“You do not leave without me. I have yet to repay my mother’s debt to you, and my own debt now.” He glances at the blood on my shoulder. “I should not have left your side, even when you were fighting the dragon.” He pulls a black stone blade from each of his sleeves and presses the flat of one blade to his forehead, and then holds it out to me. “Take it,” he urges.
I take the blade and look at him askance.
“That is yours until I have repaid my debts to you. Twin blades, yours and mine, to bind us until we have both achieved our goals.”
I press the flat of the blade to my forehead. “Thank you, Enzio.”
“All right,” Yerengul says. A wicked grin lights up his face, and he leads me to the table and pulls out a chair. “Just so you know, Sorrowlynn, you will be training with the fiercest, toughest, most disciplined people known in the history of the world. It isn’t going to be easy. It isn’t going to be fun. But I promise you, if you do everything I say, you and Enzio will be off looking for my brother before the first snow starts to fall.”
King Marrkul puts a bowl of steaming porridge in front of me. “Eat up,” he says with a grin, clapping me on the back. “First rule of being a warrior is you have to feed your weapon. Your body is your weapon. Everything else—sword, bow and arrows, staff, knife—is just an extension of your weapon. To be the strongest you can be, you have to eat.”
I dip the spoon into the porridge. When the bowl is empty, I say, “I am ready. Let’s get started.”
First and foremost, I have to thank you. Yes, I am writing this to you—the person who is at this very moment absorbing these words into his/her brain. Thank you. You read my book. You are the reason I write. You are the reason I didn’t give up after a rocky start as a writer, when nearly three hundred people told me I wasn’t good enough to succeed. But you are proof that I have succeeded. I love you, dear reader, even though the only way we know each other is through the bond of my words between our minds.
And then there is my family. Thank you, Jaime, my husband, for working all these years so I could stay home with the kids and write in my spare time. (Is there such a thing as spare time if you have five kids? I will let you know if I ever have time to find out.) Speaking of those five kids, thanks for listening to this story and loving Sorrowlynn and Golmarr.
Bonny Anderson, thanks for being my critiquing go-to girl, and thanks for loving this story. Speaking of go-to girls, Kristin Wester, I wish you were still here. I finally switched back to fantasy. This book would have been your favorite of all of my books—I miss you!
I must mention my literary agent, the incredibly smart, professional, stalwart, knowledgeable Marlene Stringer. Remember those nearly three hundred rejections mentioned earlier? She was the yes that changed everything. I am here because of that one simple, yet not-so-simple yes. Thank you, Marlene, for giving me that tiny three-letter word that changed my life.
Emily Easton, it is a pleasure and an honor to be working with you again. I write the best story I can, and you open it up and show me how much better it can be. I wish I could reach across the United States and throw my arms around you and give you a great big hug.
That goes for everyone at Crown who has put thought and energy and creativity and time into this book: Samantha Gentry, Phoebe Yeh, and the entire team at Random House Children’s Books. Thank you!
Last of all, with deepest humility, I thank God, my Heavenly Father. Everything I have, he has given to me.
BETHANY WIGGINS is the author of Stung, Cured, and Shifting. The Dragon’s Price came to life one night at dinner, while the Wiggins family was having their customary mythical beast conversation and Bethany’s son asked about the worth of a dragon’s scale. Bethany lives in the desert with her husband, five quirky kids, and four black cats. You can follow her on Instagram, and on Twitter at @wiggb, and visit her at bethanywiggins.com.
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Bethany Wiggins, The Dragon's Price
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