Page 11 of Curse of the Midnight Dragon (The Moonlight Dragon #2)

Celestina

While I felt rather ridiculous dressed in the sheer pink dress as we left the ship, the style of dress—lightweight and without any sleeves—was what most young Tiburnian women my age indeed wore in the city. Soren kept his arm draped over my shoulder and me tucked against his side as we headed through the busy maze of streets.

“How do you manage her so well?” Proctor asked Soren after we’d walked for several blocks. “Is it the collar? Or do you use compulsion as well? What did you do to her to make her so tame?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The muscles in Soren’s arm tightened.

“Come now,” Proctor said with a chuckle. “You don’t have to pretend with us. Your brother told me all about how you acquired her and how you plan to use her.”

“Use me?” I cried at the same time Soren started to say, “It’s not—”

“I have recently acquired one, too,” Proctor blurted. It sounded as if he couldn’t hold in the news a moment longer.

“Cullen mentioned that in his letter,” Soren angrily replied.

I opened and closed my mouth, not sure what to address first. The fact that this man thought Soren planned to use me as his personal dragon. Is that true? Or the fact that this man had captured a dragon. And Soren knew about it. Urgh!

I couldn’t really tell Captain Proctor what I thought about him (I never had liked a braggart) or my thoughts on the fact that he was holding someone like me a prisoner. (He deserved to be punched in the nuts.) Not while we were out here on the street. Not where someone might be listening. We were in enemy territory, which meant we needed to guard our tongues. Captain Proctor had apparently forgotten that.

“Mine is as vicious as a crystal cobra.” He was speaking too loudly. Was he trying to get us caught? “No matter what I do, no matter how harshly I punish her, I can’t seem to break her. Cullen has been trying to help, but he’s been unsuccessful as well. She seems immune to all but the simplest compulsions. I was hoping you could lend a hand, that you could use your…um…beast to—”

“No.” Soren bit off the word.

“Beast?” Did he just call me a beast?

“But that’s why you have her. To—”

“No,” Soren repeated. His jaw muscles tensed. “Not here,” Soren added quietly when the captain seemed eager to persist with his questions.

“Right. Right.” The captain gave Soren a sheepish look. “It’s just…I’ve been so frustrated by my…and my general is pushing for results…but…I understand. Later.”

With that said, Captain Proctor led us to the door of a three-story house with a wide front porch. Unlike many of the houses on the street, this one detached from the neighboring homes. Instead, it was ringed by a tidy flower garden that was bursting with large pink blooms. It wasn’t a wooden house, like those in the village surrounding the castle in Earst. This house had been crafted from what looked like clay. Pale, pink clay that was nearly the same shade as the flowers.

“My parents live here?” I asked.

Proctor barely glanced at me before he knocked. A gray-bearded man in a crisp linen suit and white tie opened the door almost immediately.

My heart fell. That wasn’t my father. Proctor had led us to a trap.

The man at the door took one look at the five of us and opened the door wider. “The Vackers are waiting in the sitting room, Captain,” he said to Proctor with a slight bow.

“What is this place?” I asked, refusing to pass through a door that might lead to a room filled with enemy soldiers.

“Your parents’ home,” Proctor answered smoothly.

“No. This can’t be their home. They’d brought no riches with them. They’d fled with only the clothes they were wearing.”

“They brought us something better than riches. They brought information. And here in Tiburnia, information is worth more than gold. Prince Soren, please, her parents are waiting.” Proctor made a gesture, indicating I should be the first to enter the home. That wasn’t going to happen. Even if I were foolish enough to do such a thing, Gray, Raya, and Soren would never allow it.

Gray, with his hand on his hip—presumably where he’d stashed his collapsible sword—made a cautious entrance into the home. “I don’t like this,” he grumbled to Soren as he passed by us.

Gray continued into the sitting room, taking a quick look around before stepping back out to nod to Soren. Soren, with his arm still wrapped around my shoulder, led me toward the room where my parents were supposedly waiting. My heart beat wildly as we entered the large space. Silky drapes billowed at the tall windows that looked out onto the street. There were three sitting areas in the room where an array of luxuriously upholstered sofas and chairs were arranged with small intricately carved tables interspersed between the chairs. Golden trays piled with pastries sat on a few of the tables. On some of the other tables, finely cut glasses filled with a deep red drink sat on silver trays. I swallowed hard and hoped my parents weren’t serving us blood.

