Queen of Dragons - Shana Abe

Darkfrith was deceptively ordinary by day. By night, her skies glistened with scales.

Tonight was especially ideal; the clouds were still low and heavy like tufts of wet fleece, easy to pierce. It would be just like shooting an arrow through a blanket.

From the balcony of his unlit quarters, Kimber watched the skies. He watched as the men of his tribe dissolved, one by one, into gusts of smoke that drifted upward from houses and farm-steads, up to that billowing mass, churning and fading. He felt them Turning again above the haze, becoming more than smoke. He cocked his head, and he could hear the very air above the earth sliced into rivers by wings and tails.

His blood began to pulse in harmony. His heart in his chest began to hammer, a gilded beast poised to break free.

He removed his garments. He stepped forward, closing his eyes in appreciation, expanding his lungs until they hurt. The rain perfumed him, it cleansed him, sent anticipation along his bare body in slick beaded welcome.

He opened his eyes and at last became smoke.

The first time he'd Turned, pain had flamed through his being like the molten core of the sun. The initial Turn was always the most treacherous—too many young drakon perished in that first instant of disintegration—but the subsequent joy of breaking free of his human form had been akin to nothing he had ever known. And after all these years, there was nothing still to compare to it: not food or drink, not power or money, not women. Nothing.

He let the rain pour through him, effortless. He willed himself to rise and he did, another plume of gray, another drifting coil, until he grazed the edge of the clouds, learning their cold sapphire weight, pushing through, merging.

He did not wait to Turn again. Kimber became a dragon right there, still cloaked in rainclouds, and did a spinning loop that swirled the mists. He stretched his neck and his wings and charged higher, breaking free all at once, an arrow indeed of scarlet and blue, and talons of bright hard gold.

His tribe was about, hunting and diving. Sinuous, lustrous as polished steel, the other dragons instinctively swerved away, letting him soar where he wished.

The moon was an ivory pearl encircled with stars, ever tempting. The land below the clouds was soft and living, and his.

His people, his home; every aspect, every atom of the air, every heart that beat.

He could not imagine wanting to leave. He could not imagine a more perfect place.

Kim bared his teeth and pumped his wings to climb higher, until his memories of the day had blown clear, until there was nothing of him left but the harsh, animal ache of straining muscle and breath.

The second body was found in a mine. A mine that the princess—and every other dragon of the mountains—knew well, in fact. It hadn't been dragged very far inside, but the winter had been long and even more frigid than usual. It had snowed nearly every week from November into February, and the winds had pushed great mounds of leaves and powder into every cranny of the world. By May, the snows were beginning to let loose their grasp to rain, and a peasant boy, a sheepherder, had ventured into the tunnel entrance by chance to escape the hammering downpour.

Once it had been a great and prosperous mine, as all the mines stabbed through the Carpathians were. Once, it had yielded cart-loads of ore riddled with copper, and dragon-men and human men had worked together to empty it of its wealth. But that was centuries ago. On this day it offered only one fresh discovery to the drenched shepherd: the remains of a man with a hole in his chest, and fair hair that had frozen into icicles, slowly thawing beneath a blanket of snow.

And a ring made of gold. A signet ring.

The news reached the castle that afternoon. By four o'clock Sandu had tracked Maricara not to the mine—he wasn't surprised she wouldn't go there—but to the high and bleak peaks of the most remote of the mountains, higher than any of the Others would go. Higher than trees, higher than hamlets or monasteries, higher even than Zaharen Yce.

She stood alone with her feet planted in the snow, her arms folded over her chest, gazing out at the cloudy tors of stone and ice that stretched as far as he could see. He knew she sensed him, although she really didn't move. Only her eyes cut to him, that pale and penetrating stare finding the curve of smoke he took to funnel down to her side.

She did not stir as he coalesced. He became human with his back to hers, not touching. Neither of them turned around.

It was damned cold up here, and blustery. She was always doing outlandish things like this, going off to stand naked in the snow atop a mountain. Sometimes he wondered if she did it just to test him, to see how far he truly would push to follow her.

"The situation is poor," Alexandru said.

"Yes. I imagine so."

"No, Mari, I mean poor. The worst I've ever seen. The Others are frightened, and they're angry. They're no longer complaining about their sheep or pigs. They're hiding their children. Great God, Maricara. Even the serfs have heard whispers of what's been happening in France."

Her hair whipped his back with the wind, a brown so deep it was nearly black; loosened grains of snow whipped with it, embedding in his skin.

"I don't know what to do," Sandu confessed, hearing the frustration in his voice. "Tell me, Princess. What should I do?"

She was silent a long while, and just when he was beginning to suspect she wouldn't answer him at all, she did.

