Page 16 of Fortune's Blade

I sighed.

“Harpies,” Claire said, following my eyes. “There’s a clan that lives in the crags near here, and some work for father.”

“Sure,” I tried to look nonchalant.

I don’t think I succeeded, but she didn’t call me on it. “There are numerous houses, with nine great ones, in these mountains,” she said instead. “Father has the allegiance of more of the smaller houses than anyone else, making him the first among equals, I guess. But he isn’t a king. He doesn’t get to say what the other great houses do. Dragonkind are fiercely independent and would never put up with that.”

“And what about what his own house does?” Louis-Cesare asked, because the creatures who had attacked us had looked pretty local to me.

“He’ll deal with it,” Claire said, her jaw tight.

“Here, perhaps. But that doesn’t mean we can trust anyone he sends with us. Once they are out of his sight—”

“He’ll deal with it!” she repeated, but the uncertainty in her voice echoed in the confines of the passage, which a moment later let out onto the largest corridor I’d seen yet. There was no one there but us, which probably meant that we were very late, and everyone else had already gone into the dining hall, but Claire nonetheless pulled us over by the wall.

“He will,” she said, sounding more certain.

“Not if he isn’t there,” Louis-Cesare said stubbornly. “Anyone who doesn’t want us here could volunteer to accompany us on our quest, then tell him whatever they liked when they returned alone. There are a thousand ways to die in Faerie, and once we’re gone—”

“No one is going to kill you!” she whisper-shouted.

“—who is to contradict them? I am not saying that your father’s people are traitors or disloyal,” he said, as Claire’s eyes flashed dangerously. “But they could dispose of us thinking that they were helping him by keeping his house out of the current conflict—”

“You understand nothing about dragons! They don’t think like humans—”

“Then how do they think?”

“—and I’ll be with you—”

“As you were today?” Louis-Cesare asked archly, and watched her bristle. But he didn’t back down. “There are plenty of ways to separate us, and once you’re no longer present—”

“My father’s people are not a threat!” Claire snarled, just as a bright green dragon with a pale-yellow belly sailed through the open side of the corridor, changing into a pretty brunette before her feet touched the floor.

She stumbled a bit, uncharacteristically clumsy for one of her kind, but she appeared to be in a hurry. Her cheeks were flushed and her hair, which was almost down to her ankles, was a bit mussed. But it complimented her huge dark eyes, and the ombre blue silk dress she wore, with what looked like a scattering of diamonds near the hem where the darkest color was, as if suggesting the coming of night. She was tying up the sides of the dress as she took off running, her bare feet silent on the slick stone floor, until she slipped—

And Louis-Cesare caught her.

It was an instinctive reaction for a gallant Frenchman schooled in the manners of another age. But it was not taken that way. She stared at him for a second in shock, then started screaming bloody murder and changed back in an eyeblink, filling the corridor so tightly that I don’t see how she expected to be able to maneuver to fight. But she managed it, with a barbed tail catching Louis-Cesare a glancing blow, which was still enough to send him tumbling out of the open side of the hall.

He caught himself at the last second, literally by the tips of his fingers, and flipped back inside, right before a wash of flame obliterated the space he’d just been occupying. I screamed, Claire roared in a voice I barely recognized as hers, and I spotted my husband clinging like the proverbial bat to the high ceiling of the corridor, and looking more than a little spooked. Then Claire suddenly changed, too, shoving me behind her and getting into the other woman’s face.

Only it wasn’t a woman anymore, and I just stood there, unable to believe that we were involved in a second fight in less than an hour.

Fortunately, Claire’s presence calmed things down, with the other dragon looking startled as hell as she looked from her to us. And then her expression changed to embarrassment followed swiftly by curiosity, staring up at the ceiling as Louis-Cesare dropped back down beside me. And then peering over Claire’s scaley shoulder at us as if she’d never seen our kind before.

And maybe she hadn’t.

These folk didn’t get out much.

She disappeared after a moment, winking out of sight behind Claire’s considerable bulk. “Your pardon,” someone said softly, a moment later.

The translation spell we were using, because neither Louis-Cesare nor I spoke any fey language, made everything sound kind of tinny. Like listening to an old-fashioned radio minus the static. Nonetheless, the breathy sincereness in the woman’s voice came through, and then her human form peeked around a massive dragon thigh to blink at us some more.

“You were saying?” Louis-Cesare said to Claire.

“Goddamnit,” she snarled, and changed back.

Chapter Six