Vow of Ashes (Dragon Trials #2)

Chapter 1

One

Fieran

My mother had a new gift for me: a wedding.

The gleaming arena had been rebuilt since monsters crashed into the stands, endangering mortals and Fae alike, who clogged the stands again tonight as if they had already forgotten. On the dais, where the queen usually stood alone, three thrones now rose.

Three thrones made of dragon’s bones, dipped in gold; I had never seen twins of her own terrible throne. Shadowbane’s restlessness lashed inside me at the sight, as it always did.

The question was only the specific shape of the trap. Either she intended to make a mockery of what I’d plotted with Cara or marry me to someone else. Mockery for its own sake was not her usual style. She wrapped gentle charm around the blades of her plans, and they cut no less sharp.

Just last night, Cara had asked me to marry her. Begged me, really.

I hadn’t wanted Cara to bind herself to me to shield her family while she was out of her mind with terror.

I had told her no in a fit of sentimental foolishness.

Now I was going to pay for in front of everyone my mother could fit in the stands.

My delay had been uncharacteristically moral of me, and I regretted it immensely.

The herald’s voice cut the murmur. “The queen calls her son to her side.”

I turned before the echo died, and I let myself seek Cara, just as I yearned to. I checked with Ander first, but he stood there straight-backed, his arms crossed and his face a mask. I frowned, and my gaze skipped on to Bismyth.

Cara stood straight-backed at the center of my clan as if she had always belonged there. Her striking ocean-colored eyes were wide with worry. She took a step toward me as if she would fight the queen at my side.

She couldn’t, but her desire still settled on my skin like a claim.

Shadowbane, in my head, somehow managed to snort despite being a disembodied voice. “A claim you have no right to.”

Perhaps. But one I would never surrender anyway.

I winked at her. Hold, Cara. My fierce little mortal.

She was just as much dragon shifter as mortal, but it was her mortal side that made her so incredible. No wonder the mortals were ready to deify her after seeing her command griffins and throw herself into the fray to save them.

The stands were packed as I climbed the steps to the queen’s dais.

Fae were in the best tiers, wearing careful expressions because the queen and her spies and her Nightwalkers saw all.

Mortals crushed tight in the poorer sections, every one of them pressing toward the rail for a better view.

Magic shimmered in the air, distorting the edges of faces into a blur of jewel-bright eyes and eager mouths.

The queen was luminous and composed as she always was for a ceremony. She watched me climb with the glowing smile she reserved for moments of her most gleeful cruelty.

“You look prepared,” she said, low enough that only I heard it.

“I always am.”

The look she gave me was long and amused, almost fond, as if she had come to enjoy my struggle for freedom. “We will see.”

Sometimes it felt as if she saw things as a game between us. As if she had not tried to get me killed to the best of her ability, given the magic that bound us, and as if I had not returned the favor with a murder attempt.

“When Lightbringer returns, she will eat the queen.” Shadowbane’s voice was his signature growl, accompanied by his signature promise of violence.

“She can’t eat the queen any more than you can,” I reminded Shadowbane. But I understand the urge to indulge in the fantasy.

“We will celebrate today,” my mother said, her voice now carrying through the whole arena with that particular melodic amplification she had perfected over centuries, “with a great hunt of the creatures that have stalked our lands.”

The crowd responded. Hunts always worked on them: the combination of safety promised and danger displayed was the most effective theater she managed.

“This is a special day, indeed,” she continued, “because I am pleased to announce my son Fieran’s wedding.”

The shock and excitement below were immediate.

Bismyth would close around Cara. Clan Amber would protect her as well. Its leader, Ander, who had claimed her for their clan in his perpetually delightful and useful jealousy, would use this as proof of my deceit.

Cara herself was hard to predict. She was an outsider to our world, but she was sharp, and she moved through it as if she intended to bend it to her will.

Sometimes that was a gift, and sometimes I thought it would lead to our doom.

Given she had pieced together my plan to drag Lightbringer back into this world before we married, just in time for my mother to enchant her and babble my plots, I was leaning toward doom.

Still, I was counting on her more than I should have been.

The shape of the trap was elegant; I’d give my mother that. She knew my romance with Cara somehow threatened her plans. Once Cara married me, the generational protection magic would shield Cara. So she’d see me married to someone else.

She didn’t know about the ring hanging from the necklace around Cara’s pretty throat, or my half of the vows, already spoken.

Or she knew Cara wouldn’t act to protect me. That thought rose with a phantom of anxiety. Had my mother used Cara’s brother Tay to convince Cara to abandon me?

“We have long had an ally in the Kingdom of Caer Lira,” my mother said, her voice carrying the particular warmth she manufactured for declarations.

My chest tightened at the mention of Caer Lira, and with it, a blur of memory: Zia brushing strands of silky dark hair from her face, a shy smile flickering across her face, and how there was nothing shy in the way she wielded a sword.

“And I am pleased to continue that friendship by sealing Fieran in marriage to his childhood friend, Zia.”

It was a good plan. There was only one weakness, one that the queen didn’t yet know.

My fate was in the slender, calloused hands of the girl who sometimes despised me.

And I wanted her anyway. Gods, maybe I wanted her more for it.

