2. Blake
BLAKE
Bring me the head of a dragon, or I shall take yours.
My brother had always demanded so much of me, but this was beyond the pale. Yes, there were fewer mages in our number than there had been a generation ago, but that didn’t justify sending a Cavendish prince to the very edge of the realm to die.
Unfortunately, that was precisely what Evander meant for me to do.
Our great-grandfather, a hero to all of Llangard, had torn dragons from the skies with the flick of a few fingers and left their corpses smoldering on the mountainside.
He’d buried entire clans as they fled to the Mawrcraig Mountains.
He’d called the very Spires up from the earth to give us a home fortified against attacks from above.
And I? I could move wind around a bit.
It made me more than a passable swordsman, to be sure.
It was impossible for my opponents to win a sparring match when they couldn’t cut through the air to get at me, when they meant to step here but the wind turned them there.
But I didn’t have the power to reshape the world like the first Cavendish.
Even Grandfather had remained rather impressive to his very last day.
As for Evander, I didn’t know how he fared. He would not reveal his might to anyone, he said, so that his enemies never knew what he was capable of.
Apparently, I counted among that number, though I’d never quite understood why brothers stood as enemies to one another.
In any case, I wasn’t capable of fighting off a dragon, much less an entire clan of them threatening the throne’s building of a castle at the village of Merrick. But if I might die fighting a dragon, surely that was better than certainly dying at the hands of my own brother.
There was no love lost between us. My very first memory was of his serious, displeased scowl.
He’d resented me for everything—a second son’s freedom, my skill on the training grounds, whenever Mother took time to play with me when we were young.
It wasn’t her fault that he was a dour child uninterested in games.
But after Father died, Evander demanded service.
He wanted to know what Lord Aronfort meant to do with the large quantities of grain his province had hoarded for the coming winter. He wanted to know who Lady Bevel took to bed, for she was a widow of considerable wealth and held more sway at court than Evander thought any woman ought to.
In the end, she’d taken me to bed, and I still didn’t see much value in what information I’d gleaned from her. Perhaps my brother simply wanted to diminish me in the eyes of the court by passing me around how he liked, but it didn’t matter.
I was still a mite happier than him; I could say that for certain.
But happiness didn’t buy me power, and when the dragons flew at Merrick, I rushed out to face them.
This was my chance to make it home and I—
Staring up at the enormous cobalt dragon, I couldn’t fathom killing him. He was beautiful, shining in the sun.
He reared up, and when he spat a gout of blue fire at me, I threw up my hand. His flames broke around me in a heated sapphire swirl. He—
I stood there, stunned, half aware I’d almost died, but mostly awestricken by the glittering blue mass of him. The power as his muscles bunched.
No wonder the dragons had kept us under their giant clawed feet for so long. These beings—it was so easy to believe they were born from the moons. They weren’t of this world.
And while I was stuck, unable to move, the dragon spread its wings, leapt forward, and clutched me up in his enormous paws.
The air swirled around me, cool in my lungs when I breathed in. A strange serenity wrapped around me as we rose, and I turned my head to look at the earth shrinking below us.
The village was smaller and smaller, and then disappeared entirely.
That didn’t matter, because I saw the blue of the sky like it was all that existed in the universe. I saw the tops of the clouds as the dragon flew higher.
It wasn’t entirely lost on me that the dragon would drop me at some point, and if I could not summon the wind to slow my descent, I’d break against the earth below us.
It was just a matter of time and distance, but even knowing that, I couldn’t think of it for long when I saw the world from a whole new perspective.
In time, the dragon folded in his wings and dove toward the ground. Still, he held me tight in both hands, clutching me closer to his chest as the wind resistance grew.
He landed, and when he set me down, I staggered. I’d expected to fall to my death, and there I stood, gaping like a frog.
Between one blink and the next, the dragon shifted back.
He was over six feet tall, with black hair that hung around his shoulders and eyes that gleamed bluer than the skies we’d flown through.
More importantly, he was naked. I—
I hadn’t read about that, but it made sense.
I’d just never considered that on two legs, they’d be, well, nude.
But it wasn’t like the books in the Spires library would discuss the peculiar allure of a dragon’s skin, or how easy it was to imagine the sun bouncing off gleaming scales when taking in even their two-legged forms.
