Page 17 of Valor’s Flight (The New Protectorate #5)

Chapter Ten

Hours after they came to an understanding in the kitchen, Alashiya sighed, “I hate being behind.”

Stalton had withheld her payment for a month the last time she’d asked for an extension. She couldn’t afford to take that kind of hit again, or worse — risk the atelier cutting ties with her altogether.

Her grove had been doing business with them since her grandparents first came to the UTA. The atelier sold her grove’s work and took a cut for their efforts. Once, their work had been in high demand from many shops and designers, but now the demand for handmade embroidery was much lower.

She was lucky that Stalton still commissioned her, and even luckier that Adon continued to request her work. Alashiya couldn’t risk alienating either of them.

So she worked into the evening, until she was forced to turn on a lamp, and then worked some more, pretending all the while that she wasn’t hyper-aware of the dragon that watched her from the doorway.

The tips of her right thumb and index finger grew red and sore from the constant push and pull of the needle.

Her back ached. Her eyes began to burn from the strain of focusing on such small details for so long.

It wasn’t until the dragon made a low rumbling noise that she realized she was hungry, too. She’d missed dinner again.

Alashiya sat back in her chair with a low groan. Flexing her right hand came with some difficulty. Her muscles were locked in position. Trying to massage some life back into them, she dared to glance at the dragon, whose snout just barely touched the threshold of the door.

“I don’t make for good entertainment,” she dryly noted. “I bet watching me work is a bit like watching paint dry.”

The dragon’s great head tilted. She had no idea if it was an agreement or not.

“I embroider things for a living. Clothing, mostly. My specialty is goldwork — embroidery with threads wrapped in gold wire. My family has been doing it for centuries. I do other things too, but this is what I’m best at.

” She watched the light reflect off the gold the atelier sent with the order slip and the garment, her tired mind caught in a swirling current of memory.

The spirits of her grove, many ancient beyond reckoning and those she’d known in life, twined their stories and their skills into a branching silken thread. It was her duty to guard that thread, to add her own fiber to its length, and to pass it on to another.

And it was the greatest grief of her life to know with perfect certainty that she would fail.

Shaking off the familiar thought, she continued with false cheer, “I learned from my mother’s line.

My father’s people come from the seaside, so they did things differently.

They were famous for their dyes, and were some of the first to make purple.

Our cloth dressed royalty for thousands of years.

” A smile quirked the corner of her mouth when she cast the dragon a look.

“Not everyone comes by it naturally, you know.”

He said nothing, of course, but something in his eyes caught her. They held each other’s stare for what felt like a long time. Too long.

The hook in her chest jerked. She looked away, breathless and alarmed by the near-physical pull that overcame her whenever he was near. Alashiya chalked it up to nerves, but that didn’t make it tolerable.

Flushing, she shook herself. The dragon had no interest in listening to the story of her ancient line, their triumphs and the failures that led to her.

To the end. It was even less likely that he had any desire to hear about her work.

No doubt a dragon lived a far more exciting life than hers.

She lived safely by design, but that didn’t mean it was anything he wanted to hear about.

Gods, she didn’t even want to hear it.

Levering herself up from her chair, she stretched her tired muscles before approaching the doorway. The dragon graciously moved aside as much as he was able, allowing her to enter the kitchen.

The kitchen had been expanded to accommodate her grove, meaning it was far larger than she’d ever needed it to be, but only just big enough to accommodate a huge dragon and herself at the same time.

Trying to cast aside bleak visions of the future, she squeezed around her guest to begin fixing herself a late dinner. “Anyway, I’m behind on a commission. I’ve got to finish that project this week or I’m screwed.”

The dragon’s low rumble made itself known over the sound of sauteing onions.

Alashiya had no hope of figuring out what it meant, so she pretended he’d made a noise of interest and continued her one-sided conversation.

“I’ve never met a dragon before. I bet you have an interesting job.

Everyone around here is either an outdoor recreation guide or a farmer.

