A Shade of Dragon 2 (3 page)

J
ust as I
had promised Michelle, the watchtowers, barely visible through the screen of driving snow, came into view. We trudged on through snow which hardened under our feet as the sun lowered into the horizon. This meant that somewhere nearby—

“Halt!” I called, throwing my hand out and catching Michelle on the shoulder. Having everything bleached into tones of white, gray, or blue made differentiation of the landscape very difficult. “It’s our moat.” Snow fluttered across the river of ice. I could only assume that the alligators were dead.

Naturally, the drawbridge was up. Not that it mattered now that the water and animals were frozen solid.

I extended my arm for Michelle to take. In those high-heeled boots, she would fall and hurt herself. Crossing the moat arm in arm with Michelle, I found my moccasins skated easily, and I remembered the carefree evening Penelope had all but forced me to have at Goose Pond. A wistful, bittersweet smile turned up one corner of my lip.

The gatehouse was deserted. There was no purpose to posting a man at its window, for the weather would certainly debilitate us. We were standing, but we could not fight. The snow stung our flesh and made us stiff and slow. By contrast, ice dragons thrived in frozen temperatures. It gave them vigor and stamina. They were doubtlessly certain that they would never again lose control of The Hearthlands—if they could maintain this witchcraft over the island.

If we could transform into fire dragons, the castle could have been retaken. But not only would we be dangerously conspicuous in our dragon forms in this environment, we could not bear to be nude. It would be crippling. For the first time in our lives, transforming into fire dragons would not help.

Each entry point along the gate was sealed with the criss-crossing bars which lowered from slats in the stone. I grimaced at the sight.

“If they’ve retaken the guard and locked even the exterior gates,” I murmured, “we have no hope of entry. They hold the keys.”

“Oh, please,” Michelle scoffed. “How complicated are your locks?”

She pulled a silver pin from the depths of her curls and marched to the nearest gate. I frowned after her. Was she about to—help someone? I decided not to get excited about it, just in case she used it as leverage for a favor later.

“I used to always pick the lock on my dad’s liquor cabinet, and it… Oh, this is primitive,” she muttered, glaring through its wide hole. “I’ve never seen a lock this big before.” She thrust her silver pin inside and fished around, face screwed to one side, then sighed. “Tumblers are frozen into place,” she informed us, rearing onto one leg and using the other to kick the lock with the spike of her heel. Its guts busted and sprayed, but the gate didn’t budge. “Well, dammit,” she muttered, settling with a pout.

“Not so fast,” I warned her, stepping forward and heaving at the gate. It reluctantly wheezed and crunched into the stone slats overhead, ice chips showering into my hair as it went. I turned back to Michelle and offered her a reassuring smile. “You did it. Thank you.”

Michelle shrugged. “I’m sure one of you was about to think of that.” She flounced past me and through the exterior gate as if we were back at the Emporium at Shoreside, returning unwanted Christmas robots, or whatever it was that the people of Earth purchased in droves during their holiday season.

I gazed after her in wonder, then lunged forward and gripped her arm. “By the mercy of the gods, woman,” I hissed, “keep to the wall!”

T
he town seemed completely deserted
. I cupped my hands around my eyes and peered through frosty windows. Inside were dark quarters, kitchens, libraries, offices, all void of life.

And the sun had set.

Shuddering, I relinquished my dream of reconnaissance today. Our time had been spent in travel, and as the temperatures plummeted further still, it was a matter of urgency to find shelter.

Einhen paused midstride. “Did anyone else hear that?”

In unison, we each went still.

Crunch. Crunch. Crunch. Crunch.

Someone was approaching in the snowy street.

I tried three doors and let myself in through the first to give way. Michelle, Einhen, and Khem followed in after me, and the door closed behind them.

Warped wooden floors. A long bar along one wall. Instruments dangling.

“Gordon’s Instruments,” Einhen informed us, nudging a storefront sign which had been dragged inside and left askew near the empty fireplace. “That sign would make excellent kindling.”

“Yes, yes,” I said. “Tonight—when it is too dark to see smoke against the sky—we will light a fire to get us through the coldest hours. But leave the sign to bar the door. There is other kindling we can use.”

“Woohoo!” Michelle sprang up from behind the bar along the far wall. Clasped in her hands was a bottle of dark drink, labeled with a skull.

“Shhh,” I hissed at her. Khem and I set to quickly hoisting the sign along the slats next to the door, where the lock would conventionally go.

“Does anyone want a drink?” Michelle set to work on the cork.

“Um… gods, yes, I’ll have some,” Khem said, smiling for the first time since this journey had begun. He ambled toward the bar while I glared out the window, searching for the source of the footfalls. It was getting too dark, however, and the layer of frost on the window made it impossible to see in or out.

