Throne of Dragons

She kept going; it wasn’t far now. Just a few dozen paces, and she would be out of the village. Once she was in the open ground beyond, surely even the Quiet Men couldn’t find her?

That thought was enough to make her keep going. Lenore crept from the shadow of one building to the next. She was almost there, almost there.

There was a patch of open ground ahead of her, and Lenore froze on the edge of it, waiting, looking left and right. She couldn’t see anybody, but she knew already how little that could mean with people like this. But if she stood there and did nothing…

Lenore ran as much as she could, given how her body hurt with every step, bursting forward for the safety beyond the open ground. Behind her, she heard a shout from the inn, and she knew that Eoris or Syrelle had gone into the room where they’d left her, discovering her missing. The thought of them in pursuit was enough to make her move faster, running for the greenery beside the road, for hiding, for safety.

“There!” a voice called, and she knew then that they’d spotted her. She kept going, not knowing what else to do, knowing only that if she stopped, they would have her in their clutches again.

She couldn’t run any faster, but she was at least among the trees and the bushes beside the road now, her breath coming in pants as she ran, moving left and right in an effort to foil her pursuers.

Lenore heard the sound of footsteps behind her and dodged around a tree, not daring to look back. Another tree lay ahead, and she knew that if she could only get around it, there was denser greenery beyond. She could lose them there, maybe, but first she had to choose. Left or right… left or right…

Lenore went left, and immediately knew that it was the wrong choice as strong hands grabbed her, weight bearing her down to the ground hard, knocking the breath out of her. She tried to fight, but she already knew how little she could do. Hands wrenched her hands in front of her, tying them there, then pulled her up.

The man who stood there was Ethir, the one who had caught her in the stables; the first one who had… He lifted her easily, setting her on her feet.

“You’re going to regret running, Princess,” he said in that soft voice of his. “We’ll make sure you’re going to regret it.”

“Please,” Lenore begged, but it made no difference. Ethir dragged her back toward the waiting horses, and the trip south, and every moment of horror that awaited her beyond the bridges leading out of the kingdom.

CHAPTER TWO

King Godwin II of the Northern Realm sat on his throne in front of a sea of his courtiers and struggled to keep his temper. After all that had happened, after his daughter Nerra had been forced to leave, he hated that he still had to sit here, pretending that all was well. He wanted to rise up from this throne and go after her, yet he knew he couldn’t.

Instead, he had to sit here, in a great hall that even now had the remnants of the feasting before not quite cleared away, holding court. The great hall was huge and stone built, with banners on the wall with the bridges that marked the North. Squares of carpet had been set out, each one restricted to a different rank of the nobility, or to particular noble families.

He had to stand there before them, and he had to do it alone, because Aethe wouldn’t step out in front of courtiers who had helped send Nerra away. Right then, Godwin would have preferred to be almost anywhere else: Ravin’s kingdom, the third continent of Sarrass, anywhere.

How could he pretend when Nerra was banished, and his youngest daughter, Erin, seemed to have run off to be a knight? Godwin knew he looked disheveled, his graying beard less than perfect, his robes of office stained, but that was because he had barely slept in days. He could see Duke Viris and his cronies looking over with obvious amusement at that. If the man’s son weren’t due to marry his daughter…

Thoughts of Lenore calmed him. She was off about the wedding harvest, accompanied by Vars. She would be back soon, and all would be well. In the meantime, though, there were serious matters that needed to be attended to; rumors that had swirled through the court and promised danger for all of them.

“Bring forward my son!” Godwin said, the words ringing around the room. “Rodry, step out here and be seen!”

His eldest son stepped out through the crowd of those watching, looking like the knight that he was, and like the man Godwin had been when he was younger. He was tall and muscled with years of sword practice, his blond hair cut short so as not to get in the way. He was every inch the warrior, and it was clear that people watched him with love as he strode through them. Now, if only he could think, as well.

“Is all well, Father?” he asked, offering a bow.

“No, all is not well,” Godwin shot back. “Did you think I wouldn’t find out about the ambassador?”

Say this for his eldest son; at least he had a solid streak of honesty in him. He could no more hide behind a lie than behind a slender tree. Vars would probably have dissembled out of cowardice, and Greave would have wrapped everything up in pretty quotes from those books of his, but Rodry just stood there, solid as a stone. With about the brains of one, too, given what he said next.

“I couldn’t just stand there after he’d insulted our entire family, our whole kingdom,” Rodry said.

