She stepped on his scale and he watched her lips part in a cry.
The drop of blood she’d spilled and caught shifted, dispersed.
He blinked, and the jellyfish’s tentacle brushed across his jaw and sent pain singing through his nerves.
His claws sank into the soft, giving flesh of the creature, spilled gelatinous fluids into the water around his face, the poison in its blood as unforgiving as the stings on its suckers, numbing his tongue, blinding his eyes, in the few moments it took before his body healed itself and the remains of the fish floated away.
For a moment, a moment, he was free.
Away from these accursed waters. Away from the denizens of the sea constantly testing to see if he was the strongest of them.
Away.
Not free.
He opened his eyes and the chains glinted with their sigils in the dark deep of the depths. The blood bindings were unfaded, and yet he’d been away from here. He’d been on land.
Her blood against his scale.
But not in the sea.
So close and so very far away.
Ouros tipped back his head to roar, but who would hear him?
She had not heard him.
A moment of change, needing to be quickly forgotten.
It had been over a week.
To hope for her return would be to ask for too much.
The sand sifted against the pads of his claws, fell into the current when he raised a fistful and let it go with the tide, travelling far further than he ever would.
Better to lay upon his bed of shells and forget. His plans were astray. His freedom gone.
He closed his eyes and shifted his arms to cradle his head.
Why remain awake when there was nothing to see but all that he had seen over his millennium in the past?
Are you there?
The sea shifted around him. Eddies of plankton swirled up from the sands, chased around his sleeping form by the great whales who fed off their masses.
He enjoyed the whales: their white bellies so easily pierced by his claws, their meat sweet to the taste, nothing like the other fish that swam in the seas. They were like cattle or sheep. Venison, when caught from the open plains. Creatures that were meant to feed the great gods of the world, not the bottom dwellers who fed on the rubbish that tumbled from the land into the waters.
Venison.
He could barely remember the taste.
Unlike the swill filling his mouth currently. The tasteless, crumbled mush that dried out his tongue needing water to wash away despite the currents around him.
But that wasn’t—
He opened his mouth and the bitter brine of the sea swept over his pallet. He raised his tongue, hoping the strange taste, texture, would wash away with the liquid. It filled his gullet, slid down his throat when he swallowed, over his gills and into his lungs stealing the oxygen from the drink.
Ouros choked.
Not him.
His eyes opened as his body fought a sensation that was foreign to him, drowning in the ocean that was his home.
Gone were the whales and the plankton.
The golden walls around him were dry and stifling. The bed beneath his belly…legs, was soft and silken to the touch when compared to the sand.
He stared at the teal scale and the bead of red marring its surface.
The woman clutched at her throat, eyes wide with terror as she turned blue from lack of air and he floundered in what to do.
Are you there?
Not words, not in the way a larynx formed them, or air gave them sound.
They were in his mind, a call that felt of fear and desperation, the same emotions that had assaulted him in the sea when she stood on the shore and dropped her shawl into the waters.
Hope and despair.
Calm yourself, girl. You are fine. Take a breath.
He issued the thought with forced conviction, hoping that she would obey the command and not question who spoke it as it had taken him too long to make sense of the madness engulfing him.
Her breath caught, a feat, considering she’d not taken a lungful for some moments.
In the stillness between them, his eyes locked with the blue of hers.
He’d seen many colors of eyes over his years. Fish bore an infinite spectrum in their scales and their blood. The reds and yellows and blacks and greens, but never a blue so pure it was akin to staring into the bright white of a sunrise, that first hint of color breaking over the horizon.
His scales were as much a spectrum of all the sea colors, from the black that decorated his back to the aqua scales of his underside that would hide him in the sky.
But even he did not bear a scale of such color on him as her eyes.
She blinked, and he took the second it took her to reopen her gaze to look more fully at this mortal who he’d grabbed to him bare breasted and drowning but had never truly seen for who she was.
The planes of her face were not as angular as the women and men of his time. Her hair a softer wave than the tight curls he remembered. She bore no scars, though her skin was a pale gold rather than the burnished ochre of those of the land he’d once lorded over. Fair, he would call her, though the way she held her body, the muscles he recalled pressed to him, suggested anything but frailty in the spirit her flesh held.
Far too like the bitch who had betrayed him to his fate.
Far too intriguing.
She reached out a trembling hand to touch his snout, and he snorted a puff of steam against her skin to stall her embrace.
Ouros’ head tipped to the side when she didn’t stop, didn’t hesitate despite the fear he could smell coming from her skin, the beads of perspiration dotting her forehead.
Of all the years he’d spent on the tiny island, his island, not one of the two-legs had ever dared approach him, not in all that time.
Frightened. Pitiful.
He narrowed his gaze, but her hand inched ever forward, and she placed her palm against his cheek, so light he barely felt her touch, the armor of his scales so thick he could not tell if her skin was soft or harsh against his own.
