“Nah, we don’t have that kind of money. Unlike you.” He gave him the once over, a meaningful look. “You privileged jerk. Your eyes even get to be like emeralds when they glow, and my grandmother was Irish!”
“The truth is, we’re just naturals at everything we do. You’re too easy to beat. And my father’s Russian. His unusual green eyes, even in his human form, earned him a second look from Mother.”
Djibril nodded and winked at him. After doing some stretching, he sat down next to his friend.
Keith tipped the bottle of water to his mouth, then closed the cap and set it aside again. “Privileged royals, then. You all get to look better than the rest of us, too.”
“As it should be.”
While Djibril enjoyed himself needling his friend, the dragon inside him quieted down, satisfied with the win.
“Hmmm.” Raking his fingers through his ruffled hair, Keith shook his head. “Watch that head. A little more, and it will explode. I’ll quit the job for incompatible differences, is what I’ll do. No more me dealing with obnoxious CEOs and politicians, then, while you deal serves and charm the females in your all-white Wimbledon getup. After all, I’d rather stab myself with a broomstick than pander to the bast—”
“Yeah, yeah. But if I didn’t stay in the public eye, would we get so many sponsors?” Djibril interrupted.
If he didn’t, he’d be subjected to a full-on rant with the foulest language Keith could muster. He might just have to switch to dragon form and fly away to avoid that, back up north, to the cold climate he didn’t much care for. Of course, the fool would follow him all the way to Germany, which was where the next match was scheduled in a few days.
“Unless what you’re really envious about is my female admirers,” he teased again.
Keith raised an eyebrow. “I have a hurricane of a wife and twin daughters who must have the Devil in their genes. The term ‘dragon’ never fit anyone so well. So I don’t need more demons … eh, women in my life, or I’ll risk an early death for real.” His eyes widened in horror.
“When you want them off your back, you can always come here with me and burn some energy.”
“What energy? You think they leave me any?” He broke into laughter.
“Pity the glamor of disguise doesn’t work with our mates and we can’t cover our tracks from them. Another reason why I love being single.”
“Rub it in, will ya? Truth be told, I could call you a chicken, Mr. Commitment-Phobe. Getting hitched with a firecracker is where you’d really show some guts.”
“Sure thing, Ms. Joan of Arc.”
“You’re trying hard to get on my wrong side today. Careful what you wish for.”
“Yeah, we can be quite hot-tempered.” Djibril snickered, while Keith’s eyes started to glimmer dangerously once again, a bit more than usual. “But I think you’ve had enough exercise today. You seem tired, even though I know your fire won’t go out that easily.”
More laughter, from Djibril this time.
Keith punched him in the arm. “I’m fresh out of puns today, bro. My tank’s on empty. I can say, though, that you’re full of shit.”
Djibril grew serious. “Well, I appreciate all that you do. And I need you to stay strong and healthy so you’ll have time to learn a better vocabulary.”
Keith grinned. “So you can keep milking my ass, you mean. Not sure if that opportunistic trait comes from your Russian or Ethiopian side.”
The man liked to joke and play around, but Djibril knew this company meant a lot to his friend, too, and he’d trust him with his eyes closed. Keith Dougal was born to do what he did—and he didn’t just think that because they happened to be related. An ancestor, Dima Zharkova, linked them. A cousin to his great-grandmother, Vera, she’d eloped across the Atlantic with her American suitor, a three-toed dragon commoner, about a couple of decades in the twentieth century, and set up roots there. The story had created quite a furor in their family—the woman had dared to marry beneath her—but time had weathered the effects of the scandal.
That line of dragons had produced good stock, though, like this guy, who’d stuck with him through thick and thin. When Djibril had to travel to compete in matches and go on various media appearances, he could think of no other person who could run the business so well, like a well-oiled machine.
