The Dragon's Blood Bride

Chapter 3

My father did not cry when he said goodbye to me. He gripped my shoulders instead, hard enough to bruise, and said the kind of thing men say when they cannot afford to say what they actually mean.

"You will write to us the moment you're settled."

"I will."

"And you will remember that you are a Farrow before you are anything they name you down there." His eyes were red at the rims, though he blinked hard against it. "Whatever crown they put on your head, Liora, it does not change whose blood you carry."

I wanted to ask him why he said it like a warning instead of a blessing, but the courtyard was full of horses stamping and breath fogging in the cold morning air, and there was no time left to ask him anything at all. Three days had gone by in a blur of packed trunks and fitted dresses and Maren pressing small useless comforts into my hands, a locket that had belonged to my mother, a vial of dried lavender for sleep, promises I did not know yet whether either of us could keep. Wren had not said much of anything since the messenger's letter arrived. She said even less now, standing at the gate with her arms wrapped so tightly around herself that I understood it was the only way she could keep from grabbing onto me and refusing to let go.

"I'll see you at the wedding," I told her. "A month from now you'll be standing beside me complaining about the itchy dress they've put you in."

"Don't joke." Her voice cracked. "I don't like this, Liora. I haven't liked it since the first wagon came through the gate."

"I know." I pulled her into a hug and she did not fight. "I'll write to you every week. I promise."

She held on a moment longer than I expected, and when she finally let go, she did not look reassured. Nobody in that courtyard looked reassured, and I told myself it was only the cold making everyone's faces so tight, only the ordinary grief of a family watching a daughter ride away, nothing more than that.

The road south took eleven days, and I spent most of it watching the world change around me the way I imagine a caterpillar might watch its own body change, slowly enough to notice each shift and still be unable to stop any of it. Thalmoor's white hills gave way to brown ones, then green, then to farmland so lush it looked unreal after three winters of watching our own fields fail. The escort my father had sent, twenty of Thalmoor's best riders under Bastian's command, rode close around my carriage the entire way, and Bastian himself found reasons to fall into pace beside my window more often than duty strictly required.

"You've gone quiet," he said on the ninth day, when the road had leveled out into wide stone-paved lanes that meant we were close now, close enough that the air itself smelled different, richer, like a land that had never known hunger.

"I'm thinking."

"About the prince?"

"About all of it." I watched a farmhouse pass, its windows glowing warm even in daylight, candles burned for comfort rather than necessity. "Doesn't it strike you as strange, Bastian? All of this wealth is so close to a kingdom that's been starving for years, and none of it ever crossed the border to help us until they wanted something from us in return."

He did not answer right away, and when he did, his voice had dropped low enough that only I could hear it over the horses. "It's more strange than that. Two nights ago, when we camped near the river, I couldn't sleep. I got up to walk the perimeter and I heard two of the Queen's men talking near their fire. I wasn't meant to hear it."

Something in my chest went cold before he even finished. "What did they say?"

"One of them asked the other if this one would be easier than the last, since she seemed less troubled than most brides tend to be." Bastian's jaw worked. "The other one laughed and said it never mattered how easy they were once they got to the mountain. They said the mountain didn't care either way."

"The mountain." I turned the word over, feeling its weight without yet understanding its shape. "What mountain?"

"I don't know. I didn't hear more before they noticed I was near. But Liora, I don't like it. I don't like any of this, and I think you shouldn't either."

I wanted to tell him he was wrong, that soldiers talk nonsense around campfires the same way traders spin stories for ale, but Maren's voice was in my head now too, the missing princess who never wrote home, and underneath both of their warnings sat the memory of a wax seal shaped like a claw instead of a crest, a detail I had not been able to explain away no matter how many times I tried.

We crested a hill an hour later, and Veyrith's capital spread out below us for the first time, white towers catching the afternoon sun, a city larger than anything I had ever imagined living in, let alone ruling beside. It was beautiful in a way that made my breath catch despite everything Bastian had just told me, and for one unguarded moment I let myself believe that maybe wealth like this simply looked strange to eyes that had only ever known lack, that maybe I was building monsters out of nothing more than my own fear.

Then I saw it. Rising up behind the city, dark against the pale sky, a mountain unlike any of the gentle hills we had crossed to get here, its peak wreathed in clouds that did not move the way ordinary clouds moved, that seemed to pulse faintly, once, like something breathing.

"Bastian." My voice came out smaller than I meant it to. "What is that?"

He followed my gaze, and I watched every ounce of color leave his face before he answered me.

"I don't know," he said. "But whatever it is, our escort just went silent, and they're all looking at it the exact same way you are."

Ahead of us, one of the Queen's riders turned in his saddle to glance back at the mountain, and for one unguarded second before he caught himself, I saw something on his face that no soldier escorting a royal wedding should have worn.

He looked afraid.