"You must go back to them and tell them the truth. Tell them that men have decided to hunt us again. They should take all precautions."

"Men?" he echoed, and in his astonishment turned his head to see her. "What are you talking about?"

She glanced back at him, sober, her cheeks pink with cold. "I didn't kill anyone—at least not those two. They were drakon, and English. If they'd wished to, they might have killed me in a fight. No doubt they would have been bigger and stronger. But they died in human form, which means they were taken by surprise. There were no claw marks on the body, just that one wound to the chest."

"You saw the new body?"

"I did." His lips pressed tight, and she sighed, looking away. "This afternoon, first thing. I flew there as soon as I heard."

"Oh."

Sandu faced away too, his eyes tearing. His feet were numb to the ankles. He crossed his arms and clenched his fingers into his elbows to control the shivers, but Maricara only stood there like a rock, like a statue, unmoving. Her hair curved around him once more, a cloak of dark wind.

"I don't think they'll believe me," he said softly, and blinked to rid the salt from his vision. "I don't know. I don't know."

"Then they are going to die," she answered. "The proof will come to you soon enough. I'm leaving. If the killings continue, you'll know it wasn't me."

Deep in his heart, Sandu had braced for this moment. He might have even been searching for her to tell her so himself. But it was a relief that she said it aloud instead of him. He felt lighter at once, guilty and thankful in a rush of warm confusion. The snow, the jagged peaks, the relentless blue and white of his world all came together, all crystallized into a new and clarifying sense. She was leaving, and all would be right again.

When the air cleared from his exhalation, he spoke to the ice on the ground.

"Where will you go?"

She reached up to tuck her hair behind one ear, a girlish gesture, one that made her seem both younger and more ordinary than she really was.

"To the west, I think," Maricara said. "I have a message to deliver."

"Mari—"

"You'll do fine. Keep your head up. Keep your eyes open. You're the prince now, and the people will want you to be ruthless. Never forget it."

How could he? Because of her, the gilded wires of Alpha caged every second of his life.

CHAPTER THREE

It is no small task of will to veil ourselves from Others. Temptation tantalizes from all around—the tang of delicious sky upon our tongues; the fierce, burning stretch of our wingbones as we clasp a channel of wind. The pleasure of rolling through clouds, or of becoming one; of stealing into locked inns and cafes in thin, smoky tendrils, to do as we like.

Food tastes better as dragons. Colors that appear to you as dark and bland are as vibrant as the sunrise to our eyes. Scents can overwhelm us; from miles away we can smell mice or apple blossoms or that small teardrop of fear that winks from your eye as you gaze up at us lancing the heavens.

Cold, heat, water, wind: Everything slides off our scales.

We are more beautiful than you, and infinitely clever. We can glide so high above your common little towns, you'll convince yourself we're just the expression of your wildest imagination. Too much ale. Too little sleep.

So if a drakon of such extraordinary Gifts was forced to travel, would she choose the ordinary human way, with horses, and reeking carriages, and ships that crawled at a slug's pace across the open seas?

Or would she merely open her wings and fly? You know what you would do, if only you could.

CHAPTER FOUR

Years later, when his life had resolved once again into reasoned lucidity, Kimber would remember the night that his sensible and fortified existence shattered with one particular, acute sensation: sweat.

It was hot in Darkfrith, the hottest June anyone could recall. Summer had come early in a wave of heat that shimmered across the land, that dried the tender tips of anemones and meadow grasses, and burned the sky into a deep, humid cobalt. The fresh green shoots of wheat and rye slowed their spectacular growth; the many streams that fed into the River Fier grew sluggish and shallow. Only the forest remained unaffected, dense and fragrant with wildflowers and bracken, elm and oak and birch.

The village elders convened for gossip over whist and lukewarm lemonade, wearing muslin and lace in shadowed parlors with the casements opened wide.

The young retreated into the woods.

At night those who could would still take to the air, finding relief in the thinnest upper curve of the atmosphere; there were no clouds to hide behind. Even the moon seemed to withdraw, her light wan and blued. Excepting the new mosquitoes darting above the ponds, nothing flourished.

That afternoon a letter had arrived from the marquess and marchioness. It was postmarked from Flanders, addressed to Kimber, and consisted of just two lines:

Others come. Guard the shire.

Kim pondered that, sprawled atop the duvet of his ebony bed, as he followed the moonlight creeping along the ceiling, and then gradually down the walls. He'd left the balcony doors open to the garden of flowers and gravel pathways two stories below, but the only aroma that lifted was of wilted petals and baked stone; there was no breeze. It was too hot for coverings, too hot for riddles. He'd already crossed the shire and back, had set his guards in constant flight at the perimeters, and still had no idea what his parents might have actually meant.