Shana Abe - Queen of Dragons

With her arms at her sides, the lace spilled past her fingers. The Earl of Chasen was larger than she; the breeches she'd pulled on were too big as well. She'd had to roll the waist over twice just to get them to stay up.

Maricara tipped her face to her shoulder and inhaled. She thought she might be able to smell him in the linen. She might even catch the scent of their coupling on her skin—though that was imagination. The sun addled her brain.

She was addled. It was the best explanation for this astonishing, scotch-warm feeling in her chest. The butterflies of before gathered and thickened into anticipation, into joy and light. When she concentrated on him it only intensified: his face, long brown lashes and crystal-green eyes; the smooth-muscled curve where his shoulder met his arm. The touch of his fingers, slow and soft, or firmer, more urgent. His dragon grin. His human smile.

She had her own secret smile; she kept it as she drew a cuff in to tickle beneath her nose, and took another deep breath.

A pair of children emerged from the break in the woods. One boy, one girl, both about ten years of age. Her skirts were beige and blue and rumpled. His collar and knees were smeared with mud. They were arguing about something, a stick and ball, the river that had taken the ball.Mari listened to them without moving.

She remembered a time when she had been that girl, and Sandu had been the one ever scolding her. These children were tow-haired, and their words were foreign, and the place was foreign too. But they were the progeny of her kind. As if they'd practiced it, at the precise same moment both of them glanced her way, found her framed in the window and in light, even from such a distance.

The girl lifted her hand in a wave. After a second, the boy did as well.

Mari raised her hand in return. She pressed her palm to the glass as the pair of them walked on, still arguing.

And there were more voices arguing. There was her name, her title. The words like a cold splash of water in her face: imprison her.

She cocked her head. She pushed away from the window and looked back quickly at the doors that led to the sitting room, that led to the hall. Both remained open.

Too much a risk.

Despite its size and maze of hallways, it wasn't hard to find her way down to the main level of the mansion, where all the men were. She felt them, of course, but they weren't even bothering to keep their voices low.

The soles of her feet felt very warm against the marble floor. Can we even trust her?

She walked by three footmen without pausing. A scullery maid hung back in a corner of a gallery, a mop in hand, her face downturned, still dipping a curtsy as Mari passed. No one looked directly at her. Like mice pinned between the paws of a cat, they were frozen, trepidation and an acrid tinge of fear shrouding them like a cloak.

After all, Kimber, we don't know who she really is.

This was an ominous, familiar dream: a giltwood mirror hung by the master stairs, her own reflection a brief moving shadow. She glanced over and there was the princess once more, pale and ghostly, cold and bright. Her hair was a rough black streamer down her back. Her eyes were dragon eyes, liquid silver. Glowing with radiant light, they dominated her face.

Where her loyalties lie.

She did not realize she had that Gift. No one had ever told her, and she had not known. It gave her the look again of a beast behind a mask. No wonder the little maid would not lift her head.

She is my wife.

No, my lord, she isn't. She isn't yet.

As Mari reached the portal of the room that held all the men, the conversation choked into silence. She breached the entrance, standing alone before them.

"Good afternoon," she said, and even her voice sounded different inside her head, smoother, darker, with a song of menace and despair lurking beneath her words.

She found Kimber in their midst at once, his face and body half-angled to hers; no doubt like the rest, he had felt her approach. In the next instant he completed his pivot, coming to her in a quick, easy stride. He took her hand in his own. She allowed him that, keeping her focus now on the other men in the room, their faces and closed, defensive postures. They were grouped en masse in a block of unvarnished light; when one turned his head to steal a glance at the man beside him, his wig let loose motes of flour, bright as snowfall in the sun.

Their square of tables was just behind them. It was littered with papers and empty cordial glasses. A scribe sat there staring at her, his quill pinched between his fingers, too gone to his thoughts even to rise to his feet.

"Your Grace," the earl said. "I apologize. I have a gown for you."

"No need." She freed her hand, smiled at the standing men and watched two of them rock back on their heels. "As you can see, I've made do."

"Maricara."

"Yes."

Kimber waited until she looked at him. With the daylight shining behind him he carried a nimbus, his face in shadow, even his eyes cast dark. He made a short motion toward the table. "Sit down."

"No," said one of the men, and broke from his pack. "Begging your pardon, Your Grace, but this is a private meeting of the Council of the Drakon. We permit only members to attend. Perhaps the princess would care to retire to the—to the chamber we've prepared especially for her."

"Not really," she said, still smiling. "Why? Do you imagine the princess cannot hear you from there?"

"Madame, I don't know what you—"

"Since you are discussing me, my loyalties, and my future, I believe I'd like to have a say. If there are accusations to be made, I'd enjoy the opportunity to respond. Or are you not so enlightened as that? In my land, even the lowest of serfs may lay claim to the right of defense."

The man who had tried to get her to leave spoke again, shaking his head. "This is not a trial."

