Page 103 of Fortune's Blade

And the strangest thing was that she didn’t look like much. I was used to vampires, who believed in ostentatious everything, the bunch of peacocks, constantly trying to advertise how old and powerful they were by what they wore. It was practically a coded language, but it was not one this woman spoke.

Her gown was rich in material, but no more adorned than Lord Rathen’s. She had brown hair, piled on top of her head in a crown of elaborate braids, with enough left over to tumble loosely down her back, and brown eyes. Not hazel or amber or anything exotic; just brown. She was handsome, as dragonkind tended to be, and would have been remarkable anywhere else.

Here, she was honestly kind of ordinary.

Yet she was powerful and I didn’t need the feel of magic brushing over my skin to know it.

Tanet was shouting something at the guards, but he had passed through the silence spell and I couldn’t hear him. But Rathen hadn’t moved, nor had Regin, except to pull his prisoner a few inches closer to his body. The woman saw the gesture and smiled slightly.

Then her eyes turned to me.

“Such a small, unassuming package. So easily overlooked. But that would be a mistake, would it not?”

I didn’t know what was going on here, so said nothing. But Rathen did, while very slowly getting to his feet. “That is Dory. The one your lord seeks is Dorina. They are not the same.”

“Yes, so I understand. There are two. Why did it never occur to us that there might be two?

“Another trick; another deception. But the gods were always thus. They hid the one behind the other, so that we could not find her.”

Her eyes finally drifted to the man kneeling in the dirt and slush, who was staring at her with an expression caught between hope and fear. “But that is Lord Steen’s problem,” she added. “I came for my son. I will trade the information you seek for his life, then we will go and trouble you no more.”

Regin started to say something, but Lord Rathen held up a hand.

“Speak, then. If your information is worth a life, you shall have it—of me. But House Ondar may not agree. Their daughter died in the fight your son caused.”

The woman bowed her head slightly, and her eyes were somber. “I am truly sorry for the girl, and will speak to her family,” she said, moving forward.

Only to have Regin’s hand around her son’s throat become a mass of scales and claws.

She stopped as if surprised, and spread her hands. “I have come to talk, Lord Regin. Or do you think I plan to take on all of you?”

“You don’t want to know what I think, witch!” He glanced at his lord. “Don’t believe her lies. Vitharr is likely here in force; we need to get back to camp—”

“In force,” the woman, or the witch I guessed, laughed as if he’d said something funny. “Yes, that will do.”

And before I could even try to figure out what she meant, Tanet ran back out of the woods, on fire and screaming. He crashed into the silence spell, scrabbling against it as if it was a wall of glass, his face terrible and half burnt away, and unholy sounds emanating from his lips. I didn’t know why we could hear them, or why he wasn’t changing into a form that the fire couldn’t hurt, or how a silence spell had suddenly become a shield.

I didn’t understand anything, until I looked back at the prisoner. Who had been staring at what I belatedly realized was an illusion, just like the rest of us. Right up until his mother shoved a knife between his ribs.

Chapter Thirty-Two

There was a lot of screaming going on, half in human voices, half in shrieking dragon speech, to the point that it hurt my ears to hear it. And I wasn’t even that close anymore. I wasn’t in the little glade, or inside Lord Rathen’s tent, where the uproar was taking place.

I was in another tent nearby, where Claire was fighting fate and fighting hard.

“I’m losing him,” she told me, looking up, her strange eyes huge in that unbelievable face.

And despite the scales sparkling on her cheekbones like glitter in a nightclub, and the otherworldly crown of horns disturbing the riotous red hair, and the all-encompassing dragon skin making her look like she was wearing a couture jumpsuit, she was suddenly Claire again. Her dragon half seemed to have retreated and it was just her, looking lost and frightened, because she couldn’t save him. Antem was dying.

“Her blade pierced the heart, and I don’t—I can slow it down, but I can’t stop it. I can’t stop it!”

“Slow it down, then,” Louis-Cesare said harshly. “We need answers!”

“I’ll tell you nothing,” the man—the boy—said, laboring with every breath. “Nothing!”

And he wouldn’t. I could see it in his face, his eyes, the clamp of his jaw. After all, when you’re so close to death, what is there for anyone to hold over you?

I wouldn’t have talked, either.