Page 39 of Deadly Maiden

“Not here. Not yet.”

“I will ask you many questions when we camp then.”

He says nothing further.

I have caught him out. It’s a small win.

I start to assemble my questions.

Chapter 11

Rorsyd

Ahhh.

How the blood thunders. How it churns through the chambers of my cavernous heart.

I exult in being dragon.

The panorama seen through my dragon eyes is lush with the mauve, purple, and orange hues of sunset.

Below my vast wings birds flock, arrowing to the darkening treetops to roost for the night.

I exhale, sighing, casting off the lost years and decades of my grieving.

I inhale and revel in the complexity of the scents—the musky hints of faraway wood-smoke, the veins of tree sap and unfurling blossoms, the freshness of high-altitude water, the splash of distant ocean depths. With dragon strength, endurance, and wings, the join of land and sea is less than an hour to the west.

I have missed this. Pined for this.

Wept for it.

I have sorrowed long and lonely with an exquisite wine in my goblet as I drank myself into unconsciousness. That was not worthy of a dragon.

The other fae are but specks on the land unrolling beneath me.

I and I alone rule in this domain, the sky.

Oh, the exhilaration of flying after so many years of humdrum existence with my feet glued to the land in man shape.

I need this. I need this to be who I am.

Without this, I will slowly die. My heart will die.

It was already happening.

And now? I ponder recent events. I have also been exchanging flirtatious banter with the vexatious fae girl who now sits upon my back. She is daring and headstrong, but not reckless? I like that in a female.

I am ancient, and she is young.

I vowed to destroy the child of the necromancers who killed Orish, and that is she. Yet here I am…flirting with her.

I must destroy herifshe shows any signs of turning evil.

And has she? No. To the contrary.

I find I am not sad over this. I rejoice instead. One should never ever take life without due consideration of the good and the bad in such a situation. One cannot retrieve a life once it has fled the world.

Wait, no. That is what necromancers do, is it not?

---