Page 25 of Dance with the Dragon Duke

“Hello there,” he greeted her, and she kissed his cheek, the peck like a drop of warm dew on the edge of his jaw.

A giant tortoise lumbered out from the shrubbery edging the lagoon beneath the waterfall. Three adult fairies rode on its back. Except for Ruby, the girls flew off to help gather flowers to feed the turtle they called Pots.

Tomorrow lay on her back in the grass, gazing up at the purple sky. Ruby gazed with her, stretched out along her belly, her arms folded behind her head. She chattered at Tomorrow absently.

“Are you talking about the stars?” Tomorrow guessed. The little lights were faint in the sky.

At Dark’s insistence, the clouds rolled away and the sky darkened until stars shone brightly.

“Ooooooooo,” Ruby said. Ruby had always liked astronomy. She hovered about Dark and his telescope when he did his charting to add more creations to his magical sky, and she listened the most attentively when he told the girls stories about how the star signs got their names.

“That one looks like the Night Mother’s horse, Slepnir,” Tomorrow said, pointing to the central-most grouping. Slepnir’s head was shaped like a triangle, its body rounded and its tail a long string of lights.

“You know your stars,” Dark said, sitting down beside her. He wanted to trap her hand in his, link their fingers. Instead, he picked at the grass that poked his trousers.

“Only the more popular ones. You seem to really love them,” she said, gesturing at his tower. “I saw all your charts inside there. Where’d you pick up the fascination?”

Dark ripped free a blade of grass that wasn’t really grass, just another of his creations, and he tore it down the middle. “Dragons don’t believe they get an afterlife, or at least, it’s not the same one that other beings with souls get. Full-blooded dragons eventually become one with the mountains, neither alive nor dead.”

“That sounds . . .”

“Tedious,” he offered. He ripped the blade into a third piece and began to braid the strands together.

She chuckled. “Yes. A bit.”

“The fae believe they go on to walk the stars with the Divine Night. My mother was not a dragon. She was fae. A trickster and a Lunar diplomat before her death.” He peered up at the canopies of glowing lights. “I believe she’s walking those stars now. That and every loss I’ve had thereafter has only increased my interest in them.”

Before he finished the grassy plait, Ruby came and snatched it from his fingers, winding it around her neck like jewelry, as he knew she would. She chirruped at him happily before lying back down on Tomorrow’s stomach.

Dark continued, “I don’t know much of my mother, but I think she would choose to walk with Slepnir there. I’ve been told she liked horses.”

“That’s lovely, Dark.” Tomorrow laid her gloved hand on his knee, and she gave it an affectionate squeeze, a squeeze he felt simultaneously around his heart. “I’m certain you’re right about those stars.”

“We have a lot in common, you and I,” he said, wondering if he was being too obvious with his attempts to hint at connection. He’d had experience trying to seduce a person physically, but no experience using his feelings like some . . . well, some mortal. “My mother wasn’t married to my father either, you see.”

If Tomorrow suspected him, she didn’t let on. “Ah. We’re an illegitimate pair, both with a duchy hanging over us.” She smirked at him. “Is it a lot, tending to a duchy? It sounds tedious—though not as tedious as becoming a mountain of rocks.”

His breathy laugh was short-lived. “It’s significantly less tedious once everyone in the duchy is dead.”

“The first war,” Tomorrow groaned. “I heard a few things about Mount Rasika being caught up, but . . . I shouldn’t have brought it up at all.”

“It’s not your fault. No, that blame lies with my tyrant father.” And with himself, he thought glumly. When it came to protecting the land he’d been given, he’d made all the wrong choices. Death and trouble clung to him, and the vulnerable people who depended on him had been caught in the crossfire.

Dark ripped free another piece of magically-made grass and began to knot it briskly. Ruby took it before he finished, tying it in her hair.

“Beautiful,” Tomorrow told her with a lightness that warmed Dark’s chest.

Ruby gave her gloved finger a quick love bite before she flew off to show the other fairies and the tortoise Pots her new prizes.

Tomorrow gazed around, taking in the meadow. “What’s your favorite treasure in your hoard?” she asked. Then her smile went sly. “Wait! Don’t tell me. I want to guess at it.”

She picked herself up out of the grass, wobbled, and fell onto her backside with a snorted giggle that made Dark’s heart feel like it’d grown two sizes too big. He laughed at her.

Squashing a pile of grass, she rolled haphazardly onto her side. “My legs are a bit tired. I haven’t run like I did this morning in ages.”

Dark helped her rise. He braced her hips and boosted her back with his tail.

“Very useful, that tail.” She was grinning again in that way he’d warned her against.

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