An oily feeling slunk through Loren’s gut at the mention of praising that wretch of a woman. Ariadne did not deserve the loyalty these men showed her. Of course, she had been placed on a pedestal by Loren himself. Now he had to live with the mistake of thinking she would be anything less than a half-breed’s whore.
“Indeed.” Loren nodded. “I wish to bring her home as soon as possible.”
So he could put the bitch in her place. He would teach her the consequences of raising a hand against him.
“I wish to secure Central Province as quickly as possible,” Wintre continued with murmurs of agreement from down the table. “With a focus on Laeton, of course. Little movement has been reported by Colonel Foster in Eastwood, making me believe they have gone back into hiding. That these monsters were able to cross our borders so easily is a tribute to their cavalry, certainly, but we have the advantage now.”
Leveling a deadpan look at the General, Loren cocked his head. “Is that so?”
“Quite, Your Majesty.” With that, Wintre looked down the table. “Captain Odom. Present your findings to the King.”
A young Caersan man with dark brown hair cut short about his ears and a shadow of a beard stood. He shuffled through scrolls that littered the table before him, unraveling several before finding the one he wished to share. Glancing beside him, Odom made a subtle gesture, and a small, pale mage with wispy hair pulled into a top knot pushed to his feet with no sense of grace.
“And who are you?” Loren demanded, eyeing the mage who had been let into his war chamber without his permission.
At first, the mage wrung his hands nervously before offering an awkward smile and replying with a quick, “Rupe Lothrum.”
Loren glared at the mage, who could not have been much older than a couple of decades. “From where do you hail?”
“The Leus Plains, Your Majesty.” Rupe’s voice shook as he spoke. “But I trained in Algorath for the last three years.”
“What did you train?” Wintre asked, his eyes wide with silent urgency.
Rupe looked from Loren to Wintre to Odom and back, his pale cheeks shifting from white to gray. “Medicine.”
“What use is medicine to vampires?” Loren asked, his mouth curling at the corners.
“I’ve been trained by dissecting bodies,” Rupe explained. “Mostly dead prisoners from the Pits, but I’ve gained some experience in…other forms.”
Heaving a deep sigh, Loren glared at Wintre. “Not only do you bring a mage into my war chamber, but you also brought one that is a blithering idiot.”
At that, a sickly shade of pink washed across the mage’s face. He mumbled something incoherent before pushing open the scroll that Odom had chosen. Again, he spoke to the Captain,who then took the page and shuffled past the chairs of grumbling officers to bow before Loren and hold out the paper.
Loren merely stared at him. “Explain.”
The paper stretched out before him, Odom’s hands holding down the curling edges. Without looking Loren in the eye, the Captain said, “Rupe dissected the dragon.”
The oxygen left the room in an instant. Loren whipped his attention to the paper now spread out before him and batted the Captain’s hands away to inspect the diagrams before him. Sketches of the great, winged beast, labeled and sorted by layers, spread across the page. Musculature, bone structure, nerves, and organs had been carefully pulled apart and inspected, then drawn with unnerving accuracy. Pieces of animals Loren recognized from hunts and others he had never before seen—including an entirely new pipe that extended the length of the beast’s neck, connecting a strange organ from its gut to a cavity in its face with a single word written out beside them all.
Dragonfire.
Adrenaline dumped into Loren’s veins, his body alighting with a fresh form of excitement—one he had not felt in quite some time. This new discovery meant they were now one step ahead. Those monsters from the mountains thought they had the advantage because they had control of the skies?
No. Loren would silently move his chess piece into position with this new information, and when they attacked with these beasts once more…it would rain dragon’s blood.
“Give me those,” Loren said, now looking to the mage and gesturing for more of the scrolls. They slid down the table, and he inspected the information Rupe had scratched upon the papers. What he found was precisely as he suspected: the dragon scales were immune to fire and hard as steel. “Skin it. I want new armor from the scales within the week.”
Rupe’s eyes widened. “The scales are not light-weight or small, Your Majesty.”
“I am a Caersan.” Loren did not so much as glance at the human. “Weight is not an issue. The size, however…well, you are a mage. Make it manageable.”
Hesitation, then Rupe said, “Of course, Your Majesty. At once.”
“The rest of you.” Now Loren lifted his gaze to Wintre, then the other officers. “I want the perimeters of Eastwood and Waer fortified by ballistae large enough to bring down one of these beasts.”
Wintre nodded. “We have ballistae already set up—”
“No,” Loren snapped. “Make them bigger. We underestimated their size and capabilities. I want a single bolt to bring one down.”
