by Emma Hamm
His wife. She hadn’t thought she’d ever see the day when that man glowed with happiness. He’d dedicated his life to her, to Sigrid, but now that would all change. Now he had the woman of his dreams back, and she was the fierce, feral woman Sigrid had always assumed she would be.
Raheem stopped in front of them, crossed his arms over his chest, and glared at everyone. “You have to return. Sigrid is right.”
“Why’s that?” Camilla asked, mirroring his stance.
“The army didn’t really return. The advisors left to see what the army had accomplished and then returned here with a small group of men to deal with Sigrid if she attacked again. This wasn’t the entire army. In fact, it’s only a small portion. The rest are continuing to march on Greenmire Castle.”
So that was the gut feeling Sigrid had felt. It was the sick feeling that something bad was going to happen.
She scratched the back of her neck, tugging on her hair. “Then we return.”
“There’s more bad news I’m afraid,” Raheem continued. “The Beastkin heard tales of the battle and joined in.”
Sigrid groaned, “Why would they do that?”
“Rumors are their leader is more bloodthirsty than the boy king.” He leveled Camilla and herself with a knowing look. “Jabbar seems to be leading them once more.”
“And he’s attacking… who?” Sigrid asked.
“Everyone.”
Of course he was. The man had gone mad with power. She could only assume what her kingdom was facing. They had to return. She had to try and stop this war, and it didn’t matter how difficult that ended up being. Everyone needed her.
Raheem met her gaze. “Sultana, there’s so much more to this story than just one woman trying to save the world. We need an army to fight a three-way war that isn’t going to end any time soon. I don’t think this is something which can be fixed by a dragon falling out of the sky.”
Another voice interrupted them. “Then how about two?”
There was something wrong with Nadir’s voice. She’d only heard such tones in her head, when both the man and the dragon were speaking with her. Now, both voices were laced over his in a way that made her twitch in concern.
He stood at the end of the hall, hands loose at his side, and a deep scratch on one shoulder. The torn fabric of his shirt gaped over the wound, blood dampening the edges. She tried not to look at the bloody footprints he’d left on the golden floor.
He held out a hand for her, flicking the fingers inward as he beckoned her. “Come, wife.”
“Nadir, is everything all right?” she asked.
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
Because you’re covered in blood, she wanted to say. Because there’s something other than a man looking through your eyes.
Sigrid remained silent and strode to his side. This wasn’t something which could be fixed by their friends or the humans who knew him so well. Sigrid had never seen anything like this before. He was utterly unhinged, and so thoroughly beyond her reach that she feared anything would anger him.
But she did not fear him.
She took his hand, slid her fingers between his, and tugged him away from the friends and family who stared in horror.
“We’re going to Wildewyn,” she called back at them. “We’re going to stop the war.”
“You can’t do that alone!” Raheem shouted.
“They won’t be able to stop us.”
She hoped they wouldn’t even try. A dragon was a dangerous thing, but dragon mates who took flight and attacked a battle together? Getting between the two of them would only end in bloodshed unlike the world had ever seen before.
Sigrid tugged him toward the servants’ quarters where she knew there was a pool where she could wash the blood from his body. It was a lesser known one, where Camilla had always washed herself, and hopefully there wouldn’t be anyone there to disturb them.
They’d take one look at their sultan in such a state and run away. Her fear was that someone running from him would only set off the dragon’s ire more. The chase was so much fun to their beasts.
She tugged him through the door and looked around the room. The still pool in the center wisped hot curls into the air, undisturbed by another body. The open balcony doors allowed a cool wind to brush past them. Two benches on either side of the heated pool already had towels resting on them.
“Go on,” she said, turning to bar the door. “That cut on your shoulder needs tending.”
“The dragon will heal it.”
She flattened her palm on the wood in front of her, refusing to turn around when she recognized the guttural tones. “It would make me feel better to tend it. As a man, Nadir. It’s important to remain a man when you can.”
“Why?” he asked. Two voices asked the question, one so much weaker than the other. “When it’s so much better to be a dragon?”
At that, she did turn. He stood in the center of the room, watching her with yellow eyes. His pupils were little more than slits, and she swore she saw the ghost of a larger form overlaying his.
He wasn’t even trying to control the dragon anymore, she realized. Or perhaps he couldn’t. The chains were broken, the beast unleashed. And she didn’t know how to control that beast at all.
“Nadir—” she whispered the word but didn’t have anything else to say.
He shivered at her voice, then turned away from her and stripped the ruined shirt from his body. “I find I no longer wish to be a man, Sultana.”
Such a thing would be a shame, she thought. The rippling muscles on his back shifted as he moved. His body was bronze poured over a stone statue of strength and humility. Not a scar laced over his back, not a single muscle out of place. He flexed, his biceps bunching as he pushed the fabric of his pants down, taking the wrappings of his boots with them.
Naked, he strode into the pool with perhaps a little too much confidence. But then again, he’d always been a confident man. A boy who’d been raised with multiple concubines and a wife from a very young age had good reason for such confidence.
