Just One Knight

by Bridget Essex

  “All right, then, yes, they’re safe here if that’s what you mean.” Fane tucks the shirt into her trousers and starts to pull on her boots. “And, yes, we’ll meet at the fire fountain at two. Obviously, there are tourists here because of Wild Night, so there are people in the city who are not Draco—Draco are expecting non-Draco to be about right now, so no one should really notice you ladies. Just, keep your heads down and stay out of major trouble. But get into some minor trouble, if that’s your fancy.” Her grin is wide enough to split her face.

  Lellie glances at the Draco and raises her brows, and I wonder—just a little—if Lellie and Fane are on the same page…

  It’s not two yet, and a lot can happen in a relatively short amount of time when you’re in a beautiful city, far from home, on a night that’s as magical as this…

  I glance at Cinda, and her mouth is turned into a lovely, impish grin.

  I think we’re on the same page, most definitely.

  “All right. Let’s go!” Fane stands up straight and looks at the rest of us with a wide smile. “I do hope you love my city—it’s a beautiful place full of beautiful people who do beautiful things.”

  “What kind of…things?” asks Lellie, and she sounds genuinely curious, not just flirtatious. “I’ve never known many Draco.” She falls in line with Fane as we start to move through the sparse woods, climbing upward and upward toward the city gate.

  Her earlier professions of murder seem to be momentarily quelled.

  “I can tell you all about them, lady,” murmurs Fane, and then like the smooth bastard that she is, she offers an arm to Lellie, her head inclined toward the knight.

  Lellie raises one brow and stares at that proffered arm for a moment too long, as if to say that Fane certainly has some making up to do…but then Lellie, Lellie, actually takes the Draco’s arm.

  Well. I know the trouble my friend is going to be getting up to. I can’t hide my grin, and when I glance sidelong at Cinda, she’s grinning, too.

  “Well, now I just feel left out,” sighs Tahlia, throwing her gloved hands up in the air. Fane glances over her shoulder, a brow raised.

  “Really? News of the Fox Queen spreads far and wide, my friend. Mention who and what you are in any tavern or in any press of ladies, and you’ll probably have your pick.”

  “Maybe I do want a little dalliance before the main event…” she muses, and her mouth turns up happily at the corners.

  “Just remember, we’re meeting at two,” I mutter, already nervous that with all of these dalliances, everyone’s going to forget the clock, but Fane and Lellie and Tahlia all make murmurings of promise, and as we enter the wide open gates of Mount Verlit City, everyone seems to disappear in the sudden press of people we’re met with.

  It went from still and quiet to an uproar and riot in a heartbeat, it seems.

  And then, here we are.

  Mount Verlit City.

  With Cinda on my arm, just past the big, black gates and into the city, the sights and sounds of a wild night unfold around us. I hold tightly to her, and I look at her shining face as she gazes at the party unfolding around us, and my heart skips a beat too many.

  Oh, there are feelings growing in that erratically beating heart of mine.

  Cinda’s the one I’ve been wanting. The one I’ve been waiting and watching for my whole life.

  She grips my hand even tighter, and then she wraps an arm around my waist, pulling me close, pulling me down to her for a spontaneous kiss.

  There’s suddenly music all around us, bright, brass music like horns and happy bells, and the press of people start to form a line.

  Cinda breaks from the kiss and laughs in delight as the woman in front of her grabs her arm lightly.

  “What’s happening?” she asks the lady. And the lady, looking back over her shoulder, smiles at Cinda.

  Her eyes are slit like a dragon’s—a Draco.

  “It’s the Wild Night parade!” the woman cries, and—all around us—the very happy, very inebriated crowd…

  Begins to dance.

  Chapter 16

  CINDA

  I laugh in delight and wrap my one arm even tighter around Talis as the woman in front of us pulls us along, and the woman behind Talis grips her hand and follows us. We begin to weave in and out, in and out of the lines of people—mostly women—who form almost instantly on either side of us.

