Page 55 of Fortune's Blade

And then my sluggish mind figured it out, and it felt like every bone in my tortured body liquified. Because it was a tent. Just a tent!

I fell back the scant half inch that I’d risen off the ground and just breathed for a moment.

“Do not try to lay this on us.” Louis-Cesare was saying from somewhere outside. My heart leapt in my chest at his voice, although he wasn’t sounding happy. He rarely shouted, but when he was pissed off, his voice got progressively flatter and flatter. And this was as close to robotic as I’d ever heard it. “We have done nothing—”

“Nothing?” Tanet repeated. “Your woman charged the chieftain of Vitharr!”

“Who was threatening her life! What would you have had her do? Run away from a direct challenge? Slink off with her tail between her legs?” And, okay, the voice was less robotic now. “If so, you do not know her—or us—very well.”

“And wish I knew less,” Tanet hissed, although it was getting hard to understand him. His voice had an overlay of what I assumed came from his alter ego, a dark rumble behind the words that was enough to raise the hair on the back of my neck and to have me feeling for the tent flap to back up my partner.

Only to have someone else open it before I could.

I glimpsed Claire’s features limned in a dim, greenish light as she ducked inside. I felt myself relax again until I realized—the light wasn’t coming from the aurora borealis in the skies outside, as I’d first assumed. It was coming from her eyes, and the things it showed me—

Her hand clapped over my mouth before I could let out the scream that was rising in my throat. So, my gut reaction just stayed there, getting progressively more and more insistent and more panicked but with nowhere to go. She was stunning, some part of my brain piped up to say, while the rest of me was busy screaming “run!”

But I wasn’t going to run, because the changes in Claire weren’t just cosmetic. I literally couldn’t move, and I was not weak, even as damaged as I was. But she was stronger, and so we just remained there, staring at each other, while the two men argued outside.

“—two natured, but she’s been suppressing it for most of her life!” Tanet said viciously. “No one has ever heard of such a thing; no one knows what it does! I wanted her to come here and learn about us, about herself, before it was too late—”

“It seems she understands a great deal,” Louis-Cesare said. “She was magnificent—”

“She understands nothing!” Tanet snarled, and with his other half’s voice echoing his own, it sounded like a lion’s roar. “She was overwhelmed by her other nature tonight, consumed by it—”

“She saved our lives!”

“Yes! And in the process may lose her own!”

I stopped struggling at that, in favor of staring up at the alien creature above me. She didn’t look human anymore, although she had the vague shape of one, and was still garbed in her elegant gown from dinner. But she didn’t look like a dragon, either. I didn’t know what she looked like, but it was nothing like the dragon headed servants, which must be another species.

Because this . . . was something else.

The hair was the same, brilliantly red and plentiful, only seeming to flow on invisible air currents around her face. And the eyes—the eyes were green, if so bright that I almost couldn’t stand to look at them. And her facial features, the slim, delicate, slightly elfin ones I knew, remained, but everything else . . ..

I took in the changes slowly, and she let me, even removing her hand from my mouth when I stopped struggling. But there was something vulnerable in her eyes, as if she didn’t want me to see her this way. Yet she didn’t move even though I didn’t hurry.

My head was still swimming, and there was a lot to take in.

Her skin, usually pale, was pure silver-white now, except where tinted with lavender in the hollows. Her eyebrows and lashes were likewise pinkish-lavender, as were her lips. But that was nothing next to the tiny scales feathering out from the sides of her eyes: purple and pink and iridescent green, and growing larger as they met up with those framing her face and running down to interlocking plates on her neck.

As far as I could tell, she was covered in similar plates all over her body, mainly silver in color but with a prismatic quality to them. She could seemingly shade them any color of purple or green that she chose, or leave them a polished mirror reflecting her surroundings. She did that several times as I watched, flushing through the limited spectrum before going dark like the tent, and almost disappearing until she made herself come back so that I might see.

And she was worth seeing, I thought, my wonder finally overriding my fear. The scales created a full, figure-hugging, liquid-looking suit of armor, fitting together so tightly as to be almost seamless. Especially at the joints, where tiny, more flexible scales allowed for ease of movement. And then, to top it all off, was what looked like a literal crown of rough, bone-like scales, starting in a deep vee on her forehead and ranging upward to form two, perfectly curled horns.

I don’t know what was on my face, probably shock as I had just woken up and this was not the view I had expected. And I guess that wasn’t the right response, because in less than a minute, Claire’s eyes were welling up with tears. The two men were still arguing outside, but I didn’t care anymore.

She was hurting.

“It’s okay,” I told her, cupping her cheek, and feeling the tiny scales framing her jawline against my fingertips.

“It’s not okay.” She covered my hand with hers, but didn’t pry it off. “It’s—it’s what can happen, when my kind don’t let their other side out enough. Sometimes, it doesn’t want to go back into hiding and it fights you.”

“It?”

Claire closed her eyes. “She. I know it’s a she. I just . . ..”

She trailed off.

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