Page 1 of Crown of Betrayal and Blood (Dragons of Tirene #3)

Chapter One

“On this fifth and final day of honoring the life and death of Jasper Barda, king of Tirene and defender of our kingdom, we invite you all to pray to the gods one last time and entreat them to greet our great ruler as he joins them in the next world.”

The priest’s voice rings through the crowd as heads bow and a respectful silence reigns. In the back of the room, my neck remains unbent as the rest of the attendees mourn.

King Jasper Barda of Tirene wasn’t exactly my favorite person.

Despite the throne room stretching long and wide enough to comfortably fit several full-grown dragons, Tirenese citizens stand shoulder to shoulder, packing themselves in to honor the traditional days of mourning for their deceased monarch.

Though raised in Aclaris after I was kidnapped as a child, I am Tirenese by blood. If I truly intend to make this land my home, I must respect their customs.

Which is one of the reasons I’m crammed inside this space with too many people and the mingled odors of their bodies. For the fifth day in a row. I’m even wearing a court gown of white linen, the traditional color of mourning.

However, considering everything Jasper put me through, I harbor some pretty complicated emotions regarding this whole spectacle.

Prior to his death, the king ordered his younger brother to pose as an instructor and alicorn trainer at Aclaris’s Flighthaven Academy, win my trust, and kidnap me. Once in Tirene, he had me tossed into an enclosure with two formidable dragons in a surprise test to prove my dragoncaller heritage. Failure to engage would have ended with both me and my sister Leesa—whom Jasper also kidnapped from Flighthaven—getting incinerated. Not a fun way to go.

Oh, but there’s more. Next, in hopes of producing a litter of royal dragoncaller heirs, Jasper coerced me into marrying him. When he suspected there was something going on between his brother and me, the king tossed me into a cold, dirty dungeon while sending Sterling on a mission to forestall any rescue attempts. To top it all off, someone poisoned my food during a cozy dinner for two with the king in my filthy cell.

So, although my heart breaks for Sterling’s sake and for his mother’s, I can’t say I find his brother’s death all that devastating. At the same time, I readily admit that I owe the man a debt of gratitude beyond words. In what might have been the most selfless act of his life, Jasper thrust his body between his younger brother and the drachen, sacrificing himself for the prince.

While I would never have wished for Jasper to suffer a gruesome death at the hands of a bloodthirsty shadow creature, if the choice is between him living or him saving the man I love? There’s no contest.

Sterling stands alone as the last soldier falls, his body rigid and his gaze fixed on the drachen hovering before him.

Dread unspools in my gut as he abandons the dwindling flames of protection and prowls closer to the darkness.

“Sterling! No!”

My heart stutters.

The dragons’ roars of challenge thunder across the heavens as I race for the prince, but he’s too far away.

A masculine scream rings out along with a flurry of motion. The king sprints toward Sterling with his sword held high.

The king charges out of his ring of guards, slamming his shoulder into his brother and knocking Sterling aside. Jasper slashes with his sword and sinks his blade into the drachen as if piercing water. The weapon swishes straight through the phantomlike creature.

In a swift, brutal motion, the creature strikes. Blood, deep and dark, spurts from Jasper’s throat, painting the ground with royal blood before he’s yanked down.

I lean on the wall and attempt to tame my rapid breathing. Such a terrible attack, yet we still understand so little about the monsters.

Let’s see. First off, they’re creepy as fuck. Shadow creatures that can flit around oozing and changing shapes while murdering indiscriminately should not exist. Second, they sometimes kill without leaving a single mark and other times drink blood.

We know that at least in Tirene, they started off killing animals…deer, alicorns, even a juvenile dragon.

Then came the attack on the palace.

The drachen enthralled scores of people, rendering them too terrified to think or flee. Fighting with physical weapons such as swords proved useless…something Sterling’s brother learned much too late. Flames from my fire magic held them at bay. Whether that was because of the light or heat, we’re still unsure.

I suppose I owe Jasper for even more than keeping Sterling safe. If not for his orders, I never would have met and fallen in love with his brother in the first place. Though our story began with me as a mere job to Prince Knox Sterling Barda—or Instructor Sterling Thorne, as I knew him back at Flighthaven—we quickly became more to each other.

After the initial shock of his lies and betrayal settled, Sterling convinced me that our love was genuine. I understand his reasons for everything he did. The kidnapping. The betrayal. His loyalty and love for Tirene. I’ve forgiven him, and we’ve moved past that.

It still doesn’t seem real that I’m in love with the crown prince of Tirene.

In addition to the king, twenty-eight other people died in the drachen attack.

A shiver whispers across my skin. Twenty-eight people. Dead, just like that. Nine palace guards, seven soldiers, five servants, four nobles, two children, and one king.

Way too many lives lost, and yet we were lucky not to lose more.

Leaning against the wall, I peer over the crowd toward the raised dais at the front. At the bottom, Dowager Queen Alannah Barda, Jasper and Sterling’s mother, sits shrouded in white, like a specter of sorrow among the living. The poor woman lost her husband, her daughter, and her eldest son, leaving only Sterling as her remaining immediate family. Her eyes resemble haunted pools, reflecting a pain so deep that it’s no wonder she often slips beyond the world’s grasp. After Jasper’s death, new white streaks appeared in her dark hair almost overnight. Today, they flutter loose around her drawn cheeks.