  Most of the people are drunk, truth be told, but their dance formation doesn’t suffer terribly for it. Everyone wears the happiest of smiles, hoots and hollers in jubilation, as the lines of people begin to snake into one another. It’s almost as if we’re forming a spiral that begins to curve inward, but not quite. For when we start to curve tighter and tighter, that’s when the spiral loosens, and then we find that we’re curling outward. It’s hard to follow the steps—mostly it’s stomp once with your right foot, twice with your left foot, and then once with your right again, but everyone seems to be falling out of the rhythm—the rhythm that’s beaten by large drums that seem to be just ahead of us, but I can’t quite make them out. We do our best with the dance, Talis and I, and we laugh all the while as we weave our way through the city.

  I’m mostly noticing the people, noticing how happy everyone looks, how thrilled and enthusiastic they are about the dance. Some people are singing words, but it’s in a language I don’t understand—it’s probably Draco, I realize, my heart soaring. I’m hearing them speak Draco!

  The city rises around us. That’s the first thing I notice about it, really, that all of the buildings seem sharp and angular. They’re all mostly built out of this shiny, black stone that I don’t think I’ve seen before. It reminds me most a black-painted mirror. Everything seems to be long and lean and thin, tapered to a point at an end. There’s a high amount of towers that rise from the city itself, and as I look upward as the dance moves through the streets, I see a dragon land on one of the spires. It’s a smooth, easy landing—much smoother than the one Fane made (which is an uncharitable thought—she was carrying rather a lot of us), and the dragon reaches out and grasps the black spire with sharp claws. She folds her wings against herself and ducks her long, serpentine head to look down at the festivities with bemused eyes.

  We follow the loose spiral, and we whirl together, and the bright colors of the city, of the people, begin to blur in front of my eyes.

  I start to only notice Talis.

  I know, I know, I wanted adventure, I wanted to see the world, and somehow, when I’m out in the world…it winds up that I only have eyes for the knight. I’ve seen bits and pieces of the city, and it’s all beautiful and epic in the best possible ways.

  But this knight. Oh, this knight!

  My heart.

  Every time she smiles, every time she ducks her head, her grin growing as she watches her feet, trying to match the beats and moves of the women around her, and a little shock of red hair falls into her eyes…I don’t quite know how to tell you this, but every part of me becomes awake. Yes, my lady parts shout in jubilation, just as loudly (and with, perhaps, even more energy) than the joyously shouting crowds. But it’s my heart, too. She’s lovely, the way she follows the dance pattern, the way she moves through the crowd, the way she moves, the way she speaks. Everything about her is something lovely, something beautiful that my eyes can’t help but follow.

  And everything that I am responds to her voice, to her touch, to her sweet nobility and to that perfect, smoldering mouth. She sets fire to me as surely as Fane set fire to the tavern…which might not be the best metaphor, but my goodness, was that fire hot inside of the tree. And that’s the best thing I can think of. All-consuming heat.

  That’s what Talis does to me.

  And I love it. I love it. I want to be baked in the oven of her love. And that’s ridiculous, that sentiment, but I’ve gone all mushy and gooey around the edges, and when I look at her, that’s the only way I think—in silly words and metaphors. I understand, now, how the poets come up with gods-
awful poetry. I understand why bards sing like moon-drunk ducks about love. I always thought it a little silly, but now, now I’m the silly one.

  And I don’t care who knows it.

  I care for this woman, and it’s growing into something too big to contain. It’s only been one night.

  But oh, what a night it’s been.

  And it’s not over yet.

  We wind our way through the city, and then the spiral starts to dance faster and faster. I’m pulled along by the woman in front of me, who’s laughing in delight as we spiral tighter and tighter with the line to the left of us, and the line to the right of us.

  We must be reaching the heart of the dance.

  For I think we’ve reached the heart of the city.

  I gasp as I look up, then, at what must be the Mount Verlit palace. This great, black stone structure rises much higher than the rest of the towers that ascend from the city itself. The spires at the top of each palace tower branch out into curving points—these, I realize, are built to be actual perches for the Draco in their beast forms. I watch as, overhead, another dragon lands on one of these perches and sits there for a moment, looking every bit like a rather enormous (rather imposing) bird.