Sigrid was not like that. She didn’t even like having her face bared, let alone her entire body.
Steeling herself for the conversation ahead, she reached for one of the towels and strode toward him. “There are many reasons to be a man.”
“Name one of them.” He leaned against the edge of the pool, stretching his arms along the sides.
“Being able to talk with others and have them understand you.”
“Twist my words, you mean. The only people who I’ve ever spoken to have used whatever words comes out of my mouth to their own advantage. I trust no one, other than you.” He leaned his head back when she crouched behind him, eyes searching for hers. “And I don’t need words to speak with you, Sultana.”
He overlaid the spoken sounds with an echo in her head. The dragon inside him was far more dangerous than she imagined because it knew how to tempt the beast within.
She shook her head. “You are a sultan. You cannot disappear inside the beast forever.”
“A sultan of a land who fears him. Of friends and family who betray him and the kingdom.” He shook his head. “Your argument is failing, wife.”
Sigrid reached out and dipped the towel into the water by his shoulder. She had hoped she might be able to calm him herself. Now, she questioned whether or not that was possible. The water trickled through her fingers, dripping into the pool like a song.
“Could I ask you to stay human for me?” she inquired, watching the water reflect the sunlight. It was like diamonds dancing across the waves he’d created.
“You could.”
“Then I ask it for myself, husband. I’ve had such little time to know you. To understand your thoughts and dreams as a man, not as a dragon.”
She touched the towel to his wounded shoulder. Each dab made her wince inside. She recognized this kind of slash as only a sword could make. Someone had drawn a weapon on him. She couldn’t blame them. A dragon had been
attacking them with the clear intent to kill. Likely it had been Abdul.
That man had always wanted to kill Nadir. She’d seen it in his eyes more times than she could count. He wanted what Nadir had, and was well aware he’d never get it without the boy. But that only filled him with more fury.
What must it have been like to have the man who raised Nadir lift a blade to the man he called son? She almost wished she had been there to destroy him herself.
Nadir reached up and placed a hand on hers, stilling the movement and pressing the white towel against the wound. Blood soaked through her fingers, leaving a blossom of color against the fabric and her skin.
“What are you doing to me?” he asked.
“I’m cleaning your wound.”
“You’re doing so much more than that.” His voice turned gruff and deepened with the rough edge of a dragon. “You walked in here and everything changed.”
“I didn’t mean to change everything. I had as much choice as you did in our marriage.”
“It can’t change,” he replied. Nadir remained staring away from her, looking at the wall or perhaps through it to the kingdom beyond. “But it already has.”
“What are you saying?”
“I love you.” He said the words as though they were a curse, but they blasted through her like a prayer. “I’ve loved you for a long time, and I wondered if you knew.”
Words stuck to her tongue. A flame bloomed in her head, and a golden plume of hope took flight within her. Incandescent, it billowed and grew like a storm on the horizon. “I didn’t,” she whispered.
“Well, I do. I knew it from the first moment I saw you fighting and realized you were divine absolution come to purge the darkness from my soul. From the first moment I kissed you and you tasted like blood. When I saw your hands were stained red, just like mine. I might have dragon within me, but you are my wings.”
She let out a tiny sound on a sigh. A small, wicked part of her desiring to devour him in that moment. To breath in the poetry of his words and the love no one else had dared give her.
He loved her.
He loved her.
She didn’t know what to say. How did one respond to that when she was so bad with words? Sigrid struggled to think of anything to say, anything that was more than just I love you too because he deserved so much more than that.
“Come here,” he said gruffly, pulling her into the water with him.
She went gladly. It didn’t matter that the leather clothing she wore would be ruined forever. Sigrid sank into the water, legs on either side of him and arms around his neck. She tucked her face into the hollow of his throat and blew out a long breath.
Nadir held onto her hips. His thumbs stroked her hip bones, delicately tracing circles. “You don’t have to say anything,” he said.
“I want to.”
“Don’t. I already know, habib albi.”
The words were Bymerian. She didn’t recognize them, and didn’t think she’d ever heard another Bymerian say them before.
Picking her head up from his shoulders, she quietly asked, “What does that mean?”
He didn’t reply. Instead, Nadir reached up, stroking a thumb along her jaw. He moved up and touched a gentle finger to her furrowed brows. The wrinkles eased under his touch as he smoothed the worry and fear away.
“Ya hayati,” he whispered, touching a fingertip to her lips. “Ya amar.”
“Nadir.”
He smoothed his hand along her jaw, tunneling beneath her hair. His other hand at her hip pushed her forward. He pulled her into him and slowly pressed his lips to hers.
She sank into his kiss, remembering a time when they hadn’t worried about war or violence. They’d only worried about each other and what they might think. His tongue traced her lips, and she allowed him to delve into her mouth while feeling as though he were sinking into her soul.
Sigrid had always wanted a man who would challenge her as a husband. She hadn’t wanted the sweet man who’d died at the altar for her. The one who would have worshiped her steps and whispered sweet nothings in her ear.
She’d searched her entire life for this man. A monster who would devour her, body and soul. The one who would choose to tear her apart, only to stitch her back together exactly as she was, because he wouldn’t change a thing about her person.
