Maybe she left him, I mused. If she had, I couldn’t blame her. I wanted a man who would make me laugh, who was daring and adventurous and embraced life with the same zeal I did. Not someone who seemed to have the emotional capacity of a lizard.
After the maid finished dressing me, she escorted me out of the room. Lessie scampered after me with surprising agility for a newborn, and I was glad for her company as the maid led us to Lord Tavarian’s study in the west wing.
As I stepped into the study, I was surprised to find how much I liked it. I’d expected to find something cold and austere, but even though the dark furnishings and thick rugs screamed intense masculinity, there was something welcoming about the place. Maybe it was the smell of leather and vellum and ink that reminded me so much of Salcombe’s library. Or maybe it was the comfortable-looking chairs grouped around the low coffee table, where I could imagine myself lounging with one of the many books on the shelves that paneled the entire room.
But it certainly wasn’t Lord Tavarian himself.
“Sit,” he ordered, gesturing to one of the chairs in front of his massive oak desk. The surface was meticulously organized, with not so much as a paperweight out of place.
Rather like the man himself, I thought as I sat. His long, black hair was pulled back into a queue at the nape of his neck, and he wore a dark vest over a crisp white shirt. He looked less like a dragon rider today and more like the quintessential businessman, with the points of his collar perfectly pressed and not a hair out of place. In the daylight streaming through the windows behind him, he looked younger than I had thought—around thirty-five, if I had to hazard a guess. He might look even younger if not for the implacable expression he wore, and the air of authority he wore like a mantle.
What would my life have been like if I’d been born into power, as he so clearly had been? Would I have been bred to wear that mantle, too? Or was it something you inherited, like having red hair or dark skin?
Lessie jumped up into my lap the moment I was seated, then squirmed for a few seconds as she settled herself into my skirts. “Soft,” she purred happily, nuzzling the top of my thigh. “I don’t understand why you hate it so much.”
“I’d like to see you try to run with a tent around your legs,” I retorted, then blinked. Was I able to speak telepathically as well?
“Of course you are,” Lessie said, as if that had been obvious the entire time. “I was wondering why you hadn’t tried it before.”
“You and your dragon seem to have bonded quite nicely,” Lord Tavarian observed. “I trust you both slept well last night?”
“We did.” I cleared my throat, and then decided to just go straight to the point. “To be honest, though, I’m not really sure why you care. I tried to steal from you last night. What does it matter whether or not I had a good night’s sleep?”
“The health of a dragon, especially a newborn, is tied to the health of its rider. You may have bonded with Lessie, but she belongs to my family. Therefore, so do you.”
My mouth dropped open, and I nearly jumped out of my chair before I remembered Lessie was sitting in my lap. “Now wait just a minute—”
Lord Tavarian held up a hand. “By stealing from me and getting caught, you have essentially put your life into my hands. Is that not correct?”
I opened and closed my mouth several times, trying to formulate a pithy response. “Yes,” I finally said grumpily. “But it would be nice if you could give it back.”
Lord Tavarian raised an eyebrow. “It is hardly my fault that Lessie chose a robber to be her sky-mate,” he said. “But dragons see things differently than we do, and she clearly saw something in you that makes you worthy.”
“Has a dragon ever chosen a ground-dweller as a rider before?” I asked as something niggled at the back of my mind. There was something very wrong about all this—a piece of the puzzle I was missing.
“Never,” Tavarian said flatly. “Only a human with rider blood in their veins can bond with a dragon.” His eyes were bright and hard, like a flint that had just been struck. “Which begs an important question—who are your parents? And why were you raised as a ground-dweller?”
I stared at him, my mind reeling from this latest revelation. “That…that’s impossible,” I sputtered. “I can’t have had dragon rider parents.”
“That is the only way you could have bonded with your dragon.” Tavarian frowned. “Do you know anything of the Dragon Wars?”