  There are black stone steps ascending to the palace gate, and the whole thing is very nice and impressive, but what really draws my eyes is the structure right before those palace steps.

  It’s a statue of a woman. But this isn’t just any old, run-of-the-mill statue.

  This thing is taller than Fane when she’s in dragon form. This statue might, in fact, be taller than two Fanes in dragon form if they were stacked one atop the other. I look up…and up…and up (which is, apparently, the theme of this city), and my mouth drops open.

  I’ve seen statues before, obviously. There are a million in the various temples of Arktos City, and there are statues around the city of different queens and knights and heroines in our long history. But we don’t have any that are so…impressive.

  This statue is of the woman, the first queen of Bright Coast, Queen Verlit, apparently. And she is sculpted beautifully, in full armor. There is an iridescence to the black stone that was used to create this statue, and in the magelights of the city, she glitters like a star. There’s a stateliness to her form, with her chin lifted high, a swagger to her shoulders that are curved back, like she’s about to erupt in a warrior’s cry. She holds a sword in front of her, the point of the blade resting easily against the ground, her two hands gripping the top of the sword, her legs hip-width spread. She looks so powerful.

  She looks like a queen.

  As we enter the square, as I look at the statue, three clay pots positioned at the statues feet seem to explode. But that’s not quite right, because when the fire and its shadows are gone from my eyes, the clay pots are still there…that must be what they meant when they called it a fire fountain. For flames shoot into the air from the mouths of the clay pots, and then those flames arc down, almost like liquid, to curve into the basin at the statue’s feet. The flames burn away, and then repeat, fire shooting toward the heavens, rising to the height of the statue’s face. My breath catches in my throat as I watch the fire, but my breath is catching for other reasons—for we whirl faster and faster, the spiral of all of us, the drums clash, the brass bells ring, and the horns sound, and then the tempo of the beat changes.

  “This is it! ‘The Dragon Maid of Bright Coast!’ They’re playing my song!” Talis cries out, laughing with delight, and as the spiral tightens until we’re all wedged in together, I turn and realize that I’m pressed up against the knight.

  The crowd scatters as the song begins.

  “Dance with me,” Talis whispers into my ear, the heat of her breath, of the dance, moving through me, burning brightly. I’m burning brightly, I realize, as brightly as the flames that rise in the night air, as brightly as the city itself, sparkling on the mountaintop like a jewel cradled in a perfect ring’s setting. I turn, and I wrap my arms around her neck, and her hands find their place at the curves of my waist, and we’re swaying to the steady beat, the rhythm of the song as hard and fast as the pulse of someone who wants something so badly.

  Like my pulse right now.

  I look up into the knight’s face, I hold her gaze, and I can feel the blood surging through me, can feel my entire body surrendering to the want and need that flow through every inch of my skin, through all my blood and bones, through every single part of me. She feels it, too. I know she feels it, too. For when Talis looks down at me, now, her hands gripping my waist like a lifeline, like something that could save her, she breathes out, the breath catching in her throat.

  “Cinda,” she whispers, and when her tongue caresses the syllables of my name—I can’t help it. I shudder. She said my name like a supplicant speaks to a goddess, and I want to hear her say my name again and again. I want to hear her cry it out.

  Perhaps it’s the heat of the city. Perhaps it’s the fact that, in a little while, we’re going to come together and do something patently wrong. Perhaps it’s the magic of this night. I don’t know. I honestly don’t know. Perhaps it’s just her. But I know what I want, and I want to claim it.

  I want her. And I want her now.

  “Do we…do we have time…before…” I murmur into her ear, and I don’t even get out all of the words.

  “Yes. Yes, absolutely, yes,” she groans back, and then she lifts her hand and curls her fingers gently on the back of my neck. She bends down, and we kiss.

