Chapter 13
The clothes Lochlen had left me were intimidating, and I held them up skeptically. There were fitted hose with a green tunic that came down to the knees and belted at the waist. I had never worn anything other than a dress, and slipping the form fitting hose and loose tunic on made me feel naked. And strangely . . . free.
A pair of knee-length, golden brown leather huntsman boots completed the outfit. They laced up the inner side around seven brass notches. They were surprisingly comfortable, and I danced from foot to foot before looking down at the discarded dirty dress at my feet. I didn’t know what to do with it so I just left it there.
“Do I meet the dragon king now?” I asked as I moved to the chamber’s entrance.
Kye and Lochlen stood on the opposite side of the room near the tunnel, and they turned to face me. Kye’s eyes remained impassive, his expression even, but Lochlen’s face broke into a smile. I glanced down at myself.
“It feels inappropriate,” I said, gesturing at the outfit.
Lochlen shook his head. “Humans,” he muttered.
Kye glanced away. “The rebels are not a modest lot.”
Kye’s words were reassuring, and I moved further into the room. Lochlen had tied his shoulder length brown hair behind his head, and Kye had changed shirts. The tunic he sported now was a darker green than the one he had worn before.
“Dragons call their king ‘His Grand Magnificence’ when addressing him. He is called a rex instead of a king, and you bow by falling to your knees and placing your forehead against the floor,” Kye instructed as Lochlen motioned for us to follow him. I gaped at them both.
“His Grand Magnificence? Really?” I asked.
Lochlen pulled us into the back of the chamber, and I ducked as it narrowed and then opened back up again.
“It’s no more ridiculous than calling your king ‘his royal majesty,’” Lochlen pointed out.
I suppose he had me there, but His Grand Magnificence?
Kye leaned in close. “You’ll understand when you see him,” he whispered.
I shuddered as the chamber grew cooler, darker. The orbs kept the room lit, but they couldn’t chase away the shadows. I smelled stagnant water now, and the cavern had become so large, I couldn’t see the top of the cave. There were impressive, and not so impressive, rock formations. Our footsteps were beginning to echo in the huge cavern.
I thought back on the narrow entrances we’d come through before and wondered at the vast difference between them and this massive chamber. I assumed any dragons wishing to enter the forest had to revert to a smaller shape beforehand, either human or animal.
And then I heard the roar. It shook the cave, and I stumbled backward. Kye’s arm went around my waist. I wanted to push him away, but the roaring continued, and my footing was not good.
“Like our own kingdom, dragons have a type of herald at arms, although dragons simply call them announcers. The call sounds fierce, but the roar is merely a herald announcing the dragons’ rex, their king. You can’t see him because the rex prefers no one precede him into a chamber,” Kye practically yelled into my ear.
I swallowed hard.
“I’m not afraid,” I yelled back even as I shuddered.
Kye’s chest shook behind me. The bellow masked all sound, but I was pretty sure he was laughing.
And then the roaring stopped.
What came next could not even compare to the carved figures I’d seen on the divan in the outer cavern. The beast that moved into the room made those figures look puny, unimpressive. This dragon was blue, a deep blue with red-tinged eyes and massive furled wings. The scales on his body were smooth, and they shone as if someone had recently polished them. A thick tail with hard ridges trailed behind him, and the horn just above his eyes was ivory and sharp.
I gawked, staring as his large eyes watched me, his oval pupils growing longer and thinner as he lowered his head. I was frozen. Smoke curled from his nose and mouth, and I was overwhelmed by the smell of sulfur.
“Drastona,” Kye prompted.
He was on the floor at my feet, and I carefully lowered myself next to him, falling into a kneeling position before touching my forehead to the damp cavern stone. It was a hard move for me looking away from something that terrified me so much. If I could see the beast, I could at least run if it looked like he was going to eat me. On the floor, I was doing nothing more than offering myself to the dragon. Maybe that was the point.
“Rise,” a deep, rumbling voice ordered.
I stood cautiously, Kye beside me. Lochlen had moved to stand next to his father.
The rex watched his son a moment before flicking him suddenly with a claw. Lochlen stumbled.
“You remain shifted in my company?” the rex asked. The dragon king sounded annoyed.
