Page 3 of Dragon Fire

Stirrings of the attraction he had felt for her when they were both dragonets in training bothered him. What could he offer a beautiful dragon such as she? She was one of the greatest flyers in the land, tasked with teaching the best of the best youngsters. She was stealth personified with her sky blue coloring and ability to soar so high and creatively that nobody could spot her from the ground—even those who knew what to look for when she was aloft.

Hrardorr was miserable. He had nothing to offer the lovely dragoness. He would never pick another knight. He could not form the five-personed family that was the norm in the Lair—the two dragons, their two knights, and a human woman to complete the circle.

Genlitha was as miserable as Hrardorr, in her own way. She seethed quietly, doing her job with quiet dignity, teaching the younger flyers how to best utilize their wings on the tricky air currents in this area. She also flew reconnaissance missions with Gowan, who was as silent as stone lately.

He’d taken steely resolve to a whole new level since the battle. Genlitha still wasn’t absolutely certain what had happened that night when she’d stayed in the snug boathouse with Hrardorr ostensiblyguardingthe cache of diamond blades that Livia’s artisans had been turning into harmless baubles since the day after the battle. She and Hrardorr had talked long into the night, catching up on all the years they’d missed.

They’d known each other as dragonets, but their paths hadn’t crossed again until now. Hrardorr had made quite a name for himself in the intervening decades. He’d been a ruthless fighter and leader of dragons and men in his own right. And then, he’d been blinded by skith venom.

And now, he was here. In theretirementLair. Oh, nobody said it out loud where anyone who might be offended could hear, but everyone knew the Southern Lair was a cushy assignment in a lovely climate for old bones. Knights came here when they got old, and promising youngsters were sent to learn from their elders. Nothing ever happened here, it was said.

Until it had.

A foreign enemy had decided that, while the main part of Draconia’s defenses were engaged on the Northern and Eastern borders, they’d hit the soft Southern coast at its heart. They’d raided a few smaller towns on their way to the small city of Dragonscove and the Lair above it, but it was becoming clear that their strategy had been to hit hard at the only place that could have given them real resistance.

They’d come armed with dragon-killing weapons. Costly diamond-bladed spears and giant crossbows mounted on a large percentage of their ships. If they’d succeeded in defeating the dragons, the entire southern coast of Draconia would have been theirs for the pillaging. Or invading. The lower half of the country could have been taken over before anyone preoccupied by the fierce fighting up north had a chance to do anything about it.

But the enemy hadn’t bargained on Hrardorr.

Part sea dragon, he could swim like a fish—and somehow see underwater even though his eyes were blind—but he could also breathe fire, unlike a full-blood sea dragon. He’d been their secret weapon, and he’d turned the tide of the battle distinctly in the defenders’ favor.

It wasn’t going too far to say that he’d saved the town. Not that he’d let anyone give him the kudos he was due. Hrardorr spent more time out of the Lair than in it nowadays.

Genlitha suspected he was spending his nights in Livia’s boathouse, but she wasn’t certain. She couldn’t swim gracefully underwater like Hrardorr. The only way she could get into the boathouse was if someone opened the door for her. Hrardorr, half sea dragon that he was, could just swim up under the doors and enter the structure from below.

He was back to avoiding her, and Genlitha didn’t like it. Not one bit.

She’d thought they’d made such progress toward understanding each other the night after the battle, but then, he’d closed himself off again and gone into hiding. Or as close as a giant blind dragon could come to actual hiding.

But Genlitha could be patient. She’d lived a long time already without Hrardorr. She’d survived the loss of knights and chosen new ones. In fact, her partnership with Gowan was still new. He’d been a fighting man—a soldier, leader and trainer of warriors—before he caught her eye and she’d decided he would be her next knight partner.

Gowan was still learning how to be a knight. Not having grown up among dragons, Gowan knew next to nothing about the life he had agreed to lead as her partner, but he was learning. Genlitha had hoped he and Seth were learning to share as paired knights do. She had great hopes that someday Hrardorr would wake up enough to see what was right in front of him.

Seth had been helping Hrardorr from the moment he’d arrived in the Southern Lair. Seth was the apprentice to the Lair’s elderly healer, Bronwyn. As such, he’d helped Hrardorr with the tasks the blind dragon could not do for himself. Having no knight, Hrardorr needed human help from time to time, and Seth was the man to provide it.

Seth had also been studying sword work and other fighting arts with Gowan in his spare time. That had come in handy when the groups of enemy sailors had made it to shore. Seth had commanded the cannon fire from the top of the battlements at the mouth of the harbor. He’d also fought back to back with Gowan against large numbers of enemy sailors armed with cutlass and dagger when the aging cannons had not been enough and the enemy had made it to land.

The sword Gowan had commissioned as a gift for his student had come in handy that day. Seth had been blooded and proven. He’d shown all the doubters in the Lair where he’d grown up that he was much more than they thought. He was a capable warrior, like his fathers before him, even if he’d chosen to help the woman who’d been like a grandmother to him instead of carrying on his studies in warfare as a young man.

And then, Seth and Gowan had spent time with Livia, and Genlitha had gotten ideas. She hadn’t shared her speculations with anyone yet, but she still thought it was awfully coincidental that the man Hrardorr liked most at the moment, Seth, was involved with Livia, who was also involved with Gowan. If Hrardorr and Genlitha got together, their knights would, of necessity, share a wife between them. With the attraction flaring bright between Gowan, Livia and Seth, it made sense that they would be the perfect human partners to a dragon mating between Genlitha and Hrardorr.

But Hrardorr refused to chose Seth as his knight. Unless and until that happened, Genlitha and Hrardorr could never be together.

If Genlitha were to give in to her attraction to Hrardorr and go so far as to join in a mating flight with him, the spillover of emotion and passion would fry Gowan’s mind unless he had a mate of his own. Not just any woman would do either. It had to be a mate of the heart, bonded soul to soul. Only that kind of bond could handle the dragons’ passion that would ultimately leak over to their knights.

It was a rule of being a fighting dragon and having a knight partner. Until your knights had a mate of their own, the dragons must never join.

Genlitha had always thought that a small price to pay to defend her land and people, but now that she was around Hrardorr again…

And so, Genlitha was miserable too, though she hid it better than most. She was a patient dragon. She could wait a little longer.

Gowan was angry. He silently seethed about the way Captain O’Dare had treated not only him and Seth, but Livia especially. She wasn’t a child. She was a woman who had apparently grown up without benefit of having her father around much at all.

Now that he was here, though, he seemed intent on treating her as the child he remembered rather than the woman who had evolved while he’d been gallivanting across the waves. The man shouldn’t be allowed to have it both ways. He might be the wealthiest merchant in Dragonscove, and the most powerful, but he was just a man. Gowan could take him in single combat. At least, he thought he could.

But it would kill Livia if Gowan fought with the man. Despite everything—the neglect and the poor treatment—Captain O’Dare was her father, and she loved him.

But Gowan loved her too. Shocking as that thought was.

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