“Not as much as your brother’s half-digested nerf head nearly woundedme. Threw it at me while I was sweeping,” she snapped, glaring with the one eyeball set in the center of her forehead.
“Merely a dragon’s way of showing his appreciation for a good meal,” I suggested, but she didn’t take the bait.
Green skin wrinkled across her furrowed brow. Braided dreadlocks draped over her blocky shoulders. Her graying headbarely reached half my height, lulling the foolish into underestimating her—Alaric being one such fool.
“Know who else used to toss things about in a fit of rage?”
Memories knocked, and I gritted my teeth at the intrusion. An image of a dragon much larger than Alaric flashed in my brain. The crack of its tail as it smacked my brother across the room, snapping bones. Punishment for some minor infraction.
When it came to the king’s successor, there was no room for failure. Alaric took the brunt of his temper.
“I will speak to him.” Without the trogg’s hospitality, we were screwed. Unlike me, Alaric couldn’t shift, making him rather difficult to hide. Also, I knew nothing of cooking, healing, or housekeeping. Nor did I typically need these skills, seeing as how my rakish good looks garnered me most anything I desired.
The trogg nodded. “There’s food on the table for you, too. Got to keep up your strength if you’re going to care for him properly.”
Care for him.Since birth, it seemed my only purpose was to serve the beast. The unappreciative bastard. “Thank you, Myrna. I’ll take it from here.”
I strode deeper into the room. Overhead, a high-domed ceiling glimmered faintly beneath its layer of tarnished gold. Hand-carved arches cut through the aged surface. The space was large enough to accommodate even the biggest of dragons—and several friends. If he had any.
Thick swaths of cobwebs draped the stone walls, the morbid decorations better suited to a haunted carnival display. One wall held a hearth so large it could roast multiple wild boars at once. In front of its smoldering fire, rested my brother—his scaly form resplendent on an enormous pile of moth-eaten rugs. The nest was far from the quality he preferred, but it would have to do while he recovered.
On the other side of the room stood a long table, large enough to host a dozen hungry royals. It was the one clean spotin the place, Myrna and her crew having polished the wood to a rich mahogany hue.
They shouldn’t have bothered. With the grime removed, scars of the past had surfaced. Scars I had no interest in revisiting.
I sank into the dry-rotted armchair at the table’s end, propping my feet on the buffed surface. My heels found the familiar groove worn into the wood over centuries. Before me sat a platter of bread, cheese, and some unidentifiable meat I didn’t care to analyze. After all, the trogg lived below the surface of the mountain.
“Where were you? You’ve been gone for hours,”came a low, threatening voice, registering in my mind instead of my ears.
“Oh, you know,” I said aloud rather than through our mental link, “just visiting the village library. Catching up on some light reading.”
“You dare to mock me while I lie here suffering?”Alaric’s throaty growl rattled the table under my heels.“Tell me you didn’t fly near Nefarr where others could spot you.”
“Me? Flying in broad daylight? Why would I do that when you’ve explicitly forbidden it?”
“Excellent question. Why would you when I gave you orders not to risk exposure?”
“I risked nothing. Nobody saw me,” I said through gritted teeth. At times, I suspected he forbade me from revealing my dragon to others out of jealousy. Since he could no longer walk as a man, he kept me from my other half.
“After disobeying my direct order, did you find them?”
I shoved a hunk of bread into my mouth, chewing slowly, delaying the answer I knew would ruin my meal.
“Well?”Alaric barked, smoke coiling from his nostrils in slow, irritated spirals.
“The birds are gone. Not a single Adarna exists in the area. Their nesting grounds are long since abandoned. Not a feather insight.” Once, the rare magical bird flourished here. Without a drop of obsidian to be found, they’d either died out or flown away.
Like me.
“Dammit.”Alaric’s tail punched the floor, sending a cloud of dust billowing up around us.“Just a few of their eggs could have fortified me.”
Or not. Lately, I’d begun to suspect his recent weakness and inability to heal were a symptom of his curse. My heart sank.
His illness.
My failure.
“How was your meal?” I asked, steering the conversation away from the subject of his declining health.