Wandering toward the ashes of the fireplace, I supposed it was good. We would be vulnerable to, but also protected by, the lack of visibility. I filled the pit with the small store of kindling alongside the hearth. We would be safe throughout the night, save for a random raid. No. The fire people overwhelmed in numbers those of ice—at least, we had in years past—and even occupying the city, the ice dragons would be unable to fill every house. After preparing the fire, I would check the entire shop and determine any unsecured points, potential exits, or hidden entrances.

“I’ll have a drink as well,” Einhen muttered, lifting a hand and stepping forward. “And then let us build the fire.”

“It is already done,” I informed him, exhaling a spray of orange sparks into the pit. In a matter of seconds, a fire sprang up before me. “Now…” I stood and sighed, peering overhead, at all the dangling instruments. I plucked a lute from one panel of the wall. “I will be securing the perimeter, and then taking first shift at the window, if anyone needs me.”

A
t first
, I played the lute softly and gazed out at the street, while forcing the others to maintain silence. But, as the night deepened around us and none roamed the street, the reins were loosened, and I allowed the other three to carry on as if nothing was at stake. Even Einhen, carried away on the tide of drink, fell victim to fits of giggles and embarrassing revelations. Naturally, I’d never witnessed Michelle more in her element than while in the company of adoring, drunken men.

Meanwhile, I continued to play the lute, and I wondered where Penelope was. I had removed the magical mirror from my satchel just in case she might contact me, but it was a fool’s hope. The mirror rested against the bar, dark and void of all its former power, just like The Hearthlands. I wondered if my brother, Altair, was alive. I wondered if they were torturing my father, Erisard. Was everyone all right out there?

I was pulled from my own thoughts as the lute was slid from my hands. Michelle simpered down at me, the lute now dangling at her side. “Come sit with me. The other two are passed out, and I’m bored.”

“I’m not your entertainment for the evening.” I took the lute back from her before turning away. I wouldn’t engage in her pettiness.

“Theon.” Michelle looked down at her shoes. “I’m… lonely.”

I was being rude to her. It was not Michelle’s fault that the Oracle had prophesied what she had—that Michelle, not Nell, was my intended mate—nor that the Oracle had insisted I test my denial of her prophecy by bringing Michelle to my home country as a companion.

“And they told me how much the cold bothers you guys,” she added softly.

I grimaced. It was true. My bones were aching and creaking as if I were an ancient skeleton. “All right,” I muttered, standing. Michelle beamed and moved toward the fire, where Einhen and Khem were strewn together, asleep in the glow of the flames.

“Will you share a drink with me?” Michelle asked. I shook my head. She surprised me by accepting this rejection, and we took our places by the fire. “So, Theon,” she addressed me, curling her body toward mine. “Tell me something, will you? Because I just can’t figure it out. Why the hell did you bring me here?”

I’d been suspicious at her confession of loneliness, but now her candor confirmed it. She, too, was drunk. She just handled her liquor better than Einhen and Khem. I had already answered this question and told her that the oracle had forced me to bring her.

“Well, as I said before, Lady Ballinger,” I said, reaching forward and taking the dark bottle from her grip, “I was forced by a third party.”

Michelle’s eyebrows popped up into her hair. “Really? Who would ever care so much?”

I sighed.

“An agent of destiny, or so she claimed. However, I hold fast to doubt. Her name was Pythia—she lived in the caves—and she prophesied that the mate I had found and sworn to love was grasped blindly, and wrongly.”

“Reeeally.” Michelle settled back to survey me with an impish realization. “You’re talking about Nell, aren’t you? She said Nell was wrong for you.”

I grimaced and met her eyes. “She claimed that Penelope was not the universe’s selection of my mate.”

“So, as, like, punishment, you had to bring me?” For a moment, Michelle just scoffed. But then the expression lifted away from her face, and wonderment transformed her into a real beauty. “She said it was me,” she breathed. “She said I was the one you were meant to be with.”

“With whom I was meant to be,” I corrected.

Michelle’s grin widened, and she leaned into me. She had obviously had too much to drink. I lifted a hand to steady her, and was surprised when she took the hand and slid it against her waist, slinging one thigh over my lap and straddling me. I leaned away, but she hovered over me.

“Admit it,” she dared, running one hand over my chest and burying the other into the hair at the nape of my neck. Her eyes met mine, glowing with the light of the fire. “You feel it too.” She leaned so close to me that her lips brushed mine when she spoke again. “I make you… hot.”

N
ight had fallen
outside of the castle. I remained sequestered in my royal chambers, but Lethe did not abandon me again. As we’d spoken, I had flipped open A History of War, and strangely, this time he did not try to stop me from reading it in his presence. Since then, I’d been letting my eyes trail over the splashes of calligraphy, plucking snippets of information from each page.

