My teeth scraped together, my jaw bone spasming from the pressure. Each second wasted could mean one more life lost. Hundreds. I couldn’t stand it. They needed me, needed my strength and my blade.
Her gaze pierced me where I stood by the gate, fretting. “You’re the queen, aren’t you?”
The question made my heart stutter. “No crown,” I snapped, shifting the saddle on my shoulder.
“I could say I see your status in your bearing,” she said, wryness edging through her tone. “Or that I recognize you from the coronation.” Her gaze shifted to the dragon before returning to my face. “Why did you do it?”
“Do what in particular?” I’d done many things, some good, a few bad. Lord Zeiger could attest to the latter.
My pulse hammered against my ribs. Not far from here, people were screaming, fighting, dying. Inside this isolated aerie, a trainer chattered as if this was a normal day.
“Why did you give your ladies high status?” Her brows roselike she was curious, yet her hands kept working, adding to my frustration until I had to clench my free hand into a fist to hold back my shouts. “You put them above those they grew up with, those with status they’d held all their lives.”
“I want to do away with all that, but I need to take tiny steps, or I’ll disrupt the court.”
Her breath snorted out. “If any court needs disruption, it’s this one.”
“All of them, I imagine.”
“You’re probably right.” Her gaze lingered on me, peeling back layers to expose areas I didn’t want her to see, as if what was happening in the city wasn’t already slicing me open from the inside. “I heard you’re high born but that you’re not like any other.”
“I’m not special.” I dropped the saddle onto the sand with more force than was necessary and started toward the front of the dragon. “I grew up thinking I was an orphan.”
“Instead, you were miraculously revealed to be a high lady.”
I shrugged. “I’ve always been a dragon trainer from a border fortress. Nothing else.”
“A dragon trainer who married our king.”
“To solidify a treaty,” I said through clenched teeth.
“Why marry someone you’ve never met?”
I wanted to snap at her to get out of my way or threaten her until she backed off and let me steal the dragon from the aerie, not stand around chatting about my motivations. But she was a citizen of this court the same as me. And I couldn’t bring myself to brush off a fellow trainer.
The dragon coiled his head around and our gazes met.
I reached up to scratch him between the eyes, the place that pretty much made dragons roll over and thrust their feet into the air when you did it right.
“Youdoknow dragons,” she said. “I’m Kian, by the way.”
“Reyla.”
“QueenReyla.”
I shrugged. “That came with the marriage.”
“There are few who’d say no to the king.”
“Then why didn’t he marry someone from here?”
“The curse kept them away.”
Before I could snap out a question, she stared blankly at the dragon’s side. A shiver went through her, and she shook her head and began grooming again.
I wanted to growl. Start flinging my blades at a door. But my need to get to the city overrode every other desire.
“I ran away,” I blurted out before I could shove the words down my throat. My free hand curled into a fist, my nails biting into my palm. “I thought if I ran far enough away from where the man I loved died, I’d be able to forget.”
