Page 14 of The Dragon King's Pregnant Mate

"My king?"

I turn to find Darian in the doorway, his expression carefully neutral as he surveys the scene. Blood has splattered across my formal clothes, ruining the expensive fabric.

"Get rid of that." I gesture to the corpse. "And send word to our agents in the north. I want confirmation of every rumor, every whisper about my brother. If he lives…" My claws scrape against stone as I clench my fists. "If he has her…"

There is no mercy in my soul left for my brother. I knew this already. But now…

My bloodlust is infinite. I’ll kill him impossibly slowly if he has hurt her. If he hastakenher.

"Your courtiers await above," Darian reminds me gently. "They expect you to address the grain shortage—"

"The people of this wretched place can rot." Smoke fills the air with each word. "My brother plots against me while my wife's power grows stronger by the day. The grain shortage means nothing if we don't—"

"It means everything," Darian cuts in, with the authority of decades of service. It is unusual for him to be so forward. "Your people freeze and starve while you hunt shadows. The Lords see weakness in your obsession with finding the queen. If you ignore them now—"

"What?" I whirl on him, letting my rage show fully. "They'll rebel? Plot against me? They already do! At least with Calliope by my side, they feared me. Feared us. Her power is the key to everything—you saw what she did that night. What she was capable of."

And if I don’t get her back, if I don’t find her, I’ll gladly burn this kingdom to the ground. I know it with an innate, terrifying ferocity.

Darian doesn't flinch from my anger. "And if the spy spoke truth? If she's truly allied herself with your brother?"

"Then I'll kill him." The words come out in a growl that's more dragon than human. "I'll burn every fortress, search every mountain cave until I find them. And then I'll show them both why the Dragon Kings have ruled for a thousand years."

Chapter 7 - Calliope

Time moves strangely in Ulric's wretched tower. Days blur at the edges, marked only by the changing quality of light through the arrow slits and the irregular appearances of silent servants with meals I'm never sure I should eat. The ancient stones seem to absorb sound, creating a perpetual twilit hush that makes me question whether the world beyond these walls still exists at all.

My first week here passes in a haze of fever and exhaustion. The magic I unleashed fighting the mercenaries took more from me than I realized, leaving me weak as a newborn colt. I drift in and out of consciousness, aware only of my child's steady presence within me and the eerie silence that pervades the tower. When I'm lucid, I catalogue my surroundings: the chamber is circular, perhaps twenty feet across, with seven slits placed at irregular intervals in the walls, too narrow to see through well. The stones are old—older than Millrath's walls—and covered in carvings so worn they're barely visible. Sometimes, in the strange half-light of dawn, I swear they move.

Perhaps this place is older than even Arvoren’s family’s dynasty. But I know it is not older than the Windwakers. I don’t know how, but I know.

The servants who tend me never speak. A woman with burn scars across her throat brings breakfast at irregular intervals. A boy missing three fingers replaces the rushes on the floor. An ancient man with milky eyes changes the bedding. They are all draconic, but I know not where they hail from. Their silence feels deliberate, orchestrated, like everything else in this place.

Ulric visits daily, always at different times. Sometimes he brings books—histories of Kaldoria, treatises on magic, accounts of the old wars. I am reminded in these hours of his ruse, the man he pretended to be when I knew him in Millrath. He sits in a high-backed chair near my bed and reads aloud like we’re still in that library, his voice smooth as honey, weaving together fact and implication with surgical precision.

"Did you know," he says one gray morning, "that the first Dragon Kings were more beast than man? True shapeshifters, not bound by human morality or weakness." His eyes flick to mine over the top of a leather-bound tome. "Unlike now, when we chain ourselves with crowns and laws, pretending at civilization. I wonder often what a creature such as you might make of that.”

I recognize the bait but take it anyway. "You think your brother pretends?"

"Don't you?" He marks his place with a ribbon of deep red silk. "All that careful control, that rigid adherence to tradition—it's a cage he built for himself, then tried to force everyone else into. Even you."

The words hit closer to home than I'd like. I turn away, ostensibly to pour water from the pitcher beside my bed. My hands shake slightly. "You seem very interested in your brother's marriages.”

"Marriage, singular." His smile is razor-sharp. "There will never be another, you know. Not now that he's tasted real power. That's what draws him to you—not love, whatever he claims. You're simply the strongest weapon he's ever tried to possess, I believe. Power is the only vector by which he can see the world around him. He has always been this way."

"And what am I to you?" The question slips out before I can stop it.

His laugh is soft, almost gentle. "An ally, I hope. In time. I’d gladly have your friendship, Calliope. You know I would.”

By the second week, I'm strong enough to leave my chamber, though I suspect Ulric allows this only because he knows I'm still too weak to attempt escape. The rest of the ancient compound reveals itself slowly, like a puzzle box with too many solutions. Staircases spiral in impossible directions, and corridors that should connect instead dead-end in empty chambers thick with dust. Windows that face north in the morning somehow look south by afternoon, or perhaps I truly am going mad.

An ancient magic, almost dead now, lingers here. Some empire I will never know nor understand.

The few guards I encounter move like ghosts through the halls, their armor scuffed and antiquated, bearing no House colours, their eyes downcast. None wear Ulric’s sigil. When I pass them, they press themselves against walls as if afraid to touch me.

"They fear what you represent," Ulric tells me over dinner in a chamber whose ceiling vanishes into darkness. Candles float above the table, their flames perfectly still despite the draft that whistles through the arrow slits. "Power untamed by tradition. Magic older than our petty kingdoms."

"Your brother's soldiers never feared me," I say, watching his reaction carefully.