The last third of the book was devoted solely to Emperor Bram.

“My grandfather,” Lethe had told me, when I’d recognized the name. Where I might have expected his voice to be swollen with pride, it was deflated.

“He was… decapitated, wasn’t he?” I ventured, wary of stepping too far onto sacred ground.

But Lethe nodded tiredly, as if this was a story he had been hearing for his entire life. “Yes, when he was my age. He led a massive rebellion of our people, who had been subjugated by the fire dragons for too long, and it almost ended in the capitulation of the Aena dynasty… but we were weakened by the elements, and Grandfather Bram was taken from within these castle walls. My father was only a baby then. Grandfather Bram was assassinated publicly, on the gallows, and my father was spared for his innocence in the matter.” Lethe’s lip quirked. “Though I am sure the soft-bellied fire dragons regret that decision now.”

“You talk like you never show a person kindness.” I flipped another brittle page in the book. I had read into the final chapters, where Lethe’s childhood was supposedly mentioned. “But you rescued me from those guards, and you didn’t have to.” I glanced over at him, the curtain of my hair between us. “And you brought me soup, but you didn’t have to. You—”

“I threw you into the fireplace,” Lethe reminded me nastily.

I dropped my eyes, and a blush burned my cheeks. “Yes. You did do that.”

To avoid his gaze, suddenly hot with anger for some reason, I scanned the words splayed before me—and there caught his name, ensnared in a long paragraph: Lethe Eraeus, grandson of Emperor Bram, who had ruled for approximately three weeks. Bram had been ruthless, from what I had seen. One picture portrayed a slaughterhouse—filled with young women.

I shuddered.

Lethe Eraeus was once hailed by the ice dragons as the destined leader of their people. However, since the brief victory over the fire dragons of The Hearthlands, their numbers had continued to dwindle. A strict regimen of malnourishment, abuse, and training had all but killed the most recent generation to be born into the ruins of ice dragon society. It is with seeming pride that the disgraced Eraeus lineage boasts Lethe as the foremost recipient of this brutal treatment, as the prince of their plot.

My eyes tipped to Lethe. I’d thought my childhood had been difficult—watching my parents’ marriage fall apart, listening to their accusations and counters bleeding through my bedroom wall—but I had never been abused. I couldn’t even imagine hunger. Even on the occasions that they forgot to prepare my lunch, there was plenty of food in the kitchen. I’d quickly learned to prepare my own sandwiches and drinks.

Lethe’s eyes shifted toward me and he froze. “What?” he asked.

My own gaze darted back to the pages of the book to evade his.

“Nothing,” I lied.

I glanced back at Lethe to see that now he, too, was scrutinizing the book in my lap.

“I told you not to read that while I was here!” Lethe sprang up and grabbed the book off of my lap and clung to it.

“Lethe.” I reached a hand out and he flinched from it, glaring at it. I wondered if anyone had ever touched him with gentleness. “Lethe—you don’t need to be ashamed. I’m not going to judge you. I’m your friend.”

“Ice dragons don’t have friends.” Lethe still clutched the tome to his chest. “We have accomplices, and nemeses, and patsies, and henchmen, and on occasion—rare occasion—lovers. But never friends.”

“Well, I’m not an ice dragon. I’m a human being. And we do have friends.”

Lethe just continued to stare, his frosty blue eyes flashing at me.

I took a tentative step forward and touched the book at his chest. His nose curled, a warning.

“It doesn’t matter to me what’s written here,” I promised him, trying to make eye contact. That icy armor that kept the world at bay was still between us. “When I was a small child, my parents forgot about me all the time. I made my own breakfasts, lunches, and dinners. My mother became embroiled in the pursuit of catching my father in an affair—and after three years of fighting, and silence, and rifling through his pockets when he got home at night… she finally got what she wanted, and they separated, with me caught in the middle. Limbo.”

Lethe nodded. “I know that pain. The ice dragons are a notoriously unfaithful people. My mother…” His eyes closed momentarily. “She’s gone now. She was murdered during a brutal season on the Obran peninsula—during which we all suffered the ill effects of cabin fever. But… during her life… she sought constantly to root out the women with whom my father had his dalliances. And she was quite successful. She ordered the executions of at least a dozen different women, and I was only a boy at the time.”

I grimaced.

“So you see?” I reassured him, letting my fingers creep to the outer edges of the book and grasping it, gently prying it away from his grip. “There’s nothing shameful or weak in having a difficult childhood. It only means that you’re stronger now because of it.” Lethe’s grip on the book loosened, and he allowed it to be returned to my grasp.

