A Shade of Dragon 3(56)

Nell went to stand directly in front of my mother. She looked much smaller by comparison, as humans are generally smaller than dragon people, but something similar passed between them. A kindred air to the straightness of their backs, the evenness of their eyes. They were a pair of queens.

“During the war, so many people ran,” she reminded my mother, her voice soft and private, something for Mother alone to hear. The speech was over, but a conversation had begun. “Now all that remains are those who would not leave for whatever reason. These are your truest people. These are the people who will pour themselves into the earth like rain so that it will spring up again.”

Mother watched her closely, thoughtfully, and I took a deep breath. She had that glint in her eye that she would have whilst appraising a jewel or hearing a request for a loan. “You are almost right,” Mother allowed. A small smile spread across her lips. “But these are not my people, Mrs. Aena. Not anymore.”

With that, Mother descended into a deep bow before her, the gathers of her gown buffeting down around her legs like the explosion of a flower’s petals in bloom. She clasped her royal brooch in one hand—the brooch which bore the family crest—and lowered her eyes until her chin almost touched her sternum.

When she stood again, her smile was hardly any larger. It trembled slightly, and her eyes were crusted with tears. “You, my dear,” she whispered to Penelope. “You are the wife of my eldest son, the prince of this great land. And although the coronation has not yet been held, it will be forthcoming. These are no longer my people.” Her tearful eyes turned from Nell to me, and she nodded again, a nod of approval and of departure. “They are yours.”





Theon





That night, after the remnant of our people had been secured wherever there was room enough to house them, and after Nell had excused herself to bathe in the steaming atrium, I gazed across the wounded expanse of The Hearthlands—the snow silvery and broken like shards of glass, not melting, but also no longer falling in thick swaths—and thought about the coronation to which my mother had alluded. “Forthcoming,” she had said. It was a lot to digest. Before me lay this ruined kingdom. But at the same time, Nell was right. Within its ruins lay the seeds of great potential, and if we didn’t turn our backs on that, if we instead allowed this new course to germinate, perhaps the capital city could be more magnificent than ever before. I was relieved to have her at the helm with me.

“Hey,” a soft voice called behind me. Before I turned, I saw her reflection shift, milky and blurred, on the glass. There was a pensive quality to her features now which the outside world seldom ever saw. So often, for others, she was cheerful at best and stoic at worst. But for me, she was vulnerable. She was bare.

I turned to behold her, swaddled in a silken, pearlescent bathrobe, her hair down and damp, her eyes deep and pained.

“Hey,” I replied, advancing to brace her elbows with my fingertips. I scanned her face for some clue as to her melancholy. We were together, back in the castle, and my own mother had bowed to her as the new queen. What could weigh so heavily on her still? After everything we had been through? “What’s wrong?” I asked, my brow furrowed.

Nell averted her gray eyes. “Queen,” she breathed, breaking away from my touch to stand near the glass, where I had been when she’d entered the room. “Queen in a day. It’s an awful lot to handle, isn’t it?”

“And I’ll be king,” I said, touching her shoulders. It had been so long since we’d been in the same room, unfettered by circumstances. I couldn’t stop touching her in my dream-like wonderment. “It won’t be so different. It won’t be so hard.” My reflection smiled at her in the glass. “Were we not already kings and queens?”

Nell smiled, but the smile was melancholy, and her eyes wouldn’t quite touch mine. “There are pressures on a queen—archaic pressures, really—which your culture places there.” Even as she said this, one of her palms came up and laid over mine on her shoulder. “You knew this… and you let that device, the astrolabe, go.” Her eyes fluttered down to her feet. “You knew it was our only hope. To manipulate the stars of The Hearthlands. To change the will of the gods, and make me”—she cleared her throat, and a tear darted down her reflection’s cheek, cast against the dark night sky outside like a falling star—“make me the woman with whom you were destined to be.”

I gripped her shoulders and twisted her gently to face me. I could not stand to continue having this conversation with the window. “Fate can be cruel,” I said, an unintentional bite to my tone. “According to Pythia, the gods had set me to fall for Michelle. It seems that you were to be with Lethe. It certainly would have been easy for Michelle and I to be together, and in truth, there were a few times where I stood at a crossroads between the two of you, and hers was the path of least resistance. I could have chosen her. Easily. But the gods… They crush even their most devoted followers at times. They make play pieces of us, and games of our lives. What about Romeo and Juliet?” I asked her. “It would seem, to consult history, that they were destined to die together in the Capulet tomb. But is that the way their lives should have gone? Two mere children in love, unable to reconcile the feud of fools? Was destiny good in that moment? Was destiny fair?”