Rise of the Phoenix

Chapter 4: The Snooze

“I think you and I both know I am not,” I scoffed. 

He chuckled, the sound both low and thrilling. “Believe me, no one realizes that more than I do.”

“Then,” I paused, throughly confounded by his words, “why would you go through all the trouble of purchasing me from the slavers? It’s clear you don’t want me here.” I wasn’t sure if he was insulting me, but my pride wouldn’t allow me to be offended. He was entitled to his preferences, whatever they may be. I couldn’t blame him if I wasn’t to his taste, but why would you spend one thousand gold pieces on a bed slave you didn’t particularly fancy?

He turned his head to me and frowned, our eyes connecting for a split second. “Pride,” he finally answered, after a long moment. “Humans cannot own a dragon, even a dragon-blood.”

He was lying to me. I didn’t know how I knew, but I could feel the dread budding from deep in my core, whispering confirmation of his deception inside my head. What purpose could there be in lying to me? If he wanted to bed me, honestly it probably wouldn’t take very much to convince me. That only left more sinister options… Was he planning on eating me? That would explain the hungry looks he had been giving me earlier. 

“No, that’s not it. Why does it look like you’re about to eat me?” I asked him, wide-eyed. It was better just to know what he was doing. 

His body started shaking underneath my tight grip. For a split second, I was afraid he was about to take dragon form or something equally as terrifying. Then I recognized the deep rumble of his laughter. 

“You really don’t know anything about dragons, do you?” he asked me between choked whoops of merriment. 

“I already told you I didn’t,” I answered with a roll of my eyes. “I just don’t understand why you lied to me.”

“I could say the same to you,” he replied seriously, wiping tears of laughter from his eyes. “But you are free to leave if you wish it, though I recommend letting me take you as far away from the slavers as possible.”

“I don’t understand,” I murmured, gesturing towards the wagon full of slaves behind us. “You’ve bought a cartload of slaves, and I don’t even want to think about how much gold you spent to do so.”

“Gold is nothing to dragons,” the Prince answered quietly. “What we do not have is able-bodied men to fight our wars.” 

I paused for a moment, considering the reality of his words. “So those men will be made to fight for you?”

“No,” he answered quickly. “They will be paid handsomely, enough so that they can live as a king should they ever return to Beinna, but no one will force them to do anything. They are free to leave, too, should they wish it.”

“So dragons don’t have slaves?” I asked him, genuinely curious about his customs. 

“We are all slaves to my father’s whims, but, no, ice dragons do not have slaves,” he answered with a humorless laugh. “I cannot speak for the fire dragons.”

“Hmm…” came my simpleton’s reply. Not my best work, but the only thing I could think to say as we bounced along on his massive horse, my arms wrapped around his waist like an octopus to keep myself from sliding off. The Prince did seem to have relaxed a bit, and it no longer felt like I was hugging a petrified tree trunk.

“What about you? I take it you have no family, otherwise they could not have been so stupid as to let you get yourself thrown to the slavers.” His words were gruff and harsh, and I felt my stomach drop as I prepared to lie again. 

“I have no family,” I answered. The feeling of dread grew inside me, and I became aware that his body had tensed again under my grip. 

The stark realization hit me again. He could sense when I lied to him. But how? Some dragon ability I’d never heard of? And just how did I somehow seem to have the same power to know when he had been lying to me earlier?

“At least not one I can return to,” I corrected myself quickly. His body relaxed a bit more and I sighed into his back. 

For some reason, I really found the closeness comforting, which was odd because I wasn’t one to seek out physical contact. It generally made me very uncomfortable, so I kept my liaisons with men brief and to-the-point. Cuddling and sweet caresses were not something I had ever longed for. I dropped my face into the fabric of his cloak and breathed it in. “You smell like the ocean,” I whispered to him. “I could sleep here.” A strange wave of euphoria washed over me, and my muscles relaxed. It felt as woozy as if I had consumed an entire bottle of wine on my own. 

His body tensed again, and he brought the horse to quick halt. I barely kept from sliding off when I looked up and saw his panicked expression gazing down at me. 

