Dragon Fire: Dragon Knights (The Sea Captain's Daughter Book 2) Read online

  He’d taken steely resolve to a whole new level since the battle. Genlitha still wasn’t absolutely certain what had happened that night when she’d stayed in the snug boathouse with Hrardorr ostensibly guarding the cache of diamond blades that Livia’s artisans had been turning into harmless baubles since the day after the battle. She and Hrardorr had talked long into the night, catching up on all the years they’d missed.

  They’d known each other as dragonets, but their paths hadn’t crossed again until now. Hrardorr had made quite a name for himself in the intervening decades. He’d been a ruthless fighter and leader of dragons and men in his own right. And then, he’d been blinded by skith venom.

  And now, he was here. In the retirement Lair. Oh, nobody said it out loud where anyone who might be offended could hear, but everyone knew the Southern Lair was a cushy assignment in a lovely climate for old bones. Knights came here when they got old, and promising youngsters were sent to learn from their elders. Nothing ever happened here, it was said.

  Until it had.

  A foreign enemy had decided that, while the main part of Draconia’s defenses were engaged on the Northern and Eastern borders, they’d hit the soft Southern coast at its heart. They’d raided a few smaller towns on their way to the small city of Dragonscove and the Lair above it, but it was becoming clear that their strategy had been to hit hard at the only place that could have given them real resistance.

  They’d come armed with dragon-killing weapons. Costly diamond-bladed spears and giant crossbows mounted on a large percentage of their ships. If they’d succeeded in defeating the dragons, the entire southern coast of Draconia would have been theirs for the pillaging. Or invading. The lower half of the country could have been taken over before anyone preoccupied by the fierce fighting up north had a chance to do anything about it.

  But the enemy hadn’t bargained on Hrardorr.

  Part sea dragon, he could swim like a fish—and somehow see underwater even though his eyes were blind—but he could also breathe fire, unlike a full-blood sea dragon. He’d been their secret weapon, and he’d turned the tide of the battle distinctly in the defenders’ favor.

  It wasn’t going too far to say that he’d saved the town. Not that he’d let anyone give him the kudos he was due. Hrardorr spent more time out of the Lair than in it nowadays.

  Genlitha suspected he was spending his nights in Livia’s boathouse, but she wasn’t certain. She couldn’t swim gracefully underwater like Hrardorr. The only way she could get into the boathouse was if someone opened the door for her. Hrardorr, half sea dragon that he was, could just swim up under the doors and enter the structure from below.

  He was back to avoiding her, and Genlitha didn’t like it. Not one bit.

  She’d thought they’d made such progress toward understanding each other the night after the battle, but then, he’d closed himself off again and gone into hiding. Or as close as a giant blind dragon could come to actual hiding.

  But Genlitha could be patient. She’d lived a long time already without Hrardorr. She’d survived the loss of knights and chosen new ones. In fact, her partnership with Gowan was still new. He’d been a fighting man—a soldier, leader and trainer of warriors—before he caught her eye and she’d decided he would be her next knight partner.

  Gowan was still learning how to be a knight. Not having grown up among dragons, Gowan knew next to nothing about the life he had agreed to lead as her partner, but he was learning. Genlitha had hoped he and Seth were learning to share as paired knights do. She had great hopes that someday Hrardorr would wake up enough to see what was right in front of him.

  Seth had been helping Hrardorr from the moment he’d arrived in the Southern Lair. Seth was the apprentice to the Lair’s elderly healer, Bronwyn. As such, he’d helped Hrardorr with the tasks the blind dragon could not do for himself. Having no knight, Hrardorr needed human help from time to time, and Seth was the man to provide it.

  Seth had also been studying sword work and other fighting arts with Gowan in his spare time. That had come in handy when the groups of enemy sailors had made it to shore. Seth had commanded the cannon fire from the top of the battlements at the mouth of the harbor. He’d also fought back to back with Gowan against large numbers of enemy sailors armed with cutlass and dagger when the aging cannons had not been enough and the enemy had made it to land.

