“But he must have liked you, too,” Julius said with a smile. “No one paints a picture that lovely of someone they don’t care about.”
He’d meant it to be a compliment, but the moment the words were out of his mouth, Chelsie’s wistful look died so fast he wished he’d never said them.
“He did care,” she said stiffly, turning the picture over so the watercolor was hidden against the wall. “More than he should have, and definitely more than I deserved. We both knew it couldn’t last, but we were young and stupid enough to think the rules didn’t apply to us. We kept telling each other that we were different. Toward the end, I think we even believed it. But reality doesn’t care what naive young dragons think, and by the time we realized we were crashing, it was far too late.”
She sounded so sad by the time she finished, Julius was afraid to ask, and yet he had to know. “What happened?”
Chelsie sighed. “What always happens when a nobody dragoness from a backwater clan gets seriously involved with the eldest son of a powerful one. We were found out, and his mother objected.”
Julius blinked in surprise. “That’s it? His mother objected?”
“I’m sorry my sordid past isn’t dramatic enough for your liking,” Chelsie growled. “But when you’re a twenty-year-old whelp alone in China, the matriarch of a territory’s biggest clan isn’t someone you wantobjectingto you. The moment she found out what was going on, she put an end to it, which included putting an end tome.She was about to do it, too, when Mother arrived to intervene.”
Julius’s jaw dropped. “Bethesdawent to China tosave you?”
“I know,” Chelsie said, shaking her head. “It sounds ridiculous now, but you have to remember this was right after she lost her first two clutches. Bethesda spent the decades after her father died laying eggs faster than anyone thought possible, but even with D- and E-clutches already hatched and growing, she simply didn’t have enough dragons yet to risk losing even one. When I cried for her help, she came to China personally to negotiate for my life. Unfortunately, there was nothing to negotiate. Even the wealth of the Heartstriker paled in comparison to the Golden Emperor’s. When all was said and done, Bethesda simply had nothing they wanted more than my death, and so she was forced to do the only thing left that she could.”
“Which was?”
Chelsie’s jaw clenched. “She begged.”
“Begged?” he repeated, incredulous.
“On her knees,” Chelsie said grimly. “She got down in front of the Golden Emperor and begged him to spare my life. Her humiliation amused them, and I was set free that same afternoon. Naturally, I’ve been paying for it every day since.”
That went without saying, Julius thought, glancing down at the bloodstained stone of her bedroom floor. He’d always known Chelsie’s story would be unique, but he’d never expected that. Even when her own life had been on the line, Bethesda hadn’t begged. He couldn’t imagine how high the stakes must have been to make her to do it for Chelsie. But while this explained how his sister had gotten so deeply in debt to their mother, it still didn’t add up why she was refusing to let Julius get her out of it now.
“I get that between the begging and everything else, you owe Bethesda a crazy life debt,” he said carefully. “But it’s been six hundred years. Entire civilizations haven’t lasted as long as you’ve been paying this off. Surely you’ve done your time.”
Chelsie arched an eyebrow. “Have you met our mother? Forgive and forget aren’t in her vocabulary.”
“But that doesn’t give her the right to keep you in debt forever,” he said firmly. “And even if she’s vowed never to let you go, none of this has anything to do with F-clutch. They’re only…” He paused to do the math in his head. “Six-hundred-years old themselves. Were they even hatched while this was happening?”
“No,” she said, her voice strangely strained. “They were laid shortly after Mother and I returned home.”
That was odd timing. If Bethesda had laid F-clutch right after getting back, that would have meant she’d been pregnant at the start of her journey, which didn’t make sense. First, pregnancy left dragonesses severely weakened, and the Bethesda he knew would never risk going up against a stronger dragon at anything less than full power, even if she was only going to beg. Second, even Bethesda—whose superpower was laying eggs—couldn’t have carried a clutch for the multiple months it took even dragons to get from the Americas to China and back again in the fourteen hundreds.
In fact, once you factored in travel time, it was actually impossible for Bethesda to have been pregnant when she’d left to save Chelsie, because E-clutch was famously only one year older than F. By that math, she must have hopped on the boat the moment the Es hatched, and even Bethesda couldn’t have gotten herself pregnant again that fast. But if she wasn’t already expecting when she’d set sail, that meant she would have had to have found F-clutch’s father in China, which seemed even less likely. There was no way any of the Golden Emperor’s dragons would fly with her after their clan head had nearly murdered Chelsie just for having a fling. Even if she’d gotten pregnant there by accident, they never would have let her leave. Eggs were deadly serious business in any dragon clan. No matter how much they looked down on her, the Golden Emperor would never have let Bethesda waltz out of his lands with a belly full of his clan’s unhatched eggs. But if she hadn’t been pregnant when she’d gone to Chinaandshe hadn’t been pregnant when she’d left, where had F-clutch come from?
He was still puzzling over this when he realized Chelsie was staring at him, her green eyes shining with a desperate, violent light. “You’ve always been an odd dragon, Julius,” she said quietly. “But you’ve never been a stupid one. I can already see that clever brain of yours putting the pieces together. For your sake, I suggest you forget them. Some mysteries are better left in the past.”
“Not if the past is still crippling the present,” Julius said angrily. “There’s obviously a lot more that happened in China than you’re telling me, but whatever it was, it’s not F-clutch’s fault. They weren’t even laid when all this happened. I understand you’re in debt to Mother up to your neck, but that still doesn’t explain why you think they can’t go free.”
He expected Chelsie to get angry at that, but she just looked sadder than ever. “You’re right,” she said at last. “It’snottheir fault, and it’snotfair, but that doesn’t mean they’re not suffering for it. They shouldn’t be, but they are, and that’s my fault, too.”
“How?” he asked, clenching his fists. “I don’t want to pry into your life. I just want to fix things.”
“I know,” she said. “And that’s the only reason I’m telling you all this. Because youdocare, but it’s not enough, Julius. What happened…what I did in China all those years ago hurt a lot more than just myself. You’ve never seen the fallout because I’ve kept it a secret all these years, but if the truth ever gets out, we willallpay. F-clutch in particular.”
“Wait,” Julius said, staring at her. “That’s why they have to stay sealed and in the mountain? Because of something you did in China?”
“I told you it wasn’t fair,” she said bitterly. “But you’re right. Because of what I did, F-clutch can never go free. I can’t tell you why for obvious reasons, but you should know it’s not just you. The only dragons in the world who know all the details are myself, Brohomir, and Bethesda. I trust Bob not to talk because he’s already seen what happens if this gets out, but Bethesda’s different. She’s a selfish, spoiled princess who cares only for her own power.”
“And you think she’ll tell your secret?” Julius finished for her.
“Iknowshe’ll tell,” Chelsie growled. “Did you really think something as simple as a life debt could have kept me her slave for six hundred years? All my blood oath does is bind me from killing Bethesda myself. To actually force me to obey, she would have had to put a seal on me before I hatched, like she did for the Fs, and that has its own drawbacks. But Bethesda didn’t need magic to put me under her boot. Blackmail is just as effective, and far simpler. There’s nothing to break, nothing to go wrong. So long as I don’t want my secret getting out, I have no choice but to obey her every word. Simple as that.”
Julius scowled. He supposed he should be happy that his mother’s control over Chelsie wasn’t some sort of crazy blood debt, but blackmail was actually way harder to deal with than magic. A life debt he could just break, but a secret was far more insidious, especially since he had no idea what secret could possibly be horrible enough to make Chelsie willingly remain under Bethesda’s heel and keep F-clutch there with her.