“f**k!” the Prince cried out. “I should have seen this coming.” In a move that you’d expect from an acrobat, he swung one of his long legs over the top of his horses head and dismounted to the ground, leaving me dazed and swaying atop the horse. 

“Oh, that was very impressive!” I squealed drunkenly, clapping my hands enthusiastically. I had no idea what had come over me, but the bliss I felt was too powerful to overcome with any sort of rationality. 

The Prince was not amused at all. The crease in his brow told me he was more than a little worried. “Come off the horse, female,” he growled 

“My name is not ‘female’,” I giggled profusely. “In fact, that’s quite insulting.”

“Then what is your name?” the Prince cooed. The sudden change in his tone shocked me more than I cared to admit. I knew a trap when I smelled one. 

“Cordelia,” I answered dazedly, mentally kicking myself for giving up my real name so easily. 

“Come off the horse, Cordelia. I’ll catch you.”

“No,” I answered, finally regaining a tiny fraction of my faculties. “I think I should leave. I don’t like what’s happening to me. You did something.” I had no idea what he’d done to me. He hadn’t offered me any food or drink so I couldn’t have been drugged. 

I leaned forward on the horse and grabbed the reins. I had no idea how to ride a horse, but stealing a dragon prince’s horse and riding away seemed like the best option available to me at the moment. 

Before I could carry out my ill-advised plan, a hard tug on my right ankle sent me tumbling down off the horse into the Prince’s arms. I gasped as he caught me as if I weighed no more than a child. 

“Cordelia,” he rasped as his eyes traveled down the length of my body. I froze, unsure of how to respond.

The gravelly, reverent way he spoke my name had thoroughly and utterly confused me beyond hope. That one word wasn’t a statement or a question— it was a plea for me to return home.

But where was home? I hadn’t called one place home in a very long time.  

“Uh, I—” I began to speak as our eyes connected. 

“I’m Prince Taiga of Isling. You may call me Tai,” he interrupted, not breaking his heated gaze from mine.

“What have you done to me, Tai?” I asked in confusion, memorized by the sparkle of his blue eyes. I was vaguely aware of noises in the distance closing in. The wagon must have finally caught up to us. 

“It was an accident,” he muttered, adjusting the cloak to cover my hips. I hadn’t even realized I’d been giving him a peep. “Obviously, I didn’t mean for this to happen.” I didn’t miss how his heated stare had dissolved into guilt.

“Obviously,” I yawned. “But now that it has, whatever this is, I would appreciate a nap.” My vision was blurring, while little stars floated in and out of my line of sight.  

He looked down at me and chuckled. “The cuter the creature, the bigger the nuisance.”

“You find me to be cute,” I giggled. “How ironic!”

“Why?” he frowned. 

“I find you terrifying,” I replied, nuzzling my head into his chest. “Not so much right now, though. You’re very warm and I think it’d be nice to smell you for awhile.” The choked sound in his throat said everything his words didn’t.

“Ah, that explains why your reaction is so strong.”

“I don’t understand. You’re not making sense and I’d very much like to rest now,” I frowned up at him.

“Male dragons release a scent to put female dragons at ease. It’s, er… It’s a mating ritual.”

“Mating ritual?” I laughed. “This is rather sudden, isn’t it? Perhaps after my nap I’ll consider it…” I reached up to trace one of his cheekbones with my finger, an impulse spurned on by my questionable mental state. I wanted to know if a frost dragon was cold to the touch, and since he insisted on clothing himself every inch of himself in his black leather garb I hadn’t actually touched his skin. The Prince flinched, jerking his head away before I could reach him. 

“Gods, this is a disaster,” he frowned, shaking his head. 

Well, that certainly put me in my place.

“Shouldn’t I be away from you if that’s the case? Maybe I can ride in the box with the other dragons…”

“Absolutely not,” he growled , as he carried me away towards the approaching wagon. 

Desmond and the other man whose name I couldn’t remember at the moment, had already jumped out of the box and starting jogging towards us. 

“Gods, Tai,” Desmond said in disbelief, “her pupils are as large as saucers. What have you done to the poor thing?”

“It just happened, Des,” Prince Tai gritted through his teeth. “I wasn’t trying to do anything to her.”