  The sword Gowan had commissioned as a gift for his student had come in handy that day. Seth had been blooded and proven. He’d shown all the doubters in the Lair where he’d grown up that he was much more than they thought. He was a capable warrior, like his fathers before him, even if he’d chosen to help the woman who’d been like a grandmother to him instead of carrying on his studies in warfare as a young man.

  And then, Seth and Gowan had spent time with Livia, and Genlitha had gotten ideas. She hadn’t shared her speculations with anyone yet, but she still thought it was awfully coincidental that the man Hrardorr liked most at the moment, Seth, was involved with Livia, who was also involved with Gowan. If Hrardorr and Genlitha got together, their knights would, of necessity, share a wife between them. With the attraction flaring bright between Gowan, Livia and Seth, it made sense that they would be the perfect human partners to a dragon mating between Genlitha and Hrardorr.

  But Hrardorr refused to chose Seth as his knight. Unless and until that happened, Genlitha and Hrardorr could never be together.

  If Genlitha were to give in to her attraction to Hrardorr and go so far as to join in a mating flight with him, the spillover of emotion and passion would fry Gowan’s mind unless he had a mate of his own. Not just any woman would do either. It had to be a mate of the heart, bonded soul to soul. Only that kind of bond could handle the dragons’ passion that would ultimately leak over to their knights.

  It was a rule of being a fighting dragon and having a knight partner. Until your knights had a mate of their own, the dragons must never join.

  Genlitha had always thought that a small price to pay to defend her land and people, but now that she was around Hrardorr again…

  And so, Genlitha was miserable too, though she hid it better than most. She was a patient dragon. She could wait a little longer.

  Gowan was angry. He silently seethed about the way Captain O’Dare had treated not only him and Seth, but Livia especially. She wasn’t a child. She was a woman who had apparently grown up without benefit of having her father around much at all.

  Now that he was here, though, he seemed intent on treating her as the child he remembered rather than the woman who had evolved while he’d been gallivanting across the waves. The man shouldn’t be allowed to have it both ways. He might be the wealthiest merchant in Dragonscove, and the most powerful, but he was just a man. Gowan could take him in single combat. At least, he thought he could.

  But it would kill Livia if Gowan fought with the man. Despite everything—the neglect and the poor treatment—Captain O’Dare was her father, and she loved him.

  But Gowan loved her too. Shocking as that thought was.

  He’d realized, only after being summarily thrown out of her house, that somewhere along the line, he’d fallen for her. She was adventurous, intelligent beyond any other woman he’d ever known, and as gorgeous as a morning sunrise. She was perfect in every way, and he wanted to make her his wife.

  Mate. That’s what the dragons called it.

  Now that he was a knight, it wasn’t so simple. A mate would have to be shared between him and whoever the knight was that partnered Genlitha’s eventual mate. Genlitha had shown no preference for any particular male dragon, though Gowan secretly thought she had a thing for Hrardorr—impossible as that was.

  Hrardorr would never choose another knight. Everyone knew that. He had vowed it publicly and adamantly. It was a shame because, despite his disability, Hrardorr had proven himself to still be a formidable dragon. He had skills and abilities that no other dragon Gowan knew of could beat, or even match.

  Those traits should b
e passed on, but what did Gowan know? He was only a simple warrior, plucked out of obscurity by Genlitha not all that long ago. She had made him a knight, and while he wouldn’t change a thing about that, he also never forgot that he was just a soldier at heart.

  Oh, he’d been born to a noble family, but as a younger son with no prospects and an older brother who wanted everything for himself, Gowan had had no expectations. He’d earned his own way since he was a young man, turned out on his ear by his older brother, with only the clothes on his back and his favorite horse, shortly after their father had died. Since then, Gowan had survived on his wits and brawn alone.

  Until Genlitha. She’d changed everything in the blink of an eye. She was magic. And the best friend he’d ever had. He loved her as a sister, fighting partner and friend, but she’d changed what he could expect for the rest of his life. Because of her, everything had changed. Now, if he found a wife, he’d have to share her, and though Livia had been willing to be with Gowan and Seth at the same time on two incredibly memorable occasions, he didn’t know if she’d be willing to accept that for life.

