by D. D. Chance
The egg shook harder, a flare of sparks shooting out from the cracks she’d just made. Belle lifted her hands slightly and scooted away, managing to turn to the side a second before the egg shattered in all directions. A third dragonet burst forth, wings spread, tiny flames breaking free of its mouth. It was shaded a deep, inky blue, while its siblings were a lighter peacock and a flame red, each as gorgeous as the others as they took their first faltering flaps, flopping around, then struggling up again. But they were all free. They were all alive.
High above her brood, the dragon queen lifted her snout high and roared a song of pure joy. At once, her children stopped and lifted their snouts, crying out, none louder than the third, smallest dragonet in its iridescent coat of midnight blue.
25
Belle
Under the cover of the extraordinary noise of the dragons’ celebration, Aiden moved to my side, practically snatching me away from the crumbled remains of the eggshells and pulling me into his arms. He didn’t stop there, but tugged me as far back as he could go in the chamber until we were flush against the wall. That didn’t improve our situation much, as the dragon queen’s body had shifted and now lay directly between us and the door.
I didn’t so much worry about that. Aiden had found me out of all the many portals that had been opened in our bedchamber, portals I suspected had closed as soon as I’d fallen through one of them. He’d found me all on his own.
He drew me tighter, his head dropping to my ear. “I’ll always find you,” he murmured, reminding me again of two things at once. The first, that he could now hear what I was thinking unless I specifically warded myself against it. The second, things had changed dramatically between us, all over again. The combination of magic and sex? Only magic? Straight-up sex? I had no idea, but I needed to figure it out, stat.
I quickly murmured the spell of protected thoughts, not even minding Aiden’s soft chuckle. I was sure he thought he could eventually find a spell to override my ward, but one thing was certain, I didn’t mind the idea of Aiden being able to find me. I’d been alone for so long, hiding from those who would do me harm, that the idea of someone being able to find me, to protect me, almost made me want to dissolve into a puddle.
Aiden shifted slightly, pulling me with him as he turned and stepped a few feet along the wall. He stopped when the dragon queen coiled her long, sinuous neck and swung her head around toward him. Her young were now protected in the tented folds of her wings, a makeshift cage of soft, forgiving walls that absorbed the blows from their tiny bodies as they hurtled themselves forward on unsteady wings. A far more gentle impact than they would have had against the stone walls of the cavern.
Apparently skilled at multitasking, she allowed them to continue gamboling about as she focused on us.
Her large, intelligent eyes gleamed with purple fire above the dark, shimmering scales lining her face, and steam rose in lazy arcs from her nose and lips, the latter parting slightly as she drew in a heavy breath.
“You know the old tongue?” the dragon queen asked, and once again, though my ears defied comprehension of the words she spoke, my mind somehow could translate.
Beside me, Aiden nodded. “It is a gift of my lineage. Though we should do a better job of teaching all the Fae. It is a noble language that hearkens back to the dawn of our existence in our overlapping realms.”
The queen’s mouth curled into what had to be a smile, though given the construct of her face, I probably shouldn’t make assumptions. Still, her words rolled through me again, sounding amused.
“The dragons’ realm overlaps with all the others, whether we want it to or not. Fortunately only at the farthest reaches of each of them, whether Magus Terra or the Borderlands, the human and monster realms, the realm of the high Fae, the triad world, the upper and lower shadow realms… ” She broke off, huffing a laugh. “We are lucky we have retreated to the stuff of legends in most of them. Our numbers are few enough as it is.”
Her gaze shifted to me. “But I see you have finally retrieved your witch, though you’re already doing a poor job of protecting her. Something you might want to improve upon before she gets snatched away to where you cannot follow.”
Not surprisingly, Aiden bristled beside me. “I’ll follow her anywhere. The realms are many and vast, and I opened a door directly to you, which should never have happened given your needs.”
“It happened because I allowed it to happen,” the queen pointed out with equal prickliness. I squinted between them, fighting the urge to roll my eyes. Were these two seriously engaging in a multispecies pissing match? It seemed so.
“Well, given the efforts of my witch, you were able to bring three new princelings into the realm. A feat to be celebrated given your advanced age.”
I stared at him, this time truly shocked. How rude was he to rip on a woman’s age, seconds after she’d given birth, for goddess’s sake?
The queen snorted a genuine laugh.
“You’re offending your witch,” she warned him. “Have a care, lest she learn her true power over you.”
I blinked, but Aiden kept going.
“And where are your protectors?” he asked, the words bold, almost an insult. I was beginning to get the impression this was on purpose, a challenging form of banter somehow preferred to respectful deference.
“Silas is an oaf.” The dragon queen sniffed. “We both knew I was past my prime for childbirth, but in this, he could not help me. I had no interest in betraying my weakness to the younger queens. I was too proud. The babies would come or not, and that was all that mattered.”
I stared at her. I wouldn’t betray her secret, the keening grief that had swept over me as I had raced through these halls toward her, the sorrow of a mother who could not help her own children at their time of greatest need.
“No one would help you?” I asked. “Not even one of the younger warriors of your kind, with claws small enough to handle the delicate eggs?”
