Page 4 of Consorting with Dragons

The king gave me a stern look. He then proceeded to give me a long lecture about what an excellent opportunity he was giving me and how lucky I was to receive it.

“Well, what if Redmond went in my place?” I’d politely asked. “I bet I could go tell him now and he’d be happy to do this for you.”

Redmond was General Tallon’s mate, and my omak’s best friend. My omak looked up in surprise. “Oh, what a great idea. Redmond and I could go. That sounds like fun. I love shopping in the marketplaces on Lycanus 3.”

The king got that belligerent look on his face that I knew all too well.

“What are you talking about?” he thundered, “this is not up for discussion. It’s not something for you to decide whether or not you want to do it, either, Rylan. It’s an order! What’s wrong with you? You’re going to pick this up for me, and you’re going to like it. It’s time you got out more. Don’t you agree, Vannos?” he asked, trying to draw him in. But Omak had already lost interest and was gazing out the window at the view outside, twirling a long piece of his hair with one finger.

He jumped a little when he heard his name, probably still lost in daydreams of shopping on Lycanus 3 with his friend Redmond. I covered my mouth with my hand so neither of them would see my smile and perhaps get the wrong impression. My omak was beautiful—no other word for it, even if he were a man, and you were supposed to call men handsome—but my omak was just pretty, and there were no other words for that. However, maybe he wasn’t exactly the deepest thinker I’d ever met. Not that he wasn’t wonderful—because he was. He was wise and sweet and kind and the best omak a person could have. My brothers and I adored him, almost as much as our father did. But he was not burdened by overthinking a situation as a general rule.

The Consort brushed his thick red-gold hair out of his eyes and turned to look at the king. You’d think my father was abusive or mean to him by how nervous Omak looked, but that would be really far from the truth. King Stefan doted on him, adored him, almost always deferred to him and acted as if every word that fell from his lips was a perfect little pearl. Not that they didn’t bicker—because they did, all the time. But they quickly made up.

My parents’ marriage was full of these little arguments and small irritations at each other, because they were really—really—different kinds of people. The king was above all else a warrior—stern, no-nonsense and fierce. As for my omak, Vannos? Despite his strong, muscular frame and all his military training in his youth—he wasn’t what I’d call a warrior. Not at all.

My uncle Mikos, for example, had a reputation for being stone cold and fearless in battle. His nickname was the “bloody prince” after all. I overheard him once say that he had worried about his younger brother Vannos, not because he wasn’t well-trained, skilled and even courageous, but because it literally hurt him deeply, way down in his soul, to cause other people any real harm.

When my omak had first come to Moravia, one of the servants, a young boy named Louis, who fancied himself in love with the king and was insanely jealous of my omak, had tried to kill him in an unprovoked and cowardly attack. My father, Vannos, who was already in a weakened condition from a recent fall, had been about to bathe when Louis came up behind him and attacked him with a heavy iron sculpture, bring the object down on him again and again. He’d been in danger of dying that day, and he would surely have been killed if he hadn’t used all his remaining strength to hold his attacker at bay until help finally arrived.

The king was understandably beside himself with rage, and he wanted Louis’s execution to be carried out, but Vannos intervened on Louis’s behalf. He begged my father to get psychiatric help for Louis instead and to see to his rehabilitation. My father agreed after a long while, most reluctantly, and Louis was now living a productive life, working on a farm on one of Moravia’s moons. The doctors had used their drugs on him and their psychotherapy, and he had long since married and had a family of his own. He was no longer a threat to society in any way.

As far as Omak’s relationship with the king, occasionally he would make some remark that might make the king roll his eyes and shoot him a look, and my omak would take offense, turn up his very attractive nose and get up to storm out. But as he swept past the king in the tight leather trousers he liked to wear, the ones that made me and my brothers blush, the king would suddenly grab his hand and pull him into his lap, murmuring something that sounded apologetic, until he finally relaxed and nodded. Then the king would excuse himself and disappear with my omak behind the nearest closed door to “finish discussing things,” and come back after a half-hour or so, a bit out of breath and disheveled looking. That had been going on all my life, and it wasn’t slowing down one bit. My brothers and I were kind of used to it.

