on the small smile and eye roll she gave him back.
“I appreciate you appreciating me.”
“Well of course-“