“Your mom and sister are coming for the Fall Moon Festival, right?” Joslyn asked.
I nodded, unable to keep the grin off my face. I hadn’t seen them since I came here nearly a moon ago, but I’d sent home a letter with a royal courier telling them of my new job, and my mother seemed happy with my new position in the Royal Guard. “Drae said that she and my sister could stay in the palace.”
The king and I were on a first-name basis, and I hated to admit it but I considered him one of my closest friends. We saw each other every day for practice, and he was so patient in teaching me new things and so easy to talk to. Ever since I joined the Royal Guard and took that pledge before everyone, it was like he fully trusted me. Gone was the stuffy king with an unreadable gaze. Now, he was just… Drae.
“What a nice king he is to have done that.” Drae’s voice came from behind me and Joslyn burst into laughter as I rolled my eyes.
“He’s okay at times,” I admitted, causing him to lightly shove me in the shoulder.
“Hello, Drae,” Joslyn said awkwardly, sitting up and waving too eagerly at him.
“How are you today?” he asked her kindly.
She gave him a small smile. “Good. I got a new dress made.” She spread her hands over the bright yellow silk and looked up at him expectantly.
It was clear she was fishing for a compliment.
Drae sighed, reading into her need for attention. He sidestepped me and faced her, leaning down to kiss her cheek. “You look beautiful,” he said.
She did look beautiful; it wasn’t a lie.
Joslyn placed her hands over his, beaming up at him, probably desperate for his touch, and a small ache formed in my chest as I watched Drae hover over her while she gazed up at him with adoration.
I wanted that. I wanted someone to touch and hold and… kiss.
I hadn’t kissed anyone since that day in the interrogation room with Drae, and now that I knew he was marrying Joslyn I wanted to move on. My sword trainer, Cal, and I had become close, and there had been multiple near misses where I thought he meant to kiss me, but something was holding him back. I decided that today I was going to ask him about it.
After my training with the king.
Drae pulled away from Joslyn and faced me. “You can spit fire in a stream of forty feet, throw fireballs from your hands five at a time. I think it’s time we mastered flight.”
Anxiety churned in my gut and Joslyn stood abruptly.
“My king, last time she—”
He cut Joslyn off. “If she is to fight beside me in battle, I must know she is a capable flier.”
Sick unease washed over me. I’d transformed a grand total of three times.
Once at my magic test. The second time in practice with Drae and Regina, and that time my arms and legs had transformed too. The third time was last week, when my entire body had transformed into a blue dragon and Drae had convinced me to go flying with him. It had been windy outside, so my wing caught the air wrong, buckled, and I fell in a dead fifty-foot drop. Although my dragon magic afforded me advanced healing, it took two days for me to walk again without pain, and I was not keen to relive that.
“I… I’m scared to. I can’t,” I admitted.
He shook his head. “You can and you will. If you let the fear take hold, you will never fly, and what use is a dragon who cannot fly?”
I groaned, looking up at the sky for any hint of wind.
There was none.
The Nightfall queen was constantly threatening our bridges at the Great River. They said it was only a matter of time before she broke through our defenses there again. She wanted the king and all the dragon-folk dead, not to mention to take over our fertile lands. Rumor had it that the majority of the Nightfall lands were hot and desolate in the summer months, and nothing grew there.
“You can do this,” Joslyn encouraged me. I could hear the shakiness in her voice.
She’d been there to witness my fall, seeing me lying broken and bleeding on the ground. At night, when I lay down to sleep, I could sometimes still hear her screams for help in my head.
The king stepped up to me, forcing me to meet his gaze. “I will fly under you so that if you fall I can catch you.”
Looking into his green eyes, hearing his promise, it made my stomach warm. I instantly felt guilty for these feelings, especially with Joslyn right here. The heat between our bodies was so intense that he stepped backwards. This happened often between us but we said nothing about it, ignoring it.
“Fine,” I growled. “But if I break a single bone, you owe me five hundred jade coins.”