Page 104 of The Dragon Queen Complete Series Collection
Chapter 103
“Well, well, I had expected to see the three of you at some point,” Draven said, flopping down onto the very nice bed he’d been given and looking up at us with a smirk. “But not so soon. Missed me?”
This one is very annoying , Glimmer informed me before stalking over to where Darkspire lay in the corner of the prince’s room. As she clambered up his side, the big dragon opened one eye to watch her find a spot and settle, before closing it again.
We think so too , I replied to her.
“I don’t think we’ve had anywhere near long enough of an absence to feel anything like that,” Brom said, but Draven’s focus was on Brom’s body language, not his words. The prince watched the wing commander wrap his arm around my waist, tucking me into his side. “We’re here to talk about your mother.” Any scrap of amusement Draven might have been feeling was wiped from his expression. “And what she’s doing to the cadets.”
“They were bruised, chastened, when I saw them,” Draven said, swinging his legs over the side of the bed and sitting with his elbows resting on his knees, a look of concern on his face. “But in one piece. They need to be to ensure my compliance.”
“We went to see the nest of an ancient dragon today,” Brom said.
“Tanis?” Draven asked. We nodded. “Well, things have escalated if they let you in there.”
“She showed us…” I went to explain what I’d seen but then my eyes narrowed as I stared at the Nithian prince. Whose side was he actually on? Ours, his father’s, his mother’s or just his? The latter I decided. “… a lot,” I finished lamely. “But we did see her with Lance and Jenkins.”
“Doing what?” When that damn smirk was wiped away, like now, he became just Draven. A rather desperate Draven. “What the hell is she doing now?”
“Does your mother have any unsavoury habits?” Brom asked. “Beyond killing young dragon queens that prove themselves to be inconvenient.”
“And murdering my brother, her elder son,” Draven replied with a growl. “You forgot that. But you’re asking about the dungeons.” Those blue eyes seemed to bore into my face. “That’s what you saw.”
“Her, the cadets and a sharp knife,” I said. “No more than that. The boys though…” I sucked in a breath. Their stricken faces were clearly etched in my brain. “They looked hurt beyond what you described.”
“Fuck!” Draven leapt to his feet and then paced across the floor, his boots making sharp clicking sounds with each step. “She’s like a damn child pulling the wings off butterflies, with just as much thought about what she’s doing. I thought…” He let out a sharp huff of breath. “I need to go back, now.” He walked towards the door of the room but, when he opened it, a dark blue dragon looked up slowly from where he was stationed across the entryway. “Tell them to let me go, Brom,” Draven ordered. “I can get into the castle?—”
“And?” Brom stood tall, his attitude, his bearing formal now. “What’s the plan, my prince?”
Draven stopped. Brom’s use of his title prompted him to remember who and what he was. The man blinked, then nodded, walking over to the small table in the room and drew out a chair for each of us and indicating for us to sit down as he did so himself. His steepled his hands in front of his face as he stared at the tabletop.
“If we can get the lads out of the dungeons and back to the keep, what’s to stop her from strolling back in again and taking them or just killing them outright?” Draven seemed to be talking to himself rather than to us. I yanked one of my knives free to fiddle with it in the nervous habit I seemed to have picked up. After a few moments I slammed it down into the table in frustration. The blade quivered with the effort and the stones in the hilt? They shone almost as bright as they had in Tanis’ nest. I looked at them, then up at the other two. “The stones…”
“Could we beg the dragon enclave for a more powerful stone?” Brom asked. “They all seem to differ in strength, in capability. If we had more time?—”
“We’d learn to wield them?” Draven snorted. “Unlikely. The dragons don’t want to put a powerful psychic amplifier in the hands of a human. Every single dragonstone you’ve seen since coming here, with the exception of those in Tanis’ lair, are the weaker kind which will only store a day or two’s memories, do little other than soothe the dragons who lay upon them. But…”
“But what?” Brom asked, leaning closer when Draven didn’t answer. “But what?”
