The Dragon's Price

by Bethany Wiggins

  I smack his arm with my staff and glare. “Absolutely not! That would be—”

  “Scandalous, I know. That’s the point,” he says, slowly running his gaze over my legs. He bows low, a graceful bow that causes my heart to flutter, and holds his hand out in the direction of the Glass Forest. “After you, Princess Sorrowlynn.”

  Taking the edges of my ragged skirt in hand, I curtsy to him as deeply as I would curtsy to my queen mother. “Thank you, my lord Golmarr.” When I stand, he is staring at me with wide eyes, and his cheeks are a shade pinker than normal. I laugh and he swallows, then shakes his head and blinks.

  “Just don’t curtsy for the Satari in that skirt…unless you want them getting a glimpse of your bloomers. Those are lace, aren’t they?” He eyes the bit of material that hangs below my skirt with renewed interest.

  It is my cheeks, now, that are glowing. “Yes, lace. They were for in case I married you. My wedding-night bloomers.”

  Golmarr clears his throat and rolls his shoulders. “I missed out on some scandalous bloomers,” he says. I gasp and swing my staff at him again, but he jumps out of the way with a laugh. With me still in the lead, we continue down.

  The Glass Forest, we discover, climbs partway up the side of the mountain, choking the native pines until they are nothing more than skeletons shooting up into dense, wide leaves that hide the sky. The sunlight shining through the leaves is filtered to a murky, thick green. The air becomes damp with moisture, which curls along the ground in gray wisps, and Golmarr has to use his sword to cut our way forward through ferns and vines and wildflowers.

  “Welcome to the Glass Forest,” Golmarr mutters, hacking through a particularly thick vine. “Home of soldiers who deserted the Trevonan army; the Satari, who were chased out of their stone cities a century ago by the stone dragon; and all manner of foul bandits and ruffians who prefer living in a lawless land.”

  “It’s beautiful,” I whisper, touching the thick, moss-covered tree trunks as we pass them. “I have never seen anything like this.” I stoop down and pluck a handful of tiny purple flowers from the ground, bringing them to my nose. They smell like peaches and vanilla. I start humming as I walk, and pick every new flower I see until I am holding a rainbow bouquet. “I have always wanted to see the Glass Forest, but I never imagined it to be this breathtaking.” I press the flowers to my nose and sniff. Golmarr stops walking and looks me up and down. His dark brows furrow.

  “What?” I ask, lowering the flowers and examining myself. My clothes look like a pile of rags draped over my body, and to think that they were once white almost makes me laugh. Now they are mottled gray, and the deep brown of old blood, like the very dirt beneath my feet. My left sleeve has a jagged tear in it, and my right sleeve is a torn, fraying mess that hangs above my elbow.

  Golmarr sheathes his sword and untucks my baggy shirt, covering the knife at my waistband. Next, he crouches down and stands back up with a handful of damp soil. He studies my face for a moment and then wipes a streak of dirt down the bridge of my nose. I drop the flowers and force his hand away from me. “What are you doing?” I ask. “Am I not already filthy enough?”

  He shakes his head and smears his hand over my chin and down my throat, covering my skin as far down as the two missing buttons expose it, all the way to the top edge of my camisole. I gasp and pull my shirt closed, and his eyes twinkle with amusement. “Sorry,” he says. “But you’re too beautiful. We need to make you as unattractive as possible.”

  “Beautiful?” I ask, thinking of my sisters, the true beauties of my family.

  “Very beautiful.” He examines me like an artist examining his painting, and then cradles the back of my head with one hand. Cupping my cheek in his other hand, he slowly wipes his thumb under my eye. “Almost perfect,” he says. “But there’s one more spot that I need to make far less tempting.” His thumb gently traces a smudge of gritty dirt over my lower lip, and I freeze. The hand cradling my head tightens in my hair. Golmarr stares at me and licks his lips, and I turn my mouth up toward his. I place my hands flat against his chest, and my thumbs extend past the edge of his vest and rest on his smooth skin. I can feel the crazy pounding of his heart, faster than my own. “It didn’t work,” Golmarr whispers, resting his thumb against both my lips. “Those lips are still begging to be kissed.” He shakes himself and backs a step away from me. “You can’t call me Golmarr while we are in the forest,” he blurts, wiping a streak of dirt over his eyebrow.