I opened my mouth to tell him that I didn’t know what the Dragon Wars had to do with anything, but then my history lessons came back to me, and I recalled a passage I’d studied in one of Salcombe’s history texts.
“You’re referring to Akron the Defender,” I said, sagging in my chair.
“Yes.” He blinked in surprise—the first real emotion I’d seen from him. “You know the tale?”
“Of course.” I sat up straighter in my chair, annoyed. “Akron was a powerful mage general who led several failed campaigns against Zakyiar, the dragon god. He managed to badly wound and capture one of Zakyiar’s dragons, and used an ancient, powerful spell to bind their souls together. That’s how the first dragon rider was born.”
“Indeed.” Tavarian inclined his head. “The price of the spell was not merely Akron’s magic, but the magic of all his descendants. In exchange, he gained the power to control the dragon, to bend it to his will, as did the lines of the other mages who followed in his footsteps. Without Akron’s soul-binding spell, we would have lost the war, and Zakyiar and his horde of dragons would have bled our world dry long ago.”
“Yeah, yeah.” I waved a hand impatiently. “That’s why we all bow down to you, because your ancestors saved the world, and that somehow makes you better than us.”
“The point of this conversation is not to lord my superiority over you, but to explain to you why this is a birthright you cannot walk away from,” Lord Tavarian said. If my barb had struck a nerve, he didn’t show it. “Not that I think you would even if you wanted to,” he added. “Could you stomach the idea of leaving Lessie behind?”
My stomach clenched at the very idea. “No,” I admitted, running a hand along her scales again. “I can’t.”
Lord Tavarian nodded. “The bond between a dragon and a rider is a very powerful thing. Being apart for too long causes great distress, and the death of one almost certainly results in the death of the other. That is why I did not allow Councilman Xanadar to take you away last night.”
His words were like a punch to the gut, and I held Lessie a little tighter. “Are you saying that if someone killed my dragon, I would die?”
“Without question.”
“Wait a minute.” I scowled. “If that’s true, then why are you still alive? Isn’t your dragon dead?”
“We are not here to talk about me,” he said, but his silver eyes flickered, and I knew I’d struck a sore point. “We are here to talk about you, and more specifically, your fate. Now tell me, who were your parents?”
“I don’t know,” I said sourly, crossing my arms. “They abandoned me at an orphanage when I was a baby. I don’t even know what they look like.”
Tavarian was silent for a moment, assessing me. “I cannot imagine why any rider would abandon his infant daughter at a ground-dwelling orphanage when there are vast resources to care for her up here,” he said. “Is it possible someone other than your parents dropped you off?”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” I said. The idea threw me for a loop, and for the first time, I felt the knot of resentment toward my birth parents, the knot I’d buried so deep I barely felt it, jiggle a little. Could it be that they hadn’t given me up after all? Had something else happened? Were they dead?
“I will look into this more and see if any riders went missing around the time of your birth,” Tavarian said decisively. He paused, as if weighing his next words carefully. “It is obvious by the way you speak that you are not a simpleton, and no ordinary person could have broken into my vault. So,
what possessed you to risk your life? Why steal from a dragon rider, when there must be easier marks on the ground?”
I sucked in a breath. “I didn’t come of my own will,” I told him, deciding to go with a mixture of truth and lies. “I came because if I didn’t steal from you, my best friend’s brother was going to be severely mutilated. Maybe even killed.”
“So, you came to steal the dragon egg on behalf of another?” Tavarian’s eyes narrowed as he leaned forward. “Who?”
I shook my head. “I wasn’t after the egg, honest. I didn’t even know you had an egg, and neither did Slick, the crime boss who put me up to this. He just told me to come up here and steal the most valuable thing you had.”
Tavarian gave me a nonplussed look. “And why would you think that the dragon egg was the most valuable thing I owned?”
I folded my arms. “Is it not?” I countered.
