Light Dragons 01 - Love in the Time of Dragons

you call us liars?”
    “No, my lord, never that!” Papa wrung his hands, my mother next him looking pale and frightened. “If you will just come back inside the hall, I will explain to you—”
    “Explain what? That you are holding a dragon prisoner, a female dragon of tender years?”
    “She is not a prisoner—” Papa started to say, but I stopped listening for a moment. A dragon? Here? I had heard tales of such beings, but had never seen one. Margaret told me they did not really exist, that it was just a bit of foolishness spoken by men who had too much wine, but once I had overheard my mother talking to her maid about a female dragon she had befriended in her youth. Perhaps Mama had hidden her here all these years. Who could it be? Leah, the nurse who tended both Margaret and me? One of my mother’s serving women? The flatulent Lady Susan?
    “I just wager you it’s her,” I told Abelard. “She is very dragonlike.”
    “Bring her forth!” the warrior demanded, and I pushed Abelard’s head aside in order to get a better view of the bailey, watching with bated breath to see the dragon.
    “My lord, there are circumstances that you are not aware of. Ysolde has no knowledge of her ancestry. We have sheltered her as best we could, indeed, raised her as our own daughter—”
    My skin crawled. My blood curdled. My brain exploded inside my head. I stared at Papa, my papa, the papa I had known for my entire life, unable to believe my ears.
    “—she has been protected from those who would ill use her, as sworn by my lady wife to the dragon who bore her here.”
    “Me?” I said, touching my throat when my voice came out no more than a feeble squeak. “I’m a dragon?”
    “That is none of my concern,” the warrior said now, his voice thick with menace. “She is a dragon, and evidently of age. She belongs with her own kind, not with humans.”
    My own kind? Scaly, long-tailed, fire-breathing monsters? A sob of denial caught in my throat, the noise almost inaudible, and yet as I stood there reeling from the verbal blows my father—the man I thought of as my father—dealt me, the warrior spun around, the gaze of his black eyes so piercing, I could swear he could see straight through the wood of the stable.
    Run , my mind told me as the man started forward toward the stable doors, and I knew at that moment that he was one of them. He was a monster the like of which I’d never seen. My brain didn’t wait for me to absorb that knowledge. Flee , it urged. Flee!
    I didn’t stop to question the wisdom of that command. I spun on my heels, racing down the narrow aisle of the stable to the far corner, where a small window had been cut in order to pass hay through from the fields. I wasn’t fast enough, however, not if the roar of fury that followed me was anything to go by.
    “Stop!” the warrior bellowed as I leaped through the window, not even pausing as I hit the ground hard before I was off again, racing around the pens holding the animals to be slaughtered, dashing between the small huts housing craftsmen and their families, dodging chickens, dogs, and occasionally serfs as I raced for the postern gate along the west curtain.
    “Lady Ysolde,” John, the man on guard at the gate, called in surprise as I rounded a cart loaded with wool destined for the market, not even slowing down as I flung myself past him and through the postern gate. “Are you off to the village—hey, now! Who are you, and what right do you have to be chasing Lady Ysol—oof!”
    I didn’t stop to see how John fared, although I sent up a small prayer that he hadn’t been hurt by the warrior. I ran along the rocky outcropping that led down into the village, the moat not coming around to this face of the castle since it would be impossible for anyone to scale the cliffs that hugged the west and south sides. Behind me I heard the noise of pursuit, but I had always been fast on my feet, and I dug deep for speed as I leaped down the last of the rocks and headed for the trees beyond the village. They marked the edge of the thick forest where I had spent many an hour, wandering pathways known to only a few. If I could just make it there, then I could hide from the warrior . . . and then what?
    I didn’t stop to answer that question. I just knew that I needed to be by myself, to absorb the strangeness that had suddenly gripped me. And I couldn’t do that with the intense, black-haired dragon storming around me.
    He was still