“Oh! It’s the very flirtatious dragon. Hello, again!” I waved at him. Tai put a gloved finger over my mouth to shush me. 

“I’ve never seen one so far gone before,” Desmond chuckled. “Corvyn, have you ever seen anything like this?”

“Not in all my days,” Corvyn shook his head. “And never from a dragon-blood.”

“I suspect she’s more dragon than human,” Tai said grimly. “I can think of no other explanation than that.”

“I’m not a dragon,” I giggled.

“So you say,” Tai answered as he shifted my body and threw me over his shoulder. “Yet here you are, as loopy and pliant as a drunken lamb.”

My muffled protest was swallowed up by the thick velvet of his cloak. 

“Perhaps I should take her, Tai,” Desmond frowned. “She’ll sleep through everything, anyway.”

“No,” Tai growled at him. He had already jumped into the box with me slung over his shoulder. “You take Shadow. Or you can fly. Shadow knows the way back on his own.”

“As you wish, your highness,” Desmond answered, still frowning. Before I could blink, I was unceremoniously flipped over onto the Prince’s lap, and Desmond was skulking back towards the horse slowly, as if he half-expected the Prince to change his mind. 

“Relax, Cordelia,” the Prince soothed. “You can rest now. I’ve got you, and I won’t let anything happen.”

“You’re behaving very strangely, I think,” I muttered, desperately latching onto the last rational thought in fluttering through my head like a lifeline. “Yet, I’m too sleepy to care right now. Yes, I think I will take you up on your offer.” I nuzzled into his chest and closed my eyes, waiting for sleep to take me. The jolt and click of the wagon crawling forward again sounded like a lullaby to me in my addled state. 

“I can’t see this ending well,” Corvyn said gloomily.

“What am I to do?” the Prince growled. “Abandon her here? Go on my merry way and pretend I never saw her?”

Yes, actually that sounds amazing, your highness. 

“You’re shocked and not thinking things through. I want you to take a moment to really think about this, before it ends poorly.”

“Everything ends poorly for me, Cor,” the Prince answered with a humorless chuckle. “I know this will be no different.”

“Don’t think like that, your highness,” Corvyn chastised. You know that old codger will have to kick up his heels someday. Then you can do things as you see fit, the way things oughta be done.”

“Yes, I suppose I can finally look forward to the day my father finally dies,” the Prince replied cynically. 

By this time, the lines between dreams and reality had blurred for me. I couldn’t quite be sure what was in my head, and what I was actually listening to. I heard my grandmother’s voice in my head, calling me inside to help her chop vegetables for a pot of soup. Everything faded away until it seemed I was listening to their conversation in my grandmother’s kitchen, while stirring a pot of vegetable soup.

“I noticed your heartbeat, you know,” Corvyn muttered. “I was, after all, your bodyguard for half a century, when you were a small pup. I am conditioned to listen for it.” Corvyn’s gruff voice remarked. I kept my eyes closed, hoping his next words would shed a little light on the bizarre nature of the dragons I’d been swept up with. “Is it everything they say it is?”

“More than that,” the Prince grunted. “She’s a f*****g siren trying to drown me. Damnation, I think I want her to.”

“I cannot even think of what to say to that,” Corvyn grunted.

“Say nothing, Corvyn. Just another reason I’m a disappointment to my father, I’m afraid. A peasant dragon-blood, of all the infernal things she could be!”

“Never known you to be such a snob,” Corvyn laughed. “She’s a little small for my taste, but brave and powerful.”

“You couldn’t possibly know that, you old coot,” Tai laughed. 

“I’m an excellent judge of character.”

“She is… interesting, to be sure,” Tai answered quietly. I felt his eyes study me, and thanked the gods that I really was drifting off to sleep.

“Send her away, then,” Corvyn suggested. “Keep her isolated and far from King Adrian’s grasp until the time comes.”

“She would take my sanity with her,” Tai muttered.

“Then do whatever you want, Tai. Parade her around in front of your father and refuse to marry the mortal princess for I care. I’ve no idea why I bother wasting my sage advice on you,” Corvyn replied dejectedly. 

The Prince only sighed, and I sleep took me as I pondered his words and what they could possibly mean.