The Princess' Dragon Lord (9 page)

“You cannot even look at me while you say
it!”

She pulled her arm away and glared at him,
using the pounding in her skull to add to the anger that was no
doubt showing on her face.

It had the right effect. She'd often heard
how fierce she appeared when angry, especially with the scar
twisting her features into an even more frightening visage whenever
she sneered at someone.

It was good for keeping her students in line,
and it was working on Azoth now as well.

He jerked back, but didn't get up off the bed
where he sat next to her and move away. “I'm looking at you now,
and I'm telling you that, that is a load of self agonizing
bullshit. Stop wailing over something that happened a thousand of
years ago. You're supposed to be a dragon warrior.”

Azoth jumped up and away from the bed,
snarling back down at her. “You...you heartless fae wench! I
murdered you on our wedding day! Nearly your entire family! There
is nothing I can do to make amends, and you say such foul words
over my grief?”

“Because it wasn't your fault!” She shrieked,
then winced.

Ouch. That had been a mistake, but it was
totally worth it.

He blanched. “Not my fault? Of course it was
my fault. The blame is entirely mine as it was my actions that
brought about this mess.”

“You don't even remember what happened.” she
said miserably, and by the visions she was getting, the things she
was learning, she was willing to bet that Dagda was involved as
well. She wasn't so sure about Nyx's place in this mystery any
longer, but she wasn't quite yet ready to give him up as a
suspect.

She told Azoth everything she'd seen in her
latest vision.

“Still nothing of the day of our marriage?”
He asked, his voice much smaller.

She shook her head. “No, just what happened
before.”

Azoth shook his head. He reached his hand out
and gently pushed her down onto the mattress, tucking her back
in.

“You defend me now. It will not be the same
once your full memory returns.”

“If you can't remember it why are you so
sure?”

His jaw went tight. “I was told of the things
I did, of the hurtful words I spoke, after the event happened, when
I was in a proper mind to hear them.”

“Before or after they whipped your back?” she
asked. Diana wasn't about to fool herself about where all of his
scars had come from.

He waved off the subject. “No more than I
deserve. Quite lenient, considering I murdered a fae princess and
most of her royal kin.”

She believed him when he said it. Most
likely, it was being separated from his dragon half that had been
seen as the true punishment.

Whipped, torn into pieces, and then thrown
into this prison to be forgotten. Not to mention the way he was
eating himself up over it. It made her sad.

Not for the first time, she wished she didn't
have such a horrible scar running down her face, but for the first
time, she wished it away because it was hurting the feelings of
someone else, and not her own vanity.

Azoth stood straight, and Diana stiffened as
he turned to go.

“Wait,”

“Yes, princess?” Again, he was at the doorway
to his carved out room, looking back at her.

She sat up again, slowly to keep the
dizziness at a tolerable level, and held out her arms to him.

His hands became fists, and his lips thinned
at her invitation.

He took it. He came to her and joined her in
bed, unable to resist the thought of allowing Diana to comfort
him.

Although her head still throbbed and body
ached from the times they'd already been together, he was as gentle
with her as though she was made of a thin sort of glass. As the
pleasure slowly overcame her pains, she wondered how he could ever
think himself capable of purposely hurting a fly, let alone the
woman he loved.

Chapter Nine

“You said I needed to forgive you for you to
be able to leave here,” Diana said the next morning. She was
assuming it was morning, really. The domed cave separated her from
the sky, so she couldn't tell, but they'd just left bed after a
nice nap, and were currently eating the bits of fresh fruit and
bread Azoth had provided for them on his bed.

It seemed like a breakfasty sort of meal, so
she was going to call this time morning.

Azoth nodded. “Any of your relatives, or Mab
herself would do, assuming any survived the war. It was what my
father had offered in order to calm the enraged queen without
sentencing his son to death. I would be imprisoned, and my freedom
then rested in the hands of your kin. I assume this stipulation
includes you, as a member of Mab's living children.”