His skin was a deep gold, like he’d spent much of his time on the coast where there was little shade to protect him. His chest was peppered with dark hair, and while his muscles were well sculpted, he did not look like a man who had plenty.
Well, except for between his legs, where his cock hung heavily. I was staring at it when he stalked forward and ripped my forgotten sword from my grip. He tossed it aside with a snarl.
Far be it from me to attack an unarmed man, much less an unclothed one.
He was glaring when I met his eye again.
“I thought you’d drop me,” I admitted with a wry grin.
The man snorted, and I could easily imagine the steam coming from a great dragon’s snout as he did it. “So you could take me down with you?”
My brow pinched. “I—” Take him down with me? I was fairly certain I’d be fully occupied trying to keep myself alive while I plummeted to almost-certain death. “It hadn’t occurred to me.”
“Of course,” he sneered.
When he stepped away, one of the other men offered him a cloak to wrap around himself.
Each of them had one, but the way they wore them, hanging loose over their chests, made I seem less like they were for any sense of propriety than a simple matter of protecting their vulnerable human-like bodies from the elements.
There were four of them, none armed, but if I had claws, I wouldn’t need a sword either.
I swallowed. “Did you bring me all the way here just to kill me?”
The blue-eyed dragon’s shoulders tensed. A smaller one with dark blue eyes and sandy brown hair stuck his chin out and rounded on me. “Why shouldn’t we? You meant to harm us.”
My mouth twisted. He had a fair point.
I had.
It wasn’t personal, but I didn’t think that’d weigh in my favor. If I told them I’d been sent to kill them, the wisest thing they could do was put me down.
But a lifetime at Evander’s beck and call, going wherever he directed, slipping between the sheets of whichever bed he pointed me toward, had prepared me for a moment just like this.
“If I could make myself useful to you, would that earn a measure of mercy?” I reached to my shoulders for the leather straps that kept my armor in place.
“What are you doing?” the first dragon demanded, his bright eyes narrowed as I released my chest plate. It hit the ground with a hollow sound.
“I don’t suppose you have anyone you’d like me to fight for you?” I asked.
The sandy-haired dragon scowled. “Who would we have you harm?”
I shrugged. “No one that I can imagine, if you were honest at Castle Merrick, but I only have a few resources to offer you.”
All four dragons stared at me, confused and frowning.
“There’s my sword arm,” I elaborated, “but if that’s no use, I’m afraid I’ve lost my friends’ favor, so . . . all that’s left to offer you is me.”
With my armor gone, I pulled my linen tunic over my head. All my life, I’d eaten well, trained hard. I was handsome enough to stay their fury.
“You mean your body,” the first dragon said.
I bit my lip. “That’s the idea.”
“Absolutely not,” he said.
The sandy-haired one’s nose flared. “What? I mean, if he’s offering—”
The first dragon’s face scrunched up. “We’d hold him captive, and you want to fuck him?”
”Well—” The sandy-haired dragon glanced at me, and I grinned. I thought I’d found my ally.
“Does it help that I’d welcome it?” If my smile turned coy as I swayed toward him, I was fighting for my life, only not the way I’d been trained to. “Though you’re quite the specimen yourself. I’d have you both, and happily.”
The first dragon clenched his jaw, but he didn’t deign to respond to me. He looked at his brethren. “Do what you want. I’ll have no part in it.”
He stalked around the nearby fire. It wasn’t quite a village here, but the campfire looked like it’d been built long ago and used many times. There was a stone table nearby. It must be where they cooked.
He dropped onto a stone turned over in a makeshift seat, while the sandy-haired dragon offered his hand to me.
“If you’re sure,” he said, his brow pinched in the middle for a moment. He glanced across the fire at his grumpy friend, but he put up no further argument, so it was just down to me to convince him.
I smiled sweetly as I put my hand in his. I’d rather not die, and he was a dragon. There were worse ways to go if I did.
He led me over to the table and pulled off his cloak, draping it over the stone to make the table a bit more comfortable for me.
I undid my trousers and slid them down my hips before I bent over for him.
I hoped they had oil, or at least were inclined to a bit of foreplay, but I didn’t expect what came next.
The dragon dropped to his knees behind me, and he ran his hands up from the backs of my knees to my ass, encouraging me to tip over farther.