Now, here they were, in Ethiopia, his mother’s native land, pursuing one of their long-term missions to build a new factory and create more jobs for the locals, his people. Discussions with Tis Abay Manufacturing were well under way, and things looked promising.
“If we do nothing else, we must honor our roots. Follow our road.”
“We’re getting philosophical today, I see. Dragons might live for centuries, but for some of us, that magical spark, that enthusiasm, never leaves us.” Keith scratched his head and looked, unflinching, at the sun. “If I envy anything, perhaps it’s that trait in you. Sometimes, I wonder if I’m cut out for this.”
The heavy cloak of sobriety fell upon them.
“It’s not a matter of being cut out for it or not. It’s what you are—you either accept it or you don’t.” Djibril patted him on the back. “You say I’m vain, often proud, and the last, at least, is true. I’m different. We all are. Yet, if I’m not proud of what I am, of where I come from, who’s going to be? How could I help my people? How would I bring change and hope, then?”
“That’s a tall order.”
“It’s my destiny. I’m the Dragon King’s son, his first-born and the Crown Prince.”
Keith sighed. “Well, then, perhaps I haven’t been dealt such a bad hand, after all. Imagine how worse it could be. I could be you.”
“Next time we fight, I’ll kick you in the ass and send you howling to your wife, begging for a ten-pound ice pack.”
And he could probably swing that, physically speaking.
“Let’s be real, though. At some point, something’s gotta give. You can’t keep piling on all this responsibility on your shoulders while evading the real issue, a.k.a. your royal future. You can’t singlehandedly change the world in the century you will live in it as a human.”
Djibril got up and relished the feel of the land under his feet. Keith had hit the nail on the head, but he dismissed that. As he always did. “A tennis career is highly rewarding. It’s fast, crazy, frustrating. You never stop moving. Business keeps a man alive, motivated, running toward an ever-moving finish line. But this … this is something else.”
Seeing the place thrive, mentoring the youth—these weren’t just empty concepts, words thrown about for show.
He lived this, and the avant-garde sports products and apparel he sold made all of it a reality. No castles in the sky for him. No dreams. Just action.
He looked at the vast expanse around him. At harvest time, this whole area would be abuzz with hardworking people earning a day’s wages. At this time of night, though, in the sleepy village close by, most would be tucked in their beds for a few hours after a day of toil. Soon, they’d start afresh, working the land, tending to the animals, or making their way to the factory Djibril’s sports company sponsored and slated for expansion. This whole country was, after all, his home, at least as much as the one he had in the Bering Sea, a place tucked away from hostile eyes, where his kind could live peacefully, without persecution.
He had a lot to live up to—the legacy of two proud and ancient royal lines carried on to him by his parents. That weight felt heavy on good days, and excruciating on bad ones. Staying away from that home made it all seem very distant, and he made do that way.
Truth be told, he missed his family, especially his younger sister, Zoya, who loved being the bane of his existence. It had been a while since he’d seen them, with his constant travelling and commitments. This trip, though, he’d craved it. Being in a place where he belonged, where his roots ran deep.
“Maybe it’s time to go, see what Yakob is up to at the factory. I said we’d be over to check on things before we head north.
”
“Cool.”
Djibril grabbed a T-shirt, his blue canvas loafers, and a backpack off the ground. Just then, his arm tingled, a sensation followed by the scent of burning skin.
Not a painful feeling, for heat gave him life. More surprising, if nothing else.
Raising his arm, he watched his flesh bubble and change colors as his blood rushed to the surface, right under a thin layer of skin. Separating and gathering in parts between his inner elbow and wrist, the blood started to glow, as though stoked, giving the whole thing the appearance of a tattoo.
Soon, the glow turned into burning embers, and then lines of fire formed in letters spread over a couple of lines. A royal summons, ending with a stamp of their family crest, which sported a pouncing five-toed dragon.
After a few seconds, the letters vanished, and the burning subsided.
