Chapter 2
Chapter Two
Clove awoke slowly at first.
Comfortably.
He was coaxed back into consciousness by the extreme pleasantness of a warm bed, the sensation of being wrapped in fine blankets rather than curled up in dirty straw.
He was sure it was a dream, and not eager to abandon it; yet as he slipped closer to waking, he became more and more aware of the physical reality of it all. Warm. Secure. Soft. Tangible.
Eyes closed, he stretched and smiled, running his fingers over silky sheets. Such luxury! He had never touched anything so fine, let alone been allowed to sleep in it—
His trailing fingers touched something hot.
Hot, firm, and soft-skinned.
Flesh.
Clove jolted awake, sitting straight up in bed with a convulsive gasp. He yanked the sheets protectively up to his chin to cover himself.
In that changeable moment between sleeping and waking, dream and reality, he thought he heard and even felt a great rushing, like wind. Something that moved suddenly, with great speed—fast enough that as soon as it was gone, he was unsure whether he had really heard or felt anything at all.
Then there was silence.
It was dark.
Listening to his own heartbeat, the static of his frightened breath gradually returning to normal, Clove forced himself to focus.
He reached out and slowly felt over the sheets for evidence of another body.
This time, his fingers encountered no shock of hot flesh—but they did pause upon a warm spot, a suspicious divot in the bed where someone or something might have lain.
Retracting his hand, Clove took wary inventory of his body.
He felt no telling pain between his legs. No obvious sense of violation. He was naked still, but in a way that was more reassuring than if he had found himself dressed, and thus known someone had touched him.
As he surveyed himself, his eyes adjusted, and he realized that things were not truly dark.
There was light.
But the light lay on the other side of something gauzy, something that hung around him on all sides.
Clove rolled over and reached out, reached up, until his grasping fingers found the curtain and pulled it aside.
He blinked out at the strangest of chambers.
Wonder temporarily silenced his guardedness.
Beyond the comfort of a huge canopy bed, whose semi-sheer curtains were tied low to each bedpost, drooping playfully down to offer the illusion of privacy, Clove observed a room large enough to fit an entire house.
No, more than a house—big enough to fit a small inn, with room enough for two levels, and space enough to fit even a chimney, he thought.
He couldn’t have said for certain, because the full extent of the room was lost to darkness. Its edges dripped with shadow.
What he could see was what lay near him: twin tables on either side of the bed, their surfaces strewn with both desiccated flowers and lush greenery.
An army of pillar candles of all different sizes cast their flames from atop the tables.
Some squat, others tall, they burned dutifully, sweating wax.
Observing the length of their drippings, Clove calculated that they must have been lit at the same time, and not very long ago.
Whoever had lit those candles could not have been long gone.
Clove’s skin crawled anew.
Brought back to the reality of his situation, his hands flew to his body, seeking further evidence that he had or had not been robbed of his secret jewel.
His hands found no reason for alarm at his ankles, up his legs, between his legs, up over his stomach. They kept going, searching. Probing.
They stopped short at his neck.
There, his fingers found a cool band of metal. It encircled his throat fully; there was no apparent clasp or fastening, and it was not loose enough to have been slipped on over his head. He could only conclude that it had been forged as a single piece and magicked onto him. Slavers’ magic.
He had been collared.
Clove sat there for a boiling moment, stunned, then began to tug furiously at the metal band.
Outraged, sickened, his mind buzzed with questions. Who had placed the collar on him, and why? What was the collar capable of? It had to be enchanted, but for what purpose? To hurt him? To force his compliance? To keep him from running away?
With sinking dread, it occurred to him that he had not, after all, been bound to the bed. There was nothing obvious preventing his escape.
And of course not. Why bother? Why waste time with bindings when magic could do the job instead?
Despite his best efforts, the collar did not give. Not even a little.
Not that the obvious and insurmountable was going to stop Clove.
He sent the bed rocking with his efforts, forgetting his surroundings while he rolled and yanked at the metal, sweat beginning to dew up on his brow. The sheets slithered to the floor with a sulky rustle, as if offended by his carelessness and disregard.
The sheets were not the only thing that moved.
As the bed rocked, there came a new rustling from overhead, and a petal fell from above and landed on Clove’s exposed knee.
He recoiled instantly from the touch. Head jerking up, he froze in his squirmings, and stared open-mouthed at the four-poster’s ceiling.
Up above him, flowering vines had wrapped themselves so thickly along the upper beams of the canopy that there were no more beams left to see.
Flowers fat with petals, reminiscent of peonies, gazed down upon him, their weight causing them to droop and peek boldly through the surrounding leaves, winking in the candlelight.
Senses sharpened in the dark, Clove recognized the floral scent that had subdued him, and shuddered.
This startling detail was followed by a second.
Clove’s eyes roved slowly down the bedposts.
There, all the way down the ornately carved wood, had been painted an array of complex sigils. Sigils he recognized as magical, although he did not know what they were for.
Though he could guess.
Heart giving one massive jolt, body flushing with adrenaline, Clove abandoned his struggle with his collar and practically tripped over his own feet in his rush to leave the bed.
He didn’t even flinch at the ice-cold touch of the stone floor.
He stumbled forward several paces before he caught his balance, then spun around to cast his gaze suspiciously upon the bed.
No vines unwound from the beam to come for him, and his collar did not punish him with pain for having left the mattress, but he found himself waiting, sure that something would happen.
