Page 188 of The Wild Prince's Favorite
No, she couldn’t let her chance to get away go so easily. She didn’t want to risk spending the night down here and freezing until she got sick. Her father might think she had become somewhat invulnerable because she was pregnant, but she wasn’t, and even if she had been, Alezya wouldn’t have wanted to spend a single night in this crevice.
She had to get out, and she couldn’t wait around for someone else to decide if she was worth saving or not.
“Do you think my father will leave me down here long?” Alezya hissed. “If he even gets a whiff of another clan trying tosave me, he’ll haul me to somewhere you won’t be able to reach. He will be the one your clans have to negotiate with, and I will have no say. Is that what you want?”
“B-but you said he couldn’t command the dragon!”
“He can’t, but I can, and there are many things my father could do to force me to do his bidding. You saw how he treated me last night, how my whole clan treated me. Do you really want to risk me being thrown into a hole you can’t get to next time? Leave your clan’s fate in my father’s hands? Or mine? Get me out now, or the Munsa Clan won’t get any immunity from the dragon at all.”
She heard them whisper in panicked voices, trying to decide what to do. Alezya glanced down at Niiru, who was also waiting but had turned its eyes to her as soon as it noticed her staring.
The little dragon immediately jumped to its feet, looking ready for action. It gave Alezya an idea.
“We really need to get out of here,” she said.
“...We? Who’s with you?”
“Fly,” she whispered to the small dragon.
Niiru let out a cheerful, high-pitched growl, and excitedly spread its wings, immediately flying high and out of the cave. She heard the panicked voices of the men, who had most likely not expected a baby dragon to jump out of there.
“Come back.”
Alezya would have never thought the training she had done with Kein would help her order around a baby dragon, but sure enough, Niiru flew back into the crevice, its tiny wings appearing to be just big enough to support its body weight.
Much to Alezya’s surprise, instead of landing somewhere in the area, it dove right toward her, and she had nowhere to go, so in a last-second attempt to trust the young dragon, she opened her arms, and caught it as it landed all four paws on her. She almost lost her footing from how heavy the baby dragon was, butNiiru held on just fine, putting its front paws over her shoulder and nestling against her neck like it was the most natural thing in the world to cuddle against a human.
Alezya wrapped her arms around the young dragon to support it, but it was as heavy as Lumie, if not heavier, and she still had a hard time believing what it was doing. Its hind legs were pressed against her stomach, the claws digging into the leather, making her glad she wasn’t naked, or this would have been painful for her.
“She has a dragon,” someone whispered in disbelief. “She really has a dragon down there with her!”
“Get her out,” another voice hissed. “Let’s just get her out and bring her to the leaders. They can decide what to do with her then.”
Alezya let out a heavy sigh of relief.
Seconds later, a rope appeared, and she told Niiru to fly and get off of her so she could grab the bag of food and give it to the young black dragon to hold while it was flying next to her.
“Fly,” she said. “Up.”
Niiru let out one of its cute little growls, but instead of taking off, it flapped its wings just enough to remain at Alezya’s eye level, and while she held onto the rope and was slowly pulled up, it kept flying at her level as if checking on her ascent.
The lift was slow and scary, making Alezya hold on to that rope for dear life and mentally remind herself not to look down. She could climb the flank of a mountain very confidently, but being suspended by a single rope mere feet above rock-solid ice was one of the scariest experiences of her life. She would take a dragon ride any day over this.
She tried to have faith, but it felt insanely long. If anything happened, if her father’s men came or something and those men dropped her, she might fall to her death this time...
Finally, her head reached the surface, and two hands grabbed under her arms to drag her up to a safe position. Niiru, who was following close behind, growled as soon as the men’s hands touched Alezya, and they dropped their grip a second later.
“Niiru,” she scolded the young dragon.
It stopped, turning its big amber eyes to her with curiosity written all over its baby dragon face. Still wary of how unstable the ground around a crevice could be, Alezya crawled on all fours until she was in a safe-looking area, and let out a heavy sigh.
“A-are you alright?”
The men looked too scared to approach her now, with a fierce baby dragon guarding her. Alezya nodded, before she slowly stood. Her arms and shoulders were painful from holding on to the rope, but now that she was confirming for herself that there had been only three men to pull the rope, she couldn’t complain about the slow lift.
She immediately realized they were from the clan with the braids, as they all had some intricate hairstyles full of braids, as long as a woman’s hair.
“Munsa Clan, was it?” she said.
