Page 24 of The Dragon Queen Complete Series Collection
Chapter 24
“Mother, I think I’d be best placed to tell—” Draven said, stepping forward again, his tone and the speed with which he spoke the words betraying his urgency. His mother held up a hand.
“I can’t see why you would be. You weren’t there. You were here. Girl, bring the dragon forward.”
“Lady Pippa,” the king corrected in a bored voice.
“Lady Pippa.” The queen’s full lips thinned down into a line, her eyes flashing as she looked at me, angry already and I’d barely said a word. “Bring your dragon over here for me to inspect. She is my dragon’s only daughter.”
“Of course, Your Majesty.”
Glimmer let out a curious little warble as I drew her down from my shoulder and then carried her up the stairs to the queen’s dais, stopping on the step before her throne. I dropped down onto one knee and then offered the dragon out like she was a fish at the market. Glimmer squirmed, then thrashed, sending me waves of discomfort, then displeasure, as the queen leaned forward and then peered at her more closely.
My heart was in my throat, despite the fact I knew how this worked. Dragons belonged to the crown. Riders belonged to the dragons and therefore were the crown’s to use as they saw fit. But I didn’t see Glimmer as their property. Not when those fine blue eyes narrowed as she inspected the wriggling dragon, a sharp hiss from her forcing Glimmer to still. My dragon peered up at the queen, one monarch to another, a growing sense of disquiet rising in the two of us as the queen’s mouth screwed up.
“And how was she born? I admit, I find it passing strange that some girl from the hinterlands would bind the queen dragon to her when all of the more suitable candidates were passed over.” The queen waved her hand, dismissing Glimmer, who I gladly returned to my shoulder, even if I felt there was a slight in the gesture that allowed it. “Well?”
“Your Majesty, it’s quite the tale,” I began.
“Tell it in as few words as possible. This is no chat in the marketplace about the coming harvest,” she instructed.
Some sixth sense had me turning around, catching Draven staring at me with all of the considerable intensity he could muster, as if that might communicate something meaningful. But it didn’t.
I turned back to the queen and then nodded.
“I was the sole heir to my father’s estate, but was driven from it by an unscrupulous stepmother. The riders helped me to correct the situation and during the trial, the egg started to hatch.”
The queen’s eyes widened, a terrible light burning there.
“My stepsister threw herself at the egg, thinking it was responding to her. Her ambition knew no bounds…” The queen’s glare had me rushing on. “She tossed the egg to the floor when it was clear it wasn’t her that caused the response and I leapt forward, catching it before it hit the ground.” I looked down at Glimmer, her golden eyes shining as she met my gaze. “And that’s when she broke out of her shell.”
We had a tiny little moment, where there was just Glimmer and just me. My dragon’s love, it washed over me, driving everything out of me but an answering feeling that was of an intensity that took my breath away. I loved the little dragon to distraction, felt her fill my whole heart, and I knew she felt the same toward me.
“Broke out?” The queen’s words cracked through the fragile shell of what we’d just been experiencing, thrusting reality at us. “Or was it cracked in the fall?”
“What are you about, Raina?” Magnus asked, straightening up in his throne.
“Her egg was small when she was hatched and she’s not grown much in the time she’s been free of her shell. This and the fact she didn’t bond with any of the candidates in the city.” The queen looked over at her husband with a hard glance. “We discussed what this might mean.”
“If the egg didn’t hatch and she didn’t bond with anyone,” Magnus said in a dark tone. “The dragon has done both.”
“But how did she do so?” Raina pushed on. “Did she fight her way free of the shell, as all fit and strong dragons do? Or was she broken free by the selfish scrabblings of two ambitious young girls, seeking to rise above their station?”
So many breaths got sucked in at that, but none more than mine. When I did so, it felt like I’d drawn in a gasp of smoke-filled air, or the icy cold of a midwinter blast. My lungs fought to inflate, fought to keep pumping air in and out as I heard the queen keep talking, delivering a life sentence seemingly with as much care or concern as one might order their breakfast.
“The queen-in-waiting is heir to the throne at our son’s side, his fit and true mate. Darkspire is a massive, strong beast, as a Nithe dragon should be. You would want him mated to… this?”
Magnus seemed to see us for the first time, his brown eyes thoughtful as he took both me and the dragon in.
“What’re you proposing, Raina?”
“As I did before, if the riders returned empty-handed.”
“But this is a live dragon, not a half dead dragonling, stuck in the shell. To execute such a thing?—”
“With all due respect, Majesties…” When I looked around, Brom blinked, as if wondering how he’d found himself in this position, seeming as though he felt that his lips had moved without his permission. He swallowed hard when he realised he had the attention of the very people he had addressed. “The dragons have already bonded with Glimmer. Any attempt to… put her down would be taken very badly by them.”
Put. Her. Down.
Each word seemed to reverberate around in my head, echoing, echoing as if it got bigger and more distorted with each time I heard it. I praised the gods that I was still on one knee before the queen’s throne, or else I would have fallen to my knees in shock. Glimmer let out a piercing little screech, something that drew a censorious look from Raina, but I just held her close, so close, because I was remembering the last time I’d been through this.
