The Dragon Mistress

by R. A. Steffan

  “What about children, though?” I couldn’t help asking, intrigued.

  He stared back. “Eh? What about them? The village looks after its own, regardless of who’s sleeping with whom or who fathered whom. Everyone’s responsible for the children. They’re the future.”

  “An eminently sensible approach, I’ve always thought,” Aristede said, without looking up from his meal preparations.

  I sat and thought about it, a slow smile crossing my lips at the picture Eldris had painted. “You know, this kind of thing is why I wanted to travel in the first place,” I said. A laugh escaped me. “Well, this and the dragons.”

  Neither Aristede nor Eldris responded, and I wondered if I’d unintentionally put my foot in it somehow. An instant later, Gladya filled the sudden silence, though her smile was sad.

  “I’m afraid there are no more dragons in Utrea,” she said. “You’re a few years too late for that.”

  “I know,” I told her, sobering. “I learned that on the ocean voyage down from Eburos. But I’d still hoped to travel in the mountains… maybe see where they used to live.” Even to see bones or broken eggshells from such magnificent creatures…

  “The mountains are dangerous.” It was the first contribution Rayth had made to the conversation since returning from caring for the horses.

  “Oh?” I countered. “So is the trade road to Safaad, as it turns out. What’s your point?”

  Rayth ignored the question and took a deep draught from the waterskin he was holding.

  “‘Ere,” Eldris said, reaching out one massive arm. “Hand that over for a minute. Might as well have wine instead of water in the stew.”

  So, not a waterskin, apparently. Eldris took the wine and poured some over the diced vegetables and strips of dried meat Aristede had added to the metal pot at his side. A few minutes later, the pot was bubbling merrily in the fast-burning fire.

  “Tell me more about what happened to the dragons,” I said, hugging my knees. “The man I talked to on the ship from Rhyth said that people killed them all, but he wouldn’t go into detail.”

  Gladya mirrored me, her expression turning into a frown.

  “It was King Khalafu’s father,” she said. “The Alyrion Empire was threatening Utrea’s borders, but the Emperor feared the damage the dragonriders might do in the event of an all-out war. They say the old king was a little unstable—”

  Rayth, who had been reunited with his wineskin as though it were a long-lost lover, made a derisive noise like a snort.

  “—and he made a deal with the Alyrions,” Gladya continued. “The Emperor offered him a peace treaty as long as he agreed to have all of the dragons in Utrea destroyed.”

  “You’re joking,” I said into the heavy silence that followed her words. “That’s horrible!”

  “Horrible and stupid,” Gladya agreed, more passion in her voice than I had yet heard from her. After a moment, though, she looked down, her expression growing sheepish. “But don’t tell anyone in Safaad I said that.”

  “You’re right, though,” I told her. “That was an awful decision! Destroy the one thing that was holding the Empire at bay? It’s foolhardy.”

  Gladya shrugged, still looking down at her feet. “I suppose the king thought the peace treaty was more desirable than continuing tensions between the two countries. The Emperor gave him some trade concessions and other allowances, as well. So he sent the army out to kill all the adult dragons, and offered an outrageous bounty for anyone who brought him eggs.”

  “He decimated his bloody army while doin’ it, too,” Eldris muttered. “It’s not like adult dragons are easy to kill.”

  “That wasn’t the worst of it, though.” Gladya’s voice had gone so quiet that I had to strain to hear her words. “When the dragonriders protested, he had them imprisoned. Some of them were even executed… and the rest died soon afterward.”

  My heart gave an unhappy lurch. “The riders all died? Why? How?”

  Gladya looked up at me, her brown eyes luminous in the firelight. “Their soul-bonds were broken when their dragons were killed.”

  I stared at her, trying to understand. “I don’t know what that means.”

  She shook her head. “I’m not sure anyone who wasn’t a dragonrider could really understand. But apparently, before a dragon accepted a rider, they had to form some kind of a connection. Mental… spiritual… I’m not really sure how it worked. But a wild dragon—an unbonded dragon—is nothing more than a dangerous beast. When dragons bonded with people, though, together they became something more. Something wonderful.”

