“You don’t have to hang around if you don’t want to, Mr. Seahorse,” I told him. “If you feel like you’d be better off in your meadow, there’s still time to go back before we get too far away.”
But Mr. Seahorse only chimed again and rubbed his little head against my cheek, almost like a cat looking for affection.
My heart melted just a little—he really was the cutest thing. And though I hadn’t been looking for a pet when I rescued him, I found I couldn’t help liking him now that he had apparently adopted me.
“Aww, it’s okay,” I told him, reaching up to stroke his delicate nose very gently with one finger. He chimed happily and nuzzled me some more, so I continued to pet him as Ari’s Drake took us higher and higher into the pale blue sky.
It occurred to me that I had been in mortal fear of meeting the fire-breathing dragon who lived inside Ari not even twenty-four hours ago. And now I had not one but two fire-breathing creatures in my life and I felt perfectly happy about it.
What was happening to me? Was I changing in some way? Or was I simply becoming more comfortable with the strange new world I found myself in?
Whatever the case, I felt more ready than I would have thought to meet Ari’s parents. I was absolutely certain they weren’t going to want me for their son but that almost made me feel calmer about the situation.
Of course I would be on my best behavior, but I didn’t have to worry about ingratiating myself with them or making them like me because I knew in advance they wouldn’t. So, other than being as pleasant as possible, all I could do was just grin and bear it while they told Ari off for daring to love a scarred Made Nocturne instead of the perfect Drake girl they no doubt had picked out for him.
Crap—I wished I hadn’t thought of it quite that way. It made me feel worried all over again about how I looked. But before I could go down the spiral of self-loathing and doubt, I seemed to hear Megan’s voice in my head.
“Nobody can make you feel inferior unless you let them. So don’t let them, Kaitlyn!”
I lifted my chin and straightened my shoulders.
I won’t let them, I told myself. No matter how high and mighty they are, I won’t let these people make me feel bad about myself. I’m a good, kind person and I have people who love me.
That one of those people just happened to be Ari, wasn’t my fault. So the Alpha Drake and his Queen were going to just have to deal with the fact that their son loved someone as completely inappropriate as me.
“They’ll have to deal with it, Mr. Seahorse,” I told my new little friend defiantly. “And I’m not going to let them make me feel bad about myself, no matter what.”
I just hoped I could keep my own resolution. But as a huge, white marble palace came into sight and began to grow larger in the distance, I was already beginning to doubt myself.
72
Kaitlyn
At first I thought the white marble palace—which looked a little like the pictures you always see of the Taj Majal—was really close. But as we kept flying and flying and not getting to it, I realized that it wasn’t close at all—it was actually pretty far away.
What made it appear closer was that it was really big.
After we had flown a little longer, I amended the word big to huge. A little while after that, I was thinking it was immense.
By the time we actually landed on the vast natural plateau it was built on, I had no words. It was like looking at a palace made for giants.
This is how a mouse must feel entering a human house, I thought, as I looked up at the enormous white marble archway that rose at least a hundred feet above my head.
Of course, riding on the Drake’s back made me much taller but even his head didn’t come close to brushing the top of the arching entryway. But he walked with certainty, as though he knew exactly what he was doing. Despite being so big, he had the smooth, loping stride of a cat and I barely swayed at all on his back as he moved on all fours through the entryway and down a vast marble hallway.
The hallway’s walls were set up as a kind of portrait gallery. But there were no people pictured here—only dragons. Or Drakes, I supposed.
The pictures themselves weren’t painted but woven on elaborate tapestries which all looked to be at least thirty meters wide and thirty meters tall. These enormous portraits portrayed dragons of all colors—scarlet, green, royal blue and even some royal purple like Ari’s Drake.