Page 204 of Golden Queen
When I closed my eyes, I could see it! It was sleek and smooth, a muted, muddy brown with irregular blue patches as bright as Idylstone running down its side. The little splotches of color faded down the dragon's body looking like messy strokes from a paintbrush against that soft brown color.
I gasped as it spun again in the shell, as though restless. A beautiful orange eye, as vivid as the molten rock in the lake outside the door, came into view. It looked back at me with that vertically slit pupil, and I knew it saw me as well as I could see it.
"Well, hello there, beautiful boy," I whispered to the dragon, having almost no awareness of anything outside myself and that warm, peaceful cocoon inside the egg.
I watched rows of delicate scales slide past as the dragon turned again, slightly spiraling inside the shell so that by the time it took another full turn, nearly sheer folded wings and a long, ridged tail passed in front of my vision.
Reluctantly I opened my eyes to see the confused face of Balthazar in front of me, studying me intently.
"He’s beautiful," I told him. "Like someone painted him with little bits of the sky."
Balthazar's slid his eyes to Io behind me in question. I turned to see a matching look of curiosity on his features.
"You saw it?" Io asked. "As in, you got an image of the dragon?"
"Isn't that what you expected to happen?" I asked.
"I expected you to feel it moving inside the shell," he said, wonderingly. "Can you see the others?"
He pulled me toward the next egg on the table, but by then I was apprehensive. "Maybe I didn't see anything. Maybe it was my imagination filling in the pieces," I said, knowing that was absolutely not what had happened. I knew as well as I knew the color of my own pale-gray eyes that the dragon in that shell was brown and blue with bright glowing orange eyes.
Io gave me a look that told me exactly how much he believed that nonsense himself as he laid my hand on the shell.
It was the same as before. It came slowly; the awareness of movement; the sense of the creature. But the moment I closed my eyes, he was there, the same muddy brown, the pattern slightly different, the colors inverted.
I let out a startled laugh as a bright blue idylstone eye came into view—Alduran blue I realized—as bright as Aben Verforge's eyes—as lovely and pure as that glimpse of Io's had been.
"He has orange spots running down his sides instead of blue, and blue eyes instead of orange," I said, keeping my eyes closed, smiling so big it threatened to cramp my cheeks. "They are the same, but their colors are switched around."
I felt Io come up behind me and his hand covered mine. "That is amazing. I would give anything to be able to see them. Come," he said abruptly. "Tell me about the third."
I laughed as he dragged my hands away, excitedly.
I sucked in a breath as I saw the third. It was beautiful beyond belief.Shewas beautiful. The female dragon moved slower than the other two. She was no less energetic, just more graceful as she turned inside the shell, spinning in her endless spiral through the warm liquid of what, to her, amounted to her entire known world.
Her scales were inky black, as dark as Veles. Her visible eye was a soft brown flecked with milkier swirls that reminded me of a painting I once saw of the great dust storms that plagued the entire southern continent before the godsgrass.
Her body, down the line of those black scales was flecked with alternating orange and blue, both colors standing out so sharply against her scales that it seemed to glow.
I explained to Io and Balthazar what she looked like.
"She looks like her mother, then," Balthazar said. "I’ve always thought Kantu was the prettiest of them all."
"Does she look healthy?" Io asked eagerly. "And the others? All their parts formed correctly?"
"They look perfect," I said. The look on his face proved how much he truly cared about his dragons.
It warmed my heart to see that side of him—to see that he had more capacity for love than I had ever expected. I wasn't sure why I had expected anything else when all he had ever shown me was that side of him. And he had been in Albiyn looking for lost children.
He was truly good, no matter what those shadows might represent if they had been in another. Hewasthat farmer tilling the soil with a sword.
When we were back in our own bed later, and I was moving over him, our bodies joined, I couldn't help but think of him as a father.
Even in the midst of passion, my body, my heart, cried out with some primal urge that positively shocked me, to bear his child.
I wanted to make that child with him—nurture it safe inside me just as those dragons had been safe inside their warm shells. We would create something new, but also part of us—part of him, complete with those shadows that danced around his fingertips where he held my hip as I slid my body over him in that ancient, primal dance of our own shared pleasure.
He sat up, drawing my face down to him. "What are you thinking of Sera?"
