The Dragon King's Rejected Mate

Trial Announced

They came for me at dawn. Four guardsmen in full livery, boots loud on the west wing stairs — which told me everything before a single one of them opened his mouth. Good news never travels with an escort.

Pippa was already in my room. Pippa had a gift for knowing when my life was about to get worse; it bordered on witchcraft. She took one look at the guardsmen in my doorway and started lacing my grey dress with the speed of a girl defusing a bomb — fingers flying, yanking each knot tight enough to creak.

"Smile," she hissed. "Whatever it is, smile as though you were born to it."

"I was born to scrub pots."

"Then smile as though the pots are watching." She shoved a heel of bread into my hand. "Eat. You look half-dead."

"I feel deader."

"That's the spirit." She lowered her voice. "Listen. The Dowager was closeted with Lord Vayne till past midnight. Whatever this summons is, it's been cooking longer than stew."

My stomach turned over. "Comforting. Thank you."

The walk to the Council chamber took ten minutes and lasted ten years. Twice I passed guardsmen I'd shared bread with in the kitchens, and twice they looked straight through me, as though I were already a ghost story. Servants pressed themselves into doorways to stare. A laundress crossed herself. Somebody's page whispered, loud enough to carry, "That's her," and his friend whispered back, "The Unscented one" — the way you'd name a riddle instead of a person.

I'd scrubbed the Council chamber floors twice a year since I was twelve — on my knees, lye eating my knuckles — and I'd never once stood in the middle of it wearing a dress while twelve old dragons united in distaste.

The chamber smelled of old incense ground into older stone, and underneath it the storm-smell of dragons at council — smoke and rain and hot metal.

Twelve councillors around the long table. The Dowager Queen in the high-backed chair at the King's right hand — hers by custom, though no law had ever given it to her. And Kael at the head of the table, black on black, gold eyes fixed on the papers in front of him.

He didn't look up when I entered.

That was the point. It was always the point now.

Dain stood by the door in his captain's blacks. His eyes flicked to me once — one quick, unwilling glance — and away. He couldn't afford to be seen caring either. I filed that glance away and held it tight.

"Wren Calloway." The High Councillor folded his hands. Lord Vayne — Seraphine's father, which explained a great deal about my life lately. "The Council has deliberated on the matter of the Choosing."

My mouth went dry. Deliberated is a word people use right before they ruin you politely.

"The law is clear," Vayne went on. "A Choosing, once spoken, cannot be unmade." He paused the way a headsman pauses. "However. Tradition provides a path. Before any claimed bride may stand beside the King, she must prove herself worthy of the crown she would share."

A murmur ran the table. The Dowager smiled into her teacup.

"The Trial of Queens," Vayne said, "will commence in three days. As is customary, all presented candidates of the season will walk the trials together."

Together. So the court could watch me fail beside girls who'd trained for this since childhood. My knees tried to fold. I locked them.

Old Lord Corvane cleared his throat. "Three days is… swift."

"Swiftness is a virtue, my lord," the Dowager said mildly. "Unless you suggest the crown dithers."

Corvane folded faster than laundry.

"The trials are ancient," the Dowager continued, setting down her cup. Porcelain clicked against porcelain, loud in the quiet. "Fire. The Iron Maze. The Night Vigil." She recited them the way other women recite recipes. ""Every queen of Ashvale has faced them. Every queen has survived them." She smiled as she said it. They always smiled when they said things like that."

Every queen was a dragon, I thought, and bit the inside of my cheek until it hurt.

Fire. The Iron Maze. The Night Vigil. I turned the words over, testing each for sharp edges. Fire would try to expose me. The Iron Maze — a labyrinth of ironbriar in the undercroft, if the servants' tales held — would try to break me. And the Night Vigil: alone until dawn in the dragon crypts, among the bones of dead kings. Three doors, and every one of them opened onto ruin.

Seraphine sat in the observers' gallery behind her father. That was wrong — observers stood; they didn't get stone benches — but there she sat, golden and composed, as though she owned the bench and the chamber and possibly the kingdom. She caught my eye and smiled the particular smile of a girl who has already read the last page of the book.

That's when I spotted the Dowager's list.

It lay on the table in front of her, three lines in her sharp slanted hand: Fire. The Iron Maze. The Night Vigil. And beside it, in fresher ink, a column of notes — preparations, names, sums. I couldn't read it upside down at that distance.

I didn't need to.

Because when the herald stepped forward and read the trials aloud, every candidate's mother in the gallery drew breath at the word Fire —

— all except one.

Seraphine was already smiling.

She'd known. The order, the trials, all of it, for days. The Dowager hadn't merely arranged my trials. She'd rehearsed them — with her favorite.

Heat prickled under my nails. Not here. Not now. Breathe.

"It is customary," Vayne said, smoothing his robes with an oily flourish, "for His Majesty to offer the candidates a word of encouragement before the trials. A few words, Your Majesty, to honor tradition."

Every eye went to Kael. Mine stayed on the floor — safer — but his chair scraped back, and my treacherous heart did the thing it had started doing lately: beating in a rhythm that wasn't quite mine.

"The trials speak for themselves," the Dragon King said. Winter off the mountains. "Let them proceed."

No encouragement. No glance. The refusal landed, hard as a slap, and two of the councillors visibly relaxed. See? A passing fancy. The court can stop holding its breath.

Under the table, where no one could see, the bond pulled taut between us, a wire about to sing. Mine was the only heart in the room beating in time with it.

The Dowager rose. The chamber rose with her. Everyone but the King, who remained seated, which told its own story about who truly ruled that room.

She crossed to me. Orris root and cold iron. She took my chin in one cool hand and tilted my face up, examining me the way a cook examines a fish at market.

"Three days, child," the Dowager Queen said softly. "Do try not to burn."

She smiled, and swept from the chamber, and the whole Council exhaled — the way a room exhales when the storm passes overhead without striking.

I didn't exhale with them. I stood, thanked no one, and walked out to find Pippa. If the Dowager meant to burn me in three days, I had three days to learn how not to be.