Odd. Very, very odd. How had their conversation progressed from the dragon to him?
Slowly, Deven returned to his work, but a bit more thoughtfully than before.
Fiora closed his eyes and leaned his elbows on the stone parapet, wishing he could simply take flight and soar into the wind that whipped past, tangling the streamers of his hair around his face and shoulders. The setting sun glinted from the river, turning it into a ribbon of gold and orange with ripples of slate — like fire, flaming its way through soft green hills. The view from the turret was lovely, but it would be lovelier still from a thousand feet in the air, beating his wings through air currents brought from distant lands…perhaps he’d even catch a breath of his distant home. But this evening, he had to be earthbound. Too many tasks to accomplish that depended on fitting into a chair behind a desk and using opposable thumbs.
What a dreary, bothersome way to spend one’s time. Not that any other night was less than dreary and bothersome.
Bother.
Light footsteps tapped up the stairs behind him, and then a deep voice said, “My lord, I’ve sorted your correspondence. And there’s fresh coffee.”
Andrei, efficient as always. Fiora stifled a deep sigh. “There can’t possibly be anything interesting,” he said without turning. “There never is.” The sun had sunk another few degrees, and the bend in the river had fallen into the shadow of the hill to the northwest. Did he really need to go inside and read letters?
“Hmm. Today, there might be,” Andrei replied, in a carefully modulated tone that Fiora had learned spelled trouble. “You have a letter from the council of Ripley. With more seals affixed to it than I would have thought they would possess. They seem to have had it stamped by every guild in the town.”
Double bother.
“What can they possibly want? We pay them well for their goods, don’t we?”
If he’d sounded very slightly plaintive — possibly even whiny — Andrei was tactful enough to pretend not to notice. “Very well, my lord. But this — I really think you need to read it for yourself.”
Bowing to the inevitable, Fiora turned and made for the stairs. Andrei nodded respectfully and fell into step just behind him, carefully shortening his stride to match Fiora’s. As powerful as Fiora might be in his other form, he barely reached average height in this one, and Andrei’s tall, lanky body towered over him. If they could only have split their difference in height, and divided up their hair — Andrei had none, while Fiora’s blue-black masses tumbled below his shoulders — they might have made two almost normal-looking fellows.
If you didn’t look too closely at the pale azure tint to Fiora’s skin, anyhow, or his slit-pupil eyes.
Oh, there was no use. He couldn’t pass for human, and crying over it was so much wasted water.
Fiora’s study was two floors down in the tower, past his bedchamber’s suite, which occupied the level just below the roof. He’d chosen this tower to be his personal quarters for its views and for the size of the turret’s roof balcony, which allowed him to land comfortably. On days like this, he wished he’d put his study in the cellar, or somewhere else suitably gloomy. All the broad arched windows in the study accomplished was making him wish he could fling himself out of one.
The letter from the town council sat in the precise center of the perfectly polished desk, all of its seals nearly crowding out the heavily flourished lines of script. Clearly the guild of scribes had been involved, and Fiora anticipated a headache after he’d interpreted the meaning of all those loops and squiggles.
Finally letting out the sigh he’d been repressing, he dropped into his chair and began to read, absently sipping from the coffee cup set to his right hand as he did.
And then he popped bolt upright again, gripping the parchment hard enough to tear the edge, the cup clattering into its saucer as he almost dropped it.
“Andrei. Tell me I have not taken leave of my senses.”
“I’m sorry to say, my lord, I believe it is the town council who has taken leave of theirs.”
Fiora carefully relaxed his fingers, letting the parchment drop to the desk, and looked up to meet Andrei’s gaze. His servant had his hands clasped behind his back as he stood waiting, the picture of ease — except for the furrow between his brows, as expressive as Andrei ever was. It wasn’t just Fiora, then, who thought he’d never heard anything more absurd.
“A sacrifice,” Fiora growled. “A bloody rutting sacrifice. Really? What the fuck have I done to make them think I’d want one of their miserable maidens? No one’s followed that tradition for centuries. And I don’t eat people! Why would I want to, when we have a cook who can prepare such divine roast mutton?”
He broke off, panting, and dropped his head in his hands. Oh, God, but this was a disaster. One more sodding inconvenience to add to the pile that already comprised his life. He’d come to this peaceful, civilized kingdom to get away from the hidebound traditions of his homeland. (Well, and also to get away from his mother. But that was really only coincidence, as he assured her in twice-monthly letters.)
Back home, dragons were feared, respected, and treated as an entirely separate caste, except by the very highest echelons of the human aristocracy. Even among the nobility it had been hard for Fiora to find anyone who would look past his skin and his eyes and his oddity. And the last time, one of the rare times, he’d met a man who’d smiled and laughed and taken him to bed without a qualm…well, look how that had turned out. Even if he hadn’t hoped for more acceptance here, necessarily, he had hoped to be ignored.
Being offered a sacrifice, the most hidebound of hidebound sodding traditions, did not fall under that heading.
And anyway, he’d never eaten anyone and never planned to. All those clothes, and bits of jewelry…terrible for the digestion, not to mention how they’d get stuck in his teeth. He didn’t even hunt his own game very often. Fur and antlers tasted terrible.
And then Andrei added one more fillip of awfulness. “I doubt they expect you to kill her, my lord. I think the inclusion of the words innocent and pure hints at another use they believe you’d have for their sacrificial maiden,” Andrei said, with an arid dryness that verged on sarcasm.
“Ohhhh,” Fiora moaned, yanking on his hair and making his scalp ache. “Oh, God preserve me.”
“Unfortunately, God can’t write your answer to the council for you. That task, to my great and everlasting despair, falls to me. What ought I to reply to them, my lord?”
“Tell them to stuff their sacrificial maiden up their collective —”
“Hardly a suitable place for someone innocent and pure,” Andrei cut in, with acerbity. “Try again, my lord?”
Fiora peeked at him through his hands. Andrei was all but vibrating with annoyance. Well, that made two of them. But as it often did, seeing Andrei irritated calmed Fiora sufficiently that he was able to think, rather than simply react. He had spent years learning to ruffle Andrei’s usually smooth feathers. It always made him happy. That was what the man got for starting out as Fiora’s boyhood tutor, after all.
“Hang on,” Fiora said, his brain having taken a few moments to do its job. “What do they have to gain from this? Really, I mean? Because they can’t be stupid enough to think I’d burn their town or eat them all at this point, not when I’ve been living here for months. I pay really quite unsubtly inflated prices for their best wine, candles, and silk, not to mention all the food, rather than simply demanding it for free. I haven’t even bitten anyone. Not so much as a nip. Why now? If they want to try to steal from me, one girl isn’t the likeliest candidate. I’d think quite a few men with swords might be more the thing.”