He snorted, and in that moment, he looked more human than I’d seen him yet. “Of course it is,” he said, “but I wouldn’t expect a ground-dweller to know that. Why would you grab the dragon egg, when there were many other things in the vault you could have brought back for this Slick?”
I thought about lying, but decided there was no point. “I have a talent for seeking out valuable objects. It’s a special sense I can use to home in on high-ticket items, and when I activate it, the objects in a room send out a kind of signal. The more valuable the object, the stronger the signal.”
“And of course, the dragon egg would have emitted the strongest signal of all.” Lord Tavarian leaned back in his chair, staring at me as if he were seeing me for the first time. “That is a very interesting talent.”
I frowned. “You don’t seem nearly as surprised as I thought you’d be.”
“All dragon riders have a talent,” he said. “We still carry a spark of magic from our mage ancestors, and it manifests itself in different ways.”
“Really?” I looked him up and down. “What’s your talent?”
A knock on the door saved Tavarian from having to answer—not that I thought he would have done so anyway. “Come in,” he called, and Captain Marcas entered.
“Ah, she’s awake.” The captain took the seat next to me and gave me a once-over. “You look different.”
I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. “Being buried in a mountain of silk and lace will do that to a girl.”
“You’ve got a lot of spunk for a girl who was nearly arrested last night,” Marcas said pointedly. He turned to Tavarian before I could formulate a retort. “So, what have you decided? Are you pressing charges?”
“I will not be,” Tavarian said, “so long as Zara agrees to cooperate.”
“Cooperate?” I echoed. “What does that mean?”
“It means that you will enroll in dragon rider academy immediately, and that in exchange for me sparing your life and sponsoring your training, you will pledge your services to House Tavarian.”
“I’m not pledging myself to anything,” I protested. “I have a life on the ground, a business to run! And it’s not like you’re doing me some great favor by sparing my life. Like you said, if you kill me, then you kill Lessie too!”
Lessie, who had been snoozing in my lap, suddenly came alive. She raised her head and hissed at Tavarian, and the sparks that shot out of her mouth lit a stack of papers on fire.
Lord Tavarian sighed as he yanked a canister from a bracket on the wall and sprayed white foam all over the papers. Lessie yelped and shrank back into my arms, startled by the loud noise.
“You may be a dragon, but that does not give you cause to behave in such an ill-mannered fashion,” Tavarian said quietly to Lessie as he put the canister away and swept the ruined papers into a trash can beneath his desk. “If you cannot behave yourself, then you will have to wait outside.”
Lessie hissed at him, but she begrudgingly curled back up into my lap and settled for glaring at Tavarian. “He would not talk to me like that if I were fully grown,” she groused.
“Of course not,” I said soothingly, stroking the top of her head and trying not to laugh. Her outrage was almost comical, but I knew she wouldn’t appreciate my laughing at her.
“Zara,” Tavarian said, folding his hands atop his desk blotter. “Let’s imagine that I let you go. I allow you to return to your home, to continue whatever business and life you’ve created for yourself there. What will become of Lessie? How will you care for a dragon and keep her safe from those who would kill her to poach her hide, her blood, her very bones? Dragons are very hungry creatures, and the larger they grow, the more they need to eat. Even if you found a place to keep her, how would you keep her fed?”
I swallowed hard. “I don’t know. But I do know that I can’t abandon my life. I’ve worked too hard for what I have, and there are people who depend upon me.”
“If it is the matter of this debt you owe that criminal, it is easily taken care of,” Tavarian pointed out. “I can have Captain Marcas meet with the Municipal Guard and arrest these criminals. They’ll be shipped off, far from your friend and her brother.”
“Really?” I asked, a spark of hope kindling in my chest. “You would do that?”
“If it is an obstacle to you becoming a dragon rider, yes,” he said simply.
Huh. Maybe Tavarian wasn’t so bad after all.
Or maybe he’s just using you, a voice in my head argued. He doesn’t have a dragon of his own anymore, so of course he’s not willing to let you go.