  With my heart still pounding from him smudging me with dirt, I nod. “I will call you Ornald.”

  “And you will be Jayah.” I cringe at the name of Golmarr’s sister-in-law—the woman who I thought would be my sister wife. “Jayah isn’t so bad,” Golmarr says, slashing a trail through the forest once more. “And speaking of Jayah, do you want to meet her?”

  “No, not really.”

  “Are you sure? She is a great cook, and my brother, her husband, has some of the best cattle in my land. When I come home, they will throw me a feast.”

  “I don’t care to meet her,” I snap as I gingerly step over a rotting log with the aid of my staff.

  He turns to face me. “Sorrowlynn, I am asking you if you want to come home with me,” Golmarr says. He studies my face, watching for a reaction.

  My mouth dances upward into a smile, and I bite my bottom lip, accidentally getting pieces of dirt in my front teeth. “Yes,” I say, and the worry of where to go and what to do is lifted from me. “Yes!” I throw my arms around his neck and squeeze, and he hugs me so hard that my feet leave the ground. I stay in his embrace for a drawn-out moment, until he sets me down and steps away.

  Once more, Golmarr starts whacking the bushes with his sword, and I stare at his shoulder, how it tightens and flexes with every slash. I want to press my fingers to his skin and feel the way it moves, feel the strength beneath it. I want any excuse to touch him.

  The deeper into the forest we travel, the gloomier it becomes, until the air is so murky and dank, I almost feel as if I am beneath Zhun’s lake again. The smell turns from damp to the cloying scent of wet clothes left in a heap too long. Mist rises from the ground, curls around the brown tree trunks, weaves between the ferns and flowers, and attaches itself to my bare legs.

  A flash of the forest flickers in my mind, of trees coated with layer upon layer of mist that has frozen, until all the green is encased in ice, like glass. “So that’s why they call it the Glass Forest,” I muse, trailing my fingers over the damp, feathery leaves of a fern as tall as I am.

  “Why?” Golmarr asks, peering at me over his shoulder.

  “Because in the winter the mist freezes on the plants and they look like glass.”

  Golmarr shakes his head. “No, Jayah. The forest will freeze any time of year, even in the heat of summer.”

  I frown at Golmarr. “But how can that be? When it is warm…” I remember the creature I saw flying above the forest the day before, and think of The History of Dragons, a book too heavy to lift, which I was forced to read in the royal library when I was ten. “A dragon lives here,” I whisper. “And it has breath of ice. The glass dragon.”

  “So say the legends, but no one knows that for sure. No one has seen a dragon in this forest and lived to tell about it for years, and no rumors of freezing glass have reached the grasslands since I was thirteen.”

  I shake my head. “No, the legend is right—the history books are right—and—” Golmarr presses a finger to his mouth for silence and waits for me to catch up to him.

  “We are being watched by several Satari men, Jayah,” he whispers. “Play along with whatever I say.”

  “Whatever you say, Ornald,” I reply, gripping my staff a little more tightly. I whisper, “Will they try to kill us?”

  “Not if we are lucky. The Satari are incredibly hospitable to anyone they do not consider threatening. If we’d been discovered by Trevonan renegades, we would have had to fight to survive.” We keep walking, but Golmarr doesn’t take the lead,
opting instead to stay beside me. I scan the forest, looking for whoever is watching us, and see a tree trunk up ahead shift and move as brown-clad man steps away from it and then ducks into the thick green undergrowth.

  “Ornald,” I whisper. Golmarr nods his head so I know he also saw the man, and then he sheathes his sword and stops walking.

  “Come here,” he whispers. I walk to his side. He puts his arm around my shoulders and presses his lips to my ear. “Stop holding that confounded walking stick like it is a weapon,” he whispers. And then he looks into my eyes, and his eyes are narrowed, but he smiles so brightly that I can’t help but smile back. “When your father finds out that we aren’t married, he’s going to kill me.” Golmarr taps my nose with his finger and I blink at him. “At least we have a good excuse. Those bandits who stole everything—”

  The hiss of steel being unsheathed fills the forest, and it comes from all directions. Golmarr’s arm tenses on my shoulders, but he doesn’t make a move for his sword. “Hello?” he calls, feigning surprise. Six brown-clad men step out from behind trees, and all of them have drawn swords.