  Or that she would be a mate for whichever knight turned out to be partner to Genlitha’s ultimate mate. It was a chancy proposition, and Gowan had his doubts that so many variables would ever line up in his favor.

  Frankly, just thinking about it all gave him a headache. And then, his thoughts turned back to Captain O’Dare, and Gowan wanted to growl in frustration. His thoughts went round and round in a vicious circle lately.

  It was all he could do to keep his mind on his duties. Genlitha had laid into the leadership over their fear and near-inaction during the battle, which had earned him the far patrols for the past week. Suffice to say, he and Genlitha weren’t the most popular pair in the Lair at the moment, but that was all right by Gowan.

  He didn’t need to be popular. He just needed all his people to be at their peak of performance, which, sadly, the leadership of the Southern Lair and many of its knights just weren’t. The youngsters, he’d found, were eager and followed his instruction faithfully. It was the old timers who balked.

  They’d embraced the usual tranquility of the retirement Lair, and when they’d been called upon to defend the city below their mountain Lair, they’d nearly failed. If not for Hrardorr, Gowan hated to think what would have happened.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The far patrols weren’t that bad, really, Gowan decided after a while. He’d mostly gotten over the anger he’d felt at the way he and Genlitha were treated by the elders in the Lair after the battle. His respect level for those old men was at an all-time low, however. They would probably never regain his regard.

  He wouldn’t go so far as to call them cowards—the way Genlitha had done, which had earned them this form of semi-exile—but they certainly weren’t what he expected of fighting men—especially knights of the realm. Gowan had fought beside and trained many warriors in his time. He knew the breed, and he had expected knights were a caliber higher than most soldiers.

  However, if these men who ran the Southern Lair had ever been true warriors, they were far from it now. They’d spent too many years sitting on their backsides and letting others fight the battles in the country. They’d grown soft and scared.

  Softness could be remedied with hard work. Fear, however, was another thing entirely.

  “Heads up,” came Genlitha’s voice in his mind as they were flying yet another endless far patrol. “Something comes on wings from the south.”

  Gowan thought through what he knew of this region’s geography. There was nothing to the south except ocean…and one island that had recently been rediscovered out of the mists of legend. Gryphon Isle.

  “Is it a gryphon?” he asked his dragon partner. She had much keener eyesight than he did and would see anything approaching long before him.

  “Can’t tell yet. Too far.” She veered southward to meet the potential threat. A few wingbeats later, she spoke again. “Those wings are not like mine. They are feathered. It is a gryphon. I will try to bespeak it.”

  Genlitha’s wingbeats picked up speed as she glided toward the gryphon. She approached from above, Gowan noted. The gryphons had wicked claws and sharp beaks, but their feathered wings and furred bodies were vulnerable to dragon fire. In the unlikely event that this one was unfriendly, Genlitha took the high ground, using her coloration and the sun to hide her location for as long as possible.

  “He says he’s a messenger from Gryphon Isle sent to the Southern Lair with urgent information. His name sounds like…Flurrthith. I think that’s it. Gryphons have funny names,” Genlitha observed. “I will fly out to meet him, then, if he is what he claims, we can guide him to the Lair.”

  More a passenger than participant in this sort of mission, Gowan was eager to get his first close look at a gryphon. He’d heard about them, of course. There were a few making a bit of a splash in the capital at the moment, that were the talk of the town. But he’d never seen one up close or talked to any. He wondered if this one would talk to him. They were rumored to be somewhat aloof creatures that must be approached with what seemed like exaggerated respect.

  He’d been taught the protocols, though he hadn’t thought he’d ever have to use them. He remained silent, not trying to communicate with the spec in the distance that grew rapidly larger. If the gryphon wanted to talk to him, it would make first contact—or so he’d been told.

  “Greetings, Sir Knight,” came an unfamiliar voice in Gowan’s mind. “I am Flurrthith, messenger from Gryphon Isle and the great wizard Gryffid.”

