Queen of Dragons - Shana Abe

"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.

CHAPTER TWENTY

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.

This other dragon was no princess. But she was yellow-haired and fair and born in a mansion of clouds and light; let us call her a Lady.

The Lady also winked with stones, mostly amethysts that moaned a curious song about lakes and caverns, and geodes breaking apart into sparkles. About the Lady's neck was tied a velvet ribbon, and from it hung a pendant shaped as a heart. Embedded in the pendant were three shards of diamond, each one of them shining pale, evil blue.

The Princess looked at the Lady, and the Lady looked at the Princess. The rain fell upon them in hard silver pins, biting at their skin.

The diamonds lifted and joined to weave a chorus of blinding noise; it was all the Princess could hear, and all she could fathom, until the Lady said:

"Go, Maricara, and forget me."

And the Princess did.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

She had traveled across a continent without accompaniment. She had crossed the skies, and bathed in secluded tubs, and supped on cold meats and cheesecakes and slices of gingered pineapple, delicacies all purloined from the finest of houses. She had been alone, and not lonely.

But Mari had accompaniment now. Oh, they were not so bold as to follow her openly, not even the footmen who had dashed ahead to open the main doors before she reached them, or the gardener and his assistant who glanced up from their bed of mulch to watch her stride past, sweat-dripping faces beneath the brims of straw hats.

Not the three young kitchen maids, also in the garden, clipping herbs and whispering behind their hands. The gathering of boys behind them, holding baskets.

There were drakon everywhere in this shire. They trickled through the woods still, clouded the cobalt sky. They watched her without approach. They waited, she knew, for the order from their Alpha. That was all that held them back.

The air felt opaque. It felt so heavy and wet she could hardly force it into her lungs.

Mari angled toward the staggered break of trees that marked the forest closest to the manor. She crossed a bed of violets and pinks, crushing perfume beneath her heels. The shade of a chestnut dappled her shoulders and dazzled her vision, and the chestnut touched branches with an elm, and the elm took her into the real woods, and then she was inside them, and the air was cool on her face, and she could draw breath again.

She set her back against a rowan. A copper-winged butterfly zigzagged through the holly and bracken; she closed her eyes against the matted green leaves and summoned the cold.

Snowstorms. Winter.

Mountains and boars and white fields. Frost rimming windows; icicles frozen from eaves.

Zaharen Yce.

It had been raised in crystalline towers and wide, high terraces, a true sanctuary for dragons. Only later did it grow walls and an armory, transforming with deadly grace into a plain sound fortress. It could withstand cannons and cascades of flaming arrows. The portcullis was of iron. The oaken doors still held the indentations of a battering ram wielded four centuries past—the doors had not yielded. Time had proven again and again that humans could not breach the castle.

Dragons, however.. .oh, dragons could.

She brought her fists up to her eyes. She felt her lips pull back in a grimace of a smile and did not know if she should scream or weep.

An occupation. They planned to occupy her home—to invade it. They had planned it all along, perhaps for years. Perhaps from the very first. And the Zaharen—proud and cloistered and unwary—the Zaharen would fall because these dragons were stronger than her kin. By Gifts and wiles and smiling false diplomacy, they were stronger.

Damn them to hell.

And Kimber.Kimber.

The shaking that had taken her in the council's chamber stole up through her limbs once again, bleak and icy, colder even than that snow she remembered.

In her darkest musings she had imagined something like this. It explained their repeated requests for her location, to come to her or have her come to them. But she'd also thought that these English drakon would be more like her own folk, remnants of a once-mighty race, with pockets of power and a majority of thin-blooded people. Before coming here, Lia had been the only one of them Mari had ever known, and certainly Lia had been formidable, but no more formidable than Maricara herself.