Shana Abe - Queen of Dragons

"I won't be going anywhere near them. They'll be roasting in the heat on the ground. I'll be high above."

"And I'll be right beside you."

"That's really not necessary."

"Indulge me. Consider it a favor. Just think of all the ways you might demand repayment."

He said it with a perfectly temperate expression. There was no reason at all for her gaze to drop to his lips, to remember in a flush of warmth their languid touch and taste, to feel that wonderful, awful nervousness wash over her again.

"I promise you'll get the chance," the earl added, mild.

Mari felt her mouth go dry. "Another promise."

"Aye. And if I break it, well.. .perhaps you'll be merciful. A man is only so strong."

She'd heard of chameleons, odd little almost-dragons that changed their skin to match every new environment. In the plaster-and-gilt civilization of the Seaham resort Lord Kimber Langford did no less. In nearly the same short amount of time she had taken to drag a brush through her hair and slip into a robe—she was going to Turn, after all, no matter what he said—he had transformed into someone new: his jaw clean-shaven, his queue tied neat, his coat of pressed silk redolent with something both musky and pleasant, like myrrh. Even the seams to his stockings were straight. By all outward appearances he was a wealthy, entitled peer of the realm once again, shining with silver buttons and garters.

Only his eyes betrayed what dwelled inside him. Against the glamour of the chamber they glowed cool, phosphorous green.

It was a Gift, a rare one. And it didn't manifest in their human shape without animal provocation.

She faced him squarely. "You were going to fly anyway. I overheard you tell your brother."

His mouth quirked; he draped his coat across a side table. "Resourceful. But didn't your parents teach you that eavesdropping isn't very polite?"

"My parents had no hope of it, I hear everything." Mari shrugged. "I can't help it. And I also cannot help but wonder why you'd take such a risk, especially given your aversion to being sighted in daylight as a drakon in any form."

"It seems prudent to have a guard in the air for the journey."

"Rhys could do that. Or one of your men."

"Yes," he said. "But they're not me."

Mari walked to the wing chair by the cold, swept hearth, arranged the folds of her maroon satin robe carefully and took a seat, relaxing back as if she were in no hurry to travel anywhere. She leaned her head against the cushion. "You're planning to hunt the sanf yourself, aren't you?"

"Not right now."

"Good. Because they'll be anticipating that. They'll be waiting." "So I thought."

"If they figure out exactly who you are—"

"Maricara. Right now I'm trying to persuade you that the safest course of travel back to Chasen Manor is by coach, tucked nicely inside with my guard and my kin. That's all. Since I plainly haven't the slightest chance in hell of convincing you of that, I am simultaneously calculating the safest flight path home. A path that will lead us far from where we last sensed the hunters. I've no desire to greet them today. Certainly not with your neck on the line as well."

"Better to leave them behind here," she said, unconvinced. "Better to let them wonder and sweat."

"Yes." He moved away from her with a sudden, menacing grace, going to the window, tapping two fingers hard against the glass. He spoke in an undertone, the taps accentuating his words. "By all means, let them sweat."

"Return for them later, when you're better prepared. They won't give up so easily. They'll remain here at least a few more days. In fact, I'll come with you," she offered, when he did not speak. "We'll hunt them together."

"Two kings," he murmured—but didn't turn away from the window. His eyes reflected color off the glass, green against the bright blue sky.

"Yes."

"Smart kings let the peasants do the fighting for them," Kimber noted dryly.

"That rather works out, as I'm secretly a peasant."

"And I'm bloody George III. You've made your point, Your Grace."

She turned her cheek to the cool damask of the cushion. "Then we agree. Today we'll both go as smoke above the coaches. Two guards in the air, rather than one. Tomorrow.. .we'll be royal again."

The earl inclined his head, capitulation tempered by the sardonic curl of his lips. "Splendid. I cannot wait to hear my sisters' reaction to this."

"And your council's."

"Naturally, yes, the council. They'll welcome us home with banners and ballad singers." He glanced back at her; some of the dragon glow began to fade from his eyes. "You're deuced mulish, you know."

Mari crossed her left leg over her right, keeping the robe modestly draped across her lap. "I don't know what that word means. But I do know I'm doing exactly what you would, in my position."

"Pigheaded," he said.

"Precisely."

So they flew. Side by side, two gossamer-gray clouds that drifted high against the wind, and joined edges so often they began to seem melded into one.

At the wise and seasoned age of thirteen, Rhys had fallen in love for the first time.

Her name was Zoe. She was the daughter of the village seam-stress. She had exotic black eyes and hair of the smoothest, purest ivory, and even though he'd known her since they were infants—since they'd been wet-nursed and day-schooled together—he realized one spring day that he was truly, utterly in love.

She wanted nothing to do with him.

Rhys fancied himself not ill-favored. Even then, he was beginning to show signs of the man he would grow into, and finding maidens of the shire to adore him had never proved a challenge before, except, perhaps, when he was compared to his brother. But Zoe Lane was resistant to his every wile. If he brought her roses, she said she preferred wildflowers. If he brought her wildflowers, she said she preferred them left to grow in the downs.