Her gaze swung to me. “So much is lost to the other realms about the lives of dragons. No one could have helped me, sweet child. These babies will grow to three times their size by nightfall, and then they will sleep. They’ll be fully adolescent in barely two weeks. At that point, though their minds are yet malleable, their instincts to hunt, to rule, will already be in play. And they will be big. Too big to handle something as delicate as an egg. Even if the others would want to care for my young, and I suspect some would, they couldn’t any more than Silas or myself.”
I flinched as the canopy of her wings pouched out with every thud of the chattering, windmilling baby dragons. “Three times their size by nightfall?” I echoed. “What do they eat?”
“In this young state, they aren’t picky, but they also cannot hunt. Food is being prepared. The warriors and the queens are good at that. And there are three live princes, when all had whispered I would be lucky to bring forth one—if any.” Her grin hardened into something fierce. “Never underestimate a queen.”
She refocused on me “But to you, I owe a debt greater than any of them will ever know. Yours is the heart of a healer. You heard my need and came to help. Fitting that your husband deals in death of any who would harm his people.”
I opened my mouth to protest the characterization of my relationship with Aiden, then shut it again. Proud, she’d said. As proud as the queen undoubtedly was, I suspected Aiden was even prouder. If he wanted the illusion of our connection to stand, I could roll with that.
Then Aiden surprised me.
“What do you know of the contract between the Hogan witches and the Fae?” he asked. “As you say, we have been without a witch for a long time, and much has been lost. Much that I now realize we need to find.”
The queen’s eyes glowed with a warm light, transforming their depths into radiant purple pools. I could feel the swell of magic around us as she drew in a sharp breath.
“So that is the way of it,” she mused. “I will tell you what I know, and I will tell you what y
ou need to know,” she said, her patter that of a practiced seer reveling in her gifts. “The contract you seek is in the place Reagan Hogan left it, though hidden to ordinary eyes. What you saw of that document in Sakorn Castle was an illusion, Witch Hogan, but the truth lies close by, beneath the standing stones of the great battle kings.”
I tightened my grip on Aiden’s hands as the queen continued. “But what you will read on the blighted page of that contract will not give you relief, for all that it must be done.”
I grimaced. Well, that was somewhat of a buzzkill.
“The threat against your borders is real, King Aiden,” the queen continued. “The Fomorians have been raised from their watery graves to harry your shores anew. There are many futures that could stem from this attack. In some, you win, in some, the lands of the high Fae run black with blood, and in some, a dark new realm is created, a realm long in the making. A realm whose birth cries you have already heard.”
“The Riven District,” I murmured, and the queen dipped her head in agreement.
“But who is our true enemy?” Aiden persisted. “Do the Fomorians act alone?”
Inside the cocoon of her wings, a high-pitched warbling song rose up, arresting us all. Its beauty was breathtaking, and the queen peeled her wings apart in time for the three dragonets to burst free.
I goggled. They had been as large as my forearms at birth. Now they were as tall as I was, their wings spread wide, maybe three times my height from tip to tip. They chattered and roared with their shrill voices, nothing I could understand. The queen let out a puff of fiery warning smoke, but this time, her children crashed against the wall, and squawks of dismay and surprise and even outrage followed.
She turned her head back to us. “It would be good for you to leave. I’ll show you the way,” she said a little drolly. “Very quickly, they’ll figure out you’re here, and you’ll become food.”
My eyes flew wide, but this apparently had not been Aiden’s first dragon birth.
“We thank you for your directions,” he said, even as he drew me toward the far door.
“And I thank your witch for coming to my aid,” she said, fixing me with her jewel-eyed stare. “Belle Hogan, you were the answer to my prayer in the night. Of all the portals you could have entered—and there were many, I know—you chose to enter mine.”
I snorted. “Well, I don’t know if I chose it so much as fell into it.”
“Don’t you?” the queen countered mildly. “Like all humans, you are always seeking answers, always searching for the truth. When one sets foot upon an unexpected path, one cannot truly know where it ends. Think on that the next time you find yourself taking a path you dare not follow. No matter how great your fears or expectations, you will reach the end you must.”
While my brain bent into a pretzel trying to understand her advice, the queen turned back to Aiden. “And for your good taste in choosing her, you are always welcome here, King Aiden, if perhaps not right at this exact moment.”
As if on cue, the three dragonets staggered upright, their wings flapping as their attention finally landed on us. I couldn’t understand their chatter, but I could understand their need.
“We’re gone,” Aiden announced. He gestured sharply, opening a rent in the air, a portal to a frigid, howling landscape as the dragonets surged forward, their flaming breath streaming out before them, scorchingly close.
A second later, we were through. Out of the frying pan and into the ice storm.
26
Aiden
I expected to return to the same forlorn castle hallways that I’d found the first time I’d gone searching for Belle in the halls of the mountain Fae. But the dragon queen had given me more of a gift than she’d let on. She hadn’t directed us to Sakorn Castle, but to a desolate glade on the edge of a ruined forest, everything around us bent against an endless assault of snow, wind, and ice.
