Page 43 of The Dragon Queen

Not hurting me.I moved in then, rubbing my hands along Cloudy’s eye ridges, something that had Glacier’s head snaking forward.You’ll never hurt me.

I would enjoy head rubs too.

The blue dragon pressed his muzzle very gently into my hand and that had me laughing.

My bondmate is very good at giving head rubs, Glimmer opined, climbing up on Glacier’s neck. That forced me to give both of them a good scratch.Ahh, yes, right there.Their pleasure was infectious, flooding into me, driving out all the fear and misery of the last few days. I was a dragon in the sun getting the good scratches. What could be better than that?But we must go to work. Pippin wants the truth. Her eyes met mine.We must help her find it.

“So we’re excavating this place?” Flynn said. “Well, we’ll need to do so carefully and methodically. Cloudy!” The red dragon’s head popped up from where he was digging furiously, looking just like a naughty dog. “If we just dig willy nilly, we’ll destroy artefacts, but more importantly, the context they were found in. We’ll need to work together and carefully dig through the top layer of soil, then the next layer and so forth.”

“You’ve done this before?” Brom asked, then glanced at Soren. “I don’t remember archeology being something cadets were taught.”

“My father…” Flynn’s voice was choked off, but he swallowed and then forged on. “My father was somewhat of an amateur history buff. He loved to wax lyrical about our family’s history in Skane. “We’re descended from Queen Inara herself,” he’d say.” Flynn managed to imitate his father’s stuffy tones perfectly. “One of the few times he held off trying to find me a wife amongst his bannermen’s daughters was when we were in the field.”

“Visualise what you want to see done,” I told him, holding out the egg. His hands went around mine and we closed our eyes, and that’s when I saw it. String lines and trowels, a much younger Flynn labouring over a square of dirt, excavating it carefully. I wasn’t sureif dragon claws were capable of that kind of careful work, but we’d have to see.

You want to see the ruins.Glacier moved in and nudged at his rider.You want to see what happened.

You know?Flynn asked him.

Dragons retain their history better than humans do.His head whipped around as he evidently heard Glimmer in his mind.We… feel it.She turned then to her mates.You know what we seek.Her wings flapped out as she glided down from Glacier’s back and then landed next to the stone I had been trying to dig out, her claws cutting through the grass roots far more effectively than my hands.Now we must retrieve it.

We should’ve brought water, food too, I thought dimly, as I went to work beside Glimmer. My knife dug into the earth, the tip scraping against something far harder than soil as I plunged it deeper. I scraped away the dirt to find a small fragment of carved stone. Deeper and deeper we all went, flicking soil down the side of the hill to collect in the valley as we discovered just what had been hidden from us.

“So it was an official raid.”

Brom held a much tarnished dragon corp insignia in his hand. The emblem was far more ornate, the dragon picked out in perfect detail, rather than the silhouettes we now wore, but the nature of it was incontrovertible. The same size, the same pin mechanism, it was worn by a member of the corp that had got caught in the blast of the explosives they dropped.

“Looks like he died during the mission.” Ged picked through the ghostly remains we’d discovered, then tossed a mangled knife back down into the mess. “Do you think that was an accident?”

“Or by design?”

Flynn’s jaw muscles flexed. His eyes were too bright, his skin too pale, as he considered that. “Seems like the perfect way to cover something up. No known survivors to pass on the news of what they’d done.” He looked across at Glacier. “No gossipy dragons talking amongst themselves.”

“They were sent on a suicide mission?” Soren seemed personally offended by such an idea. Wraith nuzzled his side, and he scratchedat the dragon’s muzzle absentmindedly. “Men I might be able to come at, but dragons? They’re too valuable to waste on such a thing.”

“And yet there were many, many dragons killed here.”

At Brom’s words, Glimmer stepped forward.

Dragons are power, she said, her voice taking on a strange, almost hollow edge.They have always been such. The smaller dragons on the continent were hunted, killed, or enslaved. Only the largest and most powerful could flee, crossing the channel to Nevermere. That’s why we didn’t want humans here.

Tanis?I asked on a hunch.

Glimmer met my gaze, but I wasn’t sure who was talking right now.

Power cannot be allowed to exist unclaimed.

I wanted to argue, but the evidence was before us. Human bones, dragon bones, small and big, were scattered across the ground. It must either fit within existing structures or…?

That’s why the humans destroyed the hatching grounds, I thought. We were taught that the wild dragons grew greedy, were burning people’s crops, seizing their stock animals with little thought to farmer’s livelihood, but what if…? History belonged to the victors, and it was obvious from my memories of Dragon Home who that was.

Humans.

But what we built would always be threatened by the presence of free dragons. They were so much bigger, more powerful, able to dispatch hundreds of people with one breath of ice, fire, or acid. The very thing that made them so desirable as parts of our armed forces?—

Made them a threat to national security.

One of my father’s hunting dogs went into heat and mated with a local mongrel, not the sire the dogman had in mind. I had been excited by the idea of puppies, but my father made clear that these would not survive. Would not be allowed to. The estate couldn’t afford to bring more animals into the world than it could sustain, so each one had to justify its purpose in a way.

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