“Do you really think that?” Lethe asked. His eyes seemed to increasingly open into deeper and darker shades of blue, as if something inside of him was melting.

“That children shouldn’t be ashamed of what their parents have done to them? Absolutely.”

“No.” Lethe took a step closer to me, and I turned my face upward to gaze at his. “That I am strong.”

I frowned, not truly understanding the importance of validating him in that respect. But then, the ice dragons had a very different culture from the human society in which I had been raised. “Well, of course. Of course you’re strong—”

One of his icy hands wove into my hair and roughly pulled me close. I dropped the book, and it thunked to the floor between us. Lethe advanced forward, descending on me, stomping over the book and closer to the fireplace. The stones of the hearth pressed into my shoulder blades—I’d run out of places to go—and Lethe’s cold lips pressed hungrily onto mine. My mouth opened in a gasp, but that only sufficed to allow entrance to his wintry tongue.

Unlike Theon, Lethe moved forward at a breakneck speed. One of his hands tangled deeper into my hair, and the other bunched at the lacework of my dress, pulling it open for his hands to explore my body.

I moved my head in the slightest, as he was locking me into place with his clutching fingers, and dragged in a shuddering breath.

“Lethe,” I began, uncertain of how to gently reject an emotionally fragile kidnapper who seemed to have developed Lima syndrome: the exact opposite of Stockholm syndrome.

I planted my hand on his chest to give myself more space still, but then I felt the hard shard of crystal—the pendant—against his sternum. Of course!

Lethe eagerly and totally misinterpreted my touch, hurrying to remove his tunic from his chest. I might have pleaded with him to stop and explained myself, but Lethe removing his shirt while distracted by our kisses was the exact thing that I needed in order to claim the lost shard of the magical mirror.

So I slid my fingers into his hair and allowed my tongue to enter the fray between us.

Lethe stripped the tunic from his shoulders and let it puddle on the floor. His now bared arms came up to lock around me, and he murmured satisfaction, burying his hands in my singed dress and hoisting me into the air, pinning me between the fireplace wall and his frigid yet sweating body.

He moved much faster than Theon ever had; I could only assume he was significantly more experienced, or more desperate, in the bedroom. His mouth migrated from mine, trailing deep, wet kisses along the curvature of my throat, where he fastened with a pleasant suction. For a fleeting second, I forgot what I was doing.

Shoot! The pendant necklace had become tangled around my fingers. My eyes bulged open again and I moved to unclasp the delicate silver latch at the nape of his neck. He was hard-pressed to notice how my eyes were open and my fingers were committing espionage. In fact, his hands were dangerously close to breaching the second base.

But I was so close to getting the necklace, and he was hardly paying any mind to the world around us. Lethe was wound around me like an attention-starved vampire.

Just as the pendant’s chain unsnapped and disappeared into the bundled gathers of my skirt, Lethe’s fingers tore through the loosened laces of my dress and I yelped with surprise.

“Um, Lethe—!”

At this, he yanked his face from where it was buried in my throat; two bright spots of blush stood out on his cheeks, and the roots of his hair shimmered with beads of sweat. “What?” I felt suddenly cold. For me, this had been staged—but what about for him? “What’s the matter?”

“I just feel as if we’re moving awfully fast. On Earth, we usually—well—” It was a total lie that people on Earth waited. But he wouldn’t know that. “On Earth, we have to wait—until marriage,” I lied, rather smug with the deception. After all, he had no way of knowing whether or not I subscribed to the increasingly archaic practice of chastity.

Lethe lowered me back to the ground, petticoats still bunched between us at the waist. His chest was surprisingly toned for a man who, at first glance, was so much narrower than Theon. His musculature was deceptive. “I see.” His eyes, still so deep and dark, like the waters of a warm lake, were beginning to form their ice crystals again. All he needed was an instant of doubt, a breath of space between himself and his desires, and he would wall up. “But my father would never allow for the marriage of an ice dragon to a human female—particularly the marriage of the ice prince himself.”

I made a show of disappointment for him, and clutched my petticoats close as I stepped away. The pendant was caught somewhere in their gathers, and it would not do to let the pendant clatter to the ground right in front of Lethe.

“Then, Lethe, since there can be no future together, I guess we should stop.”

Lethe cleared his throat and nodded, scooping the tunic back into his hands and shrugging it on over his head. For a moment, with my petticoats clutched against my thighs and my hair all crazy and his own complexion stark with sweat, we stared at each other like the survivors of some catastrophe.

“I will have a word with my father,” Lethe informed me, his tone suddenly cold, and then he strode from the chambers. The door clapped shut behind him, and this time, I didn’t hear the turn of any key in any lock.

He had left me alone—alone, to shake out the layers of my dress and search the floor for the shard of Theon’s fallen crystal.