Page 103 of Golden Queen (Idrigard #1)

A young boy scrambled up from a cot in the back of the room and bowed to Io. He was thin and at the stage of life where his limbs looked much too long for his body.

"Good evening, Balthazar," Io said companionably.

The boy beamed. His eager face proved he was glad to see his lord. I thought perhaps Io spent a great deal of time with the hatchlings, and I found it very charming to imagine him with a newly hatched dragon in his large hands.

"This is Sera," he told the boy. "She is going to be Lady of Darkwatch very soon."

Balthazar looked surprised at the news, but he greeted me warmly, smiling a gap-toothed smile. His face was covered in dark, nearly black freckles, and his ears were slightly pointed.

"Who do we have here?" Io asked, studying the three eggs in the crates.

"This is Kantu's clutch," Balthazar said, proudly.

"All of them?" Io asked, surprised.

"Yes, My Lord," the boy said.

"That's rare," Io explained. "It's possible they'll be three identical dragons." He took my hand and guided it to the egg's surface. "Feel," he said.

My other hand joined the first on the side of the nearly black egg. It was rough like pumice with tiny holes all through the surface. "What am I meant to feel?" I asked.

"Just wait," Io said.

All I felt was the slightly warm egg under my palms. I gave him a look, and he responded with a roll of his eyes. "So impatient," he teased.

I was on the point of taking my hands away when I felt it, faint and barely discernible; the awareness of something moving inside the shell.

It was the oddest feeling, like I could actually feel scales and flesh gliding over my palm as the tiny creature turned inside the shell.

When I closed my eyes, I could see it! It was sleek and smooth, a muted, muddy brown with irregular blue patches as bright as Idylstone running down its side. The little splotches of color faded down the dragon's body looking like messy strokes from a paintbrush against that soft brown color.

I gasped as it spun again in the shell, as though restless. A beautiful orange eye, as vivid as the molten rock in the lake outside the door, came into view. It looked back at me with that vertically slit pupil, and I knew it saw me as well as I could see it.

"Well, hello there, beautiful boy," I whispered to the dragon, having almost no awareness of anything outside myself and that warm, peaceful cocoon inside the egg.

I watched rows of delicate scales slide past as the dragon turned again, slightly spiraling inside the shell so that by the time it took another full turn, nearly sheer folded wings and a long, ridged tail passed in front of my vision.

Reluctantly I opened my eyes to see the confused face of Balthazar in front of me, studying me intently.

"He’s beautiful," I told him. "Like someone painted him with little bits of the sky."

Balthazar's slid his eyes to Io behind me in question. I turned to see a matching look of curiosity on his features.

"You saw it?" Io asked. "As in, you got an image of the dragon?"

"Isn't that what you expected to happen?" I asked.

"I expected you to feel it moving inside the shell," he said, wonderingly. "Can you see the others?"

He pulled me toward the next egg on the table, but by then I was apprehensive.

"Maybe I didn't see anything. Maybe it was my imagination filling in the pieces," I said, knowing that was absolutely not what had happened.

I knew as well as I knew the color of my own pale-gray eyes that the dragon in that shell was brown and blue with bright glowing orange eyes.

Io gave me a look that told me exactly how much he believed that nonsense himself as he laid my hand on the shell.

It was the same as before. It came slowly; the awareness of movement; the sense of the creature. But the moment I closed my eyes, he was there, the same muddy brown, the pattern slightly different, the colors inverted.

I let out a startled laugh as a bright blue idylstone eye came into view—Alduran blue I realized—as bright as Aben Verforge's eyes—as lovely and pure as that glimpse of Io's had been.

"He has orange spots running down his sides instead of blue, and blue eyes instead of orange," I said, keeping my eyes closed, smiling so big it threatened to cramp my cheeks. "They are the same, but their colors are switched around."

I felt Io come up behind me and his hand covered mine. "That is amazing. I would give anything to be able to see them. Come," he said abruptly. "Tell me about the third."

I laughed as he dragged my hands away, excitedly.

I sucked in a breath as I saw the third.

It was beautiful beyond belief. She was beautiful.

The female dragon moved slower than the other two.

She was no less energetic, just more graceful as she turned inside the shell, spinning in her endless spiral through the warm liquid of what, to her, amounted to her entire known world.

Her scales were inky black, as dark as Veles. Her visible eye was a soft brown flecked with milkier swirls that reminded me of a painting I once saw of the great dust storms that plagued the entire southern continent before the godsgrass.

Her body, down the line of those black scales was flecked with alternating orange and blue, both colors standing out so sharply against her scales that it seemed to glow.

I explained to Io and Balthazar what she looked like.

"She looks like her mother, then," Balthazar said. "I’ve always thought Kantu was the prettiest of them all."

"Does she look healthy?" Io asked eagerly. "And the others? All their parts formed correctly?"

"They look perfect," I said. The look on his face proved how much he truly cared about his dragons.

It warmed my heart to see that side of him—to see that he had more capacity for love than I had ever expected. I wasn't sure why I had expected anything else when all he had ever shown me was that side of him. And he had been in Albiyn looking for lost children.

He was truly good, no matter what those shadows might represent if they had been in another. He was that farmer tilling the soil with a sword.

When we were back in our own bed later, and I was moving over him, our bodies joined, I couldn't help but think of him as a father.

Even in the midst of passion, my body, my heart, cried out with some primal urge that positively shocked me, to bear his child.

I wanted to make that child with him—nurture it safe inside me just as those dragons had been safe inside their warm shells.

We would create something new, but also part of us—part of him, complete with those shadows that danced around his fingertips where he held my hip as I slid my body over him in that ancient, primal dance of our own shared pleasure.

He sat up, drawing my face down to him. "What are you thinking of Sera?"

I could hardly focus my mind to answer him and was altogether unwilling to admit the turn of my thoughts as he held me still.

"Just that I love you," I said, and there was no lie in it. It was all I had been thinking since the rest was born of that love, wholly and completely.

"I love you more," he said, raising me up so that he could flip me back onto the mattress.

I wrapped my legs around him as he thrust into me, sure, powerful strokes that had me nearly panting with the raw tension winding inside me.

And when we both reached release together, and he spilled himself inside me, some selfish part of me willed it to be that he would put that child inside me regardless of the looming threats—the war, the prophecy, and the monsters that now seemed to always be stalking the periphery of my mind.

I wanted it unreasonably and irresponsibly so. And I realized I must have always had this reckless streak hidden inside me since I had never once considered taking the steps necessary to prevent pregnancy—not from the very beginning. And neither had he.