Taron wiggles his bare toes in the dried grass where the Scarland meets the scraggly, still-living weeds that dared to reach from the edge of the forest. “You might as well ask me what the Clan really wants to know.”
Femir snorts and thrusts a robe at Taron. “Are the rumors true? About the Gold.”
Sighing, Taron shrugs the robe on. He didn’t much mind nakedness, preferred it even if he were being honest. But Taron’s kind of nakedness tended to make others uncomfortable. “Yes. I saw it. Emory proposed to her and she hasn’t left the palace since. Except to get her things from my city house.”
Femir swears and turns his face up to the forest. “I suppose that means it’s time to show her.”
Taron nods his head and smooths the lapel of his robe. “Might’ve benefitted her to know all her options before choosing to bind herself to someone like Emory.”
Another curse erupts from Femir. “I don’t disagree with you. I’d rather the Gold bound to one of us than that incompetent prick, but the clan wants war, first and foremost.”
“When I discussed it with her, she was vehemently against marrying him. I don’t know how he got to her, or what changed. She has no moral alignment with the monarchy, I can assure you of that.”
Femir scoffs and snugs the tie to his own robe. “It appears you’re mistaken there—why else marry the prick?”
“I’d have to talk to her to know and the Queen isn’t allowing nonfamily visitors yet. But I know Aubrey, she’s got an angle. That’s the only reason she’d accept him.”
Femir fiddles with the coin purse hanging at his neck. “I’ll inform the clan, but you’d do well to find what that angle is and if we can use it.”
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Already, Taron can taste the sweet scent emanating from within the coin purse, even with its leather cord pulled tightly shut. “We could always steal her. You’d get your war then.”
“I want them to war, kill each other off.” Femir’s lip curls. “Not have their army dumped into the Scarland.”
“Steal her and make it look like Pachuate did it, then.”
Femir’s brow furrows. He loosens the coin purse’s knot and dumps a yellow coin into his palm. Its distinctively sweet tang consumes the air. “I’ll discuss it with the Clan. First, tell her about us. All of it. You have the clan’s permission. Then we’ll discuss how to retrieve her.”
“Well, if I have the clan’s permission.” Taron throws off the robe with exaggerated flourish. Already his skin crawls in titillating anticipation.
“Your flashiness will be the death of you one day.” Femir flicks the coin to Taron.
Taron catches it and the gold’s energy pulses deliciously up his arm. “Flashiness is what has kept me alive this long, Femir.”
Taron smirks as his jaw elongates into a long, toothy maw. The bone-popping click clack grows as his arms elongate back into wide, iridescent wings. He pushes off the ground before his tail has even reached its full length. With Taron’s position, he only gets to fly a few times a year and he never wastes an opportunity to enjoy it. A passionate affair drawn late into the night comes a close second, but never quite fulfills the thrill he gets from flying. There’s nothing like the wind blasting his brow, the feel of soaring, diving, falling.
His wings beat the air as he climbs sharply into the sky, just barely clearing the tops of the trees until he catches an updraft and soars towards the palace.
I feel it before I see it. An odd warmth, a companionable presence flittering at my periphery of consciousness. I move to the edge of my balcony where the jagged cliff face of the mountain spire meets the railing.
Far up on the spire, a gold-glinting green wyvern curls its head and neck around the jagged stone, its body flattened into the black crevices.
Those beautiful, vicious golden eyes meet mine.
Gold one, it echoes into my head.
I stare back, and I am not afraid. “Tell me everything.”
THE END
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