Chapter 4
ADERYN
Fancy dinners at the palace were usually fun. Not because I loved fancy dinners or dressing up, though I didn’t mind those things.
No, it was because I got to sit near Roland, and Roland was . . . he was special.
Yes, he was the king, and he dressed in nice clothes and had lots of power, but it wasn’t that at all. I didn’t care especially that Roland could order people around on a whim, and I rather liked that he didn’t do that most of the time.
I didn’t mind his beautiful clothing, but it wasn’t important.
It was Roland, himself. There was something magnetic about him. His beauty, yes. His coppery hair was stunning and shone in the sun, and his eyes were the bluest blue I’d ever seen in my life. Bluer than the sky or the ocean.
Even the bluebird feathers in my hoard fell short of replicating that perfect shade.
Maybe those new peacocks . . .
Rhys cleared his throat, and for a moment I thought I’d been caught woolgathering and everyone was bothered by me.
But no. He was staring at Tris, like he was trying to magically send words right into his head, but I didn’t think that was possible.
Tris also didn’t seem to think it was possible, because he squinted at his father with confusion.
“So,” Rhys said aloud, “what do your people eat at banquets like this, Lord Forov?”
Lord Forov, I’d been told, was the smallish man with the mustache that reminded me of a rat’s whiskers, and the beady little black eyes.
They multiplied the effect of the whiskers and made the man seen very much like a rat in human clothing.
I half expected his nose to twitch every time I looked at him.
Maybe that was wrong, though, because the man I’d thought was Lord Forov didn’t even glance at Rhys when he spoke, and neither did Rhys look at him.
No, he held Tris’s gaze as he spoke, and then for the long, silent moments afterward.
Tris looked pained, as though he were hiding a grievous injury underneath the table, but he didn’t say a word.
Was I mistaken, and Lord Forov was not present?
If it was that, then why was Rhys talking to him?
I looked up and down the table for anyone else who might be a foreign lord, but found no one seated at the table I didn’t recognize, other than the rat man and his pinched looking companion, whose lips seemed permanently pursed.
She was wearing all black from her neck to her toes—and her dress did cover her toes.
It was so long I’d been worried she would trip on it when they’d arrived—and her hair was covered in a piece of black lace as well.
It felt like perhaps they were going to a state funeral.
Had someone died, and I didn’t know about it? I was terrible at politics, and we’d only just arrived, so it wouldn’t have been the greatest shock if I’d missed something important.
Next to me, though, Roland . . . oh dear. While Roland was excellent at putting on a happy face and not letting anyone see his emotions when they were incorrect for the court setting, I knew him better than I knew anyone else in the world. Sometimes, I thought, better than he knew himself.
Roland was furious.
He was practically vibrating with it, his lips pulled into a tight smile that didn’t even reach them properly, let alone his eyes.
Roland was good at hiding his feelings, but I didn’t think even people who hardly knew him would be fooled by this expression.
“I believe Rhys asked you a question, Lord Forov,” he said, somehow, despite the fact that his jaw was clenched tight. “You remember Rhys. My trusted advisor?”
The rat man turned and smiled at Roland, and the expression was .
. . wrong. It was like when an elder dragon shifted into a two-legged form for the first time in years, and they struggled to use their muscles to make two-legged expressions.
Like the muscles he was supposed to use to smile had atrophied.
“I’m afraid I’m not nearly as practiced as Your Majesty at telling the dragons apart,” he said, and his tone took me back to my childhood in the frozen north. It was just like one of the clansmen trying to ingratiate himself to Vidar, when in truth he could barely stand to look at his face.
I cocked my head, looking at the man, because .
. . well, that just didn’t make sense. In our two-legged form, dragons looked exactly like humans, in every detail.
Well, some of us had odd mannerisms, like the whole difficulty smiling thing, but we were entirely human-looking until you made us bleed.
“Allow me to understand,” Roland said, turning blazing eyes on the man. Next to me, his legs tensed, as though he wanted to throw himself across the table at the lord. “You can’t tell people apart?”
On the other side of Tristram, Bet Kyston was turned wholly toward Roland in his seat, watching him with amusement on his face, as though it were a play and Roland the clever main character.
Roland was terribly clever, so for myself, I was pleased that the lord’s comments didn’t make sense to him either.
I hated to think that there was something that made me stand out as “other” that I didn’t even know about.
I was fine being different from everyone else, but I wanted to know the things that marked me as different.
“Not at all,” the lord answered smoothly, as though Roland weren’t looking more and more angry as the seconds passed.
