Blood and Royalty Read Free Page B

“I will only be gone a few days at the most. Marcherion is right. They will try to take Gull’s Reach first. Stave them off there as long as you can, and maybe I can find us a way to poke back at Jenka’s brother in a way he’ll not be expecting.”
    Clover didn’t mention the issue with Princess Amelia being a mystica. She’d slipped the term accidentally before Zahrellion once, when the two were speaking privately of the girl’s strangeness. Zah seemed to understand something might be wrong then, but Clover wasn’t sure if Milly was, or wasn’t, one. The one thing she did know was that she had to find out before the girl matured.
    After a hug, she and Aikira parted ways. Clover then climbed the long, circular stair that led to the dragons’ landing pads. She could levitate like the others seemed to prefer doing, but she wanted to keep her legs strong, and keep her arse firm. After all, she was more than three hundred years old.
    She said a few quick words of respect to the other wyrms relaxing on the enchanted platforms that replenished them so, and then mounted Crimzon in the dusky light.
    “Take me to see the Oracle of Everling,” she told her dragon aloud. The Oracle, if she was still alive, had the box. Clover remembered having to stick her hand in it, but she’d been an adult, and had been riding Crimzon only a few years, at the time. Someone had claimed she was a mystica, probably one of the gambling guilds she’d taken advantage of, and then the elves of Everling had hunted her. They fought her and Crimzon, and lost terribly against them, but eventually persuaded her that she needed to know the last laws of magic, the few things Master Zarvin never got the chance to teach her.
    Once she learned those, she realized that she had to stick her hand in the box, for the legendary strawberry-haired, pale-complected mystica, who were able to give life to things born from just their will, had created horrible evils in the past. They had to be killed.
    Clover wasn’t certain how the thing in the box could tell, but the elves swore it could. She had the characteristics, just like Milly. The red hair and white skin; the power to sway the will of men, and always be favored.
    She remembered the thing touched her, and she’d felt that it was angry for being where it was. Then her arm was out and she was wiggling her tingling fingers before her face.
    She chuckled, for the elves had been even more relieved than she at that moment. Had she been blooded by the thing, and then killed by the elves, they would have then had to deal with Crimzon.
    There was the issue of the girl being a girl, though, and not yet a woman. Clover wasn’t going to steal away with Princess Amelia, at least not until she was sure the Oracle and the box would even work. She had to go see for herself.

Chapter Four
     
     
    Rikky heard the parting conversation between Clover and Aikira and found it didn’t hurt him anymore to be around his ex-lover. Clover had never seen the world in the same way as Rikky, and since Rikky wouldn’t go to some crazed dwarf’s healing fountain in some faraway land and try to see if it would heal him, or more precisely, grow him a new leg, the two of them hadn’t been able to get along. Over the first year or so of their relationship, they had became so close that Rikky considered asking for her hand in marriage. It was a good thing he hadn’t, because just as his courage was at its highest, she told him she was leaving for a time. She said that when she returned they would no longer be together in such a personal way.
    This stunned Rikky. He started training Jericho and Pascal at Kingsman’s Keep to keep his mind off of the heartache, but it had taken more time than they ever spent together to get where he was now. Rikky needed purpose in his life. He was a healer and a teacher at heart, and Clover just wanted to live forever, and bask in the power her dragon, and her dragon tear, afforded her. He understood