Chapter 4 #2
“Trainers?” the head dracologist asked impatiently. “They can easily get new trainers, but the dragon master must be replaced as soon as possible, before the king of Sennaliath grows impatient. His emissary is here with the order, and I think you should see her.”
Sour anxiety curdled Valenna’s breakfast, and her mind whirled like a child dancing around a maypole.
She couldn’t see the woman from Sennalaith—she might recognize her and take word to her father.
Valenna would be home before she had time to run, and she wasn’t ready because she didn’t know where Olivette was.
She cursed herself for losing so much time swooning over a boy with broad shoulders and nice eyes.
If she returned before she found Olivette, everything would be lost. And it would be the fault of Evander bloody Trevelyan.
“Oh, no time for that,” Valenna said. “I must leave at once.”
“She’s on her way,” the dracologist said, perplexed. “She can give you the details of the order.”
Fighting the urge to turn on her heel and run, Valenna cleared her throat and donned the voice she used when she didn’t have the patience for questions. “I will be leaving within the hour.”
The instant the carved wooden doors closed behind her, Valenna ran. She tore through the brick management house, out the front doors, and through the boxwood gardens, her feet kicking up pea-gravel in her frantic sprint, her dress flapping up and showing her stockings. She didn’t care.
Racing past iron cages, Valenna set a horse-sized fighter dragon and an armored club-tail dragon snarling and squalling. She burst into the lodging house and pounded up the stairs to her room, wrenched open her bureau, and pulled out her carpet bag.
She’d stuffed three impractical dresses into it when she realized she didn’t have any underclothes or stockings, and she needed to calm down and go about this in a sensible, organized manner.
Valenna sank onto the bed, and the quilted comforter poofed around her, coughing up feathers.
Yesterday, against her better judgment, she’d tried to recall the faint constellation of freckles on Evander’s cheeks and realized with a twinge of grief that she was forgetting what he looked like.
But now, every detail of his face came to her with brilliant clarity.
The amber in his green irises, the way his wavy chestnut hair brushed his eyebrows, his high cheekbones and square jaw, the grave set of his mouth, and the way his eyes twinkled when he wanted to smile and decided not to.
And when he did smile, the way it lit up the whole world like a torch flaring in a darkened springhouse.
A burning sensation bubbled behind Valenna’s ribs, and she pressed her hand to her stomach. Since Evander left, she’d had trouble keeping her magic contained.
Think on retribution. Imagine your sister on the throne, your father shivering in a cold dungeon, wrapped in venomous thorns. Don’t think about Evander. It’ll only break your heart. Without you around to look after him, make him take his medicine, he’s probably dead anyway.
How pathetic was she, flopped on her bed like a schoolgirl, sick over a man she hadn’t seen in a year? A man who kissed her and then disappeared the next day. Who would do a thing like that? And why?
Valenna wondered if it was because she never said she loved him. Even as the doubt crossed her mind, her gaze fell on the little tin of wyvern bone powder she still kept beside her bed. That tin said ‘I love you’ louder than any grand words or passionate speeches.
Five minutes of self-indulgence was all she could afford. She wasn’t one to lie down and wait for life to happen; she was a woman of action.
So, she dragged herself off the bed, changed from her pretty dress into a sensible traveling suit—elderberry purple tweed pants and a waistcoat over a lavender lace blouse.
She slipped her feet into low-heeled, lace-up leather ankle boots, pinned her wavy hair into a becoming but professional pile atop her head, and donned a pistachio-colored linen coat long enough to brush her calves.
By the time she was ready to leave, Valenna’s carpet bag was bloated, ready to burst. She refused to acknowledge that she was over-packing.
If she was going to be the dracologist’s emissary, she must appear respectable.
Evander Trevelyan’s presence didn’t factor because he was probably being digested by a massive lizard at that very moment.
A sharp knock at the door startled her, and she called irritably, “What?” as she struggled to close her bag.
Her landlord answered, “The woman from Sennalaith wants to speak to you before you go.”
Valenna ran to the door and wrenched it open. “Where is she?”
“Downstairs,” the landlord said, looking startled.
“Tell her I’ve already left.”
The landlord hesitated. “But, she’s downstairs and I …”
Valenna was already dragging her bag off the bed and staggering across the room. “You’re not lying,” she said, opening the window and throwing her bag out. “By the time you get downstairs, I’ll be on my way.”
The landlord watched in bewilderment as Valenna hopped nimbly to the tree outside the window and climbed to the ground. Her tidy traveling suit was rumpled, but this was no time to worry about her appearance. She did, of course, worry about it anyway.
She skirted the building, slipped through the dracorium, and ran to the town center, where the mail coach was already beginning to clatter over the cobbles, four dragons straining against their harnesses, their wings beating street debris into the gutters.
Valenna tried to run faster, but her bag weighed her down.
A sacrifice had to be made for freedom. Either she could go to Silvanlight drably dressed, or return to Sennalaith smartly dressed.
With physical pain, she dropped her carpet bag and sprinted.
The coach’s rear wheels were lifting off the street when she lunged forward, catching the door.
Her sudden weight pulled the coach down enough for her to scramble onto the side, and two helpful passengers reached out and hauled her gracelessly through the window.
A moment later, she was sitting on a leather seat, crushed between two smelly travelers.
Her trousers were torn at the knee.