The Dragon's Blood Bride

Chapter 1

“Liora, my instincts tell me that there's more to this marriage alliance, that Queen Isolde and father has refused to tell us” that's Wren my sister.

Should I say she is saying it out of fear or for the fact that she is going to miss me.

I'm Liora and have heard of Dragon stories.

They say the dragon only takes daughters. I grew up believing that was a story mothers told to keep their girls close to the hearth, not a debt written in blood a hundred years before I was born.

I did not know yet that I was going to pay for it.

The morning the riders came, I was on my knees in the frozen garden behind the keep, pulling the last shriveled turnips out of the ground that had given up trying to feed us. My fingers had gone past cold into something closer to numb, and I welcomed it. My numb fingers did not shake when I counted how few turnips were left for how many mouths.

"Liora." Wren's voice cracked through the thin morning air before I saw her, her cloak flapping open because she never bothered to close it, sixteen years old and still running everywhere like the ground owed her speed. "There are riders on the north road. A lot of them."

I stood too fast and my knees protested. From the garden wall I could see the road my sister meant, a dark thread cutting through the white hills, and along it moved a procession too long and too bright for anything good to come from it. Banners and horses in numbers our own stables had not held in years. Something in my chest went tight before my mind had even finished the thought that formed it.

Nobody rode into Thalmoor like that unless they wanted something.

"Father's in the hall," Wren said, already pulling me by the sleeve. "Maren sent me to find you."

I let her drag me through the kitchen yard, past the cook staring out the window with a ladle still in her hand, past two guards buckling on sword belts they had not worn since the last time bandits tried the eastern pass. Thalmoor did not get visitors like this. Thalmoor barely got visitors at all, not since the harvest failed for the third winter running and word spread that our granaries were as empty as our treasury.

My father stood at the head of the hall when we reached it, and I knew before anyone spoke that whatever this was, he already understood it better than we did. His face had the look it wore when he was doing sums that did not balance. Beside him, my stepmother Maren stood with her arms crossed tight over her chest, and she was not looking at the door where the riders would enter. She was looking at me.

"Whatever they offer," Maren said quietly, only to me, "you say nothing. Do you hear me, Liora? Nothing until your father and I have spoken with them alone."

"Offer what? Maren, what is this?"

She did not answer. The great doors opened before she had to, and the cold came in ahead of the woman who walked through it.

I had never seen the Queen of Veyrith in the flesh, only heard her described in the trader’s stories that came north with the grain we could no longer afford, a woman built of ice and gold, a court so wealthy its floors were said to be laid with marble instead of stone. The woman who crossed our threshold matched every word of it and somehow still managed to make our entire hall feel smaller for her presence in it. She wore furs no animal in Thalmoor had ever grown, and behind her came a young man in a deep blue cloak whose face was handsome in the careless way of someone who had never once had to work for anything, and behind him came a knight who did not smile at all, who scanned the room the way a man scans a field before he burns it.

"King Edran." The Queen's voice was warm the way poisoned wine is warm, sweet enough that you drink before you notice what it costs you. "Forgive the lack of warning. I find that the best offers are the ones made before pride has time to get in the way of good sense."

"Your Majesty honors us," my father said, and I heard the strain under the courtesy, the sound of a man choosing his words the way you choose footing on ice. "Though I confess I do not know what brings the Queen of Veyrith so far north in winter."

She smiled, and her eyes moved past him, past Maren, past Wren, and settled on me the way a merchant's eyes settle on the one good horse in a poor man's stable.

"That," she said, "is my son."

The young man in blue stepped forward and inclined his head to me with a courtesy that felt rehearsed a hundred times before this morning, and something in my stomach dropped even before the Queen finished her sentence, even before I understood what I already knew.

"Prince Cassian is unmarried," she said, "and Thalmoor, I am told, is hungry. I have come to offer a solution to both problems in a single stroke. Marry your daughter to my son, King Edran, and I will see this kingdom fed through every winter for the next generation. Grain and gold will be in abundant. Whatever your people need, I will provide it, and gladly, in exchange for one girl's hand."

The hall went silent enough that I could hear the fire snapping in the hearth. I looked at my father and saw the calculation happening behind his eyes, the same calculation I had watched him make over empty granaries for three years running, except now the number on the other side of the ledger had a face, and the face was mine.

"Father." My own voice came out steadier than I felt. "If this feeds our people, then there is nothing to discuss. I will go."

Maren's hand closed hard around my wrist, her nails biting through my sleeve. "Liora, you don't understand what you're agreeing to."

"I understand we are starving," I said, and I meant it, and I believed every word of it, because I did not yet know what the word marriage would actually cost me, did not know that somewhere south of every soft promise in that hall there was a mountain waiting, and a cave inside it, and something ancient that had been fed brides like me for a hundred years.

The Queen's smile widened, satisfied, already certain of my answer before I had finished giving it.

"Wonderful," she said, and behind her, the silent knight finally smiled too, and it was the worst thing I saw in that entire hall.