“That’s exactly what you should have done,” Godwin shot back. “Instead, you shaved his head, killed two of his guards… If you weren’t my son and heir, you’d hang for something like that. As it is, those friends of yours…”

“They took no part in the fight,” Rodry said, standing tall, taking all of this onto himself. If he weren’t so angry at the stupidity of it all, Godwin might almost be proud.

“Well, they’ll be stuck taking part in one soon enough,” he said. “Do you think a man like King Ravin won’t strike back? I sent his ambassador on his way because he couldn’t do anything to us. Now you’ve given him a reason to try harder.”

“And we’ll be there ready to stop him when he does,” Rodry said. Of course he was unrepentant. He might be a man grown, and a knight, but he had never known true war. Oh, he’d fought with bandits and creatures, as any Knight of the Spur would, but he hadn’t faced a full army on the battlefield the way Godwin had in his youth, hadn’t seen the chaos, and the death, and the…

“Enough,” Godwin said. “You were a fool to do this, Rodry. You must learn better if you’re ever to be worthy to be king.”

“I—” Rodry began, clearly ready to argue.

“Be quiet,” Godwin said. “You want to argue because your temper won’t let you do anything else. Well, I’m still king, and I don’t want to hear it.”

For a moment, he thought that his son might argue anyway, and then Godwin would have to find a punishment that would actually stick when it came to the heir to his throne. Thankfully, Rodry held his tongue.

“If you ever do something as stupid as this again, I’ll have your status as a knight taken from you as a disgrace,” Godwin said. It was the worst thing he could think of when it came to Rodry, and the message of it certainly seemed to hit home. “For now, step back out of my sight, before I lose my temper the way you always seem to.”

He could see Rodry reddening, and he thought that his son might stay and argue, but he seemed to think better of it. Instead, he turned on his heel and stalked from the hall. Maybe he was capable of learning something after all. He sat back on a throne made of hard, dark, unyielding wood, waiting to see who would come forward next, if anyone would dare, given that he still had anger lingering after rebuking his son.

Finnal, his soon to be son-in-law, filled the void, stepping forward smoothly and giving a bow that was even smoother.

“Your majesty,” he said. “Forgive me, but given how disrupted things have been with the wedding preparations, my family feels that I should make one or two… requests.”

His family, which meant Duke Viris, who still stood there smiling in the background, calm as a heron standing above a river waiting to see what he could grab. He was a man who never seemed to be directly responsible for anything, but always seemed to just be there, slightly out of reach of any blame.

“What requests?” Godwin asked.

Finnal stepped forward to hand him a rolled length of parchment. Even that was well done, because it meant that he would never have to read out the demands within the parchment himself.

They were demands; very subtle ones, but demands nonetheless. Where before, the lands offered as a dowry had run to just short of several villages, now, the revised suggestion was that it should include them. There was more money, of course, because inevitably there would be more money, but the real gains of it were hidden away, spread across an extra fishing vessel here, a tithe from a mill there. None of it looked very much, and if Godwin were openly outraged by it, he would probably look like a miser, but when you added it together, it was a definite increase.

“This is not what our families have already agreed,” he pointed out.

Finnal offered another of those elegant bows. “My father is a big believer that an agreement can always be… renegotiated. Besides, that was before other circumstances came to light, my king.”

“What other circumstances?” Godwin demanded.

“The risk of scale sickness within a family always makes it harder to marry into,” Finnal said. He sounded apologetic about it, but Godwin didn’t believe that tone for a moment. Was this why his father had stood there and had another noble bring Nerra’s sickness into the light? For a renegotiation?

Godwin rose from his throne, his anger propelling him. He wasn’t sure what he would have said then, what he would have done, but he didn’t get any chance to do it, because in that moment the doors to the great hall burst open, letting in a guard who seemed to be all but holding up a serving girl. Godwin normally didn’t pay that much attention to the individual servants, but he felt sure that this was one of the ones who had gone off with Lenore, just days before.

The sight of her there was enough to make Godwin stop short, a hand of cold fear wrapping around his heart where before there had been only the heat of anger.

“Your majesty,” the guard called out. “Your majesty, there has been an attack!”

It took a second before Godwin could even speak, his fear was so great.

“What kind of attack? What happened?” he demanded. He looked over to the young woman there, who looked as though she was barely standing.

“We… we were…” She shook her head as though she could barely even bring herself to say it. “There was an inn… there were people there. King Ravin’s people…”

Now the fear inside Godwin gave way to horror.