Page 3 of The Dragon Queen Complete Series Collection
Chapter 3
“Where the hell have you been?”
Some lads from the estate, who must have been recent employees because I didn’t know them, were standing around the pig pen gates when I arrived back at Old Bay’s hut. I had some sympathy for their harried demeanour, knowing the mistresses they had to serve.
“We need five of the beasts,” one snapped, “and probably more later. We have to feed the riders and their dragons too. Well?” He clicked his fingers in front of my face when I didn’t reply fast enough, then smiled before turning to the other men with him. “Looks like she’s just as stupid as they say.”
“Stupid, maybe…” another said, taking a long look at me. “Bloody tall, too, but she’s clean.” This one was a big burly lad with the kind of piggish features that meant he would have been more at home on the other side of the fence. His eyes slid to his two friends. “I wasn’t expecting that.”
His tone, the way the three of them clustered together in a way I knew all too well, it had my muscles turning to iron, my body tensing in readiness. Their smiles spread as they watched me edge away.
I’d known intellectually that some people are prey and some are predators back when I was Lady Pippa, but that reality hadn’t been rammed home until I was tossed out of my family home. Old Bay, too far gone to the ravages of age to have designs on me, had informed me of the dangers of the young men of the village, teaching me how to wield his blackthorn walking stick. But right now I didn’t bother with that. I threw it and myself over the pen fence as the lads advanced, landing with a splash in the foetid mud, something that made me wince. But the impact on those likely lads? They stopped in their advance, wrinkling their nose at the smell, but it was more than that giving them pause.
Pigs are startlingly intelligent creatures. So much so, it’s probably a minor crime against nature that we slaughter them for their meat. The big sows lumbered to their feet at the disturbance to their haven, then snuffled around me without any concern. Because I was the provider, of water, of acorns and other scraps I could source. Because I made sure they had plentiful mud to wallow in within their pens. But these lads…? The sows’ eyes swivelled around to fix on the boys, the intensity of their collective porcine gaze making each one of the trio reconsider whatever plan they had been formulating.
“She’s not worth it, mates,” the leader said.
“No?” I replied, then tipped my head to the far pen where some of the bigger pigs were locked up. “The pigs you want are over there, ready for you to take back to the estate.” The lads turned to warily eye the big sows pressing against the far enclosure. “Better get going, or her ladyship will not be pleased.”
“But how do we…?” one of them began to say when the leader cuffed the back of his head, before turning back to me.
“If we don’t get them back to the estate, Miss Arabella will go wild,” he tried to reason with me. “Wants everything to be perfect for those dragon riders, she does.”
“And I’ve been told I’ll be shot on sight if I set foot on estate grounds,” I replied. “The preparations won’t be perfect then, not with me present, so…”
I let the silence settle, watched for the moment when the men realised what a fool’s errand they’d been sent on. The pigs began to grunt and squeal as the three of them moved closer, the leader daring to put his hand on the gate. I didn’t wait to see if they opened it or were successful herding the beasts. I already knew they wouldn’t be.
Instead, I sneaked out of the pen I had sought refuge in, opened the front door of my hut and stepped inside, slamming the door behind me as I heard the pigs’ squeals get louder. I unhooked the supply bag from the ceiling and retrieved the bread and butter, my hands shaking with reaction from the confrontation as I spread a thin layer across the first slice, then brought it to my lips. My eyes closed, a small hum of pleasure escaping me as I heard the squeals get more and more piercing, then end abruptly as shouts and cursing faded off into the distance. I forced myself to chew the bread, savour that soft freshness, utterly alien in comparison to the unleavened blackened loaves I was forced to make when I had flour. I settled down into Old Bay’s chair and stirred the embers of the fire to life, placing a couple of pieces of wood on to burn, seeing golden eyes, feeling that warm, observant presence in my mind as I did so.
That night I dreamed of dragons.
I walked into a darkened room towards a golden casket. When I came to the edge of the table the casket was sitting on, I saw the interior was padded with folds of thick, grey flecked fur within which was nestled a dragon’s egg. My hand moved of its own accord, reaching into the gilt box to cup the side of the scaled egg with my palm, my eyes following the iridescent glow of each ridge on the egg. A glow that seemed to grow and grow, just like in the tales of the heroines of old.
Young women would be dreaming the same thing all across Nevermere at the news of a queen search, because the girl who laid her hand on the tough queen egg…? Queen-in-waiting, that’s what she’d be if a girl could make the egg flare to life. A young queen dragon lay within the hard shell, slumbering on until she was wakened, something she would only do in the presence of her bonded rider. But this wasn’t a dream of power, one where I was raised from the mud to the dragon throne of Nevermere. No, I didn’t think of that at all.
In my dream I could feel what she felt, shifting restlessly in the cramped hard shell, ready, needing to get out. Everywhere she shifted she was kept pinned in tight and, no matter how hard she struggled, she couldn’t get free. She was trapped, a sensation I knew all too well, but somehow far worse when I experienced it now. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be, I could feel that. Our body was designed to grow, to eat and to rend flesh from bones, to flap our wings and…
Did they know the queens suffered inside their eggs? I thought, tears pricking my eyes in my sleep as well as in my dream. Did they feel her pain? She needed out, I could feel that beating so furiously, my own desperation to get clear of the horrors of Deepacre twining with hers. I reached in then, picking up the egg, shocked somewhat by the heavy weight of it. I pulled it to my chest, the egg getting warmer and warmer with every minute, and then I cradled it into my arms. That need to free her, it burned inside me, brighter, harder than the heat flaring within the egg, until the physical matched the emotional.
I wouldn’t have cradled a hot coal to my chest, but I did just that in the form of this egg. It pulsed now, faster and faster, the light inside it reflecting her struggles. I tried to claw at the rigid shell, hoping to break the bloody thing free, but my fingers raked across it hopelessly. I could feel her thrashing, her snout pressing against the shell, her tiny claws seeking a point of weakness, something, anything, to let her be free.
And that’s when she gave up.
You see, she’d been here before. I saw, felt all the times she’d tried and all the times she’d failed. She’d felt the consciousness of those who might free her touching hers, but then…. Then they’d faded away, leaving her still stuck in the dark. Or worse. She’d feel their consciousness crushing down upon her, trying to force her to… My connection with the tiny presence seemed to fall away too, almost as if she consciously withdrew it now, rather than wait passively to be disappointed again.
No. My thought seemed to have all the weight, all of the import of a spoken word, reverberating out through me, through her egg. No, no. No!
As was so often the case in my dreams now, I was powerless, only able to watch what happened to me, never able to actually direct what my body did, so all I could do was bite back a scream, the sound curdling in my chest as the rage inside my body flared hotter. I watched my arms rise, the golden egg going with them, up, up. My lips moved in real life at that, begging, pleading with dream me to stop, to not do what I was about to. The little consciousness fluttered, the little body scrabbling against the impervious egg, sensing danger but helpless to do anything about it, right up until the egg hit the marble floor.
That gods-awful crack, that’s what woke me. Well, that, and the increasing clamour of the pigs. Someone was here again, outside the hut, and that had my eyes flicking open in one moment, my hand reaching for the blackthorn stick in the next. But as I swung the hut door open, leaving the smoky warmth behind for the biting cold of the early hours of the morning, and ready to defend myself, I saw a familiar figure.
“Nadia?”
“Milady…”