“A Queen doesn’t need to be organized.” Was that the hint of a smile on his solemn face? “She has people for that.” He tilted his head. “I was born under the sign of Virgo, Your Majesty.”
Lana couldn’t help but laugh at the incongruity. “Right. Good. We have that going for us.”
“Perhaps it’s different where you’re from,” Conrad said thoughtfully. “But for us… our ruling sign dictates the nature of our magic, Your Majesty. Our strengths and weaknesses, our interests, our very natures… I consider myself as closely tied to the stars as I am to my dragon. Is that not so, for you?”
She hesitated. “My mom liked all that stuff, I guess,” she said softly. “But we never talked about it.”
“Well—there are enough books on the topic to keep you reading for a century. But in short… my greatest strength is organization. I am practical, reliable, focused. It makes me dull… but it also makes me excellent at carrying out other people’s visions. Your vision is what will make you our Queen, Lana.”
“I don’t have one.”
“I saw it barely an hour ago,” Conrad said simply. “On the plateau. Are you aware that you effortlessly negotiated peace between the leaders of two communities who have been more or less at war for centuries? It took you five minutes. You may not believe it yourself, Lana, but I do. You’re the Queen we’ve been waiting for.” He smiled. “I know more than a few scholars who will be eager to sit down and talk with you. There have been extensive arguments about certain wording in the prophecy—learning about this different world that you’re from may help resolve some of those arguments. But one thing seems clear—the fact that you’re not from our world is a strength, Lana, not a weakness.”
“I don’t know what to say,” she said finally, feeling more than a little overwhelmed. “I think I’m going to need some time with this.”
Conrad nodded, looking a little abashed.
“Understandable. Let me show you to your quarters. We’ve waited hundreds of years for you, we can wait a little longer for you to settle in.”
Queen, she thought faintly, following Conrad through the hallways. She was the Queen.
Just when she’d managed to convince herself that this wasn’t a dream.
Chapter 8 - Seth
It was disorienting, waking up surrounded on all sides by stone. Seth sat up in bed quickly, feeling his heart still beating hard in his chest as he caught up on where he actually was. The cavern. The secret dragon homeland. Surely he’d dreamed it. But sure enough, when he emerged from his room, blinking in the curious light of the quarters they’d been assigned, his pack was waiting for him… and one look at their faces told him that he hadn’t imagined anything that had happened yesterday.
Right. Time for the hard part of being Alpha. Time to pick a course of action and stick to it, no matter how worried he might feel. He sat down at the large table in the middle of the main room of the accommodation, wrinkling his nose a little as he realized that, like most other things in this place, the chairs were also hewn from stone.
Josef was always on his wavelength. “They know there’s wood, right? Like, they’ve been outside long enough to see that there are trees and consider making something out of them?”
Seth let out a weak but genuine laugh—and just like that, the mood in the room rose a little. Not a lot, but enough to get by. The dragons, it seemed, had brought them breakfast—more bread and cheese, more cured meat. He was beginning to wonder if they should take offense—did the dragons think that wolves didn’t eat fruit or vegetables? Still, the bread was fresh and the cured meat tasty… and in the absence of natural light, a morning meal was at least some indication of the passage of time.
Over breakfast, they talked about the evolving situation. As frustrating as it was not to be able to talk with his parents and the rest of the pack back home, they had a lot to work out, like what could possibly be causing the disappearances, now that they’d eliminated the possibility that the dragons were to blame. The group was split on whether the same force was responsible for the wolves and dragons, or whether two separate enemies might be at play. At least, most of the group was. Elza, for her part, was still convinced that the dragons were responsible for the disappearances of the wolves and that these claims of dragons going missing too were just a cover-up. She wouldn’t be talked out of it, and Seth knew her moods well enough to quickly stop trying. Grief was a hard foe to conquer—almost as hard as the hope he knew she was nursing that her mate was still out there somewhere, alive and well.
By midday, they hadn’t gotten far in their theory-making, but Seth had succeeded in his actual goal, which was taking the wolves’ minds off their captivity for a little while. And when a pair of dragons stopped by the ledge of their quarters to drop off a lunch meal for the group, he was able to flag them down for a moment for some questions. He needn’t have bothered. Though they reluctantly shifted into their human shapes to talk with him, it was clear that neither of them had any love for wolves. They gave noncommittal answers to most of his questions, and when he asked after Lana, they wouldn’t even offer those—simply exchanged dark glances with one another, before shifting without a word and winging their way off into the cavern.
“Well, that was less than helpful,” he said drily as he brought the food back in. No point misleading his people about what the dragons had said—he knew them well enough to know their ears would’ve picked up most of the conversation. “On the positive side, they didn’t say we can’t leave.”
“They didn’t have to,” Elza said, narrowing her eyes. “We’re not getting out of here without wings.”
“Maybe not that way.” Seth nodded towards the ledge. “But there are tunnels dug into the rock behind these quarters. Stands to reason they must go somewhere.”
“Why would they bother with tunnels? They can fly.” Elza looked suspicious. But Seth shrugged.
“If I was building a secret mountain hideout, I’d make sure there was more than one way to get in or out. It’s worth checking out.” Not least because it will keep you four occupied, he thought but didn’t say. Activity was key for keeping up morale—and they just might find a path out of here.
At which point Seth would have to confront the uncomfortable truth that he didn’t actually want to leave this place. Far from it. He wanted to stay—to camp out outside wherever it was they’d taken Lana until she finally agreed to sit down and talk to him, face to face. He needed to know what was going on here—who she was, where she’d come from, why he felt so strangely compelled by even the thought of her. Once he understood that, all of that—well, then he could focus on averting an enormous war between his pack and the considerably-larger-than-he’d-imagined population of dragons who lived a whole lot closer than any of them had ever suspected.
He spent the afternoon pacing the chambers restlessly, gnawing occasionally on a piece of bread when his frustration got too much to handle. He tried shifting to his wolf shape, but it quickly proved unmanageable—his wolf was even more frustrated than he was by their captivity, and he quickly had to shift back to avoid chewing up all the furniture with his great jaws. Finally, there was a flutter of wings on the ledge, and his heart leaped.
“I’ve been ordered to bring the Alpha to the palace,” the bored-looking dragon said, arms folded over her chest.
“I’ll get my pack.”
“Just the Alpha,” the dragon said, her tone not changing. “Not taking anyone else.”
He hesitated, wondering whether this was something he should push. The messenger exhaled hard, clearly annoyed by the delay. “I’ll tell her you don’t want to see her—”