The Dragon's Blood Bride

Chapter 2

The wagons came before the ink on the betrothal papers had even dried.

I counted twelve of them rolling through Thalmoor's gates by midmorning, each one stacked with sacks of grain and casks of salted meat, and by the time the last wagon creaked to a stop in the courtyard, half the village had gathered to watch as if the wagons themselves were a miracle instead of a payment. Children who had gone to bed hungry for three winters ran alongside the horses laughing. An old woman I recognized from the mill wept openly into her apron.

I stood at the top of the keep steps and told myself that the sound of that weeping was worth whatever came next.

"You look like someone at her own funeral," Wren said, appearing at my elbow the way she always did, uninvited and exactly on time. "Not someone whose wedding just bought a kingdom's winter."

"I look like someone who hasn't slept."

"You look like someone who's scared." My sister's eyes, sharper than anyone gave her credit for at sixteen, moved over my face and did not blink. "Which you should be. Liora, nobody offers this much gold for one marriage. Not even a prince's marriage. You know that, right?"

I did know it. I had known it since the moment the Queen's smile widened in our hall, a small cold fact I had folded up and tucked away where I did not have to look at it. "Maybe they're just that wealthy."

"Maybe." Wren did not sound like she believed it any more than I did.

Maren found me an hour later in the room that had been my mother's, sorting through the few good dresses I owned for anything fit to be married in. She closed the door behind her with a care that told me before she spoke that this was not a conversation meant for the hall.

"I need you to listen to me," she said. Not the way you listen to me when you've already decided I'm wrong."

"Maren."

"There was a trader through here two winters ago, before the worst of the famine, before any of this." She sat on the edge of the bed, her hands folded so tightly the knuckles had gone pale. "He'd come north from a kingdom near the coast. He told a story about a princess from his own court who married into Veyrith the year before. A beautiful match, he said. Grand wedding. And then nobody in that kingdom ever heard from her again. Not a letter and she never visited her home. Her own mother sent riders south three times and each time they came back with nothing but apologies from the Veyrith court and gifts too generous for the silence they were meant to smooth over."

My hands still went on the dress in my lap. "That's a rumor, Maren. Traders tell stories to earn their ale."

"Maybe it is." Her voice cracked on the word maybe in a way that frightened me more than anything she had said yet. "But I have not been able to stop thinking about it since the Queen walked into our hall, and I am asking you, Liora, I am begging you, to let your father find another way. There has to be another way."

"There isn't." I said it gently, because I could see what the fear was costing her, but I said it with the same certainty I had carried since the wagons first appeared on the north road. "You've seen the granaries. You've seen the children's faces. I can survive a marriage, Maren. I don't think our people can survive another winter like the last one."

She looked at me for a long moment, and something in her expression settled into a grief that had already accepted defeat. "Then promise me one thing. Whatever they ask of you once you're inside those walls, whatever ceremony or ritual or tradition they dress it up in, you write to me. Every single thing. Do you understand?"

"I promise."

She did not look comforted.

I found Bastian in the training yard afterward, working through drills alone with a wooden sword against a post, the way he always did when something was eating at him and he had no one to say it to. He had been Thalmoor's guard captain for two years now, since his father retired from the post, and he had been my friend for far longer than that, since we were children too small to hold real blades and too stubborn to admit we were losing our practice fights to each other.

"You've heard, then," I said.

He did not stop swinging. "Everyone's heard. It's the only thing anyone in this castle is talking about."

"Bastian."

He finally lowered the sword and turned to face me, and whatever was in his eyes was not the easy teasing I was used to from him. "I'm coming with you. To Veyrith. I've already asked your father, and he's agreed to send a full escort, and I intend to be part of it."

"You don't have to do that."

"I know I don't have to." His jaw tightened. "I'm doing it anyway."

I did not have an answer for the way that made my chest ache, so I did not try to find one, and we stood there in the cold yard saying nothing useful to each other until a horn sounded from the gatehouse, sharp and unexpected, the kind of sound that meant a rider had come in fast.

The messenger who reached us minutes later wore Veyrith's colors and carried a single sealed letter addressed to my father, and I watched from across the courtyard as he broke the wax and read it, his face going from confusion to something harder in the space of a few heartbeats.

"What is it?" I asked when he finally looked up.

"The Queen wishes to move the wedding forward." His voice had gone strange, careful in a way I had never heard from him before. "Not in a month, as we agreed. She wants us on the road within three days."

Behind him, still in the messenger's outstretched hand, the broken wax seal caught the light, and it was only then that I noticed its shape properly for the first time, pressed deep and deliberate into the red wax like a signature no one in that hall but me seemed to think was strange at all.

It was not the Draven crest I had been told to expect. It was a claw.