Page 37 of A Matter of Dragons

“How the fuck would I know?” I snapped.

“He told you he was married,” Eadberh said, somewhat delicately.

I shrugged. This was not a conversation I wanted to have. Ever.

“Was that before or after he’d been up your skirts?” Eadberh asked.

I groaned and covered my face with my hands. Fuck, was it that obvious? Could everyone in this stupid town tell I’d been fooled by a dragon? A married dragon?

“After,” I admitted through the cage of my fingers.

Eadberh made that sound again, that low purr of recognition. Not agreement, not disagreement. Just: I hear you. Some of the tension slowly bled out of my shoulders. Thank the Kingdom I was traveling with Eadberh. He was the last person who’d get all high and mighty about a momentary lapse of judgment due to an incredibly attractive stranger and a bit too much wine.

“He didn’t seem like much of a monster,” Eadberh said.

“So?” I spat out the word even though, privately, I could have hugged Eadberh for moving the conversation away from my phenomenally stupid decision to share a bottle of wine with a dragon. Or, a few bottles of wine.

Eadberh shifted his feet off his bed and leaned forward. “Look, when the king told us to kill a dragon, what were you expecting to find?”

I shrugged again. “A dragon?”

Eadberh shook his head. He was getting annoyed. “No, I mean here, in the town. What did you think Cairncliff would be like?”

“Cowering in fear?” I guessed.

“Yeah. Me too.” Eadberh grimaced and rubbed the back of his neck. “I thought this town would be half ruins, to be honest. Or that the good people would be dragon slaves.”

“Or dragon snacks,” I offered.

Eadberh gave me the tiniest hint of a smile. I ran my teeth over my lower lip. The man had a point; this town wasn’t quite the hell-hole I’d been expecting. I’d thought any town harboring a dragon would live in constant fear of the monster, and any place where elves and humans commingled would be riddled with crime and violence. But that wasn’t at all what we’d found.

Eadberh leaned back and crossed his arms behind his head. “What did you think of the guy?”

“The who?” I stammered.

“Doshir. The dragon. You got to know him, obviously. What did you think?”

Heat rose in my cheeks once again. “He’s a liar. He never told me he was a dragon, and his wife didn’t come up until—” I hesitated. “Until a lot later than it should have,” I finished, trying to salvage whatever remained of my dignity.

“Did people seem afraid of him?” Eadberh asked.

“What?”

Eadberh let out a long breath and stared at the ceiling. “Vil didn’t seem afraid of him. No one in that inn seemed concerned about a dragon on the property. In fact, no one in this whole town seems to care much one way or the other about the dragon in Cairncliff.”

“No.” I shook my head as I came to my feet. “We were sent to take out a threat in the name of King Donovan. And last night, there was a dragon in the sky spitting fire all over this town. People were screaming!”

“So you think we should just march up there and kill the red dragon?” Eadberh asked, staring at me.

“Well, yes!” I raised my arms, then smacked them into my sides. “Isn’t that the whole reason we’re here?”

“Doesn’t it bother you that we might be killing Doshir’s wife?”

I huffed. There it was, the very thing I hadn’t wanted to talk about. Or to even think about. Following orders to kill a dragon was one thing when you’d never even met a dragon. But now Eadberh was right. Everything did seem more complicated.

“I guess,” I admitted.

Eadberh just looked at me. I shifted uncomfortably on the edge of my bed.