The next-to-last portrait showed an absolutely enormous Drake who had scarlet scales with a golden sheen. And the last tapestry portrait of all showed a royal purple Drake whose scales had an emerald luster. His large, golden eyes looked out of the portrait right at me and I realized that it was the Drake I was riding on now—Ari’s Drake.
“I am your Drake too, now,” the Drake informed me as he moved steadily down the hallway. “Do not forget it, L’lorna.”
“I won’t,” I said in a low voice and stroked his soft hide as I felt a surge of protective devotion come from him. What had I done to earn the love of such an amazing creature, I couldn’t help wondering? Why had he picked me out of all the possible choices in the world? In two worlds, really, since the Sky Lands were a completely different realm.
The Drake didn’t answer my question, he only sent me a sense of love and protectiveness and four more words.
“You have my heart.”
Then we were at the end of the hallway at last and I saw an immense set of wooden doors bound in brass slowly swinging open.
Crap. It was time to meet the parents.
73
Kaitlyn
The immense doors swung open slowly but if anyone was working the immense wooden panels manually, I couldn’t see them. Maybe they were hidden or maybe the doors were automatic. But would they have automatic doors in a place like this? Somehow the Sky Lands felt like a place where magic would work better than science or technology.
Or maybe I only got that feeling because we were in the middle of a freaking palace.
As the doors opened, they revealed a throne room bigger than a football field.
And it was full of dragons.
Though it hadn’t clicked before, I finally understood why this palace appeared to be built for giants—because it was. The Drakes gathered at the far end of the room were all massive—though only one was bigger than Ari’s Drake, I noticed.
The strange thing was, most of these Drakes didn’t seem to have the two-tone skin which all of the portraits in the hallway had shown. They were strictly monochrome—I saw sky-blue, brick-red, bottle-green, and lemon-yellow dragons, but their scales were dull without the metallic sheen I saw on my own Drake.
Oh dear, should I think of him as my Drake, though? Was I about to lose him when Ari’s parents no doubt told him I wasn’t in any way a suitable person for him to date?
I felt a rumble from the Drake under me and he sent a sense of certainty and protectiveness. I was his and he was mine, he assured me. No one could change that.
Feeling a bit reassured, I watched as he slowly crossed the vast, black marble floor which was polished to a high, mirror-like gloss. It was so shiny I could see his reflection in it—as well as the reflections of all the other Drakes.
There were a few humans in the room as well—dwarfed by the vastness of the immense chamber—but none of them seemed to be people of importance. In fact, I got the impression that they must be servants, waiting on the Drakes’ needs by the way they bustled and scurried about, tending to the huge creatures by bringing them vast ewers of water to drink from or sometimes big round platters of steaming, fresh meat.
As we got closer to the Drakes, who were all congregated at one end of the massive space, I decided that it must be a kind of throne room. The biggest clue to this was the way all the other dragons were clustered around one central Drake who stood on a slightly raised dais which appeared to be made of solid gold.
It was the Drake from the next-to-last portrait out in the entry hall, I realized. The one with scarlet scales with a golden sheen. Out of all of them, he alone was bigger than Ari’s Drake—than my Drake, I reminded myself. His head was several feet higher and he looked down at us with golden, inscrutable eyes that conveyed no emotion—at least, none that I could read.
Ari’s Drake came to a stop and the two of them stared at each other for a long moment. I had a feeling they were having a silent conversation, though I couldn’t hear what they were saying.
Then the scarlet Drake spread his wings—scarlet with a brilliant gold lining like vast golden sails, lifted his head and breathed fire—a huge, burning jet of white-hot flame. It made the blow-torch display Ari had put on in the Nocturne Academy Dining Hall look as small as Mr. Seahorse’s little fire when he toasted an insect for lunch and it scared the crap out of me.
I put my hand to my mouth to stop a scream and ducked instinctively. Though the massive gout of flame was high over my head, I could feel its heat like the breath of wind from a blast furnace radiating against my skin. It made my hair feel dry as straw and all the scars on my body seemed to tighten and ache at once.
My Drake’s massive body tensed and he roared once—an ear-splitting sound that seemed to incorporate an alarm klaxon, the trumpeting of an enraged elephant, and the growl of an angry lion—somehow all at the same time. Was this Ari defying his father? And if so, were things going to end badly?
I clapped my hands over my ears and felt my stomach twist in knots. I had expected Ari’s family not to like me, but I hadn’t anticipated anything like this. If it came down to a battle between the two dragons, I was going to be caught right in the middle of it—collateral damage, so to speak. There would be no surviving such a conflict any more than I could survive
