Page 59 of The Dragon Queen Complete Series Collection
Chapter 59
"Ah, Flynn!” The duke seemed to be in a fine mood when he turned around to greet the three of us, and he and his party all smiled when they saw Glimmer. “And the lovely Lady Pippa and her dragon. Let me present Lady Pippa Wentworth. This is the Duke of Tharfield and his lady wife, Duchess Eleanor.”
I dropped down into a curtsey, the movement both well practised and yet strange to me now.
“Your Grace.”
“Your Majesty,” the Duke of Tharfield said, performing a bow that had my eyebrows shooting up.
“Oh, I’m not—” I started to say.
“This is the proper address for a queen, is it not?” Tharfield’s attention was directed at Glimmer, not me, and I felt a flush of relief. Glimmer inclined her head gracefully, something that had all those in attendance cooing in delight. “One of my second cousins is a rider. His name is Leonard. Do you know him?”
“No, Your Grace,” I replied. “Though I admit, I am still finding my feet in the keep.”
“As I would imagine.” The Duchess’ voice was arch. “However do you cope, being the only woman in amongst all those men?”
“Not the only woman,” a female friend of hers said. “There’s all the serving women there that… see to the men’s needs. They just reach for one like another man might a tankard of ale, don’t they?”
Before I got a chance to reply, Eleanor spoke up.
“Flynn, you’ll need to make the necessary adjustments now you’re to be married.” She tapped her son on his nose with her closed fan. “No son of mine will disgrace their lady wife so.”
Son… wife… tankard of ale… I struggled to process the words, the whole room feeling too big and too small all at the same time.
“Flynn…?” I started to ask a question, but there were so many things that needed answering, I couldn’t seem to finish the sentence. Was this what he’d sent the messenger for? Was this what he had planned all along? I’d told him about the situation, thinking he could help but–
“Mother, I have yet to put my offer to Lady Pippa.” The look he shot me was rueful, but he charged on. “There were some details I wanted to hammer out with Father first.”
Flynn’s voice was little more than a growl, but Eleanor was not to be dissuaded.
“Details are for after an engagement,” she chided. “You need to move quickly, son. Lady Pippa is generating quite a lot of attention.”
Which brought my focus back to the room, and that wasn’t a pleasant thing.
At first it was just those in our immediate group, staring openly at me, eyes wide, or narrowed down in the way a woman’s are when watching the butcher put his thumb on the scale. They seemed to assess me like one would a side of beef and with about the same degree of respect. But as I looked further out into the room, I saw that Eleanor was right. People stared openly, even pointed.
“Father?”
Flynn’s voice conveyed a barely contained urgency.
“You’ll excuse me,” the duke told the others, though it felt like his eyes lingered the longest on the Duke of Tharfield. The man nodded. “I need to counsel the soon to be affianced.”
“Father, what the hell are you playing at?” Flynn hissed when we walked out onto a darkened balcony. “This is not what I had planned!”
“No, but it’s what I see is needed.” The duke turned towards me, his social mask dropped now and I was met by the cool, calculating eyes of a man of power and influence. Things he was going to try and increase. “Every time a queen dragon is born, each duchy provides a selection of girls who might become her bond mate. It’s a lottery of sorts, the future of our country decided by such a curious creature.”
Someone is a curious creature, and it’s not me , Glimmer retorted.
“One Harlston queen is expected, two a lucky accident, but three consecutively?” His eyes narrowed then. “We all had our suspicions, ones that sharpened when a Skanian noblewoman bonds with Zafira’s daughter and is somehow deemed inadequate.” The duke’s lip curled then. “The king does nothing, seeming too preoccupied with hunting and whoring to worry about running the country and who steps in to fill that gap? Raina.”
Not Queen Raina. Not Her Majesty, just Raina. I shot a look behind me, instinctively wary of someone overhearing this entirely treasonous conversation.
“Raina who seeks to control you even now, directing who you’ll marry, ensuring all of the queen dragons remain within her family’s control.” I knew all of this, the duke reciting back something I’d already experienced and yet my muscles grew tense as a result. “Brom is a good man, his father one of the more moderate forces within the Harlston throng, but that voice of reason is frequently drowned out, and why wouldn’t he be?”
