“No,” Tamara said softly, pain in her eyes. “You aren’t wearing it as a joke. You are wearing it to remind us of what we lost. You are wearing it because the demon king knew the effect it would have. He’s not taunting you—he is taunting us.”
Her words hit me like a sack of bricks. I sagged a little, digesting them. Faces fell around me. Tamara’s pain was shared.
I took a deep breath. Part of being a hero was building people up. Probably. It was about all I could do right now, at any rate.
“Well then,” I said with determination. “Fuck them. They don’t get to decide how we feel. Let it serve as a symbol for a future we will regain.”
Fire sparked in their eyes—all of them, hearing the call for any sort of future, not just for the Wyvern kingdom. Heads nodded. Backs straightened.
“And, hell, maybe someone can show me how to use it!”
A few people smiled, and even more chuckled. They might not have realized I was serious.
Tamara climbed to her feet, that fire still raging in her eyes.
“A villager.” She huffed out a laugh and offered me her hand. “The golden prince’s true mate is a villager.”
I could hear the irony singing through her words.
“A really poor one, too,” I replied with a grin. “The mad king is probably turning over in his grave.”
Tamara laughed. “Probably.”
“There is nothing wrong with growing up in a village,” Vemar said, and many nodded.
Tamara sobered a little. “The queen was from a village in the Flamma Kingdom. A village in a different kingdom, with a lot more status, but a village nonetheless. I wonder if she would’ve been pleased. She also wanted humility for her son. She wanted him grounded. A poor villager who unabashedly kills officers and comes in front of guards must surely keep him on his toes.”
I pinched my face without meaning to, my cheeks flaming red again. She laughed.
“So, I have a few questions,” I said to quickly change the subject.
Mr. Baritone rose, walking closer. His gaze flicked to Nyfain’s mark, and hunger flitted through his eyes. A push of his power made me bristle.
“Ooh-wee,” Vemar said, sitting up and rubbing his knees. “Micah’s dragon smells another alpha and wants to accept the challenge.”
Mr. Baritone was clearly Micah. Nyfain had told me there would be shifters who saw his mark as a challenge rather than a threat. He’d told me one of them could give me a future—something he thought he could not.
Don’t you even think about it, my dragon warned me, and I rolled my eyes.
“It won’t be a problem,” Micah told me. “I can already feel the tug of the suppression magic yanking on my dragon. I’m not from Wyvern. I haven’t been freed. When my dragon is suppressed, he won’t thrash at me to take the challenge and work to claim you.”
I wanted to ask how his dragon intended to meet a challenge from another dragon who wasn’t even here, or stake his claim on a woman who wasn’t interested, but it was irrelevant right now. There were larger issues at hand.
“If you can get out of your cells, why aren’t we leaving?” I asked.
“They have a magical lock at the top of the stairs.” Micah glanced behind him at the stairs. “Try to go through it and get something cut off.”
“Ah,” I said, having forgotten that in all the commotion. “And the lock-picking tools?”
“Stolen, obviously,” Vemar said, scratching his head. “When we are…treated to their fancy parties, we grab anything we can. Sometimes there are useful things, but most times not. They watch us closely, so there’s very little we can sneak out, especially given the state of mind we usually leave in.”
“I hate to say it, but the wolves are our saving grace,” Micah said. “They are generally thought to be more compliant than we are—”
“Because they are more compliant than we are,” said a woman with light brown hair soiled with oil and grime. “They show their lack of worth where it counts the most.”
“They don’t raise such a ruckus.” Vemar winked at me.
“The more submissive of them act cowed and broken and eager to please, and they do a damn fine job,” Bad Hair Year continued, her lip curling. “It’s kind of their thing, I guess.”
A few people snarled at that.
“They also work as a unit better than most other shifters out there,” Micah cut in. “They’ve cased the castle, taken what we’ve needed, and gotten to know all the players better than we could’ve managed. It’s too bad we only see them fleetingly at the parties.”
People fidgeted and a few murmured, unhappy to agree but needing to. Despite the need to work together, apparently dragons thought they were better than wolves. And wolves likely thought the reverse.
“How long have you been working on all of this?” I asked, hope curling through me.
“Years. Since he got here.” Vemar pointed at Micah. “He’s the one who got us all organized. How long you been here, Micah?”
“Time is hard to judge, but…half a decade, maybe? A bit more?”
My hope shriveled up, and an uncomfortable weight lodged in my stomach. “That long? If the wolves have cased the castle, surely you have most of what you need. What’s the hold-up?”
“It’s hard to get opportunities to talk with them,” Micah said. “We are only pulled out of here for larger engagements, and then we are heavily guarded. There aren’t a lot of opportunities to touch base.”
“We tried to escape once,” Tamara said. “We thought we had everything ready. We got as far as the banks, ready to force our way to the boats…”
“What happened?” I asked.
“Govam happened,” Bad Hair Year said with a grim set to her mouth. “Somehow he knew what we were planning. He had a team waiting. Without our dragons, we had no hope. They dragged us back and beat us to within an inch of our lives.”
I let out a breath, thinking about my interactions with the demon. He was clearly dangling carrots in front of me to get me to act, and then he’d be waiting to step in and catch me. Mind-fuckery, all right, and he was damned good at it.
“Huh,” I said, running my thumb over the hilt of the sword. “Well then. Maybe we need to do a little study on Govam and make sure we’re anticipating him more than he is us.”
“Already underway,” Micah said with a glimmer in his eyes. “We will make a second attempt, and next time we will win.”
“Next time,” Tamara said with a shit-eating grin, “more than half of us will have our dragons.”
“What if we don’t want to leave?” someone asked from the back, a skin-and-bones man in his late thirties, I’d guess.
His eyes had a sheen over them in his gaunt face. His lank black hair fell down over a pronounced forehead.
“Why wouldn’t you want to leave?” I asked.
“Because I’m in no hurry to rush to my death. Like the alpha said, it’s been tried. It failed. My dragon has already been suppressed again. I don’t have access to healing. When they put me back in my cell the last time, they cracked my head and broke all my limbs in multiple places. I nearly bled out. I’d rather not suffer that again. They’ll kill me this time, I know they will.”