Djibril didn’t miss the sense of urgency in that note. He rarely got one of those, except when he needed to be present at some state visit, or when his father saw fit to chide him for how he basked in the limelight, especially when it came to his charities. Never mind that they had the glamor of disguise and no human could fathom their secret—but he could do with some toning down, according to the king.
He should act the responsible prince all the time.
He grunted. What had it been this time? The front page photo of him canoodling with the current number one player’s ex-wife?
Nobody said no to the king. With a sigh, he grabbed his messenger bag and slung it on his shoulder. “Pedal to the metal, bro. Let’s see what surprises await us. Trip to the factory first, then home for me.”
“What about the tournament in Germany?”
He avoided Keith’s gaze because he knew he’d be shooting daggers at him in moments. “Speaking of that, I need you to get me out of it. Call my manager, figure out something between you.”
2
The smell of home …
A trace of water, a hint of ozone with them being so close to the North Pole. Then that undercurrent of fishiness and sea algae and phytoplankton that made up the Bering Sea. Human noses wouldn’t smell that, but dragons always could pinpoint to the micrometer the various traces of scents in their home air.
Kseniya breathed in deep as she flapped her dragon wings and landed with a smooth flow on the crunchy, almost grainy snow covering the land. It was still spring, so no chance of them seeing the actual land before a few weeks or so, when the temperatures would get to their warmest in August. For much of her life, she hadn’t seen the rock-hard earth, but with global warming, more and more of the snow melted every summer.
Still, they should consider themselves lucky that sea ice was still forming every year in their region. Other areas had seen a lot more disintegration of their ice walls.
As she looked up at the sky, she smiled inwardly. The Aurora Borealis was having a field day up there, though naked human eyes wouldn’t be able to make them out yet, the skies still being too light. With her dragon vision, though, she could see every speck of blue and green and, strikingly, some purple, too. Nature’s fireworks on full display.
She brought her gaze down, traveling over the white expanse of the land, the fields around her family residence covered in powdery snow, the trees with their bare branches holding pockets of ice and gleaming in the subtle sheen of the night. An idea struck her, and she closed her eyes and concentrated hard.
“I can still see you,” a sing-song female voice shouted on a laugh.
Kseniya turned around to stare at Elena Ivanovich Sokolova, her cousin. The beautiful blonde was dressed in regal finery, which made Kseniya grimace. As she returned to her human shape, she used her glamorizing magic to conjure a fancy gown of pearl-grey silk over her body, at the same time she lifted her long hair and arranged it into a style befitting the elegant gown. Elena being decked this way meant a party—no, a soirée—was happening inside the castle the Sokolov family called their home. Her phone, which she glamored separately and never went without, fell with a plop in her hand, and she tucked the device to a strap on the inside of her thigh.
She smiled as she approached her cousin. “I really haven’t mastered it yet, have I?”
Elena laughed. “I could still see your blurred edges.”
“Drat.”
Ice dragons could, with time and practice, make themselves invisible against a backdrop of snow.
Pulling away from her cousin after a hug, Kseniya nodded toward the castle. “The usual suspects?”
Elena nodded. “Why do you think I’m out here?”
Did she detect a little bite in those words? She shook her head. No, of course not. Elena just didn’t feel she fitted into this world of glitz and glam their grandmother loved to keep alive in their house. Her cousin felt like the poor relative foisted upon the mighty Sokolovs. True enough, her maternal grandmother had been a Chromatic dragon, from the wrong side of the tracks, and her parents hadn’t been married. Irina Mikhailovich Sokolova had never forgiven her younger son from having made a child with folks that carried such a bad reputation of everything vile and repulsive in their kind. It hadn’t mattered that Elena’s mother had been the epitome of caring and compassion. Blood mattered, period.
She wrapped an arm around her cousin’s waist and together, they made their way inside.
The cold gave way to slightly warmer air, though she’d bet no fire would be burning in any grate inside the dwelling. Ice dragons shied as far away as possible from heat and flames. And knowing her grandmother, there would be no fire dragon in attendance today. No one from that cursed royal bloodline and kind.