“Darling!” my mother crooned as she ran across the room to greet me. She pulled me away from Soren and into her arms in a hug that took me completely by surprise. My mother had never been the hugging type. She kept hold of my shoulders even after letting me out of her tight grasp. “Look at you.” She tsked as she ran her long, graceful fingers over the slave collar. Her hand stilled when it reached the faint bruise on my upper neck, one that even drinking Soren’s blood preventatively hadn’t been able to completely erase. Her gaze flew to where Soren stood behind me. Her entire body stiffened as she looked him over from head to toe. Her cool, blue eyes narrowed.

Despite the scowl she was now wearing, my mother was as lovely as I remembered her. Her pale blonde hair matched her perfect pale skin. She wore her hair in an elaborate coronet of braids. Little blue sapphires threaded through the braids sparkled in the sunlight streaming through the open windows like tiny stars. She was about a head shorter than me, and as slender as a rail. She wore a white sleeveless gown that swept the carpeted floor as she moved. “If you had let us help you escape, Celestina, you wouldn’t be wearing that awful thing. Queen Beatrice has always been jealous of you and looking for excuses to harm you.” She gave Soren another hard look. “Clearly, you’ve been quite roughly used. We wanted to prevent something like this from happening. That was why we acted as we had.” Mother waved her hand toward my bruised neck. “If only you had obeyed us.”

“The princes’ lives were in danger. I couldn’t have left them, even if I’d wanted to. They are too young to be left vulnerable like that.”

My mother tsked again. “You saved her sons, and this is the thanks Queen Beatrice gave you. She made you a slave. Gave you to our enemy. You know she doesn’t care about her children. They’re nothing but annoyances to her.” My mother spoke quickly, as if she’d been waiting to see me again just so she could scold me for disobeying her and Father.

I lifted my chin. “Someone needs to care for those boys. Whether their mother dotes on them or not, they’re innocent children. I’m not ashamed that I did what I did to protect them.” I knew what it was like to be raised by indifferent parents. From my earliest memories, my parents had often ignored me and left me either alone or, if I was lucky, with castle servants to watch after me. The only rule they enforced, with the assistance of the Royal Guards, was that I could never wander beyond the castle walls. Such a cruel rule to make for a curious and lively child. “But this isn’t the time to point fingers. What is done is done.” I kept my hand fisted at my hip to keep from reaching up and touching the slave collar. “There’s much we need to discuss.”

My father cleared his throat. “Perhaps we should sit.” He gestured to the closest seating area. Like my mother, my father looked well. He wore his dark, brown hair a little shorter than he had in Earst. But he still sported a close-cropped beard that was speckled with a few gray hairs. He was dressed in a light tan sleeveless suit that was very similar in style to the white ones both Soren and Gray were wearing. “Please, take this chair, Daughter. We should discuss why you have sought us out. And why you have brought an enemy general with you.”

Soren eased his arm around my shoulder again and leaned into me until I was once again tucked against his side. “Celestina is my bonded partner.”

My father’s deep green eyes widened with surprise. “I’ve heard gossip through the years about the Fein system of taking bonded partners. Those are lifetime bonds, are they not?” He frowned at me before returning his gaze back to Soren. “Unbreakable?”

“That’s correct. Not even death can break this bond,” Soren said, his voice a deep warning. “She is mine.”

“I see,” my father said after exchanging a long glance with Captain Proctor. “We have much to discuss, then. Please, let’s sit.”

Soren didn’t move. “My brother? I was told he’d meet us at the dock. He was not there. I was then told he would meet us here. He is not here. And I do find it tedious to have to repeat myself, but here we are. Where is my brother?”

Captain Proctor raised his hands as if in surrender. “It appears the young prince is running late. If you feel it necessary, I could send someone to find out why he’s been delayed. In the meantime, we could—”

“Do that,” Soren said, interrupting the captain. The man had been gesturing toward the same grouping of sofas that my father had wanted us to take. They both seemed determined that we sit down and eat their food and drink that— What is that deep red drink? “Find my brother. We’ll wait.”

Captain Proctor frowned. Clearly, he hadn’t expected to be taken up on his offer to send a scout to search for Cullen. After a tense moment, he left the sitting room.

Soren remained rooted where we stood. “Is it really necessary to literally stand our ground?” I whispered.

“Yes,” he whispered back.

Gray had taken a position at the one entrance to the room, his hand still resting on his hip. His eyes were constantly roving, as if searching for a reason to fight. Raya stood on the opposite side of the room near the windows. She had taken an equally tense stance, like a cat prepared to leap into a fight.

