A Shade of Dragon 2(11)

I’d been suspicious at her confession of loneliness, but now her candor confirmed it. She, too, was drunk. She just handled her liquor better than Einhen and Khem. I had already answered this question and told her that the oracle had forced me to bring her.

“Well, as I said before, Lady Ballinger,” I said, reaching forward and taking the dark bottle from her grip, “I was forced by a third party.”

Michelle’s eyebrows popped up into her hair. “Really? Who would ever care so much?”

I sighed.

“An agent of destiny, or so she claimed. However, I hold fast to doubt. Her name was Pythia—she lived in the caves—and she prophesied that the mate I had found and sworn to love was grasped blindly, and wrongly.”

“Reeeally.” Michelle settled back to survey me with an impish realization. “You’re talking about Nell, aren’t you? She said Nell was wrong for you.”

I grimaced and met her eyes. “She claimed that Penelope was not the universe’s selection of my mate.”

“So, as, like, punishment, you had to bring me?” For a moment, Michelle just scoffed. But then the expression lifted away from her face, and wonderment transformed her into a real beauty. “She said it was me,” she breathed. “She said I was the one you were meant to be with.”

“With whom I was meant to be,” I corrected.

Michelle’s grin widened, and she leaned into me. She had obviously had too much to drink. I lifted a hand to steady her, and was surprised when she took the hand and slid it against her waist, slinging one thigh over my lap and straddling me. I leaned away, but she hovered over me.

“Admit it,” she dared, running one hand over my chest and burying the other into the hair at the nape of my neck. Her eyes met mine, glowing with the light of the fire. “You feel it too.” She leaned so close to me that her lips brushed mine when she spoke again. “I make you… hot.”





Nell





Night had fallen outside of the castle. I remained sequestered in my royal chambers, but Lethe did not abandon me again. As we’d spoken, I had flipped open A History of War, and strangely, this time he did not try to stop me from reading it in his presence. Since then, I’d been letting my eyes trail over the splashes of calligraphy, plucking snippets of information from each page.

The last third of the book was devoted solely to Emperor Bram.

“My grandfather,” Lethe had told me, when I’d recognized the name. Where I might have expected his voice to be swollen with pride, it was deflated.

“He was… decapitated, wasn’t he?” I ventured, wary of stepping too far onto sacred ground.

But Lethe nodded tiredly, as if this was a story he had been hearing for his entire life. “Yes, when he was my age. He led a massive rebellion of our people, who had been subjugated by the fire dragons for too long, and it almost ended in the capitulation of the Aena dynasty… but we were weakened by the elements, and Grandfather Bram was taken from within these castle walls. My father was only a baby then. Grandfather Bram was assassinated publicly, on the gallows, and my father was spared for his innocence in the matter.” Lethe’s lip quirked. “Though I am sure the soft-bellied fire dragons regret that decision now.”

“You talk like you never show a person kindness.” I flipped another brittle page in the book. I had read into the final chapters, where Lethe’s childhood was supposedly mentioned. “But you rescued me from those guards, and you didn’t have to.” I glanced over at him, the curtain of my hair between us. “And you brought me soup, but you didn’t have to. You—”

“I threw you into the fireplace,” Lethe reminded me nastily.

I dropped my eyes, and a blush burned my cheeks. “Yes. You did do that.”

To avoid his gaze, suddenly hot with anger for some reason, I scanned the words splayed before me—and there caught his name, ensnared in a long paragraph: Lethe Eraeus, grandson of Emperor Bram, who had ruled for approximately three weeks. Bram had been ruthless, from what I had seen. One picture portrayed a slaughterhouse—filled with young women.

I shuddered.

Lethe Eraeus was once hailed by the ice dragons as the destined leader of their people. However, since the brief victory over the fire dragons of The Hearthlands, their numbers had continued to dwindle. A strict regimen of malnourishment, abuse, and training had all but killed the most recent generation to be born into the ruins of ice dragon society. It is with seeming pride that the disgraced Eraeus lineage boasts Lethe as the foremost recipient of this brutal treatment, as the prince of their plot.