  I swallowed, tears pricking at my eyes. “And when a bonded dragon died…” I began.

  “It’s rider died as well,” she finished.

  “Dear gods,” I breathed, sickened at the callousness of what Utrea’s king had done.

  The others were silent. Rayth took another deep draught of the wine, and I idly wondered if it was unusual for him to spend his evenings pickling himself in spirits.

  “Anyway,” Gladya went on, “no one has seen an adult dragon in years, and the number of eggs turned in by the bounty hunters gradually dwindled to nothing. As far as anyone knows, they’re all gone now.”

  “That may be one of the saddest things I’ve ever heard,” I decided, imagining some poor, faceless soldier who’d served his king faithfully as a dragonrider, locked in a cell, feeling the animal he’d bonded to die… knowing he would soon follow.

  “Stew’s ready,” Eldris mumbled, using a thick cloth wrapped around his hand to nudge the pot away from the fire. Maybe I was imagining it, but it seemed to me that his shoulders were taut with something. Anger, perhaps.

  We ate, although I did so sparingly. Conversation was sporadic, none of us seeming much in the mood for stories or banter. Maybe I should have felt bad for dragging the mood down, but I’d wanted to know. Tales like this one were important. It was important that people remembered the awful things those in power did sometimes.

  My childhood guardians had repelled an invasion by the very same empire that had threatened Utrea. My brother Favian and his two lovers had helped topple a corrupt king in the city-state of Rhyth. Meanwhile, I had merely stood to one side and watched these things happening around me—or heard about them, after the fact. But if nothing else, I could tell this story so everyone would remember what had happened to the dragons in Utrea—and to the humans who’d loved them.

  “You shouldn’t go to the palace, Frella,” Rayth said in a low voice, seemingly out of the blue.

  He was still seated apart from the rest of us, and I’d noticed earlier that he’d refused the stew. The wineskin lying next to him was also considerably emptier than it had been the last time I’d paid attention. His words were not slurred, but they had that overly careful quality common to habitual drunkards. I narrowed my eyes, feeling my temper stir.

  “While I appreciate your assistance in picking me up off the side of the road and helping me get to Safaad,” I told him, “I don’t really recall asking your opinion about what I should or shouldn’t do once I arrive there.”

  He shrugged, not looking at me, something about the dismissive movement making me angrier. “Then you’ll get my opinion for free,” he replied. “If you’re smart, you’ll turn around and head straight back north to your barbarian island. Go home to your powerful guardians, and don’t risk yourself in pursuit of whatever it is you’ve traveled across the sea to find.”

  I stood up slowly, facing him, snapping my jaw shut when I realized that it was hanging open in outrage. “How dare you?” I asked, genuinely taken aback at his casual dismissal of the ambition for travel I’d harbored for as long as I could remember.

  “Utrea can be a dangerous place,” he muttered, still staring into the crackling flames rather than looking at me.

  “I can take care of myself!” I snapped.

  At that, he finally met my eyes and lifted one arched brow. “Can you indeed?” he asked in that dry-as-dust drawl I was quickly
coming to hate.

  I felt my sun-reddened cheeks heat yet again as I contemplated my current position, wearing borrowed clothes and eating other peoples’ food as I prepared to spend another day begging a ride on someone else’s horse. Possibly, the reasonable thing to do at that point would have been to sit my ass down and shut my mouth.

  So, of course, what I actually did was stomp over to where Rayth was lounging against his saddle and jab a finger at his face. “Why don’t you come over here and I’ll show you just how well I can take care of myself… assuming you can part with your wineskin long enough for a sparring match.”

  Why… why did I do things like this? My preferred weapons were crossbow, quarterstaff, and throwing knives. Weapons designed to keep larger and stronger opponents from getting close enough to make use of their advantages over me. And right now, I had precisely none of those things available. When I discovered that I wouldn’t be able to find the right kind of crossbow bolts in Utrea, I’d bartered my bow as part of the payment for Laduna. A staff was impractical to stow for long-distance travel on horseback, and my throwing knives were now the property of the bastards who’d waylaid me earlier today.

