She said this like it was the absolute truth, but Julius refused to believe. “Why not?” he growled. “F-clutch was bound while they were still in their eggs. What can Mother possibly have over them that—”
“It’s not Bethesda,” Chelsie said, dropping her eyes. “It’s me. I’m the reason we’re trapped. That’s why I can’t let you give them hope. It doesn’t matter how much you change the clan. So long as Bethesda’s alive, I can never stop serving her, and F-clutch can never leave the mountain.”
She said this quickly and quietly, but Julius couldn’t wrap his head around any of it. “But…” he said at last. “Why?”
His sister heaved a long sigh and stepped sideways, revealing the beautiful Chinese watercolor hanging from the door behind her where the younger version of herself slept peacefully, smiling like she didn’t have a care in the world.
“A long time ago,” she said, reaching out to brush her finger over the ink-black curls of her painted hair, “when I was your age, I did something very stupid.”
Julius’s heart began to pound. “This is what happened in China, isn’t it?”
“Lots of things happened in China,” Chelsie said bitterly.
“But this is the one Bob was talking about,” Julius said, refusing to be put off course. “Who painted it?”
The question made Chelsie twitch. “A dragon.”
Given the intimate nature of the painting, it wasn’t hard to read between the lines. “Youwere involved with a Chinese dragon?”
“You don’t have to say it like it was an impossible feat,” Chelsie snapped. “I’m not that homely.”
“That wasn’t what I meant,” Julius said quickly. “It’s just, it’s hard to imagine you having a whirlwind romance in a foreign country. You’re always so serious and responsible, and the Chinese dragons are so…um…”
“Insular?” she suggested.
“Secluded,” Julius finished politely, though secretly, he felt Chelsie’s description was more accurate. The dragon clans of China might not be as big as Heartstriker, or as blatantly magical as the Three Sisters, but they were still some of the most powerful in the world. Whereas most dragons had merely come out publicly when magic returned, the Chinese clans—many of whom already held powerful positions inside China’s Communist Party—had banded together and taken over the country. This was only possible due to the fact that, unlike pretty much every other clan in their race’s bloody history, the dragons of China had abandoned their petty squabbles in favor of peaceful unification under a single ruler known as the Golden Emperor.
How the Golden Emperor had accomplished this, no one seemed to know. In addition to being uncharacteristically civil, the Chinese clans were secretive to a level that raised even dragon eyebrows. They didn’t even talk with dragons from the outside, and theyneverleft China. Or, at least, that was what Julius had heard. He’d never met a Chinese dragon or been to China himself. Most likely never would, either, since Heartstrikers were expressly forbidden from setting foot in the Golden Emperor’s domain. Before now, he’d always assumed the ban was their mother’s way of keeping them from accidentally starting a clan war by carelessly bumbling into an insular and powerful clan’s territory. Given what he’d just seen, though, Julius had to wonder if the truth wasn’t far more specific.
“How did it happen?” he asked. “And what were you doing in China, anyway? I didn’t think the Golden Emperor allowed outside dragons in his territory.”
“Not now,” she said. “But this was a long time ago, when things were different. Back then, Mother had just killed the Quetzalcoatl, and she was in the process of reestablishing all his old alliances under her name. Unfortunately, she had to do most of this alone since all the dragons from her first two clutches except Bob and Amelia had died in the coup against her father. My clutch was the first born to Bethesda after she became the Heartstriker, and the moment we were old enough to be trusted not to swallow our own tails, she had us running all over the world.”
“And she sent you to China?”
“I volunteered, actually,” Chelsie said with a shrug. “It was a long and dangerous trip, but traveling to the opposite side of the world from Bethesda sounded like a vacation to me. It was actually one of the best times of my life. Until things went wrong, anyway.”
That was a cryptic way to put things, but given how Chelsie was still touching the painting like it was her greatest treasure, Julius could hazard a guess. “You fell in love with him, didn’t you?”
Chelsie jumped like she’d been caught with her hand in Bethesda’s treasury, and then she shook her head. “That obvious, huh?”
He nodded, and she sighed again. “I told you I was stupid.”
“There’s nothing stupid about falling in love.”
“There is when you know better,” Chelsie snapped. “This wasn’t some human I could safely fall into puppy love with. He was a dragon. I might have been young, but I wasn’t naive. I knew exactlywhat sort of fire I was playing with, but I went ahead and did it anyway, and then I cried when I got burned. If that’s not stupid, I don’t know what is.”
The way she said that made Julius wince. “Was he that bad?”
She blinked in surprise at the question. “That’s not what I meant. He wasn’t bad at all. Quite the opposite, actually, which was the whole problem. Ishouldhave been terrified, or at least spooked enough to stay wary, but he was just too…”
“Too what?” he prompted.
“Lovely,” she finished at last, her voice wistful in a way he’d never heard from her before. “Absolutely lovely, inside and out. Smart and thoughtful and charming, not to mention the handsomest dragon I’d ever seen. Even in his human shape, he had eyes like you wouldn’t believe. They were the exact color of golden coins, the heavy, beautiful, yellow ones dragons kill for. Ironic, actually, since I don’t think he’d ever killed anything in his life.”
“He didn’t kill?” Julius said, amazed. Other than himself, he’d never even heard of a dragon who didn’t kill, but Chelsie was nodding.
“He didn’t need to,” she explained. “He was the eldest son of a very powerful clan. No one dared to touch him, much less challenge him. Even during the drought when humans forgot about us, dragons still lived like royalty in China. He’d never even had to hunt for his own food.” Her lips quirked. “I was quite a shock to him. As a dragon from the uncivilized lands across the sea, I think I was the most savage creature he’d ever met.”