The most exciting job I know of is being a ranger, but I wouldn’t want to do that, personally. ”

Chopping up the bounty from her garden using an ancient cleaver and a well-loved butcher block, she wryly added, “Not that they’d want a nymph, of course.

The rangers are almost all shifters — mostly wolves and bears.

A couple of elk. They’re the scariest, I think.

There are some humans, too — arrants and witches both.

They have to be really tough to keep up with all the shifters.

Every once in a while, an orc does a rotation here, but that’s about as exciting as it gets. ”

Alashiya scraped her vegetables into her cast iron pan and gave them a good stir. Wooden spoon in hand, she half-turned to give the dragon a questioning look. “Have you met any nymphs before?”

He lay on the kitchen floor, his chin propped on his forelegs and his gaze locked on her. He blinked slowly before shaking his head.

“Figured as much.” She hid her dismay by quickly turning back around. It wasn’t like she was surprised, but it pained her to think of how few nymphs there were in this part of the world. How disconnected they all were.

Once, they’d all been part of a vast, intimately intertwined network. They’d all been linked by that silken thread. Now they were little islands struggling to survive as time and change eroded the sand beneath their feet.

“We’re very private.” Alashiya’s gaze lowered to the pan.

She cleared her throat. “I wish you could talk. I’d love to hear about dragons.

I’ve embroidered them before, but I’ve embroidered all sorts of things over the years.

I’ve never gotten the chance to meet one before you, and they don’t star in any of the books I inherited from my aunt.

She had a preference for orcs, then gargoyles and harpies. ”

The dragon made a derisive sound deep in his throat. There was no way to know whether she was correct or not, but Alashiya thought he was a little offended.

“Don’t get upset. I don’t have a preference.”

It was true enough. Her image of Adon swung wildly between beings.

Depending on the day, she could imagine him as a gargoyle at breakfast, a merman at lunch — particularly unrealistic, that one — and an arrant by dinnertime.

For dessert, she might picture an elf, just to shake things up a bit.

She knew from his garments that he had wings, but what did that matter when he could be anything in her imagination?

Moving away from the stove, she missed the way the dragon’s violet gaze followed her with rapt attention, his eyes narrowed and nostrils flared.

“I’d love to know what your life is like,” she continued, her focus on whipping up a sauce with yogurt she made from scratch every week and the massive garlic bulb she cut down from a braid hanging in her window.

“I only know what I learned in school, but that was ages ago now. Well, school and what Debbie tells me when she recaps her soap operas. I can’t imagine that’s too reliable, though. ”

Peering over her shoulder, she asked, “Do you all live in skyscrapers?”

The dragon moved slowly across the floor. His great body sprawled until one side pressed against the cabinets by where she stood. A peculiar tingle swept through her when she realized he was trying to get closer to her.

Fortunately for her, a soft rattling noise drew her attention away from the flush in her cheeks and down to his tail, which curved around the edge of the room to lay near her feet.

Resting his chin on his forelegs, the dragon nodded twice.

“Oh, is that a some do, some don’t kind of answer?”

He nodded.

Alashiya concentrated on her sauce as she tried to picture what that would look like. Casting him a quick look, she asked, “Do you?”

She really wasn’t sure how he managed it, but the dragon looked downright haughty when he nodded again. His upper lip curled, too, like he was offended she even had to ask.

“I’ve never seen a skyscraper in person,” she admitted, leaning over him to stir her vegetables and add a splash of olive oil.

“I wonder what it’s like to live so high off the ground.

” She flashed him an embarrassed smile. “But you can fly, so I guess it all seems really second nature to you, doesn’t it? ”

The dragon said nothing, of course. He watched her silently, his great body occasionally wracked with tremors.

The bandages she’d painstakingly reapplied stood out starkly against his dark skin.

It was really difficult to remain wary of him when he was sprawled on her kitchen floor like that, but his expression was hard to decipher.

She really couldn’t tell if her chatter was annoying him or not.