“The use of the stones must’ve been widespread at some point, no doubt during the reign of the queens.” Draven’s focus flicked between me and Brom. “My mother somehow stumbled upon it, sorting through my father’s treasure chambers. Or perhaps my grandmother before her? She may have passed the secret on to my mother and…”
He let out a hiss of breath before turning to Darkspire.
“Lad, do you feel the strength of the different stones?”
The prince waited for his dragon to answer, but as we stared at ‘Spire I saw Glimmer open one eye.
“The stones don’t matter.”
“What?” the two men said.
“The stones don’t matter,” I said again, then shifted my focus to Draven. “If she was so powerful or proficient with them that she could do anything she wanted, Glimmer and I would be dead by now, with no one left alive who remembered us. Remember: the queen had to wait until Zafira rose to mate to be powerful enough to attempt that, using her dragon’s innate psychic powers to augment her dragonstone, and Zafira won’t rise again for some time.”
My words felt like ashes in my mouth as I realised why those cadets were in the dungeon.
Because the one the queen really wanted was out of her reach.
“Raina took Lance and the other cadets because she needed hostages to ensure you did what she wanted, but she didn’t need them before. Because we…” I stared at the prince, remembering his heated words, then repeating them back to him. “What I’ve wanted was always far grander than that. Everything and every person who is mine.” Brom flushed at that. “When the wing was in the keep, she had something to hold over your head. If I’m there, she’ll have something to redirect her murderous impulses towards.”
“Pippin, no.” Brom’s voice was hushed, urgent in tone. “You’ll stay here. You have to stay here. If you return, she’ll kill you?—”
“Who are you willing to sacrifice for me?” I asked, saying cold, cruel things like I was discussing the weather.
“No one, but?—”
“If I don’t return, if I don’t present myself at every court event riders are required to participate in, if I don’t put myself forward, reminding her of the obstacle I pose, she will find other victims, easier ones to kill. I’ll have those deaths on my conscience.”
“Pippin, you?—”
Brom moved forward, putting his hands on my shoulders as he spoke in a low, intimate tone, trying to urge me to see sense. And I wanted to fall into that, into his embrace, his protection, to spend my days in beautiful Dragon Home discovering each one of its secrets until he returned to me with the boys and their dragons in tow.
But then other lads would disappear and more after them.
I squared my shoulders as I stepped away from Brom, unwilling to feel his fingers leave my skin, but doing it anyway.
“I need to talk to Draven,” I told Brom and he just shook his head. “Alone.”
“No. No, Pippin, you?—”
“I’m not asking, Brom.” I hated the way he looked, as if I’d slapped him across his face, red spots forming in his cheeks, his eyes going wide. His look of pain only increased when Draven sidled closer, taking me in his arms.
The feel of the prince’s chest against my back, his face resting against my short hair was a strange kind of intimacy, but it seemed to do the job. Brom shook his head again, stepping away from the two of us as if we had betrayed him.
“You won’t do this.” Brom spoke over my head, stabbing the air with his finger. “If you have any love for me, you’ll keep Pippin out of all of this.”
“You brought Pippin into all of this the minute you all decided you cared for her.” Draven’s arms cradled my body as if in some mimicry of real affection, rocking me against him. “If she was just some little nobody, ignored by the rider corps, her dragon left to limp along, little more than a pathetic mascot, the two of them might’ve had a chance of surviving in the way you hoped. But you didn’t. And queens don’t tolerate other queens in their territory.”
“Then it will be Pippin who is made queen of all of Nevermere, not your mother,” Brom declared and I felt Draven stiffen. “Think about that as the two of you talk.” I blinked when Brom’s eyes dropped to meet mine, the sort of passion burning there I’d never expected to see. “You’ll talk to me afterwards about whatever you discuss,” he demanded. “Promise me that, Pippin.”