“People are all quite different from each other. But I’m afraid we have no previous exposure to them, and all dragons”—he shrugged, as though it were nothing—“simply look alike to me.”
Roland started to open his mouth, and on the other side of him, Tristram looked as though he wanted to cry.
Oddly enough, it was Bet who stepped in. “Perhaps the sensible thing to do, then, Lord Forov, would be to respond whenever someone addresses you personally. Whether you think they might be a dragon or not.”
The man’s eyes narrowed at Bet, and his gaze darted up to Bet’s pointed ears poking out of his dark curls. Forov’s face contorted as though he were in great pain, or perhaps he was about to sneeze, and somehow Bet looked even more amused.
It was strange, because I’d known Bet since I was a child, for more than ten years, and never before had I seen his ears sticking out like that. He always kept them covered up with his hair, so why were they poking out now?
Lady Forov started making a weird sound, and it took me a moment to realize she was choking.
I half lifted out of my seat, ready to go hit her on the back to try to help, but . . . was that acceptable at a state dinner?
It didn’t seem right to let a person choke to death simply because of propriety, but I also didn’t want to make a spectacle of myself and humiliate Roland.
Fortunately, she managed a deep breath a moment later, and it seemed perhaps she’d just swallowed a sip of wine wrong.
Bet, laughter in his voice, asked, “Is everything quite all right, Lady Forov? I know Llangard’s ideas about equality are new and strange, but I think you’ll find that when you get used to them, they work quite well.
There isn’t another country in the world where you can get such fine wool or metal craft. ”
“Human ingenuity,” Forov said, his tone sharp, eyes narrowed at Bet.
“I believe you’ll find our finest crafters are dragons, actually,” Roland said. Ground out, really.
“But a human built this lovely palace,” Forov said, waving his hand expansively at the room around us. “With magic, I understand. Very impressive. Magic that runs in your family, King Roland.”
And something about that . . . well, it made my belly go queasy and my head swim in a strange way. Something about the avaricious light in Forov’s eyes when he looked at Roland. Something about his very presence at the table, sitting next to Rhys when he refused to so much as look at him.
“Excuse me,” I whispered to Roland. “I think . . . I’ve had enough.”
Then I slipped away before anyone had a chance to so much as look at me, let alone try to stop me from leaving.
I slunk through the back passages of the palace until I found my way to the aviary. Well, no. To my feathers.
The birds were beautiful, but right then, living creatures were too much to deal with. The peacocks were gorgeous and amazing, but also loud and a little . . . a lot.
The hoard room? It was quiet and beautiful and perfect. Just feathers everywhere, of every type and description. Flight feathers and down feathers and contour feathers, in every color, and some colors that defied description.
I sat and took one of the enormous peacock tail feathers in my hand, with its strange pattern that looked so much like eyes. Was it a defense mechanism? Convince the predator that there were many threats, and not just one small bird?
The velvety barbs of the feather were soft beneath my fingers. Soothing.
Feathers were always soothing.
Some part of it was . . . Roland. Every time I held a feather in my hand, part of my mind replayed that moment when he’d given me my very first feather.
The first thing I had ever owned in my life.
And in the moment, looking at a new feather, I always felt that utter elation of owning my very first thing. Of having my very first friend.
Of looking into Roland’s so-blue eyes and not being alone anymore.
And then he was beside me, as though thinking of him had called him to me.
He sat down on the couch, still in his dinner finery and crown, looking downright sad.
“I’m sorry about him. About them. Everyone keeps saying we’re supposed to make a treaty with them, and it’ll be good for Llangard, but . . . He’s insufferable.”
“I’m sorry you have to deal with that.”
“Me?” He demanded, leaning in and gently setting my feather aside to take my hands in his. “I’m fine. I’m worried about you. And Rhys and Tris and Hafgan and Bowen and . . . even Bet, though he seems to think it’s some sort of joke, offending the man by being particularly elven.”
Was that what he’d been doing?
That did sound like Bet. It amused him to poke holes in puffed up lords. My whole childhood in the palace, he’d enjoyed his position at Tristram’s side solely for the reason that it seemed to make some lords uncomfortable to see the son of a cook be so important to Llangard.
I sighed and shook my head. “I really am sorry you’re having to deal with all of that. You don’t need to worry about me. I’m not the one who has to spend time with the man.” I shuddered. “He reminds me of a very large rat.”
Roland giggled at that, leaning in and resting his head on my shoulder as he trembled with laughter. “He does, doesn’t he?”
He picked his head up, and his face was so close to mine. His everything was so close.
Without thinking, I closed the tiny gap between us, and pressed my lips to his.