If he brought her sugar, she wanted salt. If he offered to read her poetry—poetry!—she claimed she'd rather go swimming in the lake.

With the other boys.

He'd fretted and stewed all summer, boiling in a sweat of unfulfilled adolescent desires. He'd tried everything he could think of, being kind, being mean, leaving her be, following her about, and one late night he was seated outside her bedroom window, eating blackberries and sucking the juice from his fingers while he tried to figure his next move, when her face appeared by the curtains, a pale oval framed with even paler hair.

They stared at each other; she was still the most beautiful girl he'd ever known. His stomach got upset just looking at her.

"You're really not going to quit, are you?" She kept her voice low, because, he knew, her mother slept quite near.

"No," Rhys said.

She nodded, vanished, then came back. She beckoned to him and he'd trotted up to the sill just like an eager puppy.

"Stick this needle through your earlobe," she said coolly, holding it up between her thumb and forefinger. "All the way through. Then I'll believe you love me."

The consequences had been instant, and rather immense. He was already supposed to be confined to quarters from eight at night till eight in the morning; Zoe's mother had complained more than once about his behavior around her daughter, and he'd been forbidden by the marquess even to speak with her for a full month. But there was no hiding all that blood. It had flooded his clothing and risen up around him in waves, spreading its scent like the worst sort of alarm, and Rhys never knew if it had been luck or planning that his elder brother reached him in the grand hall of Chasen Manor just before his father did.

He remembered Kimber's face, how his eyes widened as he stepped around the stairway and caught sight of Rhys trying to slip in unnoticed. How he stopped at once, and then turned as Rhys did to see Christoff emerge from his study.

A line of little red dots followed him like a trail along the floor. Rhys stood in the study with one hand pinched to his ear, trying to catch the rest of it so the carpet wouldn't stain.

His father had studied him a long while without speaking, tall and nearly frightening in his severity, candlelight dancing hellish bright behind him. It had seemed long, anyway, damned long, and it was all Rhys could do not to fidget while his fingers dripped and his mind raced through excuses.

"There was this needle—" he began.

Christoff interrupted in a deadly soft voice. "I thought I made it incontestably clear you were to stay away from that girl."

And then Kimber took a breath.

"Please, sir," said his brother, standing behind him. "It was my fault." The marquess's gaze flicked to Kim.

"I dared him to pierce his ear," Kim lied, the golden child, the Alpha heir. "I didn't think he'd really do it."

Rhys snapped his mouth closed. He tried to look innocent. "May I inquire why?"

"I was bored," said Kim. "And I wanted to see how much it would hurt."

It hurt, as it turned out, a very great deal. But somehow not as much as seeing Kimber punished in Rhys's place, confined to his own quarters, meals of bread and water for three full days and a formal, written apology to his brother for his part in the wretched matter.

When Rhys had tried to sneak meat up to him, Kim had refused it.

"They'll smell it, you dolt," he said through the door.

When he'd asked, softly, why he had done what he did, Kim had answered only, "Because."

Because he was Kimber. Leader, protector at all costs. Because whenever Rhys had fallen—in love, to his knees, into the worst of plots and plans, even at school—Kim was there to help him back up.

Kimber was always there. Rhys tried to admire him for that.

From his vantage now atop the carriage rolling back toward home, he watched the princess flow as smoke across the sky. Her grace, her thrilling beauty, all that defined the best of their kind.and Kimber there, always there, just beside her.

He felt that familiar, unhappy clench in his stomach.

Despite the fact that the sun shone very bright, he found he could not look away.

Kim had sent a man ahead to alert the shire they were returning, to carry the news that there were enemies lurking nearby—only that. He hadn't informed his guard of the thin-blooded drakon, the sanf inimicus. He hadn't wanted a full-scale panic at Chasen before he was there to contain it.

Tensions had been festering all summer. Before that. Before Maricara had arrived, before Rue and Christoff had left. The tribe's perfect mask had developed its first fatal crack back with that letter from Lia, describing a castle and pebbles and dragons that lived free under the stars.

She, too, is fully one of our kind.

Nothing had been the same since. Nothing had been as safe, or as good. The heat and oppression of this summer had only intensified everyone's tempers. Spats flared more easily and were ended more often with fists. The village tavern was filled to over-flowing every night. Creatures designed for glorious flight and battle turned to gin and petty squabbling instead. The number of feuds Kim had had to settle in the past few years had been steadily escalating, most over field boundaries or imagined insults. A few over more serious crimes, like theft. Vandalism. Runners.

With every new disagreement, with every new drakon attempting to flee the shire, the old men of the council grew more entrenched behind their beards, hunkered deep into their soft, carved chairs. These were their ways, and that was that. They would not be modified, the tribe would fall into line, and there would be no debate about it. This is how it had always been done. This would be their gift to the future as well. The traditional laws had more than sufficed all these generations. They were the only solution. Loyalty to the tribe above all.