But nothing did.
Which was almost more ominous than the alternative.
While he stood there, breath puffing unevenly on his lips, the cool air of the chamber crept over his bare skin. He wrapped his arms around himself, glanced briefly down, and then couldn’t withhold the gasp that popped out of him.
As it turned out, the sigils hadn’t only been painted on the bedposts.
They had been painted on him.
A band of them had been inscribed along the soft skin of his lower stomach, just above his groin.
Each one had the appearance of having been done in black ink, but when Clove scrubbed a spit-wetted finger over them, he realized that could not be the case, as they did not smudge.
They had been placed by magic, then, or tattooed onto him, so the ink would not be disturbed.
Could he remove them?
Clove stopped scrubbing and dug a nail into his skin with the intention of ripping into it, but stopped when a warm, pleasant feeling spread through him instead.
It radiated from the sigil he’d touched like the heat from a fire in winter, not at all unpleasant or alarming. It was comfortable. Cozy, even. And as it reached toward his core, he felt some inward part of him become placid.
Would it really be so wrong to climb back into bed, curl up in the soft, warm blankets, and wait there to spread his legs for the man who had collared him?
Clove’s cock twitched.
Inexplicably, he was suddenly flustered. Breathless. He rubbed with renewed intent on the sigil to coax out more of the feeling… only to realize what he was doing and jerk his hand away as though burned.
What was he thinking?
What was wrong with him?
He began to grasp the function of the runes scrawled up the bedposts and sealed onto his skin.
Their significance rolled deep into his bones, settling like an ache. An ache that itched at him for relief. His very soul crawled, knowing what was happening but unable to resist.
The long habit of viciously guarded bodily autonomy was all that kept his head above the warm, tempting water of those runes whispering to him.
He had to get rid of them.
Without another thought, he seized a candlestick from one of the tables and positioned it next to the dark marks on his skin. He didn’t even flinch at the prospect of pain; he was too intent on the idea of purging this spell.
But as he held the candle there, sweat rolling off him, trembling with the effort to just do it, the flame quivered as though caught in an unnoticed breeze, sputtered, and died.
Clove stared.
After one frozen moment, he chucked the useless candlestick away and grabbed another from the table, bringing it to the same marked spot on his flesh.
And again, the flame quivered, then went out with a meek sputter.
Confusion met with anger, both emotions temporarily negating the other as Clove stared at the smoke-trailing tip of the candle, unable to think. Unable to understand.
It was then a low chuckle rolled out from across the room.
Clove whipped around, holding his useless unlit candle like a weapon, and faced the far wall.
There. Peering past the ring of candles, each lit wick a singular eye dancing almost mockingly at him, he squinted, and saw the far wall had been consumed with unnatural shadows.
Deeper, darker shadows than the rest of the chamber.
The chuckling had come from within.
“Show yourself,” Clove demanded, channeling as much venom into his words as he could.
Something in the shadows shifted, but whoever was lurking in them did not emerge.
“I thought you might try it,” said the shifting shadows, amused, in a soft rumble that nonetheless managed to fill the room and crept through Clove all the way down to his marrow.
“I would have been a fool to think otherwise. The fear is too deeply ingrained in you… but you needn’t fear anymore. You are safe now. Safe with me.”
“Show yourself,” Clove demanded again. He brandished his candlestick at the darkness, jaw clenched and eyes narrowed, readying himself for whatever might come.
The shadowy figure chuckled again, but this time, did as Clove had asked. The shadows parted, and from them emerged a monstrous face plucked straight out of a nightmare.
It belonged to a dragon.
Black scales gleaming in the moonlight, horns like wicked obsidian pincers rising from a mane of upturned scales like tufts of hair, the beast peered at Clove down the length of its snout with pupilless eyes that burned with unknown intent.
Under its pinning gaze, Clove lost his courage.
He staggered back and fell onto the bed, mouth agape from shock.
He had seen depictions of dragons before—had even seen their scales displayed in the stalls of less than reputable markets, touted as cure-alls or the secret to an unnaturally long life—but those bits and pieces had in no way prepared him for the enormity of a creature like this.
Nor for the way beholding it caused a sudden rush of fear.
The beast was easily large enough to swallow him whole, its spined neck thick and serpentine, its mouth filled with terrible teeth.
It seemed impossible a creature so large could fit the way it had, tucked into a patch of shadow cast upon the far wall of the room, and it made Clove think perhaps it didn’t occupy the room at all, but rather, spilled forever into unending darkness, like it had found a way to make the shadows its home.
“Weren’t you going to take a swing at me?” queried the dragon, a touch of a taunt in its voice.
It stepped unhurriedly out of the shadows, black clawed feet scraping stone, to reveal a body that really did seem to stretch into forever.
It coiled in on itself, rolling, scales flashing as more and more of it came forth until the chamber no longer seemed as large as Clove had thought it to be. It was cramped now, filled with dragon.
And that dragon now came for him.
It approached slowly and unhurried, its arrival inevitable, yet Clove could not move.
What could he have done?
There was no place to run, even if he could have outrun a dragon—a laughable idea. He was unarmed, save the useless candlestick. His small fists were nothing. His slight body was durable from a life spent surviving the streets, but the hard years had gifted him no muscle, no strength.
Above all, awe overpowered him.
He could only stand there, could only tremble, as the great black surge of a creature abandoned the shadows and came for him.