She drew in a breath.
Her lips parted in a show of teeth, but it was not a feral expression.
For three weeks, she came to him, would touch him, speak to him though he did not know her words and at first did not care to learn them.
She was gentle where the winds and rains of the summer storms were not.
She was kind, bringing him food from her home, scents he’d never had before, meat charred by a fire instead of caught and devoured from the woods.
Seasonings, he learned, the salts and the curries and the peppers that she would use on the cow and the chicken and, very rarely, on the deer that her people did not farm but hunted through the trees.
He watched her hunt once.
She came to him with a bow and quiver on her back and held a finger before her lips for silence.
He sat on a rock, unmoving, and she skipped through the underbrush, arrows singing through the leaves as she chased a doe and he…well, he may have done his best to distract her, see what all she could do when the odds were stacked against her.
She’d turned to him, and the grin she gave him was feral where the first time it had not been.
The shaft she drew from her quiver was vibrant and green, the head of the arrow glinting black, the color of one of the scales from his back, the scale he’d given her as a gift the third time she came to visit. She whispered to the bolt, pressed her lips in a soft kiss to its head, crouched on her heels, unbalanced and yet at ease with her precarious position.
Her hands were fluid when she fit the arrow to the string and twisted in a fall to a distant point in the tree line where his sight could not follow where she aimed.
He heard the thud as it struck true.
She stood and grinned at him.
“Did you catch your deer, Amece?” His tongue still tripped over her words, but they were not nearly as gar
bled as when she’d first started teaching him her language.
“I never miss, when my bolts fly with my sight.”
He frowned, not sure he had understood her foreign words correctly.
Her lips pursed, and a high-pitched sound came from their softness.
She held out her hand.
The bloodied arrow returned to her grip.
A magic so unlike his own that he pulled back in shock at it, looked at the woman with new eyes.
“Did you think you were alone with your power, dragon?”
He heard the humor in her tone, the laughter at his confusion.
So long he had been alone in his world, only the winds and the rains and the snows there to answer to his will. To find another who could wield some control over their creation was a miracle, especially one so small and so young when compared to him and his kind. “I am glad to find I am not, beautiful mortal.”
Ouros could find no lingering features of her ancestor in this human’s face, but he saw the spirit, and was wary of it.
Her lips moved in unfamiliar shapes, the sounds held from him.
I cannot hear you, witch. Your sounds mean nothing to me.
“But I heard you plain as day.”
In her confusion, the furrowing of skin on her brow, she thought the words as well as spoke them aloud.
Beautiful, in her own way, but not nearly as intelligent as her grandmother.
You did not hear anything. I am far too distant and far too deep for you to hear my words.
Her lack of understanding was tiresome, but as she was the one who had brought him to her, she would have to be the one to send him away, to disrupt the blood bond she’d enacted with his scale, the call that he’d not thought possible when he sent the offering to the surface as temptation to draw her nearer the waves.
She spoke, and he sighed, the waters around his head billowing with bubbles, the fires of his soul steaming beneath the surface of the waves.
In her world, her space, he saw no evidence of his exhale, felt no warming heat on his face too quickly stolen by the depths of the ocean.
Her animated hands, the rapid movement of her lips, the tilt of her head, shake, bob, all stopped.
“I heard you. I know I did.”
His eyes narrowed in relief. Finally! You did not hear me. You sensed my thoughts, as I can yours when you send them to me.
“That is not possible.”
You are a creature that lives on land, talking to a beast trapped beneath the waves, hundreds of leagues distant from each other, only our minds linked together to bring us close. Sharing thoughts seems a less impossible feat than what you have already accomplished, summoning a dragon, not once, but twice, to your summons.
“Dragon.”
Oh, he liked the fear and awe in her voice when she named him as the beast she’d been taught to fear.
What had she thought she’d summoned? That had come to her in her human waters?
That she’d sought when calling out to the sea?
…just a myth…
He heard the whisper through his mind, a thought not meant to be shared but unable to be contained, the touch of a mind uncertain and longing and he wondered what it was she wanted from him, saw in him, would do if he touched her, so small, this mortal, though here he did not feel as big as he knew he was.
Ouros reached out, his clawed hand rising from the bed of sand and silk.
He curled his fingers so that his nails were held tight to his palms, would not cut such thin skin, his knuckles all that would feel her when he pressed against her cheek.
She flinched away, and his eyes turned to her hands scrabbling at the scale on her bed, the cloth she held in one, the swipe that disrupted her drop of blood at its center—
“NO!”
But the connection was gone.
And the heat of her world was gone.
He was trapped again beneath the waters.
Chapter Seven
Ven crouched in the corner of her bed, staring at the teal scale which disrupted the dun color of her blankets, a splash of brilliance in a world of unending sand.
