Wolf Princess Sold to the Dragon King

The gold recognized him. It parted. He walked through fire the way other men walk through doors and dropped to his knees in front of Guinevere before the flame closed behind him.

”Baby.” Both hands on her face. His mouth on hers. Four hours of hell compressed into a kiss that tasted like whiskey and tears.

He felt her push against his chest.

He looked down.

His brother was on the ground. Still. Blood-soaked. Eyes half-open and looking at nothing. Maddox was on the ground beside Kael in under a second. His fingers searched for his brother’s pulse. Nothing.

”Kael. Wake up.”

Nothing.

”Wake up, Kael.”

Silence.

”That’s an order.” His voice was a draconic command. Pure, undiluted, king-to-subject authority. ”Kael Ashenvale. Open your eyes.”

Kael did not open his eyes.

Maddox pressed both palms flat on his brother’s chest. Gold poured from his hands into his brother’s body. He watched it spread across Kael’s ribs, watched it search for the heartbeat, watched it come back with nothing.

He pushed more.

More.

”Wake up.” The command voice was gone. What replaced it was quieter and worse. ”Come on, Kael. You didn’t say the phrase.”

The gold flickered across Kael’s chest and faded. Maddox pushed again. The light came back weaker. He pushed again. Weaker still.

”You didn’t say fuck me, I’m thirsty.” He was whispering now. ”Now wake up so I can hit you for calling my wife pretty.”

Kael did not wake up.

Maddox pressed his forehead to his brother’s chest and held it there, and the sound that came out of him was not a word and not a cry and not anything that had a name.

It was the sound of a man who had spent four hours being the king and needed thirty seconds to be the brother, and the brother’s chest was still, and the thirty seconds were all he was going to get.

”Maddox, Aldric can fix this,” Guinevere whispered. ”I’ll get him.”

Maddox didn’t move. His forehead was pressed to his brother’s sternum and his hands were flat on Kael’s ribs and he was listening for a heartbeat he wasn’t going to find with his ears but couldn’t stop looking for with his hands.

Guinevere: Jaxon, I need a portal inside this flame circle. Assuming you’re here. Aldric, I need you ready on the other side.

Ryker: We’re in stealth, Gwen. Can you hold that flame long enough—

Guinevere: Yes. Hurry. Kael isn’t breathing.

Jaxon: Copy.

Maddox’s throat worked. His eyes closed. His jaw clenched so hard she felt it under her palms.

”Aldric,” he repeated the word in a daze. The word was gutted. Hollow.

She lifted Kael’s head off the dirt and slid her cloak underneath it, folding the edge twice because the ground on Diplomat Row was disgusting and Kael Ashenvale was not lying on filth on her watch.

Then she saw Kael’s ring was glowing.

At the same moment she noticed it, a warmth surged through her, faster than before, with the aggression of a tide that had run out of patience for her opinion.

FWOOMPH.

The gold cylinder of fire, the one that had turned night into noon, guttered and dropped like a curtain cut from its rod.

WHOOOOSH.

White light detonated from her, much stronger than the gold, hitting Diplomat Row like the hand of a god flicking a table clear.

Every soldier who had just gotten vertical from the gold blast ate the ground again on the white one. Four dice games went up in a fountain of coins, soldiers cartwheeling backward into the dark. The orgy tent took the wave broadside and folded in on its enthusiastic occupants, poles snapping, ropes twanging, five stunned participants disappearing beneath it.

Then Kael inhaled so hard his spine left the ground. The breath that followed was the sound of a man clawing his way back from somewhere he was never meant to return from.

”Fuck me.” Cough. ”I’m thirsty.”

Maddox lifted his head from Kael’s chest, blinking down at him in disbelief. Guinevere was having an identical reaction.

Then Maddox caught the ring glowing on his hand.

”Who’s.” Wheeze. ”Holding me. If it’s Uncle Eron, drop me. I’d rather be dead.”

”It’s not Uncle Eron.” Guinevere wiped her eyes, then looked up surveying the scene.

Diplomat Row, in the space of one heartbeat, became a yard sale run by a hurricane with the King of Light, Landon, standing at the center, untouched and stunned. He looked down at his hands, wearing the expression of a man who had struck a match and instead received a forest fire.

”Am I still pretty?” Kael coughed, eyes closed, blood on his chin. ”Be honest.”

”Kael, stop talking until Aldric can see you,” Guinevere said. ”I know that’s going to be difficult for you, but you are going to need to try.”

Maddox let out a noise between a laugh and a cry and shook his head once.

White portals tore open across Diplomat Row at that exact moment, seams of blinding light splitting the dark, and men poured through them glowing like the King they served, a column of Luminari soldiers spilling into the wreckage.

With a tear-streaked face, Maddox Drakencrest stood, placing himself dead center between his wife and brother, and the glowing king.

”Drakencrest,” Landon called across the ruin, calm as a man greeting an old rival at a funeral.

”Solveil,” Maddox answered, and the single word carried the weight of a history that predated this row, this tent, and this very bad evening. ”I see you’ve met my wife.”

All of Diplomat Row sat up at the sound of Maddox’s voice.

None of them knew that a miracle had just occurred outside of the gold cylinder of flame and the white blast of light that followed.

Every drunk, every gambler, every soul who had been flattened or fondled or soup-drenched in the last five minutes propped themselves up on their elbows and leaned in, frozen, riveted, delighted.

The naked. The bleeding. The stunned. Every last one of them had gone to bed the night before certain THAT had been the show of the season, and every last one of them was now realizing, with the pure joy of a crowd getting a sequel, that the season had merely been warming up.

”I love it here,” a soldier said.

”Is she going to do the light thing again?” another slurred hopefully. ”I want to see the light thing again.”