Page 73 of The Lost Prince
A woman with blonde hair and cornflower blue eyes brushed herself off and stared at us.
“You,” she marveled.
There was a goddamn dragon hovering over her, but she only had eyes for me. I didn’t like her stare, because I didn’t understand it. And I hated what I didn’t understand.
“I don’t know you,” I pushed out, irritated at her open rudeness.
“Everyone knows you,” she breathed back, voice soft. “The king’s bastard son; the mud boy experiment. But more importantly, I knew your mother.”
I took an involuntary step back. Haseveryoneknown the truth but me? No wonder the Noble boys had wanted nothing to do with me.
“Well, clearly you also pissed off the queen. What did you do? Break her nail?” I sneered.
The woman rolled her eyes.
“I’ve seen … things. By accident, I walked in on my sister and her husband. He… well, anyway, when the queen asked to see me, I thought she wanted to hear what I’d seen because she wasconcerned…”
She barked out a dry laugh.
“The Fireguards tossed me up through the hatch before I could so much as blink. Then the dragon—”
She whipped around as if expecting Zariah to swoop down and finish the job at any moment. He just tilted his massive head to the side at her.
“Did it bring you all here too?” she asked. “My brother was sent to the dragon a few months ago. He isn’t here, is he? I’m really glad he isn’t just eating all of us.”
Her small laugh grated against my nerves.
Shava bit her lip, eyes on the ground.
“The dragon tries to save who he can, but the queen makes it difficult. The four of us are the first of a new … understanding,” I managed, hoping she’d read between the lines.
She nodded, her smile still bright.
“This curse … tell me more.” Because I’d scoured the archives for anything related to a curse and come up short. If there was a record of it, it’d been long destroyed.
The woman glanced around before leaning in. The movement was comical since we were on a cliff in the middle of the desert, miles away from the palace. But I understood her reticence; those instincts to keep knowledge hidden are what kept her alive and able to gather it.
“I hear,” she whispered intensely, “that the curse is on the queen and her family for something they did. It brought the dragon here, and it’s why Nobles disappear. I know the queen didn’t want to take any chances with her bloodline. She forced the king to take a Noble woman, to see if the child would be healthy or cursed. Once you were a few years old and shown no signs of the curse, she had the prince.”
I took all of that in. If that was true, then my mother had been a victim. No wonder she’d always had an aura of sadness that clung to her like a well-worn cloak.
And yet … I wasn’t angry at the king. I knew where to place the blame: directly at the queen’s feet.
“You’ve seen them change?” I clarified, wanting to know exactly what she’d seen.
Her eyes shuttered as she crossed her arms over her chest, as if catching a sudden breeze in the hot sun.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
I frowned as she switched topics faster than a candle flame snuffed out by a puff of air.
“So … where are the others, then? The ones who were saved?” the woman asked, looking around as if they would spring into being. Where would we be hiding them, Shava’s skirts?
Shava’s eyes bored into the side of my head.
“We are the first ones saved I know of. We have a plan in place to save as many people as we can. We’d like you to help us with that.”
I’d rather stick a spoon through my eye than add more people to my plot, but I thought it would be the polite thing to say.
