Page 11 of Mountain of Dragons and Sacrifice

The bed stood in the center of the room with a table next to it. The table held a candle and striker, as if just waiting for me to light it.

That left only the cupboard beside the window to investigate.

I opened it, then blinked at the single blue wool dress that hung there, including a set of rabbit fur lined boots on a shelf. Huh. I wouldn’t actually have to walk around in a nightdress. And I’d finally have shoes again.

Once I changed into the dress, I smoothed the skirt. It fit like it had been made for me. Strange, that. Even the boots fit.

Changing into the dress had dislodged the bandages around my wrists, and I tugged them off, meaning to re-wrap them.

But beneath the bandages, my skin was fully healed, only a faint pink marking where I’d rubbed my wrists raw trying to escape.

What was going on? Even something as superficial as bleeding rope burns didn’t heal overnight. I ran my fingers over the healed skin.

I might have stayed there, frozen, but just then my stomach growled like a wildcat caught in a trap.

Straightening my shoulders, I headed for the door. No sense waiting around here. My room didn’t have any food, and I wasn’t about to wait around hoping Phoebe or someone else would bring me some.

I’d nearly become wolf or dragon food last night. I was going to celebrate being alive by enjoying breakfast.

Hopefully the dragon wouldn’t be out and about. He had implied that he wouldn’t see me until tonight. And Phoebe had invited me to wander down the corridor to knock on her door last night. I couldn’t imagine anyone, even one of the dragon’s trusted servants, would be so blasé if the dragon could be found lurking around the corner.

Perhaps dragons were nocturnal? It was an odd thought that the overlord in the mountain should be so strangely bound by time.

Or he simply preferred to lurk at night since the darkness would prevent anyone from seeing his face, which was forbidden. The servants were probably thankful for those tendencies. It would be a terrible bother to have to worry about accidentally looking upon him in the daytime.

With those assurances bracing my spine, I flung open the door and marched into the unknown.

I found myself in a perfectly normal, boring corridor. The walls were the same solid but smooth stone with doors painted in bright colors set on either side. My door was at the very end of the corridor, so there was only one way to go from here. A distant echoing of voices and laughter came from that direction.

Laughter was good, right? Surely if the dragon was around, no one would be laughing.

I strolled down the passageway, following the sounds as they grew louder. A few other passageways branched off while the occasional window alcove beamed enough light onto the stone walls.

The corridor turned a corner, then opened into a large room. Along one wall, pillars bracketed arches framing huge glass windows that provided views of the mountains. Small groups of tables and chairs clustered along one side of the room while a rug, cushioned chairs, and divans gathered before a fireplace that was as tall as I was.

But it wasn’t the enormous fireplace or the mountain views that halted me in my tracks.

No, I froze where I was because of the strange collection of people in the room. If you could call them people.

The most normal of the men and women gathered at the table looked human…except that they were far too beautiful and had ears that tapered into points. They wore clothes of wool and fur and leather, much like what I was wearing. Except the colors were nothing like I’d ever seen from dyes back home. So rich and vibrant.

But the others in the room…several of the males had goat legs and small curving horns growing from their heads. One girl had dark green skin. Her hair was also threaded with green and…were those some kind of evergreen branches woven through her hair? Whenever she moved, she shed a few leaves.

At the far end of the room, a nook formed a semblance of a room on the far side, though it remained open to the larger space. Another, smaller fireplace dominated the space that was recognizable as a kitchen, even in this strange place.

Phoebe bustled around the work table in the kitchen, stirring something in a bowl, flipping something in a pan over one section of the fire, stirring a large pot over the other side of the fire.

As she reached to stir the pot again, a part of the wall seemed to bulge toward her. A bulbous, stone-colored thing plopped onto the ground next to her. It had pincers almost like a crab but the rest of its body was somehow both gelatinous and rock at the same time.

Phoebe sighed, then whacked the creature with her ladle. It hissed at her, flinching, but it didn’t retreat. She beat it a few more times with her ladle before it gave a globby leap and disappeared into the wall once again.

“I’m not in the olive grove anymore.” I gripped the door frame, my knees wobbly. This was not at all what I was expecting.

What had I been expecting for a dragon’s lair? Piles of gold and bones. Maybe a rotting carcass or two.

Not strange people and even stranger creatures popping out of the wall.

A man rose out of his seat in the far corner. I hadn’t even noticed him on my first glance around the room, sitting in the corner as he had been. He was one of the more human-looking people, though he still had pointed ears, easily visible since his dark brown hair was cropped short, as was his scruff of a beard. He wore a leather jerkin over a blue tunic, but his clothes did little to hide the breadth of his shoulders and the power in his movements. As he drew closer, I saw that his eyes were a bright shade of blue.

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