The F didn’t look happy, but he nodded, allowing himself to be marched out of the room under Lao’s watchful glare, leaving Julius and the Golden Emperor alone.
“Thank you for your honesty earlier,” the emperor said when their footsteps had faded. “I hadn’t considered how my offer would appear from your perspective. I never meant to make you doubt my sincerity.”
Julius stared at him in shock. Dragonsneversaid thank you to him, or admitted they were wrong. “Does this mean you’re going to take me up on the alliance idea?” he asked excitedly.
“No,” the emperor said, shaking his head. “I must bring Heartstriker into my empire at all costs.”
Julius’s soaring spirits dropped like a stone. “But—”
“But you have convinced me to show you why,” the emperor continued, rising gracefully from his chair. “Come with me.”
He swept out the door, leaving Julius to scramble after him. It was a chase, too. For someone who always moved as though he were walking at the head of a procession, the Golden Emperor was surprisingly fast. Julius had to jog to keep pace as the emperor strode down the hallway toward the rear of the mountain, away from the entry room where Lao and Fredrick were tensely waiting. Given the direction, Julius assumed they were headed for the treasury, but the Qilin stopped several feet short of the giant vault door that had once protected Bethesda’s hoard, turning instead to the door of the only room in Bethesda’s apartments Julius hadn’t been inside yet. The egg-laying chamber.
Well, Julius supposed he must have been here at least once. He was Bethesda’s son, after all, and even she kept her hatchlings close for at least the first week. That said, he had zero memory of the laying chamber, and he couldn’t help feeling a jolt of apprehension as the Qilin opened the double doors to reveal a large, cave-like room with an enormous circular glass skylight set in the middle of the ceiling.
Since it was afternoon in the desert, this meant the entire cavern was lit up with streaming sunlight, turning the normally reddish rock of Heartstriker Mountain a beautiful rosy gold. It was so unexpectedly lovely, but Julius didn’t even notice the paintings until he walked straight into one.
He might have no memory of Bethesda’s laying room, but Julius waspositivethose hadn’t been here before. The sunlit cave was absolutely packed with paintings. Some had been rolled into scrolls and stacked in the corners. Others were stretched out on wooden frames that had been propped up against the walls wherever there was room. Like the ones he’d seen in the entryway, the paintings were a mix of styles and mediums, though most were watercolors. Chinese landscapes featuring dragons in particular were featured in abundance, though there were also plenty of life studies, animal portraits, and dreamy, impressionistic abstracts.
All of them were breathtakingly beautiful, the work of an obvious master, but unlike the paintings hanging on the walls outside, these were unfinished. Some, particularly the rolled-up ones in the corners, didn’t look as if they’d been worked on in centuries. Others showed signs of more recent attention, but only one—a large canvas as tall as Julius himself perched on an easel at the room’s center—looked to be an active work in progress. Some of the paint was actually still wet, as though the artist had just stepped away for a moment.
Like most of the paintings in the room, it was a watercolor, but it wasn’t a landscape. This was a portrait, a life-size depiction of a beautiful girl with long black hair. A beautiful dragon, Julius realized a second later, because though there were no obvious tells, nothing about the girl in the painting felt mortal. Maybe it was the tension in her tanned limbs beneath her simple block-printed dress, or the way her feet curled like claws into the vibrant grass. Whatever it was, she was heartbreakingly lovely. Powerful in a wild, explosive way that contrasted beautifully with the stiffly formal Chinese garden behind her.
But while she clearly didn’t belong there, the dragoness appeared fascinated by her surroundings, crouching attentively beside what was clearly meant to be an ornamental fish pond once the artist finished coloring it in. The fish were already there, a beautifully rendered tangle of orange, white, and black koi. Each one was painted in painstaking detail, their little mouths nibbling at the fingertips the dragoness trailed curiously through the water above them. Magnificent as the fish were, though, what really impressed Julius was the way the artist had captured the girl’s delighted smile. It was small, just a curve of her lips, but the joy of it lit up her entire face like sunshine.
Thatwas the detail that transformed the painting from well-done portrait into breathtaking art. It was such a delight to see, Julius didn’t actually recognize whose face he was looking at until he’d stared long enough to notice her eyes were green. Not just any green, either, but the same unmistakable color as his. Greener than the verdant grass under her bare feet. Heartstriker green.
Julius stumbled backward, putting several feet between himself and the picture. When he turned to ask the emperor the obvious question, though, he got another shock. While he’d been transfixed by the painting, the Qilin had removed his golden veil.
Not surprisingly, he was unsettlingly good looking. Not merely handsome like most dragons, but flawless on an entirely different level. Even the tiny quirks that gave his face character—his dark, too-straight eyebrows, the sharp line of his nose, his thin mouth—were perfect in their imperfections, an artist’s ideal of an elegant Chinese prince. After everything else Julius had seen of the Qilin, that was all par for the course, but the detail he wasn’t prepared for were the emperor’s eyes.
Not that he’d been taking notes during the chaos of the invasion, but if anyone had asked Julius before this moment what color the emperor’s eyes were, he would have guessed the same reptilian red as the Empress Mother’s, but that wasn’t the case at all. The Qilin’s eyes were not red like his mother’s or even blue like Lao’s. They were golden. Not yellow like a wolf’s or an owl’s, but true gold. The soft, warm, glistening metallic color every dragon instinctively coveted.
Eyes like golden coins.
Chelsie’s bitter words were still echoing in his memory when the Qilin sighed and turned back to the painting. Then, in a small, sad voice, he whispered, “How is she?”
Chapter 6
When Marci brought her knuckles down on the plain, seemingly wooden door of the Merlin Gate, the sound that reverberated through the dark wasn’t a knock. It was a gong. An enormous ringing, golden tone that shook the entire swirling sea. If she’d still had a physical body, it would have shaken her to pieces, but whatever Marci was right now—ghost, soul, or some other not-yet-named type of human leftover—at least she didn’t have to worry about that. The sound passed right through her, echoing off into the endless expanse until, at last, it faded back to nothing.
And the door did not open.
“Maybe no one’s home?” Amelia whispered. “It has been a thousand years.”
That was a good point. “I could try opening it myself,” Marci suggested, bending down to study the door more closely. “There’s no handle or hinges, but if I—”
The door rattled. Marci jerked in surprise, moving closer to Ghost as the something on the other side of the heavy wood clattered, and then light shot through the darkness like a spear as the wooden slab opened inward to reveal a man silhouetted against a wall of warm, glowing light.
Oddly enough, Marci’s first thought was that he looked way too young. She wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting, but it had definitely been closer to Gandalf or Mad Madame Mim than the elegant twenty-something Asian man standing in the glowing doorway. He was wearing a simple white-and-black robe with an elegantly folded silk fan tucked into his sash. Other than that, though, he had nothing. No sword or weapon, not even a rope that could have served as a casting circle. Marci wasn’t stupid enough to assume that meant he was defenseless, though. Even standing on the other side of the door, she could feel magic flowing off of him like water. A sensation that only grew stronger when his mouth began to move.
She frowned in confusion. The man was clearly talking, but nothing was coming out. She was wondering if there was still some kind of barrier between them when the magic rolling off the young man shifted slightly, and a voice suddenly sounded in her ears.
“Welcome,” it said, “she who would be Merlin.”
The words were clear with no trace of an accent, but though they were obviously said by the man in front of her, the sounds didn’t match the movements of his mouth at all. They weren’t coming from his mouth, either. The voice was inside her ear, as if she were listening to it through headphones, and Marci’s jaw dropped.
“Is that a translation spell?”