There were three low mounds at the glade’s center, each as tall as a Fae and maybe twelve feet across, and a narrow standing stone that rose up to defy the storm, some six feet away from us, with no inscription upon it. There didn’t need to be. This was a sacred site, unmarked, unremembered but for the standing stone, and trapped in perpetual winter. The queen might have given me my wish on a platter. The answer of the Hogan contract would be somewhere within these mounds, if there was an answer to be found.
Had she known it? Probably. I hadn’t learned the hierarchy of dragons as well as I should have—yet another glaring fault in my father’s education, as he was content to fight and isolate us more and more from our bordering realms. I had always thought him dangerously obsessed, but I was beginning to understand how great a fool he was, and his father before him, to have allowed his own pride and cruelty to force Reagan Hogan to such a great act of defiance. How much had she despised the king she saw as her captor, to have abandoned him and his people to their fate? She had to have foreseen some of what might befall the Fae in her absence, I was certain.
“Oh, it’s cold!” Belle gasped against the roaring wind, and I shook myself back to awareness, shrugging off my own light cloak, though it did little to blunt the wind’s anger. I didn’t want us to be detected on open ground making magic, though, so it would have to do for now. I offered it to her, overriding her immediate denial.
“Put it on. You will warm up quickly,” I said as she pulled the cloak around her. It was only a half cloak, but it hung down well past her hips as she pulled it tight.
“Where are we? I thought…”
“You thought we’d return to the halls of the mountain king. So did I. But the guardian of that hall is now safely in my castle, the lies he created shattered. He had the emerald crown and bracelets, but I don’t think he had the contract.”
Belle frowned. “Yo, I was there, Aiden. Everything was right there, with actual substance to it, not half real, half fake. How can—”
Whatever she tried to say next was ripped out of her mouth by a sudden upsurge in the screaming gale. We hunched together, and I threw my arm around her.
“We need the contract,” I shouted. “It’s here.”
“But where?” Belle protested, getting a faceful of wind that seemed to finally push her over into anger. “For fuck’s sake, why would you let this stupid piece of paper wander around the realm like this? And I know, I know,” she continued, waving off the admission that leaned heavily on my heart as if it meant nothing to her. “I did finally figure that part out, though it took me long enough. If the Hogan contract is here in the mountains, that original contract probably wasn’t made with the ocean Fae’s king at all, but with whatever asshole ruled the mountain Fae hundreds of years ago. So, great, it never was real. Ever! But goddess love us, we still kept coming back, didn’t we? We just couldn’t say no when you called.”
“Your promise—”
“Screw our promise!” she shot right back. “That promise was made in a morass of lies and bullshit. But instead of keeping track of the contract and, oh, I don’t know, fixing it to your advantage, you lost it so completely that even my great-grandmother couldn’t find it? Because believe me, she was motivated, so that means this thing was well and truly hidden. I mean, seriously! You’re the freaking High Kings of the high Fae, and you can’t even keep track of your own crapass contracts? What’s wrong with you people?”
I wanted to rage right back at Belle, not to discount her words, but to agree with her, to lament the stupidity of my forebears and decry how things had become so convoluted, but I could only stare. Not because of her beauty, though that was shockingly obvious, her fresh face turned up, flushed with intensity, her storm-cloud eyes angry, her dark hair whipping in the wind. But because of what was happening around her.
As Belle had started railing at me, the wind had dropped to barely a whistle, the frozen grass at her feet had turned the faintest green, the hoarfrost hanging from the tree behind her had shaken free. Rivulets of water now ran down the branches and trunks, and even as I watched, the
tiniest bud burst open on the branch nearest to Belle.
“What?” she demanded at my expression. The force of her cry echoed around the glade, loud in the sudden stillness. Branches cracked, and a rain of frigid water shook free from the trees.
She turned at the next cascade of crackling ice, then jumped back as if she’d stepped on a snake. At her feet were small white blossoms, springing up from her very steps.
“Belle,” I said, catching her hand and tugging her deeper into the glade, closer to the barrow mounds. Then I gestured back to the trees. “Look.”
She turned, stepping close to me as I continued to approach the standing stone, her gaze going everywhere at once. The ten-foot swath of our path was now completely green and radiating out both sides, the trees at the edge of the glade fully budding as the sun peeked out from the heavy clouds, the wind now completely dying away. A profusion of white flowers had popped up around the stone, the grass of the barrow mounds turning green as a ribbon of blue sky stretched open above us.
“What are these mounds about? Are they graves?” Belle asked, her voice hushed as she tried to discern the truth that lay within the glade. “Did we unlock something by coming here?”
“You did. And maybe more than you think.” I sighed, squinting at the standing stone. “I begin to wonder if the contract of the Hogan witches was hidden away from the Fae family it served long before Reagan ever visited Sakorn Castle. I mean, you’re right, of course. My grandfather wasn’t a complete idiot, even if he was a brute. He would have found the contract when we tore Sakorn Castle apart—or the first ocean Fae king would have when he claimed the first Hogan witch. But they didn’t—clearly. No one did.”
“But why would it be hidden like this?” she asked, a reasonable question to be sure. “Who even lies in these graves? We’re not going to have to dig them up, are we?”