Page 23 of Lady Dragon
“He didn’t try to keep you from staying?” Samansa asked incredulously.
“I would have liked to see him try.” Kirek’s knifelike expression softened as she looked up at her. “Jamsens didn’twantto stop me.” Her dragon-like arrogance returned with a smirk, reminding Samansa more than ever of a cat lounging in a patch of sunlight. “Maybe because I’m a better guard than any of them could ever be.”
Samansa was about to challenge her on that point—or at least explain why it was a very rude one to make—when the missing rug finally became too much to ignore. She drew up short. “Wait, did something happen? Somethingelse, I mean—last night?Here?”
Kirek’s silver eyes glowed with a self-satisfied light. “Another assassin. I caught him.” Her pleased expression wavered. “And yet, once again, I killed him too quickly, because in this body I apparently lack any restraint whatsoever. I should have left him alive for questioning, just as I should have the last one.”
Probably fortorturing, since this assassin likely wouldn’t have given any information readily or willingly. Lords and ladies, Kirek was brutal, even when trying to maintain calm. She only veered more cold than hot in her brutality, unlike most humans Samansa had met. The princess didn’t know what was better or worse.
She probably should have been more concerned about asecondassassin—who could be sending them?—but she was finding the idea of yet another one more comprehensible than the presence of the dragon girl, at the moment.
Kirek added, as if it were of little consequence, “I threw him out the window.”
Samansa shuddered. Before, she couldn’t have imagined someone Kirek’s size throwing a grown man, a trained killer no less, anywhere, let alone out the window, but after what she’d seen outside the baths, she could now. At least this seemed to have been a less bloody affair than that previous encounter.
“Dara must have been in a fright. Her room is right there.” Samansa pointed at the discreet door, narrower than those that opened onto her rooms and onto the outer hallway. She frowned. “Where is she?”
“A casualty, I’m afraid,” Kirek said, and went back to reading her book.
For a long moment, Samansa couldn’t comprehend the words. The only sound she registered was her heart pounding as hard as a drum in her ears. “What?” she whispered, hoping she could have somehow misheard. The sinking sensation inside of her was trying to drag her to the ground.
“The assassin had already entered by the time I arrived. But don’t worry, I had Jamsens’s men clean up the mess.”
Of course. The missing rug.The thought was a distant one, drowning in the immediacy of her rising emotional storm, which suddenly became too much to contain.
“Dara is dead?” Samansa shrieked.
Kirek winced, more likely at the volume than what the princess was actually saying. “Yes. I gather this must upset you?”
“I should have been awoken immediately!” Samansa cried. “I wouldn’t have wanted her hidden from me, no matter what had happened to her! I owe her better than that!”
“But she was just a servant, and it wasn’t a pleasant sight. After the first assassin, I thought—”
“I grew up with Dara!” the princess shouted over her, throwing her arms out at the unmoving, implacable dragon girl, wishing she could shake her. “She was myfriend! But maybe that’s something else you don’t understand, as a dragon.”
“I certainly don’t understandyou,” Kirek said coolly. “I would have assumed thanks were in order for saving your life.Again.”
Tears were streaking down Samansa’s face now, but she didn’t care to hide them. Anger flared within her, fueled by her grief, and her words came pouring out like flame, unchecked. “And I don’t understandyou! The sheerarroganceof you! You’re so occupied by being proud of yourself for slaying yet another assassin that you forgot Dara was a person! A person I cared deeply about!”
“So I should care about Dara, a human I didn’t know, but not the assassin? I hope you’re not telling me to mournhisdeath as well.” Kirek frowned, her brows pinched in either irritation or puzzlement; Samansa couldn’t tell. Likely the former.
For a moment, the princess wanted to draw her arm back and smack the dragon girl as hard as she could. But she wasn’tso beside herself that she would destroy the Treaty in a single, literal blow that likely wouldn’t hurt Kirek—let alone land. But even the temptation was too much of a risk. Samansa had to get away from her, or soon she would do or say something she couldn’t take back.
“Just leave me alone!” she screamed, her voice breaking, as she shoved past the daybed and threw herself out the antechamber door.
Jamsens stood on the other side, already opening his mouth to try to say something.
Samansa cut him off, half sobbing. Her grief was a living thing now, consuming her. She didn’t care who else it touched—maybe she evenwantedto burn someone. So she said the worst thing she could think of. “Andyoudidn’t save her,” she spat. “Youdidn’t keep her from dying. Some protectoryouare.”
She only caught a glimpse of the crestfallen look on his face before she shoved by him, too, and ran down the hall. Jamsens and the other guards followed her with dutiful haste, but she paid them no mind. She needed to get away from all of them, to be anywhere other than here—as if she could outrun the pain of Dara’s loss.
But death, as always, was inescapable.
No one disturbed the princess within her private alcove in the royal library except her mother, whom she sent away—and who, more astoundingly, obeyed—not even when Samansa dragged herself, half-blind through swollen eyes, back to her bed that night, numb and stumbling. No doubt Jamsens was trailing behind her, but she didn’t see him.
On the second morning, after waking with her eyes crusted shut, Samansa was utterly surprised to find Kirek outside her bedchamber doors once more. The only thing missing was the princess’s mark of favor, no longer tied about the dragon girl’s arm, but that was a small thing next to her reappearance. Samansa had assumed, after her outburst, that Kirek would have abandoned her. But the princess’s grief was still the more powerful force, so she stalked by her without a word, not speaking to her or Jamsens for the rest of that day, either, despite any lectures or meals they were forced to attend together, with Jamsens standing guard, looking miserable.
Her mother, when next she saw her, appeared concerned by her coolness toward the dragon girl, but the queen didn’t press her on it, likely because of the fresh wound that Dara had left and her worry over the sudden flurry of assassination attempts. But she wouldn’t hold back for long, not with the fate of the queendom at stake.
