House of Dragons (Royal Houses 1)

“Kerrigan, I’m so sorry,” Darby whispered.

“We never expected this to happen. Not in a million years,” Hadrian said.

“No,” she agreed. “In fact, it hasn’t happened in the nearly thousand since the inception of the House of Dragons.”

“It’s bullshit,” Lyam snapped, sharp as a whip.

That almost dragged a smile from her features.

“Lyam,” Darby admonished.

“It’s true,” he cut right in. “The whole thing is beneath the House of Dragons and the Society. They should have never let that happen.”

“He’s right,” Hadrian said softly. “I don’t know how it could have happened. You had already negotiated with Ellerby. He’d been your choice for months.”

“Yeah, and then he disappeared right before my turn came,” she told them.

Darby blinked in surprise. “He disappeared?”

“Yes. He just vanished. Left the room before he could pick me.”

“That’s odd.”

“Sabotage?” Lyam questioned.

Kerrigan shrugged. “Or a change of heart because of these.” She swept aside the braids in her hair and revealed her slightly pointed ears.

Darby shook her head. “It can’t be. That’s the lowest of the low.”

“You don’t know what it’s like out there, Darbs.”

Hadrian cut in, “We don’t. But the Society is honorable. They would never have let that happen. They took you in, knowing you were half.”

“And things have changed,” she reminded them. She gestured to the protests outside. “That isn’t normal either.”

“But they’re not protesting you,” Lyam said. “They’re protesting the tournament.”

“And you do remember the last time people started to protest the tournament?”

Her friends collectively fell silent. They remembered. They remembered that fateful night. She had come back bruised and bloody. Lucky not to be dead. Her world had never been the same.

“I can’t just stand here,” Kerrigan finally said. “I need to go see what’s happening with the protests.”

“What?” Hadrian asked.

“Kerrigan, just wait here. The Society will handle it.”

Maybe they would, but she hated standing around and feeling useless. She needed to do something. She had enough magic to help the Society if the protests got out of hand. And she wanted to be there to see if her vision came true. If the red-masked figure appeared again.

“There’s a back way out,” Kerrigan said.

They’d walked every inch of this building in the years before. Younger Dragon Blessed always helped prepare the ceremony, as surely as they had this year.

“Kerrigan, don’t go,” Darby said.

“Come with me.”

Darby shook her head. Kerrigan saw in Hadrian’s eyes that he couldn’t do it. When she turned to Lyam, she was expecting a similar no from him. He’d lost so much of his edge of adventure in the last year. One day, he’d been her right hand, and the next, he’d confessed his feelings and been determined to protect her.

But what she saw on his face today was what she remembered from so many years in the past. She couldn’t help her own face from mirroring it.

“I’ll go,” he agreed.

“Lyam!” Hadrian and Darby said together.

“We’ll be back soon,” Lyam told them.

Kerrigan just nodded, and they were off. They passed through the crowd barred inside, slipped through a side exit into a servants’ corridor, and then followed it until they reached a back entrance. Lyam unbarred the door as Kerrigan used her magic to lift the lock. It would be dangerous to leave it without barring the door again. But it was much harder to do magic when she couldn’t see. Instead, she flicked her wrist and put a bit of rock against the handle. She spelled it so that if someone tried to open the door, she would be alerted. It was a trick that she’d learned while living in the House of Dragons when everyone wanted to sneak into each other’s rooms.

“If something happens, we can rush back,” she told Lyam.

He nodded. “We should be quick.”

Kerrigan agreed. The pair slunk through the shadows. They couldn’t get too close to what was happening. Kerrigan was far from inconspicuous. She was still in her pink party gown, and if that wasn’t enough, her red hair was a beacon. Together, they crept along the side of the building and turned the corner to catch sight of what was transpiring.

Kerrigan was almost disappointed to see the Society members working in perfect synchronicity. That the humans she’d witnessed were being herded back into orderly lines, save for a few who had clearly acted violently. The Society Guard were hauling about a dozen past Kerrigan and Lyam’s hiding spot. Her gaze was trained on those people as she wondered if they were the same ones from her vision. She knew there had to be a reason that she had seen them… seen this whole protest.

The visions showed episodes of importance. They showed what would happen but not why it mattered. But somehow, she just knew that this moment had significance.

“Kerrigan,” Lyam hissed through his teeth.

And then she saw exactly what she had been looking for. Not the protesters in her vision… but Clover.