Lochlen righted himself, brushing off his human clothes before mumbling something that sounded suspiciously like an apology. And then he changed. There in front of us, Lochlen transformed. It was quick, so quick I’m not quite sure how it happened. One moment, he was a young man. I blinked, and the next he was a dragon almost as large as his father. The only difference was his coloring and his eyes. Lochlen was yellow, or maybe he was golden, with yellow-green eyes that shone in the dark. His horn was as white as his fathers, his scales as polished.
“Close your mouth, Drastona,” Kye whispered next to me.
I couldn’t take my eyes off of the gold dragon.
I exhaled. “Beautiful.”
The gold dragon’s head dipped, smoke curling upward.
“I really do prefer terrifying,” Lochlen’s voice rumbled.
I shook my head. Maybe he was frightening, but I’d seen Lochlen as a man. I’d seen his perpetual amused expression, his dry sense of humor, and I think it allowed me to see past the fear to the beauty I’d noted in the divan’s carvings. Confidence, majesty, and something more. Something bigger than I had a word for.
“This is the girl?” the rex’s deeper voice broke in, and I took an unconscious step backward.
The dragons’ rex I feared, and by the way he cocked his head, I think he liked having people afraid of him. Lochlen sat back, his posture almost lazy.
“The forest believes she is,” Lochlen answered.
The rex’s head lowered again, until his nostrils and eyes were directly in front of my face. The sulfuric smell was overwhelming, and I waited for him to breathe out, to burn me into a crisp with a simple breath.
“You look like her,” the rex said finally.
His words were enough to break his spell over me, and I glanced from the rex to his golden son.
My voice was strangled. “Her?” Kye cleared his throat from beside me, and I straightened. “Ummm, your grand magnificence,” I added meekly.
The blue dragon’s head lifted, swinging up before he sat back as lazily as his son.
“You can dispose of the formalities. You look like your mother,” he answered. “Soren.”
I stared. I’d only ever heard my mother’s name from Aigneis and once more from Lochlen when I’d first encountered him at the edge of the desert. Even my father had never said her name. I had always hoped it was because her memory was too painful for Garod, that my father had loved her so much even her name brought heartache.
“I never knew her.”
My words were sad even though there was no grief there. Aigneis had been everything I’d ever needed in a mother. I missed more not knowing the woman who had bore me, not knowing where I got the light spattering of freckles across my nose or the small heart-shaped birthmark on my ankle. But I couldn’t really miss her as a mother. I couldn’t miss what I had never known.
The rex watched me, his body still enough to be mistaken as a statue. Only the occasional wisps of smoke were evidence of life.
“A shame. She was an amazing woman, your mother. Quite a good friend of the dragons.”
This surprised me.
“Really?” I asked. “Of
the dragons?”
Lochlen moved forward, his mouth open to speak when the rex’s thick, scaly body suddenly slammed into his. Blue on gold. There was more smoke and rumbling as the rex and Lochlen quickly spoke to each other in a language I didn’t understand. A blast of fire shot forth, and I stumbled backward as Kye’s arm once again went around my waist before pulling me to the ground. The move put me on my back on the cavern floor, my breath knocked out of me, Kye’s chest was against mine, one of his arms still clutching my waist and the other braced against the stone. He had more muscle than I thought, his tunic’s open neck revealing a tanned V of bare flesh.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
I struggled beneath him.
“You’ve got to quit doing that,” I said.
Kye’s eyebrows knitted together.
“Quit doing what?”
My eyes locked with his. “Saving me.”
It was wrong, the look I gave him, but a look was better than saying words I may regret later. He’d thrown himself on top of me just now, and he’d helped me escape King Raemon’s men in the forest days before. But in doing so, he had sacrificed someone else’s life to save mine.
Kye’s face was too close. I could feel his breath against my cheeks, could see the white puckered scar at his temple, and a slight hump in his nose that suggested it’d once been broken. He had full lips, and his unshaven jaw was shadowed with new growth.
Kye studied my face a moment before turning his attention to the squabbling dragons, his weight shifting as he pushed himself up.
“Dragons are temperamental creatures,” he said, ignoring the tense moment that had passed between us. He gave me enough space to move, but not enough space to rise. “They argue frequently, and they often forget not all of us are fireproof.”