  “Satari,” Golmarr whispers.

  I force myself to keep only one hand on my staff and try my best to look like a helpless, weaponless girl who is lost in the forest.

  “What have we found wandering our forest?” one of the men asks. Three gold loops hang from each of his ears, framed by thick, dark sideburns. He scratches his black-and-gray goatee with the hand not pointing a sword at Golmarr and studies us. We make quite a pair, Golmarr and me, with our torn and filthy clothes. The longer the man studies us, the more perplexed he looks, until finally he asks, “Who are you, and what has happened to you?”

  “I am Ornald, from Carttown,” Golmarr says, dipping his head in a quick bow, “and this is my true love, Jayah.” He tries to press me forward as he introduces me, but I shove back against his hand. Golmarr chuckles, and the men surrounding us let their sword arms relax, though they do not lower their weapons. “Jayah and I were on our way to be married several days ago.” He turns to me. “How many days do you think have passed since we should have been wed?”

  I shrug, clueless as to how much time we spent in Zhun’s cave, and the men laugh.

  “Anyhow, we were sneaking off to elope—a union of the heart, not an arranged marriage—but somehow Jayah’s father found out and hired a gang of thugs to stop it. They cut Jayah’s skirt half off for the pearls sewn to the fabric and stripped us of all our belongings but my sword and this knife, which was hidden beneath my sleeve before I tore the sleeve off.” He lifts his arm up, and the man with the goatee snaps and holds his hand out. Golmarr removes his knife and places it on the man’s palm. “After that, they dumped us in the forest to starve or die at the hands of the forest dwellers.” The armed men stand a little taller and nod, pleased with the conclusion of Golmarr’s story. “We have had little to eat for days and are wondering if you might spare a morsel for my true love and me before we continue on our way.”

  The Satari leader’s eyes narrow. “Why, pray tell, would the thugs leave a strong lad like you with your sword?”

  Golmarr cringes. “Because I was conned into buying a piece of junk,” he says, sounding pained. “The blacksmith said I was buying a sword that was the exact replica of the Anthar prince’s famed dragon sword. But alas, when I tried to sharpen and polish it, I discovered the blade is not even made of real steel.” Golmarr lifts his sword out of the scabbard just enough to show the base of the silver blade. “See? If I so much as cross blades with a well-made weapon, my sword will shatter.” He lets the blade fall back into the scabbard.

  The Satari laugh and return their swords to their sheaths. The one with the goatee grins, making his green eyes dance with mischief. “I am Edemond, patriarch of the Satari band called the Black Blades. It just so happens that we are having a feast tonight and you may join us, if you’d like.”

  “We would be honored to feast with your Black Blades, but we have nothing with which to pay for our food,” Golmarr says cautiously.

  Edemond shrugs and tests the balance of Golmarr’s dagger. “I will keep your blade as payment. Tonight you shall feast with us, for we have reason to celebrate.”

  “Celebrate? What day is it that there is something to celebrate?” Golmarr asks, while at the same time I am struggling to figure out what holidays are close to my birthday. There are none.

  “We celebrate the beautiful Princess Sorrowlynn and strapping Prince Golmarr.” Edemond waits for us to react. I force my face to remain placid, something I learned by watching my mother.

  “What about them?” Golmarr asks, tightening his hold on my shoulders.

  “So you haven’t heard? Not three days past, the horse clan rode through our forest, but they were short one son. The youngest, whose sword you purchased a replica of, was fed to the fire dragon along with the Faodarian princess. We heard that she chose death over being wed to a barbarian prince, and he chose to try and save her anyway.” He frowns and mutters, “Young fools. Brave, but fools nonetheless. And so we feast in their honor! Come, my young lovers. A meal waits.”

