The Last Dragon, page 11
Harlow crossed her arms. The truth was like a river now whose dam she had destroyed. Words gushed out of her, pressurized from being held back for too long. “I’m tired of working my ass off to support you. You’re both full-grown dragons. Dad, you started your company from nothing. What’s stopping you from doing it again? And Mom, if you got off your barstool long enough, maybe you could find a job at one of those dress stores you frequent. You’ve always had an eye for fashion, and you know everyone in the kingdom with money. Why not use that to your advantage? I’ve been the only one earning anything to support us this past year, and what do I get for it? You want to marry me off to a man you and Dad can’t even stand.”
“Oh, Lemetria, I knew this was a mistake. She doesn’t like the man. Not even a little.” Darium stuffed himself into his armchair and buried his face in his hand.
“How were we to know?” Lemetria groused. “When he sent the falcon to say he’d seen her at the pits and wanted to join us for dinner, I assumed the two had a connection! It said you sat with him, Harlow. You talked.”
Harlow flung her hands down by her sides. “The only connection I had with that dragon was a few conversations where I suggested he’d be lucky to hire Dad for his second-rate door company. That’s why I thought he’d come. And he had the audacity to give us that stupid excuse about his business’s reputation.” She made a gagging sound.
“He’s absolutely wretched,” Darium snarled.
“But very rich,” Lemetria offered.
Harlow and her father stared her mother down.
“Fine, you won’t be marrying the asshole.” Lemetria sagged into the chair across from her father.
“Thank you,” Harlow said.
“There’s only one problem,” Darium muttered, leaning back to stare at the ceiling.
Harlow laughed. “Only one?”
“A big one.” Her father scrubbed his face with his hands. “What happened tonight is just the start. Without his money to bail us out, we’re doomed.”
“Exactly how bad is it?”
Her father frowned and glanced away. “Even if your mother sold every last piece of jewelry in that bag for top dollar, it wouldn’t be enough to pay off what we owe.”
Harlow’s eyes widened. Her gaze darted between her parents, and panic gripped her shoulders. For a moment, she was tempted to flee the sinking ship. Their debt was not technically hers. She could leave, work hard, live simply. She could let them fail. But even as she considered it, she knew it was out of the question. As difficult as her parents could be, she loved them. Harlow was no whelp, but she’d lived under the shelter of their wealth for hundreds of years. Her father’s prosperity had been her prosperity for most of her life, and he’d never begrudged her a single thing.
Never in all those years had her parents tried to force her to marry or to move out on her own despite her advanced age. Before they’d lost everything, her parents had never asked her to pay for anything, never expected her to contribute in any way. Even now, when they were desperate, they accepted her decision not to marry Adradys. There were no ultimatums. In fact, both of her parents looked at her with only love.
In her heart, she knew without a doubt that Lemetria and Darium were not lazy. Darium had started his doormaking business from nothing, and Lemetria had helped him grow it. And they weren’t cruel people. They never actually supported Eleanor’s regime.
No, her parents were simply stuck. Their identity had been rooted to a reality that didn’t exist anymore, and unlike her, they were struggling to adapt to their new circumstances.
“You’re not doomed,” Harlow said. “But if you continue to live like you have been, you will be.” She thought of Brantley. He and his family lived on a meager quarry income. Aiden didn’t work, and they had two whelps. If he could make ends meet, surely they could with three adult dragons contributing.
“Oh, Harlow.” Her mother sighed in exasperation. “Don’t you think we know that we need to tighten our belts? We’ve tried!”
“No, Mom, actually, I don’t think you have. What I know is that the reason you’ve stopped spending your days at the Silver Sunset is not because you have some newfound sense of responsibility but because Roosevelt cut you off. You haven’t been paying your tab.”
Her mother’s face flushed red, and her gaze darted to the floor.
“And Dad, I know that wine you pulled out for Adradys was from the stash you keep for yourself. I’ve heard the rumors. Everyone in the marketplace knows your reputation, and I don’t mean for doormaking. When we went together, there was a reason the vendors required dragmars instead of credit. You haven’t been covering your debts, have you?”
“No credit.” He massaged the bridge of his nose, looking positively ancient.
Silence stretched between them. At least her parents seemed genuinely contrite for their actions.
Neither one of them argued her point or would meet her gaze, until finally her mother crossed her arms and lifted her chin. “Well, Harlow, you seem to be the only one of us who has adapted to our new situation with any grace whatsoever. I’m ashamed to say, I don’t know what to do. If I could marry Adradys, I would—”
“Excuse me?” her father protested.
“You know what I mean, Darium. At least Adradys asked her. Harlow had an option. He didn’t ask us. Any talk about hiring your father was completely dismissed.”
Darium spread his hands, entirely humbled. “That is true. I would have taken the work. I would have swept the floor in his door factory if he’d have me.”
“I know,” Harlow said softly. “But we’re out of options now. Each of us needs to find work. Anything we can get, and I mean anything.”
Her parents stared at each other for a long time, communicating in that wordless way that dragon mates often did. Her father stood and faced her head on. For the first time since they’d lost everything, Harlow thought she saw a hint of who he once was in his eyes, which were powerful and determined.