Liveried footmen nodded when they saw her and with a flourish, pushed open the eight-foot gilded doors leading to the ballroom.
As she raked her gaze over the place, she suppressed a grimace. The usual suspects, as expected—that small group of people that gravitated around her family. She called it small, but there had to be about a hundred people milling about in there, decked in their best accoutrements.
Across the room, she caught her grandmother’s eye. The older woman, who didn’t look a day older than sixty despite being over two centuries old, gave an almost imperceptible nod of surprise when she caught sight of Kseniya.
Of course, duty now bade she go pay her respects to the matriarch. Note be damned, though the chit had stopped burning so hard ever since she’d touched down here.
With long, graceful steps like she’d sport on the biggest catwalk of Paris Fashion Week, she made it across the ballroom to her grandmother’s side.
Kseniya gave a small curtsy before bowing to lightly kiss the woman’s smooth, cold cheek.
“Grand-mère,” she said. “Comment allez-vous?”
Nothing else but French would do, of course. Truth be told, her grandmother hardly even knew how to speak Russian, as had been the lot of most of the Russian aristocrats who had graced the courts and lived in St. Petersburg back in the time of the tsars. Catherine The Great had established French as the language of her court, and this state of affairs had continued until after the period of the Napoleonic War and the French occupation of Russia. Her grandmother had been a confidante of Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna, the Tsar’s mother, in that time, and Kseniya would swear Tolstoy had written the character of Anna Pavlovna Scherer, the society maven from War & Peace, based on Princess Irina Mikhailovich Rostova, as she had been known at the time.
Few would draw the parallel as this was also her operative name inside the Corpus.
“Kiki,” the woman said without adding another word.
Her grandmother never called her Kseniya. As there wasn’t any French version of her name, she had been nicknamed Kiki, and the moniker had stuck.
She’d done wrong coming here without announcing herself.
“Oh my God! Kiki! You’re here!” said shrieking female voices, before a rabid group assailed her.
Three of her younger sisters—Masha, Maya, Mariya, the non-identical triplets—closed ranks on her and
hugged her close. In their early twenties, they could pass for teenagers.
Then, the actual teenagers, twins Alyona and Albina, also joined the fray.
Their family was an oddity in the dragon world. Their mother hadn’t waited until she turned a hundred years old to start her family. She’d gone at it barely in her thirties and, as a result, had been able to birth multiple children outside of the ten-year-window other female dragons had to contend with.
The youngest and only son, Pyotr, would already be in bed by now.
Their mother, Eliza, rushed over to them, pushing her other daughters away so she could hug Kseniya.
“Mais enfin, Élise!” her grandmother exclaimed softly, for their ears only.
Yes, they were apparently making a spectacle of themselves. Eliza—whom the older woman called Élise, the French version of her name—bade her mother-in-law no consideration and pulled her brood with her to an adjoining room. Music picked up in the ballroom. A civilized waltz, it sounded like.
Seemed she had ruffled enough feathers for the day. Kseniya turned to her mother and embraced her.
“Where is Papa?” she asked.
Eliza rolled her eyes. “Far from here, as you can expect.”
“He and Grandfather are holed up together over some ancient manuscript or whatever in the library,” one of her sisters said.
She could never make out which because each set of sisters sounded the same and the siblings couldn’t be distinguished apart by voice.
“Enough of all this,” their mother said. “What brings you here? You didn’t say you were coming.”
Time to bite the bullet. As if it also knew the time had come, the note started to burn once again where she had tucked it into her pushup bra.
She retrieved the paper and handed it to her mother, whose face fell as she encountered first the royal seal, then the two lines of text.
“What do they want with you?”
Kseniya shrugged. A deathly silence had fallen over their group, the younger girls all peeping at one another, their gazes then traveling between their mother and eldest sister.
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