“Oh, are you back to asking me now?” Omak asked, looking surprised. “I thought you were still yelling at our son and laying down the law. You’re only raising your blood pressure doing all that shouting, you know. Why don’t we go outside for a while instead? It’s such a nice day today. I was just thinking we might go for a ride later. Pegalos probably feels neglected, and wouldn’t a ride in the fresh air be nice? I could get the kitchen to pack us a nice lunch.”

Pegalos was one of the arrizes we kept, a huge animal that was used for riding. Pegalos was old now as arrizes went, though they lived very long lives, and he wasn’t nearly as wild as he used to be when he was young and had been my father’s mount. My father had finally been dragged into this century by the rest of us and had invested a few years ago in a large number of hovercraft to traverse the steep mountain trails. We used the animals mostly for sport these days. Anyone who didn’t consider riding an arriz a challenging sport never truly considered how much courage it took to climb on the backs of over a thousand pounds of muscle and ferocity and the skill it took to control the beast and race down a narrow mountain path at top speed. My brothers and I had been riding since we were little boys.

The arrizes were all uniformly black, incredibly powerful and wild. Their bodies were sleeker and had longer legs than Earthan horses, which they otherwise resembled, and their ears were more like slits on the side of their heads. They were muscular and beautiful, but they didn’t have the long manes of a horse either. Instead, their manes were short and bristly and ran all the way down their backs to their long, silky looking tails.

My omak was fearless, and he loved trying to tame and ride them. He had been riding Pegalos since my father had switched to a younger, faster mount, not because Pegalos was necessarily any tamer now, but because my omak didn’t want Pegalos to think he’d been abandoned. He said he didn’t want to “hurt his feelings.”

“Vannos,” my father said, irritably, “we can talk about lunch and riding arrizes later. I was discussing our son’s journey to Lycanus 3, if you remember?”

“Of course, I remember. I haven’t lost my mind, though you sometimes act as if I have.” Omak gave him one of the icy looks that I’d seen my omak-ahn Blake bestow upon my grandfather, Davos. They were never a good sign. They almost alwaysmeant an argument and perhaps a little groveling later on for whichever king was involved.

“Vannos,” my father said, “let’s put an end to this argument. Rylan is almost twenty-one. It’s past time he did these kinds of things for me without his omak interfering on his behalf.”

“Why do you feel you need to keep reminding me of my son’s age, Stefan? I can assure you I’m intimately acquainted with the occasion of his birth. And I don’t ‘interfere.’ He’s my son. How would that even be possible?”

My father turned an unflattering shade of red, like he often did when my omak argued with him. “You’re right. I’m sorry. But he’s certainly old enough to do this for me. Rylan is very mature and intelligent, unlike you at his age. You were…”

“Yes? What was I? Dig the hole a little deeper, why don’t you?”

“Vannos, sweetheart, this is getting off track. This is a silly argument.”

“Silly? Is that what I am?”

My father’s face turned red again. “I didn’t mean it that way, and you know it.”

I took pity on him and spoke up. “I’ve already agreed to go and do this, Father,” I said, trying to take some of the heat off. “I was only teasing before when I said Redmond could go in my place. I said I’d go, and I don’t need you to go along, Omak, though it’s really sweet of you to offer.”

“If you don’t want me to go, then I won’t, honey,” my omak said directly to me, ignoring my father. “BecauseIlisten to what my sons want.” He stood up and glanced at the king. “As for me, I’m going for a ride. Perhaps I’ll see if the Stable Master would like to go along. It’s a lovely day for it, and he, at least, always seems to enjoy my company.”

He gave the king one more haughty glance and then swept regally from the room, as my father cursed softly under hisbreath and glared after him. He glanced back sharply over at me, and I got up quickly, holding up my hands in surrender. “I guess I’ll go pack. See you when I get back.”

“Wait a minute and sit back down,” he said, before I could get the hell out of there. “Now that your omak is gone, I can tell you the real reason you’re going to Lycanus 3.”

“The real reason? What do you mean?”

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