A Shade of Dragon 2(34)

I blinked as it faded away to nothing again.

“Well?” Lethe whispered.

My eyes flew to his. He’d seen it.

“Are you?”

For a moment, my mouth moved slightly, but no words came out. I felt as if I’d been punched. Not now… not this… but I knew the right answer. The only answer.

“Yes,” I told him in a breathless hush, letting one of my hands drift through the air, rising to caress his cheek.

Lethe’s eyelashes fluttered shut, and I winced. Would I only join the retinue of enablers and abusers in his life?

I swallowed.

This wasn’t my fault.

He had kidnapped me.

I didn’t have any other choice.

I had to return home somehow.

And if I told him I was in love with him, it was possible he would set me free… but if I told him I was not, he would thrust me back down into the dungeon.

Lethe leaned into me and pressed his cold lips to mine. I surrendered myself fully. His tongue cracked my lips apart with eagerness and hunger, all ten fingers kneading deeply through my hair. I shuddered from the cold in which he had steeped me and his lips trembled to my earlobe.

“If you love me,” he whispered, his voice trembling with his lips, “then you must be my queen, and damn the rest. Damn it to hell, Penelope.”





Theon





Throughout the next day, refugees filtered down into the shelter, many wounded and bringing updates from the mad city.

A cobbler with frostbite on his wings: “They’re sending ice dragons through every shop. They’re destroying everything in the hopes of discovering even the tiniest hidden child of fiery heritage.”

A student who would permanently have a scar on his wrists where the shackles had been, said: “They’ll kill us all. The orders are to shoot on sight, no questions asked. No prisoners this time.”

And finally an out-of-work, ancient toymaker with two arrows in one wing, having made the flight to the shelter on sheer determination: “A coronation will be held for their prince, Lethe… He is to take the throne from Vulott.”

At this, I started. Vulott would never have given the throne to Lethe. Not yet. It was too soon. He had said it himself. He wanted Lethe first to take a wife… make a child…

“And,” the toymaker went on, coughing plumes of misty ice as he spoke, “the supposed prince has announced his engagement to a new empress. Gods know that this is the dawning of a new era.” His eyes searched in a kind of glazed panic amongst our faces. “Is it not? Is this not now the dynasty of Eraeus?”

The mere words caused my eyes to throb in their sockets. No. This is the dynasty of Aena, and it always will be.

“To whom will the prince be wed?” I asked. My voice sounded quiet to me, but my mother and Michelle both looked at me as if I had yelled. “Well? Did the decree note the bride?”

To me, it seemed as though I had slipped, stumbled, and brought my hands up around the old man’s tunic, all in a blurry slow motion. But it was my mother, aghast, who pried me off of him. She did not seem to think that I had slipped at all.

“Let him be, Theon,” she hissed. “The toymaker isn’t the man you think he is.”

What did that even mean? “What man do I think he is?” I asked her, glaring.

“You think that he is the ice prince. He’s just an old man.”

My chest rose and fell, though our voices were low. “I do not think he’s the ice prince, Mother.”

But she would not be swayed. “Yes. You do.”

I shook her off and stormed deeper into the shelter, the world around me rocketing away. Some fire people might have thought I was reacting to the icy poison leaving my system, but it wasn’t just that.

I pushed through the spinning kitchens, vaulted across the cellars, and stumbled into the depositories, drunken while sober. Weapons… medical supplies… I collapsed into a bed of mink, hyperventilating.

How could a man have so much in one instant, and then so little in the next? My brother was missing, and with increasing likelihood, dead. My father had been sequestered to the infirmary since our return, and though he showed marked improvement, he was bedridden. He could not lead a kingdom, much less regain one.

And me… What was I, if not a prince?

Without the kingdom at my feet, without the princess at my side, what was I?

Just a man named Theon.

A man with nothing.



 



When Michelle found me, I was huddled between a row of shields and a large crystal mirror—this one not necessarily magical.

“Hey,” she said as she lowered onto her haunches beside me. “Are you… okay?” She cocked her head to the side and squinted her eyes at me. Where had she found mascara in this shelter? Or had she been desperate enough to dig soot from the hearth?