But this was my parents’ home. Nothing would happen to any of us here. My parents were flighty and vain, but generally harmless. Save for that time that they had helped the Tiburnians attack the castle…and so many soldiers had died as a result.

“Tell me, Father,” I said, as we stood awkwardly in the middle of the room. “Why did you ask the Tiburnians to protect me? Why them?”

My father looked around him. He then smiled at my mother. She smiled sweetly back. “See all this, darling? They gave us all the luxury we could ever wish for—more than we had expected—and that was after we failed to deliver you to their care. They are a fair people. Their rulers are elected by the citizens, not by blood. They don’t limit who can do magic to just their royals. Quite frankly, this is a better place than Earst.”

“That’s not a high bar,” Soren muttered.

I started to defend my home country but stopped myself. Soren and my father weren’t wrong. Life in the Kingdom of Earst had been oppressive, not just for me…but for everyone. We couldn’t speak freely. The queen dictated how we dressed, how we wore our hair, how we lived. The consequence for not conforming was often death.

Even under the rule of Queen Frieda, who had been decidedly less capricious than her daughter, death was still a common punishment for both major and minor crimes.

“And what would the Tiburnians have expected of me if I came with you?” I asked instead.

“Why, they would have asked you to help with protecting their borders from invading forces,” my father was quick to answer.

“They wanted me to join their military?”

My father chuckled. “Come now, Daughter. Everyone in this room knows what you are, what you’re capable of.”

“We have to approach this subject with care,” Soren warned. “The collar doesn’t allow Celestina to talk about her true form. But that is why we are here. We want to get information about how she came to be in your care and—”

“The Fein wish to use you? I knew it.” My father’s eyes lit up. “And what, may I ask, are you willing to pay us for this information regarding my daughter? As you see, we are being well compensated and taken care of here in the warm embrace of our southernmost kingdom. It would have to be an impressive deal to get us to want to make a move to the continent’s northernmost, most closed-off, and presumably most dangerous kingdom.”

“Celestina is no longer yours to use to barter for a richer future,” Soren pointed out. He bared his fangs. “She’s mine.”

“Ah.” My father didn’t appear at all flustered by Soren’s claim over me. In fact, he seemed to relish the challenge. He smiled even more broadly. “But you are here, in my home. And—”

“Father. Mother.” I wasn’t anyone’s property, nor did I want to be treated as if I were. And this grandstanding was wasting our time. We needed to find out what my parents knew, gather up Cullen, and get ourselves the hell out of this country before one of us got hurt. Or worse. “Please.” I stepped out of Soren’s embrace and held out my hands to my mother. “Please, I’m here because I need to know how I came into your care. I’m not your natural daughter, isn’t that true?” It hurt to ask that.

Even if they hadn’t been the best parents or the most loving, they were the only parents I’d ever known. It pained me to say aloud that I didn’t truly belong to them. It felt as if I were severing a line to my past. What if my parents agreed that I wasn’t their child? What if the outcome of my stating that I, too, knew the truth of my adoption meant that they would no longer love me? No longer claim me?

“We should tell her,” my mother said at the same time my father said, “What are you willing to pay for this information, General Kitmun?”

My mother pressed a gauzy handkerchief to her lips with a trembly hand. “I couldn’t have a child of my own. We tried many times, but my body proved to be too frail to successfully carry an heir. The repeated losses were…quite painful. Queen Frieda, she watched us struggle to try and continue your father’s lineage. She felt our pain. Your father could have disposed of me and taken a new lover.” Her eyes grew dewy. “But he loved me. The queen saw that as well. And since your father had always been a fierce supporter of the crown, she wanted to reward him for his unwavering loyalty.”

My father closed the distance between him and my mother. He kissed her gently on the temple. “Queen Frieda brought you to our chamber in the middle of the night, Celestina. You were so small. Helpless. The queen is the one who told us your name.” As he spoke, he held my mother’s gaze. “The queen also told us that she was entrusting us with the greatest weapon the world would ever know. She had plans for you. Great plans. You were to be one of the most powerful subjects under Queen Frieda. But that was all taken away when Queen Beatrice poisoned our beloved ruler.”

“What were Queen Frieda’s plans for Celestina exactly?” Soren asked.

My father waved away the question. “What does it matter? She is dead now. And Queen Beatrice has plans of her own, plans that never required Celestina or our assistance. That’s why we had to get Celestina away from Earst. What Queen Beatrice is capable of is terrible. We realized that to have any hope of stopping her from destroying the entire continent, we would also have to save Celestina.”