Diana picked at the green bit of dragon fruit
(what else?) that grew out of the pink oval with her thumb nail.
“Guess they weren't in a hurry to let bygones be bygones.”

He looked at her strangely. “If you mean to
forgive me, no, they were not.”

It bothered her how Azoth didn't sound the
least bit bitter over that part. He'd been here for a thousand
years, yet he spoke about her former family's unwillingness to see
the truth as a mere matter of fact. Something to be stated without
really getting emotional over.

There was no way in hell Azoth, that formerly
shy young man, bitter over his circumstances while still falling in
love with his new fiancée, could have purposely done the things he
said he did.

“What happened in the fae court, after I
left?” Diana said.

Azoth had already peeled away a long strip of
the pink fruit with a long dagger. The rest of the skin came off
easily after that, as if the spotted white insides were shrugging
off a jacket. It looked kind of like cookies and cream ice cream.
He dumped the fruit into a small wooden bowl and licked his
fingers.

“I know only what I have been told, but your
servant, Nyx, was implicated in your death. He was found guilty of
adding a potion to my chalice. I know not what that potion was to
this day, but it was what blinded me with rage until I
transformed,”

He didn't go on.

He saw her still picking at her fruit, and
took the softly spiked pink oval out of her hands, and in a smooth
motion, cut it in half for her and gave her both pieces.

“Thanks,” she said, looking down at the
fruit.

Azoth handed her the rough metal spoon he'd
been using and nodded.

She thumbed the utensil, still not eating.
“Do you know what happened to him?”

Azoth looked at her sharply, then back down
at the fruit he ate with his fingers. “I know not, but if I was
flogged and imprisoned while being a lord and a king's son, I can
only imagine what would have befallen a servant.”

Images of Azoth's ugly scars came to the
forefront of Diana's mind, and her spirit sank. No doubt Nyx would
have been killed, but it wouldn't have been an execution by lethal
injection. They would have tortured him first, made him want to
die, then killed him.

“Does this upset you?” Azoth asked.

She just kept on staring down at her white
and black speckled fruit, thinking about Nyx and his face when he
proposed to her, and then when she denied him.

She looked back up at Azoth finally. He had a
faraway look to his sad eyes, as though he were in deep
thought.

“I'm not sad for him because I'm in love with
him,” she assured him. “It's just...we were friends, you know? And
I'm still not even positive he had anything to do with what
happened.”

Azoth raised a brow at her, then cleared his
throat and shifted closer.

It made her nervous. His body language as a
whole spoke volumes. He'd learned something just now, and it wasn't
going to be pretty to hear.

Azoth gingerly touched her arm. “Diana,
sakkra
, he confessed to the crime.”

She sucked in a sharp breath. “Are you
sure?”

He nodded. “When the fae who has had me
drugged, using my body as a vessel to destroy all I hold dear, has
been captured and confessed, one of my brothers made sure to
deliver the news to me. It was then that my family began to
petition to Mab to allow my release from this place, seeing as the
true culprit had been seen to.”

“And when she said no, the dragons went to
war?”

He nodded. “As far as I understand, yes,
though I do not know who was the first to draw a blade. I never saw
any of my brothers, or my father, after the day I was informed of
the servant's confession.”

Because they'd all fought and died, leaving
Azoth alone in this place, his only company the dragon, equally in
pain and equally a prisoner.

Diana cleared her throat of the swelling that
had begun to build up.

“Do you need water?”

She shook her head. “No, I'm okay. Weren't
you shouting at Nyx?” She added.

He cocked his head at her.

“I heard you yelling at him. I think it was
the first time I had a seizure. You were pacing around, screaming
and calling him names.”

Recollection dawned in his rust colored eyes,
and he nodded. “I was speaking to his ghost.”

“
Ghost
?”

“Of course. How else would I be cursing a
dead man?”