Poor little Lassie. I’d heard her yelps from down the hall and had marched into Arabella’s room, not caring for all the insistences her mother always made that I needed to knock and ask permission to enter another lady’s room. And there I’d found a red-faced, demonic Arabella and the helpless little dog on the floor beneath her, whining in pain as the wench went back for another kick.
“Arabella!”
All of my pain, my frustration, my outrage had gone into my voice as I grabbed her arm, then wrenched her away from the defenceless little dog. She’d turned on me, more of an animal than the dog herself, forcing me to give her a good shake when her teeth gnashed at me.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
She’d explained in some garbled screech of a justification that was, as always, just a self-serving screed of stupidity. I hadn’t bothered to listen to all of it, walking over and scooping poor little Lassie up in my arms.
When she bit me, that’s what had let me know how bad it was. Lassie was soft. Soft temperament, soft fur, liquid brown eyes that stared, waiting for some attention, a gentle caress. She looked at me now with those same brown eyes, almost apologising for sinking her fangs into me.
Glimmer’s eyes weren’t so soft when I stared into hers. They bristled with life, with emerging intelligence, an awareness that was starting to put two and two together as she stared back at me. Then her focus shifted to the king and queen, a vicious hiss escaping her as her body bunched up in my arms, her tail lashing.
“I can return home,” I babbled out. “I can go home and take Glimmer with me. You said it yourself. I live in the middle of nowhere. No one need know. She’ll live out her days on my land and?—”
“And the next ambitious lord seeking to make a play for the throne would have you taken for wife and your dragon as part of your dowry.” Raina bit off every word. “Your Majesty.”
“Your Majesty, I’m so sorry?—”
“The girl can’t go home,” Magnus said with a wave of his hand. “But you can’t execute the dragon. It’ll be terrible for morale. Even you would have difficulties convincing Zafira that her daughter should be executed for her size.”
Raina shifted on her throne, her brows arching, like she was itching to reply, but aware that protocol dictated she shouldn’t.
“You’ll need to get Zafira onside anyway, if she’s to rise to mate again and produce another daughter,” he continued. “Sorry, Lady Pippin, but you will not be taking the title of queen-in-waiting.”
“Of course, Your Majesty,” I said, a perfect picture of compliance, because gratitude can look like that if it needs to.
“But what will we do with you ?” he asked my dragon.
Glimmer let out a little squawk of warning, but it came too late as the queen leant forward. But she wasn’t reaching out for my dragon. Rather, the terrible wig was pulled off by a triumphant Raina. She stood there with the bedraggled thing hanging from her fingertips, my scalp feeling already lighter and cooler for its removal.
“She looks like one of the boys,” she said, considering, with a cruel smile I recognised all too well. Cecily had done the same before she banished me. “I have a solution. Put her among the new recruits. If she wishes to remain with her dragon, she can become a dragon rider with all of the other cadets.”
It felt like time stood still then, blood pumping in my ears. I was glad, glad for the option, no matter what the queen thought about it. This was a way forward, a way to keep Glimmer alive. There wasn’t much I wouldn’t do to achieve that.
“A noblewoman in a keep full of dragon riders?” the king said, wrinkling his nose. “No, that won’t work. She’s not like the slatterns we send there to feed and fuck the lads. I’d have to answer to her father, or her uncles.”
“I’ve got no such relatives,” I said, “Your Majesty.” I raked my fingers across my stubbled scalp. “I agree with the queen. I think this is the only way forward, and it's a sacrifice I’m willing to make for the betterment of the realm.”
You’d have thought I had dropped my trousers and bared my bottom, paddling it like the players when they brought their troupe to town, at the reactions of the courtiers. They all stared at me with utter fascination or horror, or a bit of both. Except for two people. Raina’s eyebrow cocked upwards, her gaze searching, as if looking for something, anything, to clue her into why I would so readily accept this sentence.
And then there was Draven.
He stared at me without blinking, his eyes just as inquisitive, but what he looked for, I had no idea. It didn’t stop him from staring, though, not while his mother threw further support behind the idea, nor while Magnus and Brom hammered out the details.
“Gods above, lass, you’ve got some fucking balls on you,” Ged hissed as we stalked out of the throne room, leaving Draven behind, now sans fiancée.
“She’s going to need some.” Flynn shook his head. “You’ve just opted to bunk in with hundreds of men. Men who like to fight hard, play hard and fu?—”
“She knows what she’s getting herself into,” Brom snapped. “Sort of.” He turned his head to me, his steps getting longer and longer. “You’ll need to bunk in with us. Usually a lad of your age and their dragon would be in the general barracks.”
“She’s not doing that,” Soren growled. “And if she’s going through basic training, she’ll do so with my lads so I can keep an eye on her.”
“Thank you, really.” I said, stopping mid-way down the huge corridor that led out of the palace. “But you’ll not be able to protect me the whole time. No one can. I’ll accept all of your offers of help, but…”
I saw those boys and their menacing progress towards me in the moonlight, their shapes growing longer and more terrifying in the darkness.
“What I really need is a gutting knife.” They all stopped and clustered closer to me, creating a wall of muscle that had Glimmer keening. “And some lessons on how to use it properly.”
“You’ll get it, lass,” Ged said, clapping his hand down on my shoulder. “Whatever you need.”