Page 4 of A Matter of Dragons

Mother’s smile tightened. “Doshir, if this is about what happened between you and the Council—”

“Forget it,” I replied, waving my hand in the air between us as if I were dismissing a fly. “It’s so long ago. I hardly even remember it.”

Mother’s forehead wrinkled. “One more thing,” she said.

“Anything,” I replied.

She finally took my hand and rose out of her seat. “Mad Scarlett has just settled in the Knife’s Edge.”

I groaned. Mad Scarlett - or B’shelath Ygtishla, as she was known in Draconic - was reportedly selfish, cruel, and maniacal; the very worst kind of dragon. And that was before some foul wizard had stolen her daughter, driving her insane.

“The Knife’s Edge is here,” I muttered.

“Less than a day’s flight,” Mother agreed. “And that’s a rather important trade route for this dingy little town you so enjoy.”

She slipped her arm in mine and let me lead her through the darkened shop. The bell above the front door sang merrily as I pushed it open.

“Someone’s going to have to go and reason with her,” Mother said, leaning forward to kiss me on the cheek. “Or this little town will have quite a hard time as the news spreads of an insane dragon nesting by their road.”

I returned her kiss, embraced her, and then waved as she vanished down the street, swallowed up by the darkness.

“Shit” I hissed under my breath as the door swung closed, leaving me alone in the antiquities shop my father had opened four hundred years earlier.

CHAPTER TWO

Rayne

By all the blessed kings of Valgros, that was an elf.

I froze in place as panic sent shock waves through my body. My fingertips brushed the hilt of the dagger tucked into my belt, one of three daggers I’d hidden amongst the lace and ruffles of this stupidly feminine disguise.

An elf. I’d never seen one before, but the man coming toward me through the gathering darkness could not possibly be anything else. His tall, thin figure with long, light hair and demonically tapering pointed ears was utterly unmistakable.

I swallowed hard, trying to focus despite the thudding in my heart. I was an idiot to have come alone, here of all places. What furious stupidity drove me to investigate the Spirit Woods at all, let alone at dusk? Why hadn’t I stuck to the safer, human parts of this damned town?

The elf rounded a corner on the crushed gravel path between lush grass and the thick, knotted trunks of ancient oaks. Now he really was coming toward me. My fingers wrapped around my dagger’s hilt. Not that a dagger would do much good if he tried to magic me by sending forth strangling vines from the trees or sucking the air from my lungs. Damn me, why in the king’s blessed name had I come here at all? Why hadn’t I done exactly what Eadberh had suggested and gone straight to the healers and herbalists?

Balancing on the balls of my feet, I clenched my teeth together, ready for anything. The elf walked toward me with a light, even gait, his hands behind his back, his eyes on the intertwined branches of the trees far overhead. The robe he wore was so white it seemed to glow with a strange, unearthly radiance. Gravel crunched beneath his feet.

He lowered his gaze as he approached me. This elf’s face was all angles and hard lines, as though it had been carved from marble. His eyes glowed with the same strange radiance as his robe. Without breaking his gait, he raised his hands, pressed his palms together, and touched his fingertips to his strange, thin lips.

“Peace of the evening, sister,” he said.

He spoke with a strange accent, as though his first language had been the wind and his second birdsong. His robes rustled as he passed me. For a moment, the air filled with something sharp and sweet, like the flower of a spicy, bitter fruit.

Then he was gone, and I was left blinking into the darkness of the path he’d just vacated. I exhaled slowly; my entire body trembled as I sank back toward the ground, abandoning my fighting pose.

“That was an elf,” I whispered as if my words would somehow make the experience more real. A slow tremor crept through my body.

That was an elf, and I’d survived the encounter.

With another long sigh, I loosened my fingers from the hilt of my dagger and dragged them through my hair. I’d left it long and annoyingly loose for the past two weeks in an attempt to blend in with the other ladies of Cairncliff. I tried to imagine how Eadberh would react when I told him about tonight. Would he be impressed?

I swallowed my own rueful laugh. No, of course he wouldn’t be impressed. Eadberh had survived a dozen missions outside of Valgros. He’d probably have dozens of stories about elf encounters that would beat the piss out of having one walk past me in the Spirit Wood.

Besides, then I’d have to explain what I was doing in Cairncliff’s Spirit Wood. I shook myself, pulled in a deep breath, and kept walking the paths. I’d never been inside a Spirit Wood, of course, but I’d heard the stories about how these things worked. Somewhere in the heart of every Spirit Wood was a spring. And sometimes, for the right person, that spring would heal.

Stupid, I knew. It was a fairy tale meant to lure the foolish and the gullible into the elves’ territory, the lands they had the audacity to claim even in the middle of fine human cities. And my very presence here meant that I was one of the foolish and gullible, even if I’d managed to resist the temptation to explore the Spirit Wood until tonight.