I followed Kye’s lead and ignored the tension, pushing my anger aside as I lifted myself up on one elbow. It brought me too close to him again, but my fascination with the beasts before us was enough to override my discomfort.
“You can understand them?” I asked.
I could feel the weight of Kye’s eyes on my face, but I didn’t look at him.
“I can. Their language is too complex for the human tongue. Speaking it is impossible, but understanding it comes with time,” he said.
The rex circled Lochlen as the golden dragon spat small spurts of fire at his father. The flames didn’t faze the dragon ruler. They seemed to infuriate him.
“What are they arguing about?” I asked.
“You.”
My startled gaze moved to Kye. “What? Why?”
“They disagree on how much you should know.”
His words made me freeze, my blood turning to ice.
“Shouldn’t that be my decision?” I asked.
One corner of Kye’s lips rose, the wry smirk obvious as he lifted a knee before resting an arm across it. “They are dragons.”
It seemed the only explanation he was going to give. The fighting had quieted, but I didn’t see who’d come out the victor.
“How do you know so much about them?” I asked Kye.
A reptilian nose came close to my head, steam brushing my neck. I squeaked as I crawled away, one hand rubbing the burn. The rex’s red eyes twinkled when I turned to look at him.
“The boy is a rider,” the dragon said.
That got my attention. A dragon rider? I’d read about those, but the scribes had assured me the stories were myths. The scrolls containing them had been written by a scribe with a wild imagination, they’d said, who had lost his license for spreading deception rather than truth. I’d asked Master Aedan why they’d kept the man’s work if it was lies. A look had passed through his old eyes, a sad look, and he’d answered with, “Written word should never be destroyed. There are facts in myths some men would rather pretend didn’t exist.”
Maybe that was the reason I still remembered the stories. Back during the days when Medeisians had acknowledged the dragons’ existence, we’d had an agreement with the creatures. Dragons were a quicker way to travel, more lethal in battle, and a powerful ally. It was rare for a dragon to accept a human rider, as they were independent and considered themselves a superior race. And yet, occasionally, even rarely, a dragon would accept a man or woman, and they would bond for life. For even though humans eventually died and dragons lived for hundreds of years, a dragon would only ever accept one rider.
I avoided Kye’s gaze, although his silence was heavy next to me.
“Riders are a myth,” I said.
The blue dragon said something in his strange tongue before swinging his head toward his golden son. Lochlen looked chastened but otherwise unharmed. There was no doubt his father had won their argument.
“I think it appropriate she bear the mark of the scribe,” the rex said.
If I had been an animal, I would have snarled. Instead, I leapt to my feet, my cheeks heated.
“No one should be branded.”
The blue dragon chuckled. “Ah, yes. On that we agree. My words meant no offense. They simply referred to your disbelief. Why is it you can accept dragons and not riders?”
I took a deep breath, the scabbed skin on my marked wrist breaking as I fisted my hand.
“The Archives speak of dragons. They speak of possible extinction, but they do not refute your existence. The riders are only legend.”
“And you only believe what you read?” the rex asked. “Do you think the talking trees and animals a hallucination then?”
My shoulders sagged, weariness I hadn’t let myself feel until now settling over me. The adrenaline was gone. My body ached, my calves and thighs were sore from walking, my arm and cheek was still raw, and my hair was a drying mass of tangles.
“No,” I said finally. “I-I believe in the forest. Magic isn’t something that can be written. My understanding them is magic.”
Well, then,“ the rex said, his eyes moving to Kye, “riders are magic. They are magic because we dragons rarely accept humans into our lives. Your race is fickle, your rulers many, and you are masters of betrayal.”
My eyes met his. The dragon rex had seemed fierce to begin with, frightening. But now he looked old, my close inspection of his face revealing scales that didn’t look as shiny as I’d first imagined them.
“Not all humans are cruel or deceiving,” I pointed out softly.
The rex snorted. “Tis your only saving grace.”
My eyes moved to Kye. He was standing now, his stance defensive, his legs apart, and his hands behind his back.
“A rider,” I said.
His dark green eyes met mine, and he nodded, his gaze going from mine to the rex and back again.
“Yes,” Kye answered, “like your mother.”
My eyes widened as my heart sank. It took me a moment to process his words. My mother. A rider.
My gaze swung to the rex.
“My mother was a dragon rider?”