  At least Rayth was drunk off his ass. That would probably be enough of a disadvantage for me to be able to take him.

  Across the fire from us, Eldris made an interested noise. “A sparring match? This I gotta see.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Rayth said dismissively, still in that precisely enunciated voice.

  A low whistle caught my attention, and when I turned, Aristede tossed me a dagger nestled in a leather sheath, hilt-first. “You’ll be wanting this,” he said. “Try not to skewer him for real. That could be awkward.”

  “Do you good to get a little sparring in, Rayth,” Eldris opined, leaning back and lacing his fingers together behind his head, the hard muscles in his chest flexing as he did.

  When I turned back, Rayth had risen silently, and we were suddenly standing much too close. I took a step back, and then mentally cursed myself for having yielded ground. He was… very tall. How had I not noticed that before?

  “Are you both quite sure about this?” Gladya asked, sounding anything but.

  “Oh, yeah. Totally,” I lied, putting more space between us since I’d already taken that first telling step. He was drunk, I reminded myself. Completely shit-faced. It would be fine.

  I shook out my bruised and aching limbs as best I could, checking the area around us to make sure we wouldn’t accidentally damage something important. “So, daggers then?” I asked, trying to get a feel for Rayth’s style as he moved toward me.

  “Dagger. Singular,” he said. His bloodshot eyes flicked to the knife in my hand. “That one.”

  All righty, then. He was apparently going to spar unarmed out of some ridiculous notion of chivalry. Great. This was totally doable.

  “It’s your funeral,” I told him. A snort, quickly stifled, came from one of the others behind me.

  I was trying to decide whether to play defense or offense when Rayth lunged, taking the decision from me. I sidestepped, only to find that it had been a feint and he was still directly in my path. I brought the blade up, flat side out since we were sparring, and he caught my wrist. With a violent twist, I wrenched free and whirled away, coming to a stop a couple strides away from him.

  Damn it… he was moving far too fast and with far too much precision for someone who had single-handedly drained half of a wineskin over the course of an hour.

  In my defense, if the knife Aristede gave me had been weighted for throwing—which it wasn’t—I could have had it lodged in Rayth’s throat in an instant as we stood across from each other. But skewering was definitely off the table tonight, even if Rayth was an annoying prick. I’d have to do this the hard way, unless I wanted to back down like a coward.

  I didn’t want to back down. I wanted to put Rayth’s drunken ass on the ground to prove a point about… something.

  I feinted left and used the moment as Rayth reacted to tangle my leg with both of his. Momentum allowed me to drive an elbow into his back as our bodies twisted around each other, and he went down. In fact, he went down far more easily than I had expected. The reason for this became apparent when his knees tightened around the leg I’d tangled between his and jerked me sideways, pulling me down after him.

  A good-natured catcall came from the small audience. I thought it was probably Eldris, but couldn’t really spare time to focus on it. The good news was, I’d landed on top of Rayth, and my knife arm was still free. Normally, I would have gone for a knee to the groin, but the way he was keeping our legs were tangled together made me think he was expecting that.

  I twisted my upper body, attempting to get the point of the knife aimed at his ribs, which would effectively end the fight. A lean, corded arm wound around mine, his superior strength ensuring I couldn’t get the blade turned toward his body. Hoping that he would discount my left hand, I threw my weight against our tangled arms despite the way it twisted my elbow.

  My left fist flew out, trying for the same neck jab I’d attempted against Eldris on the road earlier. I’d intended to pull the punch, obviously, but Rayth jerked his chin down to protect his throat and my knuckles hit his jaw instead, with more force than I had intended.

  He grunted, but didn’t loosen his hold on me. An instant later, the world shifted around me and I was somehow pinned on my back, breathing hard, the hilt of the dagger no longer in my hand and both of my wrists above my head in an unbreakable grip. Hard brown eyes, glittering in the firelight, stared down at me from a scruffy, high-cheekboned face.