Sudden heat sparked in my chest. My hand rose to press above my heart as if I might be igniting, too fast for me to resist. I never lost control.

Not in front of an entire crowd like this, with my mother smiling beside me.

But here I was, holding my heart as if it might fall out of my chest otherwise.

Heat spread through my body, and I called out to Shadowbane in my mind the way I always did when I was afraid. It was the only time he ever refrained from sarcasm.

“It’s the marriage bond.” Shadowbane’s voice sang with triumph. “You are bound. You are free.”

The bond settled into place with the weight of armor falling over my chest and shoulders. Heavy, constricting, protective.

I’d taken a step closer to the railing before I could stop myself.

No, I shouldn’t let my mother see, and yet, the railing pressed into my hip as I leaned out, searching for her.

She was nowhere to be seen, but my clan stood in a tight circle.

She would be at its center. Anayla, with her blue-streaked hair, would stay at her side until I reached her.

“You chose me.” The thought landed with a force that stunned me.

“Gods help her,” Shadowbane said, arriving right on time to douse my joy.

I had built the door. I had handed her the key.

Then she had chosen me.

I had a gift for predicting people, for getting them to do my bidding. Cara was the one face in this kingdom I could not fully read. She slid through my fingers, snarling and smiling by turns, always fascinating and often maddening.

But she had chosen me.

“In celebration,” my mother was saying, “the Claiming will be delayed. For five nights, we will not only have extraordinary Hunts and games throughout our labyrinth, but I will also raise one mortal each night to become Fae. A gift for our beloved mortals.”

The mortal stands erupted.

I watched the sound move through them like fire through dry grass, predictably eager to burn. My mother always offered hope for those who didn’t spend long enough in her orbit to be poisoned by her version.

It was a false, toxic hope, the kind that kept them grateful, compliant, desperate to deserve it. And she had multiple purposes, I was sure. She and I both always did.

Tay was still in the capital within the queen’s easy grasp. Making him Fae would seem like a gift, but Cara would receive it as a curse. Lidi was in Stonehaven, but Stonehaven was not as far as it felt from here. No one was out of reach of the queen and her Nightwalkers.

“After the Claiming, there will be one last Grand Hunt,” she promised. “Then sadly, the Trials will close until next year, once every new dragon has flown. Our dragons will return to their work keeping our kingdom safe.”

The queen moved to me, her fingers brushing my cheek in the way that looked like a mother’s fond touch. The magic came with it. Aged and cold and precise toward the bond she intended to seal.

But she could not complete it. My mother’s fingers brushed over the hard scales of the marriage bond rather than soft vulnerability. Her fingers stilled against my skin.

To the crowd, we were two figures on a dais, the queen touching her son tenderly after she announced the engagement. No one below saw anything change.

She was too careful for anything to show but for the flashing of her golden eyes.

She let another moment pass, the two of us staring at each other above the roar of the crowd.

Her lips pursed as they did when working through problems. I had seen that look quite often; I was often a formidable problem.

The queen wanted me dead, and I was not, which was proof of the value of the royal protection magic, but it was a slender shield.

Generational only. Parent to heir and spouse and siblings, heir to parent and spouses and siblings, preventing patricide and filicide.

No further. I assumed that, like some dreadful spider-monster, my mother had murdered my father once she had what she needed from him.

If she could have found a way to unmake that ancient enchantment on the royals, she would have.

“Who?” Her eyes moved across the arena floor with the slow, methodical sweep of a woman who had centuries of practice reading a room. Bismyth. Amber. Obsidian. The unclaimed.

As is always the case with predators, the movement caught her attention. Bismyth cut through the crowd, getting Cara to safety.

“The mortal.” The word carried a weight of revulsion she didn’t bother to conceal here, where only I could hear it.

“She has a name.”

“She has nothing. She is nothing.” She stopped, setting aside the distaste to replace it with something colder. “What could you possibly want with her?”

I let her see the satisfaction I’d been holding back since the bond locked.

Would I have spared Cara this danger?

I would not undo the bond even if I could. I had longed for her to choose me and slide my ring onto her finger, and not just because that served my plans and ruined my mother’s.

“She walks into your arena as a mortal and comes out the other side. The mortals watch and whisper, and hope spreads across the kingdom.” I let myself smile. “She is becoming their salvation, and I intend to stand at her side.”

Let her think it was politics. Let her think I was building a mortal faction, a popular movement, some new shape of the old game between us. Let her be surprised by Lightbringer.

She studied me with those calculating eyes, weighing what I’d given her against what she suspected. “How very common of you.”

“Mother.” I inclined my head. “A pleasure, as always.”

“The Claiming ceremony can be so unpredictable.” Her voice was pleasant, as if she were discussing the weather. “It would be a shame if your mortal found herself unclaimed.”

If a dragon did not claim her at the ceremony, Cara would burn alive. After this delay of these five Hunts, every shifter would either fly or burn.

She didn’t need to kill Cara. She only needed to keep anyone from saving her. It was almost elegant.

“She cannot fathom Lightbringer,” Shadowbane murmured, and if my heart had started beating faster at the threat, that soothed my fear. “She cannot fathom how we will shake this world with our mates at our sides.”

I descended the stairs. My wife was waiting.