Page 16 of A Matter of Dragons

He shrugged as if speaking the language of monsters was no big deal.

“How the fuck do you speak Draconic?” I blurted.

“I had a tutor growing up,” he answered. “I also speak Elvish, Dwarvish, and several of the languages from the Southern continents.”

“Oh.”

I brought my glass to my lips to cover my embarrassment. Yeah, it made sense that someone running a shop like his would speak a bunch of languages. And yeah, I’d just said fuck out loud in the middle of the most beautiful inn I’d ever seen.

Damn it. I was supposed to be acting like a lady here in Cairncliff. This was the longest conversation I’d had with anyone who wasn’t Eadberh since I’d left Valgros, and I was pretty certain I was totally fucking up my pathetic attempts to be ladylike.

But Doshir was looking at me like he hadn’t even noticed my slip-up. Thank the Kingdom.

“So, translated,” he began, “it’s something like: You will serve a great queen.”

I frowned. “What’s so terrible about that?”

The corner of his lip curled in a way that made me want to kiss him. “It’s the verb.” He made a strange growling, scratching noise. “That can be translated as serve, but it also means service. With a sexual connotation.”

Frowning, I tried to put it all together. “So, the prophecy is really: You will sexually service a great queen?” I asked.

Doshir nodded solemnly.

I exploded into laughter.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Doshir

What had I just done?

Oh, by the Mothers. I blamed the wine. I should not have ordered that second bottle. Really, I shouldn’t have ordered the first bottle. Didn’t they say the truth hides in the bottom of every bottle of frost wine?

And now the truth had slipped free. I’d just told this beautiful stranger my horrible, shameful, thrice-cursed hatching prophecy. And she laughed.

A strange sense of weightlessness bubbled up inside me, radiating through my chest. Laughter. But wasn’t that exactly the response I’d wanted? All these years of having every single dragon take their hatching prophecy so damned seriously. All the dragon taboos about sharing your prophecy with anyone who wasn’t a mate or a parent. Hadn’t I just been waiting all these years for someone to react the way I’d always wanted to react? To laugh at the damned absurdity of it all?

Rayne shook her head, sending waves of fiery hair cascading over her shoulders. By the Mothers above, she was a stunning woman. A stunning woman with a beautiful laugh, here in my very favorite elven tavern, enjoying my very favorite wine. I couldn’t have stopped smiling if I’d wanted to.

“I just keep picturing a little baby dragon,” she said, gasping for breath. “Like, hey little baby, welcome to the world. You—you’re going to be a queen’s sex slave.”

I giggled in a very undignified manner. “I know. It’s awful.”

She gasped as though trying to catch her breath. “And then, stars, when the word gets out—”

My chest tightened. Suddenly, my smile felt forced. Rayne snorted another suppressed laugh and pushed on.

“Won’t all the lady dragons want a piece of him?” she asked, waving her wine glass in the air. “Wouldn’t they all think one night with him might make them a queen?”

I raised my glass to my lips and drained it to hide my reaction. Stars, this woman had a mind like a dragon. She’d gone straight through the absurdity of my hatching prophecy and unearthed the very worst part, the poisoned barb buried beneath the words.

Frost wine burned a path through my gullet, and I felt as though I were swallowing my fire instead of expelling it. I tried to close my mind, to shut off that old, old memory. Mothers, I’d spent so many years not thinking about that day, not remembering, but now frost wine and Rayne's laughter had weakened my defenses and those damned voices snaked through my memory yet again. The words that had slithered and hissed through the corridor outside our apartment in the Iron Mountains ages ago came right back to me, dragging with them the chattering of birds in the ivy outside and the cloyingly sweet scent of flowers clasped in my claws from the bouquet I’d gathered that morning.

Had I imagined that I’d forgotten those details, the sound of the tiny mountain sparrows or the smell of the flowers I’d picked her? Stars, I’d been fooling myself. I would never forget.

I still don’t know what, exactly, had made me hesitate in the corridor that morning so long ago, why I paused inside the stone tunnel that I’d rushed through a thousand times before. Perhaps I’d felt a whisper of apprehension, some sense of what was to come. Or perhaps I was just trying to capture my words, to think of some pithy, clever greeting that would make my lover smile instead of rolling her eyes at the flowers in my claws.

Whatever the reason, I’d stood there like a stone sentinel as her familiar voice floated toward me, as inevitable as the thunderclouds that built every summer afternoon above the jagged teeth of the Iron Mountains.