“That’s settled, then. Tomorrow, we find work.”
Chapter Fifteen
Marius tried his best not to yawn as each member of the Council of Elders reported on their sector of the kingdom. It was all he could do to keep his head from bobbing. In fairness, the topics so far had been far from invigorating.
“Someone has stolen one of our mountain sheep from the herd,” Elder Montdrake said, his eyes shifting to Varilus, the elder from a neighboring sector.
“Is that an accusation, Montdrake? For the goddess’s sake, it’s one sheep in thousands. Why would I risk your anger over a singular mountain sheep?”
Marius shook himself awake. “Probably a teenager,” he muttered.
The queen glanced at him, raising an eyebrow.
He expounded. “They shift unexpectedly and have a hard time with impulse control. Always hungry. Mountain sheep are easy pickings.” He focused in on Montdrake. “Anyone in your sector have an adolescent?”
His ears reddened. “Er, actually, my nephew.”
“I’d check his treasure cave for bones. Varilus is right. If it was a common thief, you’d be missing more than one.”
The two men nodded.
“Nochtbend is raising the price of gold again,” Elder Shallice started in. His sector bordered the vampire kingdom and benefited greatly from the trade industry.
Queen Raven inclined her head. “I can speak with Master Demidicus, but Paragon’s demand for gold is not based on need. Our citizens can survive quite well without it. If people are willing to pay the price, I’d say it must be worth the cost.”
“But our economy depends on the trade!” Shallice blustered.
“If the decisions of Nochtbend will so strongly impact your sector, you need to consider how to diversify. We can’t control the price they set, and I won’t leverage what goodwill we have built with the vampire kingdom over something as trivial as gold. If people think it’s too high, they should stop buying it. If they do, I think you’ll see the price come down as quickly as it has gone up.”
“Roosevelt, what’s your update on Hobble Glen?” Marius asked, moving the conversation along.
“We’ve heard rumblings recently that an underground group of Eleanor’s old supporters are organizing. I don’t know how many there are or what they’re planning.”
Marius straightened in his chair. “Then how do you know they exist?”
“Someone left a flyer at the Silver Sunset. I brought it with me.” Roosevelt rose from his chair and conveyed a piece of parchment to Marius.
He unrolled it and read the message.
Concerned that Queen Raven and King Gabriel are breaking the old law?
Want to see things return to how they were before the revolution?
Eleanor is gone, but supporters of the old ways are organizing. Discerning dragons will know us when they see us. You can’t find us, but we’ll find you.
He handed the scroll to Queen Raven. “Concerning, to say the least,” he mumbled.
Raven glanced briefly at it, then returned it to Roosevelt almost violently, but when she spoke, she was as cool, calm, and collected as any queen could be. “Although it hurts me that any citizen of Paragon would feel that Eleanor’s reign was superior to where our kingdom is now, there is nothing illegal about this scroll. Citizens of Paragon are allowed their own thoughts and opinions. Eleanor is dead. She will never sit on this throne again. Anyone who legitimately is calling for a return to the old law needs to look no further than Marius at my side. The old law would have him as king, and he has not only already refused that position but acknowledged my position here. Unless and until this group threatens to take the throne by force or undermines the kingdom through illegal means, all we can do is keep our eyes and ears open to their activities.”
“I firmly agree,” Marius added to back her up.
The council grumbled their agreement.
“Any other news to report?” Marius asked. When there was no response, he tapped his gavel and dismissed everyone. The elders stood and started speaking among themselves, but Raven turned immediately to him.
“May I speak with you privately?”
“Of course, my queen.” He followed her from the room, down the hall to her private chambers. Confused, he paused outside her door. “Gabriel will not like my scent being in your room.”
“It’s the only way to get to my ritual room,” she said. “And my ritual room is the only place in the palace where I can guarantee our conversation will be private. Let me deal with Gabriel. Please.” She gestured to a door at the back of the suite.
He growled, completely uncomfortable but unwilling to tell her no. If she required total privacy, this had to be a sensitive topic. Maybe something about his nightmares. Reluctantly, he followed her through the door she held open for him.
Inside, Raven’s ritual room caught him by surprise. In a palace made of shiny black obsidian, somehow she’d created a room of sparkling white. The only color was the purple outline of a circular symbol on the floor and the bright green of the forest beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows on the far wall to his left.
“The white stone is marble,” she said. “Gabriel and I procured it from Earth. It helps ground my magic to have something from home.”
“Don’t you worry about someone watching you?” He gestured toward the windows.
She smiled. “No. They’re enchanted. That wall is made of stone. From the outside, all you see is the side of the palace. The enchantment is on the inside. It sees around the stone.”
He blinked and walked closer to the window. A bird flitted by and landed on a tree. “This isn’t real?”
“It absolutely is real!” Raven said like the thought offended her. “That bird is sitting in the tree on the other side of the wall.”
“But it’s not glass,” Marius said.
“So? Do the materials matter if the view is the same?”
