Chapter Ten #2
To my surprise, he’d been less disruptive today. And now, he was actually absorbed in what he was reading, which was unexpected, to put it mildly. I tore my gaze from his face when my phone sounded.
A text from Evelyn in her usual style, bullet-pointed and direct.
I looked up from the phone to find Dominic watching me, an eyebrow raised questioningly in a kind of entitlement that should have been annoying. If it’d just been Mum checking on the status of my bedding, I’d have told him it was none of his business. As it was, it kind of was his business.
“My head of family, Evelyn,” I told him.
“She wants me to mark up a Google Earth screenshot of the castle, showing which wall the markings are on. Guess she’s looking for orientation, because that might tell us something more about their purpose.
” I checked her second bullet point. “She wants me to go back and study them in moonlight, too.”
“You ever think she’s watched too much Lord of the Rings?” Dominic asked, setting his book aside and prowling around the room. For no reason other than he didn’t seem to like to be still for too long.
He wasn’t being serious, but neither was he going to put himself at a disadvantage by asking why and betraying his ignorance.
Instead, he’d elicit the information by being annoying, and I wondered where he’d learned to do that.
Whether he was just fundamentally irritating, getting his kicks from provoking people, or if it was something he’d learned to try and get information out of Rhodri.
Regardless, he was the one who’d shown me the markings in the first place, so it seemed right to tell him.
“She wants me to look at them in dragon form, in case there’s anything there that dragon eyesight picks up which human doesn’t.
” Except she didn’t say that—it was implicit in the moonlight wording.
We still never used the d-word in writing, in case humans ever stumbled across it.
“Sort of like the whole red dragon thing, I guess,” I added.
He stilled for an instant, his hand on the bookcase tightening before he turned away and looked out of the window. A little too carelessly.
“The whole red dragon thing.” His words were mocking. He wanted me to say something, that was clear. Maybe he didn’t know what I was talking about?
No, he had to know. Rhodri hoarded information like it was his treasure, jealous and acquisitive, but Dominic was his son. I couldn’t believe that he wouldn’t have been told, so I was careful in how I said it. I didn’t want his scorn for stating the blindingly obvious.
“It seems as if we were the only dragon family to keep the memory alive of red dragons’ ability to read hidden writings.
At least, Evelyn said everyone was shocked when she told them about it at the Moot last year.
” The Moot which every head of family had attended.
Rhodri had been there. He knew. Surely he’d have told Dominic.
He was silent in a way that felt dangerous suddenly, and when he turned on his heel to look at me, I could see why.
His dragon was visible in his eyes, gold irises flaring, dark pupils narrowing to vertical slits.
My own dragon stirred, ready to defend from attack.
But it seemed his fury wasn’t aimed at me, and it was gone again as swiftly as it came, swallowed by the usual deep brown of his eyes.
“No one else remembers this, and your lot just happens to know,” he said, an undertone in his voice that I couldn’t quite read.
“Red dragons are rare enough as it is. Get yourself one who’ll say whatever you want, when there are no others around who can contradict it, and you can make records say anything you like. ”
His eyes were narrowed on my face. “Such as that the Berstows, whoever the fuck they are, are the real leaders of the dragons. You’ll be trying to take the Mortimers’ place next.”
I couldn’t tell if he believed what he was saying or if he was just trying to get a reaction out of me.
His gaze stayed fixed on mine, sharp and challenging, waiting for something. And I realised there’d been a question in there, buried under the accusation.
He wasn’t going to ask it outright, that was clear. Pride, perhaps. Or maybe it was defensiveness, taking care never to show vulnerability. Growing up with Rhodri as a father, that made sense.
That didn’t excuse his accusation.
“We’re only interested in history, not in seizing power or withholding information,” I told him firmly.
Something twinged in my gut as I remembered Evelyn’s instruction to report to her first about anything I discovered.
I didn’t think she was trying to grab power, though.
Her intent was more about stopping anyone from misusing whatever we were able to uncover.
But wasn’t that the same, in the end? It was still manipulation.
Less certain now, I left that line of argument. “Look, the only reason no one knew about the red dragons was because they forgot over the centuries. You can hardly blame us for that.”
“And yet you remembered?” There was a silky quality to his voice that raised the hairs on the back of my neck. Dominic would be a very dangerous enemy, I realised for the first time.
“History’s kind of our thing.”
He settled back, hitching a hip on the table and idly playing with the stack of paper next to him. He didn’t take his eyes from my face. “Funny no one’s heard of your family before.”
There was nothing casual about the way he said it.
If I told him, and Rhodri found out I’d been sharing information he’d been withholding… But Dominic was the heir. He had the right to know this, and he needed to know how things were changing in the dragon world.
“We were in hiding for centuries,” I said. “It was the only way to survive after being ousted from power back then, and I guess it became habit. Kept us out of the wars, anyway.”
I didn’t say which wars. Every dragon knew of the vicious conflicts between families. The ones that had resulted in the state we were in now, with Abimelech Mortimer taking the role as our leader because no one had the power to challenge him.
“Convenient,” he said.
“Practical,” I corrected.
He acknowledged that with the slightest tilt of his head. And my dragon, who had been on edge at the challenge in Dominic, settled again.
“Evelyn also wants me to see if any of those castle stones can be prised away from the older wall, so we can see if there are more markings behind them,” I said, kicking myself for not having thought of that when we were up there.