“Well, doesn't
that
make a whole lot
of sense.” she said dryly, digging her spoon into the soft, strange
looking fruit and taking a bite.

It had the texture of kiwi and was
deliciously sweet. Strange considering the spiky outside.

She couldn't help but look at Azoth with that
thought.

He was ignoring his own fruit and staring at
her. “Do you not have ghosts in the place where you have lived all
this time?”

“Well, yes, but no one actually talks to
them.”

“Mortals do not speak to their dead?
Ever?”

Diana squirmed, suddenly recalling the many
times when she had spoken, inwardly, or out loud, to her dead
parents, asking for guidance, or even just thinking back on
pleasant memories.

It saddened her to know that most everything
she recalled in this life she'd been living, likely never happened
at all. Who were these people in her memories? Were they made up?
Part of the spell? What could she count on as being real?

She looked back up at Azoth as he took a bite
out of his fruit. Her husband. That was real. She smiled a
little.

“I guess we do, sometimes,” she added. “But
no one really expects them to answer back.”

“In our world, sometimes they do. A ghost has
many powers, sometimes more than they had in life. It's not wise to
cross one.”

“Or curse at one?” Diana asked with a catty
smile.

Azoth suddenly found something interesting in
his dragon fruit to stare at. “A singular incident.”

She laughed, then quickly grew serious. “I
don't think he had anything to do with...with what happened that
day.”

“You said it was his voice—”

“I know, I know, but he was always telling me
to run. And he was telling me to run right before the trees came to
life and started to chase me.” she said. “If he wanted to kill me,
why would he do that?”

It was a fair question to ask, regardless of
whether or not Nyx ever confessed to anything, and Azoth knew it.
Hell, if someone tortured Diana enough, she'd swear up and down
that she was from Mars if that was what her captors wanted.

“I know not. He could still find a better
method of returning your memories, if that is what he is indeed
doing, instead of inflicting tortures upon you.”

“Maybe he has no choice. The mind is a
complex thing, maybe forcing memories out of it is supposed to be
painful, and if I'm under a spell to make me forget, and he's going
against that spell, wouldn't that hurt too?”

She was on a roll now playing detective,
forgetting all about the fact that the guessing game she was
playing at involved her own life, and if she was wrong on all
counts, well...

“Do you believe your uncle was involved, in
my poisoning and your murder?” Azoth asked. His eyes were narrowed
in thought as he too began to see things the way Diana was laying
them out for him. She'd already told him about her last set of
visions, the memories that were not her own this time, since she
was not even in the area when Azoth's father and Dagda were having
their strange conversation.

She shrugged. “Maybe. I don't know anything
about him at all.” Except that he put on a friendly face in front
of her when she was still a princess, and then spoke in a
threatening manner to exalted guests, and frightened the servants
enough to make them run from him.

“I never told you about the mirror I found,
did I?”

“Mirror?”

She made a shape with her hands, indicating
its size. “About this big, a dragon frame swirling around it with
rubies in its mouth and claws. No handle.”

Azoth thought about it, then nodded. “Yes, I
recall that. You never found it, however. It was a wedding gift
from Nyx. You seemed most happy to have received it from him. To be
truthful,
sakkra
, I was jealous of your admiration for it.
Many times I have considered destroying it.”

“Never found it?”

“Your memories must still be fluttering about
in your head.”

“But I did find it, when I was walking
through the park. It was under a tree, just sitting there. I picked
it up and brought it with me up the hill.” It had been in her bag
when she ran away. Was probably at the bottom of the stream she'd
fallen into now.

“
Sakkra
, I have had it here with me
the entire duration of my sentence.”

“What?”

Azoth sighed and put his uneaten dragon fruit
aside for later. He licked his thumb, wiped his hands on a cloth of
questionable material, and offered his hand to her. “Come, I will
show you.”

Diana set aside her own fruit on the square
bit of flat topped rock that acted as Azoth's bedside table. She
took his hand, and went with him.