“I guess not.” He turned back toward her. “What is it you wanted to talk to me about?”
“The scroll Roosevelt found at the Silver Sunset is more concerning to me than I could let on during the council meeting. What I said was true. Everyone does have a right to their opinion. What concerns me is that someone might act out violently against my sister Avery.”
“Why Avery?” The queen’s sister had always been kind to him and was the only one who wore one of the same symbols that was branded into his skin. He couldn’t understand why anyone might want to hurt her.
“Because she’s mortal,” Raven said lightly. “Her innate power is to neutralize magic, therefore she can’t take Xavier’s tooth. She can’t heal like you or I do either.”
He frowned, remembering that was why she’d needed to be resurrected. “That does make her a target, but I was under the impression that her condition was a well-kept secret.”
Raven rubbed her palms together and paced the room. “It was meant to be, but when we brought her back after killing Eleanor, we did so on the veranda. With dragon sight and hearing, I can’t say for sure that no one else saw or heard what happened. If one of the soldiers was flying over or invisible—”
“You were out in the open. It’s completely possible,” Marius agreed. The queen was right to be worried. He hadn’t thought about the specifics of that morning. He’d been catatonic at the time and had few memories of his own. But she was right. A dragon in the area could have easily made themselves invisible and escaped notice. They wouldn’t have been scared off by the erupting volcano, and they wouldn’t even have had to have been close to see what was happening. Dragons could see for miles and hear across great distances. Avery’s secret was definitely not safe.
“What do you want me to do?”
She groaned. “It gives me no pleasure to ask this after our last conversation, but could you ask Harlow to keep her ear to the ground? Given her family’s past relationships, it’s possible someone will approach her or her parents. She might be the key to finding out who’s behind this.”
Marius raised a hand. “Let me get this straight. After warning me that Harlow might be a spy and that I should be exceptionally careful allowing her close to me, you are now asking me to ask her to be a spy for us?”
“I know it sounds ironic, but—”
Marius grumbled. “No.”
“I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important. This could be a life-and-death situation. We’re connected, you know. If someone kills Avery and she stays dead, Clarissa and I could lose our magic. We got lucky bringing her back when we did. Her soul was still with us. When Aborella unbound us before, we lost all our powers. A true death would likely mean the same fate.”
He turned back toward the window that wasn’t a window. Why couldn’t anything be easy? “I’ll consider it.”
Raven dropped her chin once in silent agreement. “Now that that’s settled, there’s something else I need to talk to you about.”
“Hmm.” The bird in the tree outside the window had captured an insect in its beak. He watched the legs kick as it swallowed its meal down.
“I’ve studied the drawings Alexander did of the markings on your torso, and I have a theory about the symbols.”
He turned back around and shot her an expectant glare.
“When Gabriel and I first met and he learned he could trust me, he explained that Paragon existed in a different dimension from Earth. At the time, I didn’t have a good handle on what that meant. And when I asked him, he held up two napkins and explained that it was like two parallel worlds existing simultaneously, but that aside from the use of a portal, you could not reach one from the other.”
She walked to the symbol at the center of her ritual room and passed her hand over it, muttering an incantation whose meaning Marius did not understand. A figure glowed to life. It looked like a stack of thirteen different pieces of white parchment separated by varying gaps that were filled by night sky and twinkling stars.
“Thirteen dimensions. But these aren’t like Earth and Ouros. These aren’t physical dimensions but spiritual ones.”
Marius shook his head. “I’m not following.”
“My first clue was when you said that the goddess was in the same place as you before we resurrected her. I understood the spell Eleanor used to kill her. Eleanor did not send Aitna to Earth or some other physical dimension. That doesn’t work with spiritual entities. She sent her to the underworld.”
“What does this have to do with the symbols?”
“I was examining Alexander’s sketches, and I kept coming back to the spiraling symbol that you and Avery share. I could have sworn I’d seen it before. After extensive research, I realized I had… in an old grimoire. The symbol represents the afterlife. So I started thinking, what if the afterlife wasn’t some abstract concept but a place? And what if it was layered?”
He squinted at the floating rectangles over the symbol.
“We have folklore in my world that hell has levels. Hell is how many humans think of Hades. Earth and Ouros have a shared history, so I started linking each of your symbols to a ‘level’ of Hades. Instead of researching in books on symbols, I read books on the underworld, and that’s when I had a breakthrough.”
Marius’s head was spinning. He was trying to follow, but this idea of spiritual dimensions was not an easy one for his mind to wrap around.
“The easiest way for me to explain is to show you. I’m going to open a window to the first level, the one closest to us spiritually.” She pointed at the first rectangle in the stack. “Tell me if you recognize what you see.”
Her lips began to move, and so did her arms and hands. She drew intricate symbols and made large sweeping movements in the air as she circled and mumbled the words to some ancient spell. When she stopped moving, a blazing light appeared at the center of the symbol. With a grunt, Raven pulled her hands apart.
Marius stopped breathing. “I know this place.” He stepped forward, reaching toward the warm yellow light and white tower beyond. His fingers bounced off an invisible barrier.
