Page 5

The shuttle touched down with a slight jolt, landing gear connecting with solid Drakhone soil. Through the viewport, a delegation was already approaching from the castle, moving with easy, unhurried purpose across the open field.

"That's our welcoming committee," Binwee said. "Remember everything I taught you. Be respectful, be observant, and for the love of the Alliance, don't do anything impulsive."

"When have I ever been impulsive?" I asked.

She gave me a look that said she had a very long list and didn't have time to read it aloud. "Come on. Let's not keep the king waiting."

I followed her to the shuttle's exit ramp, where our small security detail had already assembled: two Vaktaire guards decked out in armor who looked like they could break me in half without much effort. They nodded respectfully as we passed. The ramp descended with a soft hydraulic hiss, and then I was breathing Drakhone's air for the first time.

It smelled of pine and wildflowers, with something underneath that I couldn't name, something old and wild that raised the fine hairs on the back of my neck. The breeze was cool and carried the sound of water over rocks somewhere in the trees and birds calling back and forth in languages nobody had thought to add to my translator.

I let myself feel the ground beneath my boots for a moment. This was real, and I was about to meet a king who had been asleep longer than America had existed as a country.

The delegation was close enough now to make out individual faces.

The Drakhoni were stunning in a way that was almost physically uncomfortable, like looking directly at something too bright. They were built on a human template—two arms and two legs and features arranged in all the right places—but everything had been scaled up past the point where it should have worked and somehow worked anyway. The smallest among them stood close to seven feet tall, the largest closer to eight, all of them broad-shouldered and moving with that loose, unhurried grace that spoke of something that had never needed to be careful about anything.

It wasn't just their size, because there was a sharpness to them, in the angles of their faces and the quality of their attention, that marked them as categorically other. Their beauty was the kind that didn't invite you in so much as stop you cold, with high cheekbones and strong jaws that looked like they had been refined over millennia into something that had no business looking that good.

At the front stood a man who was not, in any meaningful sense, a man. He stood at least seven and a half feet tall, white hair falling past his shoulders, moving with the particular stillness of something that has never once in its life been in a hurry. Even from this distance, his eyes were visible: gold, bright and fierce and lit from within like a coal that hadn't finished burning.

King Kavan.

My mind supplied the name before I'd consciously finished the thought, and the rest of my brain spent a brief, embarrassing moment catching up with the rest of my body's reaction. He was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. He was not handsome in the approachable way of men who smiled easily; he was beautiful the way weather is beautiful, the way cliffs over open water are beautiful. He was all sharp planes and contained power, wearing dark leather and ceremonial armor, moving across the field as if the ground was honored by the contact.

Something deep in my girly parts made itself known in a way that was entirely unhelpful given the circumstances.

Get it together, I told myself firmly. You have a job to do, and this is not the time to go sideways over a pretty face, even if that face belongs to a centuries-old dragon king who looks like he was designed specifically to make women forget their own name.

I took a breath and focused on the mission, reminding myself of intelligence gathering and diplomatic reintegration rather than whatever that sudden tingle was.

Binwee started down the ramp and I followed, acutely aware of the gown swishing around my legs and the breeze pulling my hair loose from its braid. The guards fell into step behind us as we crossed toward where Kavan and his delegation waited.

Up close, his eyes were worse and yet somehow better. They didn't just hold still but moved constantly, cataloguing everything, bright and assessing and lit with something that wasn't quite fire but wasn't quite not fire either. Behind him, his guard stood watching us with expressions ranging from wary curiosity to something that looked uncomfortably like suspicion.

We stopped about ten feet away. Binwee performed a formal bow and I quickly mimicked it, adding the curtsy. When I straightened, I kept my eyes lowered, remembering the protocol about direct eye contact.

"Your Majesty," Binwee said, her voice carrying clearly across the distance. "On behalf of the Alliance, we thank you for receiving us. I am Binwee Jazarazant of Asad Intelligence, and this is my colleague, Lady Leila Hunter. We come in peace and friendship, hoping to assist in your planet's reawakening and reintegration into the Alliance."

I waited for Kavan to respond, to offer the formal greeting that protocol demanded. Instead, there was only silence, heavy and oppressive, pressing down on us like a held breath.

I risked a glance up and immediately wished I hadn't.

Kavan's expression had transformed from neutral assessment to something dark and furious. Every muscle had gone rigid, as if he were about to spring into action. The air around him shimmered with heat, and I could have sworn I saw smoke curling from his nostrils.

"What treachery is this?" His voice was a low growl that vibrated through my bones. "What game does the Alliance think to play with me?"

I stood frozen. Beside me, Binwee tensed, her hand moving subtly toward the weapon concealed beneath her robes. Behind Kavan, his guards had shifted into defensive positions, hands on their sword hilts.

The breeze that had felt so pleasant moments ago now carried a charge, like the air before a lightning strike. Kavan took a step forward, and despite every bit of training that told me to stand my ground, my body instinctively leaned back, away from the raw fury radiating off him.

His eyes locked onto mine, and in that instant I understood what it meant to be prey, to be seen by something so much more powerful than yourself that your survival depended entirely on its mercy.

"Speak," he commanded, and the word cracked through the air like a whip. "Tell me why the Alliance has sent me this mockery."

I had no idea what he was talking about, and no idea what I'd done to provoke such rage. As I stood there in my medieval gown with the breeze pulling at my hair and the dragon king's fury washing over me, I realized Binwee had been right.

This was no fairy tale.