But he was also the one she couldn’t have. The forbidden fruit who lived in a kingdom which hated hers. The sultan of a people who wanted to see her own destroyed. The man who hated what they were, but loved her with every fiber of his being.
Her claws dug into his shoulders as she kissed him back with all the emotion in her heart. She loved him. She loved this man so much it hurt sometimes. An ache that never left her chest, no matter how long she was away from his side.
The fires of his soul burned inside her. Perhaps, in the year they’d been apart, that fire had dimmed to an ember, but it had never gone out.
She feared it never would.
They broke apart, and Sigrid took a deep breath. “I fear your love will render me to ashes.”
He leaned forward and pressed his lips to hers once more. A chaste kiss, one that tasted like tears. “A dragon cannot burn.”
And yet, she feared she could.
The world was not prepared for them. It never had been. And if her time with the ancient’s had taught her anything, it was that the world had no place for creatures like them. They were from a time long past...
Sigrid didn’t know what the future held, and she wasn’t certain she wanted to find out.
She reached up and placed a hand against Nadir’s face. “I’m afraid of what we might do,” she whispered. “I’m afraid of what will happen if we go back to Wildewyn.”
“So am I.”
“Then why would you give up being a man? Why would you even think about letting the dragon take control?”
He pulled her forward again, this time pressing their foreheads together. She felt him take a deep breath, his ribs touching hers. “I told my mother, the one who birthed me, the leader of the Alqatara, that I would become a god king. That I would lead my people out of the darkness and into a new time.”
She licked her lips. “The ancients said there was a prophecy. Of a dragon coming back and saving everyone.”
“Then maybe this is the prophecy. Maybe now is the time when we take our place in this world and becomes gods after all. You’ve said it before. We have no place here when all other Beastkin are simple beasts. We are immortals who are supposed to be dead and yet, we live.”
“I don’t want to be a god.”
“Neither do I, my love. I just don’t think we really have a choice in the matter.”
This was the man she knew. The longer he talked the more his voice deepened and the honeyed tones of the man she loved disappeared in the wake of a dragon.
His was the crumbling of mountains. The deep burble of a frozen lake and the thundering call of an oak as it fell. The man she loved, the one she knew in the very bottom of her soul, had disappeared.
Sigrid pulled back to stare into those slitted eyes. “Are you going to give him back to me?”
Nadir, or the dragon that was inside him, shook its head sadly. “I don’t know how.”
“You should be one and the same.”
“We are,” the graveling voice responded. “In a way. He is within me, part of me, but he is not the dragon and I am not the man.”
She remembered the creatures within the ancient stronghold. Half man, half beast, stuck between the change forever because of… something.
Why hadn’t she learned?
Someone scrabbled at the door, working through the lock with a small tool. Nadir tensed between her thighs, but Sigrid held him down as she scented the air. The smell of frozen water made her smooth her hands over his shoulders.
“It’s Eivor,” she whispered.
“The beast you brought with you?”
“The woman who can help you,” she replied. “She
’s part beast, part human. She speaks with souls, or at least, she thinks she does. We can help bring the two of you back together. It doesn’t have to be a fight for control.”
“It does,” he replied. “And I’m sorry for it.”
With a swift movement, Nadir scooped his arms under her bottom and stood. She’d never had a man pick her up so easily. Sigrid held onto his shoulders, only releasing them when he strode out of the pool and set her down.
“What are you going to do?” she asked, her eyes remaining fixed on his face and refusing to traverse his body as water dripped down his muscular form.
“What we both should have done a long time ago.”
The change rippled through him so quickly. She blinked, and he was a dragon once more. This time, she wasn’t certain how much control he retained. His horned head swung back and forth, tail twitching in agitation and eyes watching her with more than a little aggression.
His back foot caught on one of the benches, crushing it beneath his weight. Nadir lifted his head and a horn struck the ceiling. Plaster and gold plates rained down on them. He huffed out an angry breath, trying to flex his wings but getting stuck in the small space.
“Easy,” she called out with both her words and her mind. “Nadir, stop it. You’ll bring this part of the palace down on us.”
He shifted more, the idea apparently pleasing in the moment. A flare of fear made her pulse spike, and he paused to stare at her.
Could he smell the scent in the air? The way she had instantly been afraid for her own safety?
Sigrid lifted her hands. He leaned forward, stretching his neck and touching his nose gently to her outstretched palms.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
His voice echoed in her head. “Saving the kingdoms, ya amar. Join me. Together, we can finally be the gods they’ve prayed to.”
She didn’t want to be a god. But he didn’t either.
Sigrid struggled to think of a way to fix this, so they weren’t both becoming something they shouldn’t be. The door jiggled behind them, Eivor peeking into the room. Waiting for the medicine woman would only enrage the dragon in front of her.
They couldn’t fight the way Nadir wanted to. She couldn’t fight her own people as a dragon. They’d already thought she was a dead. Would she return as some ghostly figure to haunt them from the grave? It wasn’t right.