  “Greetings to you as well, Sir Flurrthith. I am Gowan, partner to Lady Genlitha. My lady informs me we are to escort you to the Lair.”

  “Thank you, Sir Gowan. I have never been away from home before, but I am fastest of my age group, and they knew I had the best chance of evading the arrows.”

  “Arrows?” Both Gowan and Genlitha spoke at the same time, concerned.

  “Oh, yes. The pirates came and have besieged the island. Gryffid is fighting them off with his magic for now. We tried first, but they have sharp arrows on giant catapults. Many of us were badly hurt before we realized.” The gryphon’s voice seemed awfully young to Gowan, though he was surely no judge of such things. Still, the tentativeness of the words and their delivery made Gowan think of a youngling.

  “Flurrthith, if you don’t mind my asking, how old are you?” Genlitha asked gently, including Gowan in the conversation.

  “I have seen ten summers, milady,” the gryphon answered. Gowan inwardly cursed. Things had to be really bad on Gryphon Isle if they sent a child out with their message. Gowan assumed it meant that all able-bodied fighters were otherwise occupied…or injured…or dead.

  This news was grave, and Flurrthith hadn’t even delivered his message yet. Gowan frowned, thinking what dire situations could have caused the wizard Gryffid to send out this child on such a dangerous mission, when he was purported to love his creations—the gryphons—so very much.

  Genlitha began to curve her wings, tilting so she looped around and came up flying beside the small gryphon, both headed in the same direciton—toward the mainland. He really was small, but he had enormous wings for a youngster. No wonder he was the fastest of his age group. After watching Genlitha train the young dragons at the Southern Lair, he knew what to look for in wingspan and shape.

  “All right, Flurrthith,”Genlitha said softly, coming up alongside the youngster. “Just stay in my draft, and it should be a little easier for you. You’ve done marvelously well to get to us. We will help you get the rest of the way.”

  “Thank you, milady. Land is a lot farther away than I imagined.” His comment made Gowan want to both laugh and comfort the young creature.

  Flurrthith was about half Genlitha’s size. Gowan’s instructors had claimed full-grown gryphons were as large as dragons, so judging by his size, Flurrthith was definitely a juvenile.

  His wings were feathered, and the fur on the lower half of his body was m
ottled brown, tan and white. He had small spots in places, little stripes in others, as if the lower half of him couldn’t figure out what kind of cat it wanted to be…tiger or leopard. Maybe he was a bit of both? It was said Gryffid was still experimenting with his creations on his island. Perhaps he was improving on the gryphons in some way and this remarkable youngster was the result?

  Gowan would not ask. It seemed too personal a question and would probably be considered insulting. Even as a juvenile, a gryphon was not a creature to insult lightly. Flurrthith might look cute and fuzzy, but he was also deadly. Of that Gowan had no doubt.

  “You have a very nice wingspan, Flurrthith.” Genlitha conversed with the gryphon, probably trying to put him at ease and perhaps learn more before they reached the Lair.

  “Thank you, milady.” Flurrthith seemed tired, but they still had a long way to go. His aim had been a little off, but luckily, Gowan and Genlitha had been in the right place at the right time to intercept him.

  “Genlitha was sent here to train the younger dragons,” Gowan put in, hoping to help the cause of friendship. “So she knows good wings when she sees them, even if yours are feathered and hers aren’t.”

  “I love to fly, but I have never been this far before,” Flurrthith told them. “The island has never come under attack before in my lifetime.”

  “Can you tell us more about the attackers?” Genlitha asked gently. They could both hear the despair in the juvenile’s thoughts.

  “They came in ships. Many ships with ragged sails. Some were burned on the edges. And they have dangerous weapons that can kill a gryphon outright. Then Gryffid came and did something magical to repel the ships, but he said there were too many, and that his protections wouldn’t last for long. That’s when they decided to send me to tell the dragons what was happening and ask if maybe some of them could come help us.”

  “We were also attacked not long ago by a fleet of ships,” Gowan told the youngster. “They tried to overrun the town of Dragonscove, which lies below the Lair.”