  With three men in front of us, and three behind, we are escorted through the forest, along barely visible trails that wind between the trees. I use my staff as a walking stick even though my hands are itching to hold it like a weapon, and try to keep up with the Satari, but my body is so ravished with hunger that I can barely put one foot in front of the other. I take a step and stumble. Before I fall to the ground, Golmarr scoops me up into his arms. Gratitude warms my exhausted body, and I look into his eyes. They are so close that I can see the little flecks of gold around his pupils. “Are you all right?” he quietly asks.

  “Just tired,” I say.

  “Let me carry you for now.” I loop my arms around his neck, and he tightens his hold on me. I lay my head on his shoulder, and the Satari hoot and holler and make kissing noises as we walk.

  “Carrying her over the threshold before you’re married?” Edemond says, wiggling his eyebrows as he studies my bare legs. “You know, as patriarch of the Black Blades, I have the authority to marry you. It could be part of our evening festivities. A night you would never forget.”

  I choke on my own air and peer up at Golmarr’s face. His cheeks are flushed, but he is smiling down at me so intently that my heart starts thumping against my chest. “What do you think?” he asks me. “Should we give getting married a second try? I don’t think it could possibly end as badly this time around.” I study Golmarr for any hint of how I am supposed to answer that.

  “We will give you your own wagon for the night, too. A honeymoon wagon,” Edemond says, stepping up to Golmarr and slapping him on the back.

  “In that case, yes. Please marry us,” Golmarr answers. “The sooner the better.”

  The Satari throw their heads back and laugh, and their joy rings through the misty woods. I stare at Golmarr, and he winks at me. Then he brushes a quick kiss on my forehead.

  As the sun sets and the forest turns from green to an eerie, misty gray, I spot a caravan of brightly painted wagons positioned to form a giant ring around an area not quite so densely wooded as the rest of the forest. As we approach the wagon ring, Golmarr stumbles and nearly drops me, so I swing down from his arms. He leans forward, resting his hands on his knees. His whole body is shaking with exhaustion.

  “We’re almost there,” I say, and lift his arm over my shoulders to take some of his weight. Edemond takes his other arm, and we pass between two wagons and enter the Black Blades’ camp.

  The air is filled with the smell of onions, meat, and smoke, and nothing has ever smelled better. Children are running about the camp, waving long, colorful ribbons tied to sticks, or they are play-sword-fighting by the light of the cook fires. Men and women are gathered around the fires, turning spits with whole boar attached, and stirring pans filled with browning onions. I stare at the pigs’ crisping skin and want to gag. They look just like Golmarr did after he’d been
cooked by the fire dragon.

  “Are you well, lass?” Edemond asks.

  “Well enough,” I lie. “I’m…just surprised that your men cook.” I peer across Golmarr to Edemond.

  He raises one thick, arched eyebrow. “In Satar, the men cooked the food. It is a tradition we brought from our former stone city to the forest. Do the men in Carttown cook?” I shake my head, but I honestly have no idea. “Melisande,” he calls, and waves his hand. A tall, striking woman dressed in a bright orange skirt and a pale green shirt steps away from a cook fire and walks over to us. Two giant loop earrings hang from her earlobes, and her dark hair is twisted into a bun over each ear. Her pale blue eyes take in the sight of Golmarr and me, and her steps slow.

  “Who did you bring home with you this time, husband?” she asks Edemond. She purses her lips when her gaze finds my skirt.

  “Two lovers who were wandering the forest and in need of food,” Edemond says with a chuckle. “They want to be married tonight.”

  “You trust them?” she asks, eyeing Golmarr’s sword.

  “Enough to bring them to our camp.”

  Melisande nods and cups her hands around her mouth. “Mama, we need you!” she calls. A hunched, smiling woman starts walking toward us. Her hair is like white gossamer that is braided over her ears.

  “Mama, my husband found a couple of ragamuffins wandering the woods.” She glances at me sidelong. “He offered to marry them at our feast tonight. Can you help the lass get cleaned up a bit for the ceremony while I get the stone lanterns?”

  The woman’s wrinkled cheeks crease with a wide smile, and she clasps her hands to her chest. “Young lovers!” she says. “A wedding! I will take care of her.” She takes my hand in hers and leads me through the smoky clearing toward a small wagon. As we pass a cook fire, she calls for another woman to help us, asking her to fetch a lamp.