Page 11 of The Dragon Queen

I felt it, the moment my hands stopped raking at the earth, digging unconsciously, and my fingers closed around the crystal. Not entirely smooth, not like the ones that were always in my pocket, I could feel the ragged edge of the chip, my fingers teasing the shape edge. A tiny cut formed, blood beading along the edge, and that’s when it happened.

“Pippin…?”

He’d asked me to stay with him, so that meant he came with me.

We were making love in a bed in a room neither of us had ever seen before, the windows open, the curtains billowing as the mating fever of the queen dragon rode us. Janae, the name came to me from somewhere. But as we stared out the window, catching the moment when Janae’s mates caught up with her. Their tails, theirwings all got tangled up, their mating a frenzy of rutting that had every adult caught up in its midst.

Except for them.

I caught sight of the strange dragons, heard the bugles of the dragons not caught up in the mating flight. No outsider dragons came here without permission, that I knew. This was the most sacred of times, when all the adult humans and all the dragons in this town came together to mark the creation of the next generation.

But not them.

Their uniforms were different in style to ours, the black unrelieved except for the silver of their insignias, which were familiar. They were royal dragon riders. Free dragons, the dragon corp so close together, I couldn’t understand what I was seeing.

Especially not this.

One of the dragons carried something heavy in its claws, its flight erratic as a result, but closer it came. Dragons rose everywhere as humans ran. Draven and I pulled free of each other, reaching for strange clothes to help protect our territory.

Our territory?

I didn’t get a chance to explore what that meant because it all happened so fast. The amphitheatre was built like all the other dragon run towns, over the hatching sands. When the queen dragon was exhausted, sated, she would walk down the wide ramps leading to the hatching sands and rest her body until her eggs were born.

But she would never get a chance.

The intruder dragon dropped its burden, the heavy weight of it whistling as it fell. A simple rock would’ve been preferable, no matter how large, because this projectile was far more deadly.

“Dragonfire…” Draven now and Draven in the vision whispered. I didn’t get a chance to ask what that was as it hit the amphitheatre and then exploded out.

Screaming, I saw that as my hand found the smooth arch of a piece of masonry in the dirt. The hatching sands maintained their temperature because these were the points of Nevermere where lava bubbled the closest to the surface, keeping the area persistently hot.Dragonfire freed that molten flow. Lava splashed everywhere, over everything. Smoke, ash, fire, destruction, it all became a whirling vortex of destruction until finally I forced my fingers to loosen and the world came back with a snap.

“What the…?” Draven said, shaking his head as if that would dislodge what we’d seen. “What the hell was that?”

Chapter 6

“Where the hell did you…?” Soren’s words trailed away as he saw me walk back into the suite. “Pippin, your hand.” He had my wounded one in his, looking at the small, mostly healed scratch there. “Ged, my bag.” He clicked his fingers imperiously.

“Steady on, old man.”

Ged brought the bag over, the two of them sitting me down at the table, something that amused Glimmer. She had stayed up on the parapet, curled against Darkspire’s flank, but I felt her mind touch mine.

Overprotective, attentive… Just like good males should be.

I found myself smiling, then pulled my hand gently from Soren’s grip before fishing out the broken egg in my pocket. It was almost perfect, the pointed tip having been broken off at some point, dirt still collecting in the cracks.

“This is what cut me. I found it in the dirt on a hill somewhere outside the city.”

“West.” Draven walked in, meeting our eyes as everyone looked up. “Out by Finder’s Dell.”

“I know it.” Soren nodded, then turned back to me, turning myhand in the lamp light, then pulling out a strong smelling bottle and some rags.

“I’m not going to like this, am I?” I eyed the bottle, wincing at the strong herbal smell when Soren uncorked it. “It’s not like that liniment, is it? It doesn’t… ow!”

Not the same kind of burn. This was cold, astringent, then made the small cut throb, blood beading along the cut again.

“Need to make sure it’s clean, so it heals up right.” Soren nodded at me. “Can’t have you coming down with blood fever. But what were you doing to find that egg?”

Draven’s eyebrow rose, that cocky smile back on his face as he dared me to explain exactly what we were doing.

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