Page 3 of The Dragon King's Pregnant Mate

A knock at my door breaks the silence. I grunt, permitting entrance. I have not the patience nor energy to raise my chin, to square my shoulders. My gut feels cold all the time these days, heavy as a stone. There is no fire there anymore, just a lump of obsidian, an oxidised heart of sulfur. Something that burned eternally until it didn’t.

"My king," Darian's voice is tight with tension. "The Lords have arrived for the audience."

Of course they have. Like scavenging birds, they circle my throne, waiting for any sign of weakness. Even now, after the fury I rained upon them after their most recent and treacherous disobedience, they know not when to cease from disquieting me.

I straighten my shoulders, adjusting the heavy crown that never seems to sit quite right anymore. At least I still know how to bear its weight, I remind myself. I know how to wear it. How to carry what I must carry.

"Very well,” I say to the glass, to the city. To the sky pouring snow down upon the world I once, briefly, believed I could love. To Calliope, or the wealth of absence that she became.

The walk to my underchamber feels longer each day. Servants scurry out of my path, heads bowed, though I catch them watching from the corners of their eyes. They whisper when they think I can't hear, spreading stories about their missing queen, about the endless winter, the deaths by freezing, the missing troops, the momentarily-quelled coup. About their king's growing obsessions, madnesses, frenzies, furies. His silence and terror.

Let them whisper. They know nothing of obsession. Nothing of the way her absence feels like a physical wound, raw and bleeding beneath my carefully maintained facade of control.

I take my throne. I raise my head.

The dragon skulls lining my throne room walls cast long shadows in the torchlight, their empty eye sockets seeming to watch the proceedings with ancient disapproval. I sit straight and stoic, letting the cold iron of my crown rest heavy against my brow as I survey the six lords standing before me.

Their wounds from our recent battle are still fresh—bandages peek from beneath fine clothing, and more than one of them favors an injured leg or arm.

Good. Let them remember the price of treachery.

Lord Bellrose of Estwell steps forward first, his silver-streaked hair catching the firelight. Even with his arm in a sling, he carries himself with the insufferable pride of old nobility.Traitor, cries my blood.You should be dead for what you have done, what you have attempted.

"Your Majesty," he begins, voice dripping courtesy like poison. "We come seeking reassurance."

“And so soon,” I reply, noting the lord’s immediately evident discomfort. “It seems we only recently saw one another.”

Mere weeks ago, I sent the fools limping back to their backwater hovels at our borderlands with their troops half-demolished and power severely diminished. I won the day, yet they still believe I did not win the war. They believe the war is not over until they decide.

They know nothing of war.

“We seek…clarification,” Bellrose corrects in a strange, soft voice.

"Do you?" I lean forward ever so slightly. Several of them flinch at the movement. My merest movement terrifies them. Once, I might have relished that. "I would think my mercy after your failedrebellionwould be reassurance enough."

"Your…forgiveness is appreciated, eternally," Lord Vos interjects, his thin face pinched with barely concealed disdain. His house suffered some of the heaviest losses in the battle, and the bandages around his throat barely hide the claw marks I left there. "However, there are more pressing concerns that bring us here today."

"The winter," Lord Morwen cuts in, his scarred face twisted with barely concealed fury. "It grows worse by the day. In Whiteraid, livestock freeze in their barns. Crops die in the fields. Trade caravans can't get through the mountain passes. The Great River is frozen; we port cities in the west are starving, running out of resources. Our poorest won’t survive until spring. And…the common folk whisper that it'sherdoing.”

Andthen,he is wise enough to close his treacherous mouth.

My fingers tighten on the throne's armrests, leaving impressions in the metal. My wife—my eternal torment.

Even now, weeks after her disappearance, the sound of her name—spoken or merely thought—sends a jolt through me like lightning. I see her in every shadow, dream of her every night. The memory of her power exploding through the castle that final night still burns behind my eyes.

That a soul in my kingdom might dare to blame her brings a fury upon me so thick I can hardly breathe through it.

"Rumors and peasant superstitions," I say coldly, levelly. I was born to make my way in this chamber, I know. Crafted to keep my temper. Only one could ever make me lose control. "Nothing more."

"With respect," Lord Sturmsen rumbles, his massive frame shifting as he steps forward. “The matter at hand is worth higher regard than mere superstition. My own mages confirm it—there's power in this storm. Old power. The kind that hasn't been seen since the days of the old witches, an ancient power."

Sturmsen is an interesting lord to hear such sentiments from. He’s usually very no-nonsense, an unruffled lord of a strong house with innumerable sons. Only two of the Draconic Houses represented here today did not participate in the rebellion that almost toppled my House and city mere weeks ago; Lords Sturmsen and Caddell are the only two Lords present with the right not to fear for their very lives in this chamber, and they both appear to know it, worlds more relaxed than their fellow leaders.

Favoured or not, I will not allow the sturdy, northerly leader of Fjordmarse to speak ill of my wife.

A muscle ticks in my jaw. "Choose your next words carefully, Sturmsen."

Sturmsen laughs lowly, a rumbling sound, not unkindly and yet clearly without regard for the risk at hand. He does not offer me a response.