“Slick isn’t the only issue,” I said, shaking off that unexpectedly dour thought. “My partner and I own an antiquities shop, and as a treasure hunter, it’s my job to keep it stocked. We have other freelance hunters who bring in stuff for us to sell sometimes, but the shop is still in its infancy. Without me, it’ll fold.”
Lord Tavarian pursed his lips. “Dragon rider training is a full-time occupation,” he said. “You won’t have time to go gallivanting off into the wilderness, searching for relics amongst ruins. Is there no one who can step in to fill your role as partner?”
“No one I trust. There are rival shop owners who will pounce on mine the moment I leave it. I’m the best treasure hunter in the business, and they all know it. They’d love to get their hands on my collection.”
“Smart-mouthed and humble,” Captain Marcas said, sounding amused. When I glared at him, he added, “Dragon rider training is pretty intensive, but after the first year or so it eases up. Surely Zara could spare at least one day a week to go back down to the ground and check on things?”
“One day isn’t enough,” I protested. “We have enough inventory to last us maybe four months.”
“We will find a way to make it work,” Tavarian said. “Truthfully, until your dragon is old enough for you to ride, it won’t make much difference if you have to take a few extra days here and there for short expeditions,” he admitted. “But really, you need to work on advertising your shop more. If treasure hunters aren’t seeking you out, it means they don’t know about you.”
Or it means Barrigan is threatening and bribing them to stay away, I groused, but didn’t say aloud.
“Fine,” I said, sticking out a hand. “I agree to the bargain. I’ll pledge myself to your house and enroll in dragon rider training, if you’ll handle Slick, allow me to return to Zuar City at least once a week, and return my boots and lock pick.”
“Very well,” Tavarian said. He shook my hand, and I did my best to hide the shiver that raced up my spine. “Welcome to House Tavarian, Zara Kenrook. Your training starts today.”
7
As it turned out, my training did not start today.
“So let me get this straight. You’re a dragon rider now?”
“Yes, thanks to you,” I said to Brolian, who was leaning back in his stool behind the counter. He was minding the shop while Carina fetched lunch for both of them at the market. “And thanks to me, you get to keep your ears and your legs. You should be kissing my feet.”
Brolian held up his hands.
“Don’t get me wrong, Zara, I’m grateful for the help. But of the two of us, I’m pretty sure you got the better deal. I don’t have to deal with Slick anymore, but you get to ride your very own dragon! Since when does that ever happen to people like us?”
“You know, I thought you were exaggerating when you said you had one of the best collections in the business, but you were right,” Captain Marcas called. I turned to see him bending over a glass display case filled with jeweled knives. “These are Dragon Age weapons, aren’t they?”
“Sure are,” I said, crossing the room. “You want to check any of them out?”
“You’re damn right I do.” Marcas looked like a kid who had stumbled into a room full of candy. “Can I see the one with the pearl handle?”
As I unlocked the case to give it to him, Carina walked in. “I got us some roasted turkey legs—” she began, and then promptly dropped the greasy paper bag onto the floor. “Zara! When did you get back?”
“Just a few minutes ago,” I said as Captain Marcas turned to see who I was talking to. “Carina, this is Marcas, Captain of the Guard up at Dragon’s Table. Captain Marcas, this is Carina, my business partner.”
“Pleasure to meet you,” Captain Marcas said, inclining his head.
“You as well,” Carina said faintly. She looked at me, her wide eyes full of questions. “Zara, can we talk in the back? Like, now?”
I let Carina drag me into the back of the shop, where we kept supplies and inventory that needed to be catalogued or repaired before being put on display. Carina threw herself into the chair behind the desk where she usually did her admin, and jabbed her finger at the workbench across from it, where I did my restorations.
“Sit,” she demanded.
I sighed. “You’re the second person who’s said that to me today.” I flopped into the chair. “I know you have questions, Carina. Just give me a chance to gather my thoughts and I’ll explain.”
Call of the Dragon Page 6