I stared at him, and I realised Glimmer was too. I felt like I was channelling her queenly attitude as I looked at him. Because while he might blithely put me forward as an alternative queen to Raina, if I accepted that role there would be many more decisions made without his approval. Brom seemed to get a sense of this, his lips thinning as he shook his head in resignation at Draven and I.
“I’ll leave you to it then.”
“So it seems that both of us are determined to break Brom’s heart today.”
I’d expected Draven to move away the moment my husband left the room. But even when Brom slammed the door shut behind him, the prince’s arms continued to rub up and down my arms, only the leather of the armour muffling that intimate gesture. But of course he pulled away: how else was he going to treat me to the sight of his ever present smirk if he didn’t?
“You asked to speak to me alone, leaving your husband out of a conversation he would dearly like to be a part of.” The prince stared at me meaningfully and I knew exactly what he was getting at. It was just like he and Brom had done to me.
“Because you’re the only one who doesn’t care at all for me,” I replied. “It means nothing to you whether or not I live or die.”
He snorted at that, shaking his head before gesturing. “Go on.”
“We need to stop reacting to what your mother is doing. Instead we need to draw her out, make her think she’s going to succeed in killing me. And she can only do that when I’m in the capital,” I said, remembering, then feeling, the intensity of the vision I’d had of the two queen dragons. “We need to force her to make a mistake, one that can be used against her to turn the people and your father against her.”
I thought of Arabella and Cecily and their increasingly reckless cruelties.
“I’ll keep a low profile.” I swallowed as I considered what I was about to suggest. “I’ll play the perfect prey. She’ll think it just dumb luck that keeps me dodging her attempts. That’ll feed her arrogance and force her to be more and more reckless. Then…”
We stared at each other, as if trying to imagine the potential outcome of my plan. I shivered, because, instead, the vision I’d had reappeared in my mind: the nesting queen dragon snapping her jaws around the neck of the invading one and tearing it out, the blood joining that of the crushed hatchlings.
“You’ve got it all worked out, have you?” I came back to the here and now at the sound of Draven’s voice, a silken rope winding tighter around my wrists. “You brought this plan to me because you knew your men would reject it outright. They wouldn’t be able to countenance the idea of you being in danger. But me …? I could. Is that what you think?”
“What does it matter to you if I live or die?” I asked, my eyes narrowing. “You let those attacks on me take place. You want?—”
“Gods, woman…” The growl came from deep in his chest. Then he strode closer, matching my steps when I backed away. He caught me by the shoulders to stop me from retreating, then I felt his hands move up to grip my throat. No, not my throat, my jaw. His hands gentled as he cupped either side of my face, tilting my head back slightly so my eyes met his. “Don’t tell me what I want, because you have no idea what hell I’ve been living in.”
Glimmer’s low hum began, buzzing, buzzing in my ears, as the prince stared into my eyes. I couldn’t look away, caught in his blue gaze. My pulse quickened, my breathing became shallow, faster, and I lost track of time, my only points of reference his touch, his eyes and the humming that reverberated through me. When he spoke again, his voice was level, quiet, but with an edge of disbelief.
“You think you know me. That you can come to me with this ridiculous, self-sacrificing plan and I’ll just go along with it.” He shook his head at me, not unlike the way Brom had done earlier.
I wanted to reply, but coherent thought seemed beyond me. His thumb moved to brush against the seam of my mouth, and my lips parted. Draven took that as ground surrendered, and pressed his thumb between them.
“I brought you here for a reason, Pippin: to keep you safe.” This was the voice he’d used when I was sick, the soft, intent tone having a much stronger impact now that I was fully conscious. “And why here? Because all of my attempts to stop the queen getting to you in the capital, or in Harlston, have failed so fucking miserably. Mother and her cronies managed to find increasingly baroque ways to come for you, and I had no hope of anticipating them.” He paused for a moment. “Pippin, you and Glimmer must live.” He leaned in and bent his head closer to mine. I was mesmerised by his touch, his intent blue gaze. “Because I couldn’t fucking bear it if you didn’t.”