Read Dragon and the Princess for Free Online

horizon.
    “How can you be so heartless?” she demanded, hating to be reduced to pleading.
    “Princess, I can be as heartless as I must.” It was a flat warning that denied any hope of escape. “Are you a child to cling to your home so?”
    “It is not childish to value family, sir. I pity you if you do not!”
    “Oh, I do, Princess. This is all about family, as you will learn. Priest, pray thee, do your work.”
    Pray thee.
The first word he’d used that wasn’t quite right. How did he know Saragondan so well when Saragond and Dorn never interacted beyond this one ceremony?
    A sense of not knowing, of not understanding, swept through Rozlinda like a cold draft. Uneasy men rustled all around. Below, silent faces stared up. Had they any idea what was happening?
    The priest stepped forward. “Er . . . do you assent to use the Saragondan ceremony, sir?”
    “Of course.”
    Reverend Elawin looked around as if hoping someone would intervene, but then raised his practiced, sonorous voice. “Then I declare that all present are witness to the wish of these two, Seyer Rouar of—”
    “Just Rouar,” the Dornaan interrupted.
    The priest gaped, but picked up. “Of these two—Rouar of Dorn and Rozlinda of Saragond, princess of the royal house, Sacrificial Virgin of the blood, revered sacrifice to the dragon . . .”
    Rozlinda listened numbly as her attributes rolled out and the ceremony began. When asked if she willingly and joyfully chose Rouar of Dorn as her husband, she looked from face to face to face. “How can I say yes?”
    “Leave out the joyfully,” the Dornaan said. “I assume the princess is willing to do her duty for her people.”
    “Do you, Rozlinda, willingly choose Rouar of Dorn as your husband?”
    Rozlinda delayed, sure that something, someone, had to intervene. Nothing did. She whispered, “Yes.”
    When the priest put the same question to the Dornaan, his answer was firm.
    Reverend Elawin produced his knife. Rozlinda muttered, “More blood,” but she didn’t protest as he jabbed the fine point into the pad of her hand and then into the pad of the Dornaan’s, nor as her wound was pressed to his.
    “Thus you become one,” the priest intoned. “May blessings rain upon you, bringing prosperity and fertility in your home and in your land. And,” he added hesitantly, “may the blood continue through you.”
    That phrase was used only at the wedding of a princess of the blood. “Is that what this is about?” Rozlinda asked. “You want princesses of the blood for yourselves?”
    “Something like that.”
    She had to admit that made sense. “Will that mean your dragons won’t invade?”
    “I cannot say, Rozlinda.”
    It was the first time he’d said her name, but his doing so didn’t help because the word came strangely from his mouth, with a throat-rolled
r
and the
i
stretched almost to an
ee.
    He spoke a foreign language. His people spoke a foreign language. They probably all looked as peculiar as he did, and had strange, even offensive smells and customs. She looked around frantically again, but he hissed something like, “
Zupsisi.
”
    And the dragon moved.
    Rozlinda yelped and backed away, but the man locked her against him as the dragon heaved onto its front, got its legs under it and then rose.
    “It’s alive!” she protested, yanking against the imprisoning arms. She twisted to face her father and the knights. “He tricked us! That has to invalidate the ceremony.”
    Her father was slack-jawed, but said, “A wedding is a wedding. . . .”
    “It
can’t
be.”
    “There is nothing,” the Dornaan’s deep, emotionless voice said, “that says the dragon must be dead. Only that the man must lay it low and place his foot upon its neck.”
    “All the same . . .” But then she yelled, “Stop it!”
    She was shouting at the dragon, which had circled its long neck to point its huge, red, flaring nostrils right at her face. The point of its long tongue flickered in