A dragon.
She’d known…she had to have known what it was that joined her in the bath.
Or if not known, she should have guessed.
“What’s wrong with her?” “Is she mad?” “Witches are always mad.” “She’s possessed!”
She’d jumped from the scale, her foot bleeding where she’d stepped on it in her haste to force the creature away, but no one seemed to have seen it but her; the priest who threw off his cassock to fetch her from the water made no notice of the plate when he grabbed her arm and pulled her from the pool.
He looked her over, pausing at her foot, staring at the waters polluted with her blood.
“It doesn’t matter. The khan will decide your fate soon enough, and you can be sure I will tell him of your parlor trick with the water upon your meeting.”
“What parlor trick?”
She was dragged from the bathing room, her robe wrapped once more around her, little shield against the eyes that followed her through the halls, the mouths that parted in her passing on whispered comments, concerns, questions that heralded her more as an unintelligent pet being bandied about the keep than a human standing equal at their sides.
The priest pushed her to her knees before the throne room doors. “Wait until you are summoned.”
It was something well known to her, being forced to stillness.
That had been two days ago.
She had knelt in the entry hall to the king’s council chambers for what felt like hours before being admitted to see the khan.
He’d remained behind his wrought iron screen, the decorative pattern of sand and snakes formed out of the metal hiding all but the barest of impressions of the man from her gaze. Only the purple of his robes and the gold of his jewels were clear through the shrouding, the impression of men at his sides just so, impression only.
“This is the outcast’s spawn?”
A guard had come out from behind the curtain, nodded to the ground, the hand on the hilt of his sword warning enough that if she did not kneel again, he would make her do so.
It had been a quick meeting.
She’d knelt.
The khan snapped his fingers. “She is pretty enough. And she doesn’t look deformed in any way. See her marked where it will not cause comment. It is time we brought this line under our rule. The phai will take her to wife.”
There was a rustling behind the screens. A male’s figure stood, approached the throne and the khan but came no further than a few feet. If words were shared, she did not hear them.
She could guess. And she did not disagree.
She wanted no husband, least of all the prince of the Khanastani.
Ven placed her hand over the burn mark that scratched at the heavy material of her robes.
The priest had brought forth the branding iron, the winged dragon so different than the snake goddess sigil he himself wore as a totem scarred into his right cheek. Her mother had been marked on her forehead, the tail of the beast travelling down her nose. Havence knew the marking would occur whether she willed it or not, was as prepared as she could be for it.
A tradition.
A right of passage.
Once marked, your place was secured…or doomed.
Only her family line bore the dragon insignia on their flesh.
She’d closed her eyes at the red glow of the iron.
When the priest pulled back her robe, it had been with outrage at his conduct that she’d jolted towards him, pressed her own flesh to the rod that he held close to her waiting for her movement.
The dragon’s wings stretched over her left breast, its jaws spilling fire over her heart.
Ven had screamed. Guards held her in place, not letting her retreat, until the priest pulled away, and they dropped their touch from her.
She knew better than to touch the burn.
; “Take her back to her room. The khan will call for her when she is needed.”
Two days.
It had taken her two days to find her way back to the pool. The water held no hint of her blood in its depths, yet no women lingered near it; no guards barred her entry into the room. She slipped from her robe, the mark on her breast tender, though she’d been allowed her herbs to create a poultice to aid in its healing. Her aloe had been undamaged in the journey, likely her mother’s care having seen the succulent well-tended while Havence was kept away. It had been more difficult to find fresh yogurt, but the citadel had more supplies than she’d imagined, and though the infirmary had been lacking, the kitchens had kept a supply of the food readily enough. When the chef had asked if it was her preferred meal, a kindness, really, considering her position amongst them, she’d said no, but thanked him regardless.
Truthfully, the cook had looked at her like she was a person, perhaps not knowing who or what she was yet, but it had been good not be cringed from immediately in his presence.
She’d applied her poultice and wrapped her chest as best she could to keep the sands from scratching over the tender marking.
Then she’d retrieved the scale.
She’d wasted her solitary, meager glass of water to call the beast, pouring the drought into the cup and staring about her, waiting for the monster to appear.
Blood djinn.
Because the greatest magic her ancestors had ever worked was done with blood.
Ven poured her water back into her glass.
She slit the tip of her finger along the sharp edge of the scale.
The bead of blood that fell into the plate left a stain of red along the blue.
A secret part of her thought that it wouldn’t work, that she’d imagined it all.
It had to be all imagined, until he’d appeared.
It? She didn’t even know.
Dragon.
He was beautiful!
Breathtaking.
Terrifying.
And wiping her blood away sent him from her room, kept him from touching her, the heat of his hands a different type of heat than she’d ever experienced before, not cloying like the desert air or the noon-day sun.
She wanted to bring him back.
The Dragon's Storm Page 4