"No," agreed Mari softly. "It sounded far more like a conviction."

Another man pushed through the others, stomach first, and this one she recognized. It was the squire from yesterday, Rufus, the one who had fled into the night.

"Who was that woman you were speaking with in the spa?"

Mari regarded him evenly; the earl remained a shadowed presence against her shoulder. "What woman?"

"The blonde one. The one you met after that bloke began yelling. In the pump room, before the doors."

He did not appear to be in jest. He stared at her with bushy gray brows and blue-sharp eyes, his hands holding hard to the lapels of his coat.

Maricara lifted a shoulder in dismissal. "There was no woman."

The squire shifted his gaze to Kimber. "You saw her, my lord."

"No," answered Kimber carefully. "I did not. As I mentioned before, I was busy dealing with the man and the hotel workers. I didn't see the princess escape the pump room."

"There was no woman," Mari said again, stronger. "Why would you fabricate such a thing?"

"Fabricate!" scoffed Sir Rufus. "Indeed! I know what I saw."

"And I do not."

"Blonde woman! Tall! Green frock! She wore amethysts. She had you by the arm." "I'm telling you all, that did not happen." "Then you, Missy, are a liar—if not worse."

She kept her expression serene. She kept her feet rooted to the ground, to the rug, the cut pile rough against her toes, as the dragon in her rose and rose.

A hand came to rest upon her shoulder. A voice spoke through the buzz of rage in her ears, low and sleek.

"Have a care, Booke. You're treading deep waters."

"Great God, man," burst out the squire. "Open your eyes! She's bewitched us all! You see a female who can Turn, you see a bride, but she's an outsider to us! She's a threat! Use her, yes! Wed her and bed her, aye, but have a dram of faith in our ways as well! We don't know her. She left that room with a stranger, I swear it, with a woman wrapped in odd music. I saw them both! And then together they were gone."

Mari was beginning to shake. She thought to conceal it; she hid her hands behind her back and the grip on her shoulder squeezed and tightened and shifted to her arm. But no one was looking at her anyway. Everyone was looking at the squire.

"First our scouts disappear, then she shows up, fills our heads with some nonsense about human hunters, works us up and then vanishes herself—it's all been a game with her. One of our gels is missing, and this creature is off cavorting with strangers. Look at her, my lord. Look. " From across the chamber Sir Rufus gestured to her with a flat, open palm. His voice went to gravel. "Does she look like anything we can trust?"

She stared back at them all, her spine straight, refusing to lower her gaze. One by one she held their eyes until at last her gaze moved to Kimber, to the earl, standing at her side.

But she could not read his face. He was golden and beautiful. He had stroked her bare body, had wooed her and kissed her lips and found his rapture inside her—but she could not read him.

His lashes lowered. His hand dropped from her arm.

Mari lost herself then. She lost the feeling of princess, of winter-cold beast. She felt her heart become lead in her chest, a solid dead-weight.

"There was no woman," she repeated one last time, straight to him.

The squire's cheeks grew very red. "Aye, and isn't this what we've feared all along? I told you, Chasen. I told you and your father. This is why we needed to get to them first, before they tried any trickery—"

"Booke," Kimber said.

"Why we needed to see this Zaharen castle for ourselves, to study the land and the people before we moved to occupy—"

The earl did not speak again. From the corner of her eye he only moved his hand, a quick downward slash of his fingers, but it cut the squire visibly short. "Occupy what?" Mari asked.

No one answered. Even Sir Rufus seemed to have recalled his wits, his mouth thinning into a narrow dour line.

"Occupy what?"

She looked up at Lord Chasen, who had shifted from her side—at the light that lifted colors from the rug to emphasize the shape of his chin, his cheekbones and brow; at his eyes now very visible, glacial pale.

He slid a step from her. With a sudden formality he offered her a bow, though it wasn't deep, and his hands remained at his sides. "Your Grace. Would you do me the honor of leaving this chamber? It is a closed meeting of the council, and we have much to discuss."

"Yes," she said thinly. "I see."

She did not rush, she did not tarry. In his shirt and breeches she only turned around and walked away, the rug beneath her feet giving way to buttery wood by the door.

So here is the scene you missed, you delis:

The Princess hurried toward her escape. The glass doors were already ajar, because the fat elder dragon-man had already pushed through them—roughly, mind you; he had broken a fine brass latch to do so—and so they stood cracked, with a nick of cleaner air from the garden beyond pushing wet into the odors of the pump room.

The Princess was swift. Her slippers barely touched the floor. She moved like a dancer in ethereal gray past the slow and startled Others; the surest way to follow her was by the jet beads fringing her gown. They shone in black winking tears, and clinked and rustled and sang out with her every step.

That was how the other female dragon found her, and was able to take her by the hand. With that one single touch their minds fell into harmony. Together they flitted past the glass doors and became seamless with the night.