  The heat of the air, the heat of the flames licking at the feet of the first Queen of Bright Coast…it tinges the air with the spice of desire. The scent of a match that’s just been blown out, the crisp woodiness of an apple log consumed by flames. Everything is heat as she drinks of me deeply, as I pull her down, my arms wrapped tightly around her shoulders, now, and I rise to meet her, and she bends to meet me, and we are met in the middle, Talis and I. We are well matched, well matched in every way.

  And now, finally, after being interrupted hours ago…we’re going to finish what we started.

  Come hell or some very high water.

  “Where?” I gasp, breaking away from her, searching her face. Her eyes are dark with potent, hot need, and her mouth is swollen from our kiss. She runs a sweet, pink tongue over those swollen lips, and my entire body cries out in crescendo from that one perfect movement. I’m going to die right here and now if she doesn’t touch me.

  Talis looks around the city square at all of the people reveling. “We can’t rent a room in the taverns—they’re probably full for Wild Night,” she manages, panting.

  My mind runs through a list of possibilities and settles on one that I’m not sure about…but have some hope for. “Come on,” I tell her, turning and heading into the crowd toward the left edge of the palace gates. “Let me ask someone…”

  The first person we run into (literally—I literally run into her actually fairly hard, my shoulder knocking into hers with so much gusto that she actually winces) is a Draco, and she glances at me in surprise, since I did clock her fairly hard.

  “I’m so sorry,” I tell her with a grimace. “Listen…are there palace gardens close by?”

  She takes one look from me to Talis, and a smile of camaraderie flits across her face. And then she winks at me. “Yes, that way,” she says, turning and pointing over her shoulder, her slitted pupils adjusting to the extra light as the fire fountain erupts almost right next to us. “Down that street, make a right. There should be many others who have the same idea as you, so I hope you can find an empty bush to hide behind.” She winks again, and then disappears into the crowd.

  “Come on,” I repeat, tugging Talis forward, and she needs no encouragement. We move through the crowd as quickly as we’re able, and then, when we’re in the relative (compared to the crowd in the square) quiet of the street, Talis takes the lead, and we run, together, hand in hand, toward the palace gardens.

  Arktos City has palace gardens, too, and I was hopeful that
other cities followed suit—and I suppose I’m lucky, for Mount Verlit City’s gardens spread before us, now, just off this side street.

  There are no magelamps here, except for a few small spheres of light that manage to edge the garden path so that one doesn’t trip and fall. I wish it was light enough for me to see the gardens, for what I can manage to make out from the little light is truly impressive…

  But, to be truthful, impressive or not, it’s not the gardens that are captivating me at the moment.

  True to the Draco lady’s word, there are people everywhere, soft moans filling the heady, fragrant air, perfumed with countless night blooming flowers. I almost trip over two naked women as Talis and I try to stick to the path, and I chuckle, mumbling an apology as they wave me on, immediately wrapping themselves up in each other again. I doubt they even really noticed me.

  “Here,” murmurs Talis, and we find a tree. The trunk of the tree is about as round as I am, and there are fragrant blossoms in the boughs and branches, and they smell a little like flowers and a little like vanilla—it’s quite lovely. But, again, that’s all the attention I give it, because Talis pushes me up against the tree gently. With the trunk between my shoulder blades and against my buttocks and thighs, I lean against it, and I look at the knight. There’s moonlight here, though the clouds scuttle across it so often that it’s still hard to see, and I wish there weren’t so many shadows…but there’s a brightness in Talis’s eyes that I don’t think any darkness could obscure.

  I look up at the knight, and my heart fills fair to bursting. I feel too much when I look at her, and I don’t feel like I can contain it all inside of me. I take a deep breath, and then I reach up, and I take Talis’s face—I press my palms gently against her soft cheeks, and then trace my fingers down her neck to the edge of her armor chest plate. She sags a little against my touch, her eyes closed, a fierce look of concentration on her face, tension in every line and curve of her, her mouth open, wanting…but then she reaches up and places her gloved hands over mine, her leather-covered palms hot against me.