Beside her, Sterling’s grief radiates as palpably as his mother’s. The knowledge that his brother died to save him has weighed heavily on his shoulders in the days since the attack.

As the priest drones on, terrible memories once again claw through the barricades I’ve constructed to keep them at bay. I gouge my nails into my palms, using the stinging pain to ground me to the present.

The royal council members seem convinced that the king slew the drachen in an ultimate sacrifice, ensuring the kingdom’s safety. I wish I shared their confidence, but doubt coils in my gut.

I was there and witnessed the drachen flee. Not from the king’s sword strike. No, they fled the fire that heralded the dragons’ return to protect us.

Just because we succeeded in chasing them off that night doesn’t mean we quelled the threat for good. They could have merely retreated. They could be lurking in dark corners, biding their time. Preparing to attack ag?—

Unease prickles the back of my neck and spine.

I can feel someone watching me.

I straighten and scan the faces around me. Everyone seems focused on the dais, and I can’t find a single pair of eyes trained in my direction.

Rubbing my neck to alleviate the sensation, I urge my nerves to cut me some slack and resume my post against the wall. Still, I can’t stop myself from continuing a surreptitious inspection of the other mourners.

Nobles crowd the front of the room. Those who have traveled to pay their respects mingle with those who live in or near the palace. Two rows of guards separate this space from the far side, allowing the common folk to gather and pay their respects as well.

Overhead, filling half of the twelve alcoves, additional guards survey the event with sharp eyes. Hyde, the captain of the guard, is easy to pick out because his mountainous frame barely fits into the alcove.

Below them, a growing number of Sterling’s sigils dangle where Jasper’s banners once hung. A changing of the guard, stark and undisguised as every day a handful of the old king’s colors are replaced by the new.

The priest takes a breather from rhapsodizing over the fallen king. Murmurs rise as mourners speak to each other in hushed voices, and my skin starts to tingle again.

I scan the sea of faces and catch the gaze of an older man with dark hair. He vanishes into the crowd in the blink of an eye.

Before I can follow, someone taps my arm.

“Leesa.” I hug my older sister, one of the very few wingless people in attendance except for the children who haven’t matured enough to develop theirs yet.

For a moment, I bury my face in her dark golden blond curls. While we may not share blood, we were raised together and loved each other our entire lives. The recent revelation about my biological family hasn’t changed anything about our relationship.

It did explain how Leesa and my mother both share the same olive complexion, wavy hair, and brown eyes while I don’t resemble anyone in the Axton family line.

“Lark.” Bastian Drago leans closer as if to hug me when my sister pulls back but stops short, giving my shoulder an awkward pat instead.

“Bastian.” Not for the first time, his hazel eyes, pale skin, and slightly upturned nose strike me as familiar. It must be in my head, though, because I’m sure I never met my sister’s lover before I came to Tirene.

As far as I can tell, he’s a nice guy with a heart of gold. Smart too. He acts a little uncomfortable around me sometimes, but maybe that’s because he worries about making a good impression on Leesa’s sister. He obviously cares a great deal for her.

Leesa tugs on a curl. “You look like you’re chasing ghosts.”

“Maybe I am.” I try to rein in my nerves in front of Leesa since she’s always been my overprotective big sister. The one who would fight the world, and our mother, in order to help me. “I thought I saw someone I recognized. He was watching me, but then he vanished.”

Leesa loops her arm through mine, her grip both comforting and confining. “We’ve been digging through the archives, searching for any mentions of the Lost City you read about in The Chronicles of the Mother Wurm .”

Hope swells. The Lost City popped up in an entry I read after the attack. I hope it’s a potential lead that will help us learn more about the drachen, but so far, we’ve come up short. “Were you able to find anything?”

If anyone can track down the information we’ve been hunting for, it’s these two.

Although, I sometimes wonder which task they spend more time on…researching or making out.

Bastian shakes his head, dashing my hope with a grimace. “No. But we did discover several maps. We could use some help sifting through them. It’s highly doubtful that ‘Lost City’ is the actual name of the place, so we thought we could compare maps and check if a city suddenly disappears. We put them all in chronological order.”

“Later.” Leesa loosens her grip on my arm, her attention caught by a herald walking into the room. “It’s time for the reading of King Jasper’s accomplishments.”

“I’ll meet you two later then.” I gently disentangle myself.

Bastian glances over and nods before taking Leesa’s hand and leading her away.

I need space, a quiet spot away from everyone else where I can think and breathe. While the others are distracted, I slip down a corridor that promises solitude. It’s lined with alcoves, windows, and doors leading to the courtyard. All places I can duck into for some privacy.

The hushed echo of my footsteps creates a lonely cadence in the empty hallway, a sharp contrast to the muffled celebration of life behind me. The farther I get from the mayhem, the less tension crushes my neck and shoulders.

The quiet goes a long way toward quashing my burgeoning headache too.

Without warning, a large hand wraps around my wrist, yanking me sideways and dragging me through a doorway.