  “And that,” he said, his breath smelling of the wine he’d consumed, “was against an unarmed drunkard.”

  Chapter 3: Safaad

  FURY—FUELED AT LEAST partly by embarrassment and partly by my sudden, visceral awareness of his body pressed against mine—made me buck and squirm beneath him.

  “I’m better with ranged weapons,” I hissed through gritted teeth, and wriggled again.

  My pelvis rolled against his. It was completely unintentional on my part, but I felt a noticeable twitch of hard flesh against the crease of my thigh in the instant before he pushed away from me and stood up. I eyed the hand he extended to me for a long moment before taking it with bad grace and allowing him to pull me to my feet. His expression was once more cold and distant.

  “Well fought,” Aristede said, clapping in a way that did not seem to be mocking.

  Still, I had to hold back the torrent of arguments and excuses that wanted to fly to my lips—it hadn’t been well fought, but if I weren’t tired and sore I would have done better. If I’d had my preferred weapons, I wouldn’t have ended up on my back with Rayth’s prick poking me in the hip. If he’d had the good grace to fight like someone who’d drunk enough wine to swim in… if he hadn’t riled me up first by being such a conceited ass…

  Excuses have never won a single fight, Kitten. I could practically hear Ithric’s words in my ear, even though he was half a world away. And while having a vicious temper may have won a few, it’s responsible for losing many more. Go on—ask me how I know.

  I deflated.

  “Not that well fought,” I told Aristede. Steeling myself, I glanced at Rayth and choked back my pride. “Look, I take your point. But just because travel is dangerous doesn’t mean I’m not going to do it anyway. It’s my life. Mine to risk; mine to control.”

  He cocked an eyebrow. “Yours to lose, if you choose to risk it on the wrong thing at the wrong time.”

  “Yes,” I agreed, not willing to fight anymore tonight. “That, too.”

  “Don’t discount yourself,” Aristede said. “Rayth is a trained soldier, and you made him work for it despite being exhausted and battered. You’ve got talent, even if melee fighting isn’t your preferred style.”

  Honestly, it hadn’t seemed from my perspective like he’d had to work all that hard, but Eldris nodded agreement.

  “I could show you a few
things,” said the big man. Then, he seemed to catch himself. “But you’re too tired tonight… and I guess there won’t be much chance once we get to Safaad tomorrow.”

  I felt an unexpected tinge of regret upon realizing he was right.

  “Yeah, I guess not,” I said. “Still—thanks for offering. I’d take you up on it if I could.”

  The corner of his lush lips twitched in a roguish half-smile. “Eh, don’t mind me. I’m just jealous ’cause I didn’t get to roll around in the dirt with you.”

  I choked on a very unladylike snort of laughter, even as the tingly feeling which had made an unwanted appearance in my belly when Rayth had gained the upper hand on me returned. Thankfully, I was saved from having to come up with a witty response by Gladya’s quiet voice.

  “I admire your bravery,” she said. “I’d love to visit faraway lands, but the idea of actually doing so terrifies me. Learning a whole new language? Different customs? Not knowing any of the people or places? I couldn’t do it.”

  I shook my head. “I’m not brave, Gladya. Just stubborn. If you want to travel, you should travel. You don’t have to sail for the farthest horizon like me. You could visit somewhere closer. I mean… come on.” I gestured at the camp around us. “You’re traveling now.”

  She looked up, her large brown eyes meeting mine. A little smile tugged at her full lips. “Well, I suppose you’re right. Who knows? Perhaps I will, someday, with Darian.”

  “That’s a fair point about the language,” Eldris mused, leaning back on his elbows to regard me. “Where’d you learn to speak Utrean so well, anyway?”

  I shrugged. “No mystery there. An Utrean scholar came to Rhyth to consult with one of the priests from my home village. An old guy by the name of Ghizaan. He’s the one who convinced me to come to Utrea, though I suspect that some of his stories were more than a little embellished.” I sobered. “The ones about dragons certainly were. But, anyway, he taught me the language. He stayed for more than a year, and I think he enjoyed having someone to talk to in his native tongue.”