The Dragon King's Rejected Mate

The Bond

Dain burst through the barred door like it had insulted him — two guards at his back, swords drawn, lamplight flooding my wrecked room.

He took in the shattered basin. The knife on the floor. The scorch blackening my windowsill. My split lip.

"Majesty," he said slowly, "those scorch marks—"

"An intruder," Kael said smoothly. He'd stepped half in front of me without seeming to move at all. "My patrol drove him off before I arrived."

Dain's gaze traveled from the scorch to the brazier — upright, coals undisturbed — and back to the King's face. A long moment stretched between them, full of everything unsaid.

"He knocked the brazier over in his panic," Kael added. "Clumsy work."

It was a terrible lie. The brazier stood pristine. The scorch was on the window, in the shape of a hand.

Dain looked at it. Looked at me — at my unburned hands, folded tight at my sides. Looked at his king.

"As you say, Majesty," he said.

He didn't believe a word of it. He obeyed anyway. That, I understood, was what loyalty looked like on a man like Dain — and the fact that Kael had spent it, just now, on me, landed in my chest, warm and alarming.

But at the door Dain paused and looked back — not at the King, at me. "Get some sleep, miss," he said quietly. "Whatever this was." Then he was gone, and I understood that Dain would carry the King's lie the way he carried his sword: loyally, and with questions.

"Double the west wing guard," Kael told Dain, already the king again, voice iron. "The lady will be questioned in the morning."

Cold. For the audience. He turned to go — and at the door, his fingers brushed my wrist. One second. Deliberate as a signature.

Then he was gone, and the room filled with fuss: a maid with a cold cloth, Pippa bursting in wild-eyed, guards thumping past the door in pairs.

Pippa helped me out of my shift and into a plain day dress with hands that shook. "Your lip," she whispered. "Wren, your lip."

"I know."

"The King lied for you."

"I know."

She stared at me. "Do you know what that means?"

"No," I said honestly. "And I'm afraid to guess."

"What in the seven hells happened?" Pippa whispered, pressing the cloth to my lip.

I couldn't tell her. The lie sat in my chest, warming me from the inside, and I held it close like a secret candle.

Sleep wouldn't come. I lay in the narrow bed and listened to the new guards' boots pass my door, and under my breastbone something ached — a pulled stitch, a hollow place, worse every hour, some part of me straining toward the King's Wing and finding only distance.

Separation, some old instinct whispered. The bond didn't like distance — every kitchen tale agreed on that much. I'd spent the whole evening across a hall from him, and now a wing away, and it was done being polite about it.

I paced. I drank water. I thought about his thumb hovering a breath from my mouth — stopping. Not touching. The restraint in it had shaken me more than the assassin's knife.

Near midnight I gave up and brewed ash-tea out of sheer habit — the little clay pot, the bitter roots. I drank it scalding, and it did nothing for the ache. Of course. Thirteen years of tea, and it was never for this. Human girls weren't supposed to feel the bond this strongly. Then again, I wasn't entirely human, was I? The thought sat in my stomach like cold tea.

Near dawn, sleep took me.

Black sand. A storm sky, green-streaked and roiling. No palace, no walls, nothing but desert in every direction — and Kael, standing in it with no crown, his dark hair loose, looking younger than I'd ever seen him. Unguarded the way a sheathed blade is unguarded: still dangerous, but at rest. The storm smelled of ozone and ash — of my fire. Or his sky. Somewhere the two had gotten tangled.

He saw me. Didn't look away.

"Is this real?" I asked.

"Real enough." His voice sounded closer than the distance between us. "The bond doesn't care about doors."

I crossed the sand to him — my bare feet didn't burn, which mattered, in the way of dreams. "Why did you claim me, if you were only going to deny me?"

A pause. The storm turned overhead.

"The Council counts my unmarried years like debts," he said at last. "They'd put a knife in you the moment I looked at you twice. So I don't look."

"That's not an answer." I folded my arms. "That's a strategy."

The corner of his mouth moved. Almost a smile. "You were always going to be trouble."

"Then why—" I stopped. Asked it plainly. "Why me? At the Choosing. You could have walked past."

"Because you lied better than anyone in that hall." His eyes held mine, and there was no court in them now, no audience. "Two hundred girls, and you were the only one working as hard as I was to be invisible. I recognized the effort."

"Invisibility as a craft," I said.

"The only one that ever mattered." A pause. "Crowns make poor camouflage."

"Do you ever get tired?" I asked. "Of performing?"

"Every day." A beat. "You?"

"Only when I have to be a lady."

That got the almost-smile again — closer this time. Almost real.

Something in my throat closed. "That's the saddest compliment I've ever received."

"It's the truest one I own."

The storm thinned at the edges. He was closer than he'd been — or I was; the sand had opinions. "My mother breathed phoenix fire in the war," he said quietly. "It stayed in her lungs. I was twelve. I held her hand while she—" He stopped. Started again. "I hated your kind before I knew your name."

"And now?" My voice came out smaller than I wanted.

"Now I dream about a kitchen girl," he said, "and I wake up angry at the dreaming."

He lifted his hand — slowly, giving me time to step back. I didn't. His knuckles brushed my cheek, warm as banked coals, and the storm held its breath.

I reached for him —

— and woke.

Dawn, grey at the window. My split lip throbbed. The hollow ache behind my sternum was gone — sated, somehow, the way hunger goes after a meal you don't remember eating.

For one disoriented moment I thought the dream had been only a dream.

Then I turned my head.

And on my pillow, beside my cheek, lay a single black dragon scale.

I turned it over in my fingers — black, iridescent at the edge, warm the way a living thing is warm. Proof, or madness.

Pippa's knock came then, and I tucked the scale into my bodice and lied to my best friend before breakfast. Bad dreams, that's all.

All morning, through the questions and the fuss, it lay against my skin.

Warm.