Bile rose in her throat,accompanied by a terror that froze her body in place. Magnus watched her, his severe features impassive. But there was a knowing look in the vibrant green eyes, an awareness of the reason for her fright. Leida had already told him her voice was ruined; however, his initial lack of reaction to the news led her to hope he had missed the comment, too intent on her remarks regarding Sivatte. She should have known better. Magnus missed very little.
“I can’t sing, Magnus,” she said, shaking her head. “At least not in the way I once could.” His silence made her squirm. “Have you nothing to say?”
He unfolded his long frame from its sitting position, rising gracefully to pace in front of her. “You say you damaged your voice. How? Were you injured? You never spoke to me of it, and I saw no wounds on you.” He stopped, pinning her with a hard stare.
Leida licked her lips, feeling much like a child caught in an infraction. How many times, she wondered, could she incite his wrath before he finally lost every last bit of that phenomenal control and strangled her? She rubbed her damp palms over her knees.
“Leida?”
One deep breath, and she plunged into her tale, talking fast in the hopes she wouldn’t become completely incoherent before she was finished. “I wanted to improve my singing, make it even better than it was. I practiced every free moment.” She smiled a bit sadly, thinking of Magnus’s elderly wood sprite. “Dagden threatened to gag me with her apron if I didn’t give her some rest from ‘all that incessant howling.’”
Magnus chuckled. “Dagden has never had an appreciation for the finer points of a well-sung melody.” He sobered almost instantly. “Continue. I can sense you hesitating in the telling.”
Leida cleared her throat, annoyed at how easily he could discern her emotions. “I hit notes I’d never hit before, and you noticed. I saw your surprise when I sang for you on the eve of your trip to Meck’s Laketown.”
A sob caught in her throat. It was her last happy night with him, when he praised her voice with great enthusiasm and loved her into the dawn. When he left for the lakeside town, she had felt secure in his affection, sated and warmed by his loving. He didn’t tell her why he traveled to Laketown, only that she and two other human servants were to meet him there later that evening. The scene she came upon that night still sickened her with its memory.
Magnus came to crouch in front of her, lifting her chin with one finger, forcing to look at him when she tried to lower her head and hide within the sheltering folds of her skirts. “It was then, wasn’t it?” His voice turned brittle. “It was then that you changed, became someone I no longer knew.” He held her jaw in a firmer grip. “What was it, Leida, that made you turn on me? Withdraw so far that I soon rested my head in the lap of a stranger with a familiar face? A woman who no longer sang when I asked and stared at me with such revulsion?”
Leida jerked her head, wrenching away from his hold. She stood up, skirting out of reach as he rose with her. The festering anger once again bubbled to the surface, and she was relieved that her voice sounded firm and even when she answered him. “I saw you with Sivatte,” she said. Her eyes narrowed as she glared at Magnus. “And you’re a fine one to speak of lying in a stranger’s lap. You had your head in hers, your eyes closed as she stroked your hair and cast her spell with her voice. You looked like a man who had just found his pleasure between a woman’s thighs. I imagine you did that too, before I came across the two of you on the edge of that farmer’s field.”
There was a cautious note to his question. “Why didn’t you call out?”
Leida gasped, stunned by what she considered pure idiocy. “Surely, you jest.” She flung out her arms in exasperation. “What exactly might I have said, Magnus? ‘Hello, would you mind not seducing my master? He already has a favorite. Me.’” She fisted her hands, hiding them in her skirt so he couldn’t see the true measure of her rage, her hurt. “What would you have done had the situation been reversed?”
His black brows slammed together in a dangerous scowl. “I would have torn the bastard’s arms from his body and left his entrails for the farmer to use as fertilizer for his fields.”
Leida’s eyes widened. Magnus’s voice was heavy with jealousy, and she might have found some small joy in it were it not for the gruesome image he described. She shuddered, knowing he would have carried out such a deed without a second thought.
“This is about you, Leida, not Sivatte.”
Her knuckles went white. If she sported longer fingernails, she would have bloodied her palms. “Oh, this is definitely about Sivatte, Magnus,” she snarled. “In fact, all roads lead back to your pretty elf.”
The tears couldn’t be held back, and they cascaded over her cheeks, and it was now she who paced in front of him, hugging herself in lonely comfort. “I didn’t want to believe,” she murmured. “I didn’t want to believe you were courting another favorite. But how could I not? I saw her, heard her.” Magnus’s face blurred before her eyes. “I’d never heard singing like that. Neither human nor dragon could match a voice such as hers.” Leida sniffled, wiping at her tears with shaking hands. “And she was far more than I could ever be. Long-lived, ageless. She would be young and beautiful long after my bones had turned to dust.”
Leida hiccupped once, no longer willing to look at Magnus. She sensed his stillness, a tense waiting as if he would spring on her once she finished her tale. “You went to Lakeltown several times that month, and I knew why. I held some hope that maybe I wouldn’t lose you altogether if I just continued to improve my voice. After all, you seemed to still enjoy it when I sang or recited poetry to you.”
“I have always found great pleasure in your voice, among other things.”
She dredged up a small smile. “I counted on that. But practice wasn’t enough. I could drive Dagden to sheer madness and it wouldn’t be enough.” She did glance up at him then, seeing a new sympathy in his eyes. “So I used dragon magic, an arcane spell in one of your books. It was supposed to sweeten a dragon’s voice, so I tried it on myself.”
Magnus’s face bled of all color, his pupils expanding so that his green eyes turned black. Leida rubbed at her arms, her stomach roiling as he stared at her in horror. She swallowed a scream as he lunged for her, lifting her from under her arms and slamming her against the sheltering willow’s trunk. He crushed her against the tree with his body, and she could feel the violent tremors coursing through him.
“Had you gone mad?” he said, forcing the words out between clenched teeth. His thin face was so drawn it looked skull-like. “Do you realize you might have killed yourself with your own stupidity?”
Leida squirmed in his hold, accomplishing nothing more beyond tiring herself out. “I didn’t think it would be so dangerous.” Her voice broke on a sob, and she abruptly sagged in his arms. “It didn’t work, Magnus. I thought someone had ripped out my throat, it hurt so badly. I was afraid to tell you what I’d done.”
His grip lightened, changing to a comforting embrace as he stepped back, taking her with him. “I remember. You were hoarse. Dagden thought it was a cold, but neither of us understood why her draught didn’t work to heal you.”
Leida felt his chest expand on a long drawn breath, and he spoke again.
“Ah, Leida, why would you do something like this? Your singing was a thing of beauty, but not worth dying for.”
She used his shirt to swipe at her dripping nose and dry her tears. His eyes still looked black, his face still pale, but the shock was gone, replaced with a pained regret and some other emotion that made her breath hitch in her chest. She shrugged. “It was a pointless endeavor anyway. As you’ve admitted, Sivatte became your favorite three days after I left.” He shook his head when she repeated the same insult she’d used in the judgment chamber. “Dragons are indeed capricious.”
Her eyes closed as he tilted her head back, stroking her neck and the underside of her jaw with his fingertips. His breath fanned across her cheekbones as he spoke. “They can be. Capricious and greedy, prideful and short-tempered.” Leida sighed when he touched her forehead with a light kiss. “Look at me, Leida.”
She opened her eyes again, drained and docile in his embrace. Magnus’s gaze was intense, willing her to look at him, to listen. “It is true Sivatte is a favorite, but she isn’t my favorite. I courted her for Ariadoc. She belongs to my son.”