The duke took in one long shuddering breath, then another.
“They’ve found the means to fix the lottery, skew the results ever in their favour, and when will that stop?” The duke’s eyes bore into mine, demanding an answer, but we both knew what it would be. “They have discovered the means to usurp the whole system of matching dragons to their proper bondmates, and instead ensure all of them become Harlston beasts. The Nithian dynasty is waning and there will be a Harlston king on the throne before I’m on my deathbed. Perhaps even earlier.”
Which, of course, led to the question of Draven. Would he be the king his father raised him to be or a puppet of his mother and his powerful uncle, the Duke of Harlston?
And that’s when I realised this question had been asked before by more influential people than me, and not just about Draven.
“Prince Felix…” Flynn frowned as I breathed out the dead crown prince’s name.
“Felix was a good man,” the duke said. “He was aware of my… concerns and swore he would address them when he became king.”
“That’s why he died. He didn’t want to continue putting Harlston’s interests first.” I sucked in a breath, then another, looking back at the packed ballroom, searching for sight of the current Crown Prince amongst the throng. “And Draven will go the same way if he refuses to toe the line, or worse…” I jerked my eyes back to meet Flynn’s. “Did you tell your father, how she’s controlling people? About the stones?”
“Stones?”
I had every iota of the duke’s attention right now and some of Flynn’s frustration. He’d held the information back and probably for good reason, but…
Glimmer, what are those stones?
Why the hell hadn’t I asked that before? Maybe because she’d been little more than a squalling baby before we went to the ruin and found the crystal egg, it hadn’t occurred to me that she might know.
Dragonstone , she replied. Where all our memories, all of our knowledge go.
So why can the queen use it to control others, control you?
It takes the memories of the dead, preserves them for future generations. We are hatched in nests made of them, the knowledge of our kind passed on while we are still in the egg. When we hatch, we are not like the mindless creature I was when I broke out of the shell. As all of the dragons in the keep were. Humans took our stones because they had no other means to fight us. We could scorch them, freeze them, melt the flesh from their bones, but they…
I saw in my mind’s eye a vision of a bedraggled looking woman holding up a chunk of gleaming moonstone in her hand as a dragon approached, jaws open, wings outstretched. But as she screwed her eyes tight, the beast stopped. I watched the golden queen’s muzzle snap shut, her wings pulling tight against her body. The woman’s eyes opened so she caught the moment the queen’s nostrils flared, taking a long whiff of her.
When you broke me out of my shell, I was your child, your heart. Glimmer’s voice contained real pain there, an emotion that had my hand clawing at my chest as I twisted my head to meet her eyes. Humans use that moment of vulnerability to pour into us, just as the stones would if we were born wild. Your feelings, your hopes and desires. Your role for us. Mount, weapon, power base. I was conscious of that somehow, where the others aren’t. That’s why I chose you, why I’ll always choose you, Pippin. You don’t seek to rule me, to tame me, to force me to ignore my fundamental instincts. We walk together in this world as two queens, not as a queen and her servant.
It was that, her belief in me, that had me unfastening my necklace and holding it out to the duke, because if anything should happen to me, someone needed to know what the queen was doing. Someone powerful.
“This is dragonstone,” I said, pointing to the stone in the pendant. “It’s a means to control dragons and…” I blinked, remembering the look of the king on the throne, of the gaps in Flynn’s and Ged’s memory, “people too.”
I stared back at the dancers, seeing them move around in their carefully orchestrated steps and I felt like I was only now able to see the pattern within them.
“The queen is planning something tonight. I don’t know what, but… it’s as you say. She wants to maintain the Harlston dominance and she’ll do anything to make that happen.”
“Then you’ll marry Flynn.” The duke’s voice was full of command. “Skane is the strongest opponent Harlston has, and Tharfield will stand with us in any conflict. Cantlyn is sure to follow suit if you tell the duke what you told me…”
His reasoning spilled out, all of these plans he had no doubt been concocting for some time. Perhaps he thought he had hidden them well, but did anyone really do so? If I had put two and two together, then… Draven’s eyes met mine, the beautiful woman at his side continuing to stare up at him as she carried the conversation on her own.
“Excuse me, Your Grace,” I said and turned on my heel, striding back into the throng.