Jori thought a moment. There’d been so many throughout his life. Once he began his litany, it went on for some time. Mountainous villages in the east where his mother taught him to climb so they could see the tombs of the ancients. He learned how to wield a machete in the Amazon jungle during an expedition to find deep valley pyramids. Sand blown desert villages abandoned millennia ago. There was one visit to the far north, he shuddered and avoided that memory. He hated the cold almost as much as thieving polar bears. Other locations, other remote islands. All places that held ancient mysteries attached to them.
“And the beasts? You found them at each place?”
Jori smiled then, “No Ma’am. Not one.”
“Then why would you continue to travel to so many places, failing your purpose?”
Again, he thought about his response.
“My mother started us on these journeys, I never had the chance to understand why. But when we traveled, although we went to many places, she always took me into the vicinity of where the creatures were said to have lived. Maybe it was for safety? I couldn’t say for sure. We usually visited the villages in the general area, meeting the people and learning their cultures. There were incredible experiences to have grown up with and I count myself fortunate to have been exposed to so many different places and types of people.”
“What manner of creatures was she seeking?”
“They all seemed to be variations of dragons.”
“Your mother had a deeply ingrained obsession with dragons?”
Jori shrugged, “They were her passion, yes. She made a lot of art centered on them.” He held up his forearm, “I had some of her pieces turned into tattoos—this one here,” he pointed and traced the image, “seems to match the constellation in this territory, which isn’t visible anywhere else on earth that I’m aware of.”
There were a few murmurs among those gathered on the stands.
“And now that I’m in this room, the symbols on these banners look familiar. It’s possible they too are in her artwork.”
“If this is true, that would mean that your mother has knowledge of this place.”
“I would have to agree, Ma’am. But I wasn’t aware of this until after I arrived here and began to notice the similarities.”
Movement on the dais caught Jori’s eye. The queen raised a hand and one of her guard leaned in to hear her speak. The guard stepped forward “Madam Speaker, the queen wishes to know how old Jori Mountainside is.”
“Please answer Her Majesty,” the speaker said to Jori.
“Thirty-Two.”
The queen spoke to her guard again. “Madam Speaker, Her Majesty would like Jori Mountainside to approach the dais.”
The speaker inclined her head, and Jori’s escorts stepped forward. One opened the booth and moved aside so he could step down, then they both fell in place beside him as they walked around the speaker and approached the dais.
There was shift in the feel of the room as he moved toward the woman on the throne.
The hair on his arms rose and the air around him was alive like he was approaching high voltage generators. His lizard brain whispered ‘predator,’ which set him on edge. He forced his hands to relax at his sides, preventing them from curling into fists. As an afterthought, his gaze drifted along the wall of well-armed guards.
They stopped, and he looked up into the queen’s face.
She was beautiful, in a way that had little to do with the charge of power that surrounded her. Most arresting were her eyes; he was close enough now that he could see that the unusual color held an inner luminescence that denoted her as not quite human. She blinked and the glow faded, making her appear human again. With that distraction gone, he studied her features, which held some familiarity to them.
Had he met her before? The possibility was highly unlikely. That familiar nudge pushed at him, as it had the symbols on the overhanging banners. Had his mother painted or sketched this woman?
The queen’s eyes were glued to his face.
She stood.
The sounds of a room full of people behind him pulled at his attention. He didn’t dare turn around. He didn’t know if he was expected to kneel or bow or lower his gaze before her, so instead he stood as he was, feet planted at shoulder width, hands loose at his sides, waiting.
She stepped forward and down several steps, stopping so that she remained above him.
She stared into his eyes, unblinking. He stared back, his breath even and controlled.
Her nostrils flared as he’d seen Kymri’s do.
She blinked, breaking the pressure that had begun to bear down on him.
“I wish to see your images’.
Images? The tattoos? His gaze dropped to his forearm, the cosmic colors dappling his skin around pinpricks of white representing stars. He lifted his arm and angled it so that she may see it.
Her expression remained impassive, her gaze studied it for several moments.
“There are more?”
He nodded, his hands moving to the hem of his tee-shirt. He hesitated, “may I?”
She nodded.
He turned and removed his shirt, the cool air of the room slid around him, along with acute awareness of being so exposed to a room full of onlookers.
Several of the art pieces were wrapped around his torso or in patches over his back and shoulders. They were mostly abstract pieces with shapes and flowers and vines superimposed in bursts of color.
He turned slowly so that she might look upon him. It was as he finally finished the revolution and faced her again that her gaze slid to the one tattoo that lacked any color at all. Over his heart was the black scripted tattoo of his parents’ names, entwined.
“Elora,” the queen said on a breath.
13
Kymri’s heart stalled.
Elora.
A collective gasp hushed through the room.
From the back of the room she had heard the report, and Jori’s explanation of his actions.
A pang of protective jealousy had struck her when he approached the queen, and when his shirt had come off, she wanted nothing more than to remove him from the eyes of every woman in the room.
That name changed everything.
Elora.
The queen’s immobility where she stood, the power of the name, rippled across the room and Kymri could feel it where she stood. The rawness of it scraped at her heart.
The speaker stood, dismissing the assembly. The doors opened and everyone filed out.
Kymri remained where she was.
Unless the queen commanded her to leave, she would stay close to Jori. Even then, she might disobey. Her breath shuddered through her at the thought. Never in her life had she ever entertained the thought of going against her queen’s wishes.
Her gaze slid to her left where Odson Blackridge stood to the other side of the doors. She hadn’t seen the man in years.
Why was he here?
She turned her attention back to the far end of the room, where Jori stood facing the queen and her guard. They still hadn’t moved.
The great doors swung closed and Kymri was moving forward. The second she started walking, Odson moved in a step behind.
They stopped, flanking Jori.
The queen blinked, shuttering the raw emotion away. Her gaze broke from Jori’s face to Kymri and Odson behind him and back to Jori.
She straightened and turned to Kymri’s mother, “My antechamber.”