Saya looked at me steadily for a moment and then moved her gaze to Elenari. I wasn’t sure, but it looked like the elf was smiling.
“Now that we’ve taken the plunge with one another,” I said, pressing doggedly onward. “Does that mean that the whole… understanding that we have been operating under is finished?”
It was the most eloquent way I could ask whether it was still okay to have girlfriends.
Saya grinned and lay a hand on my thigh.
“Mike,” Elenari said, “we are well aware that trying to claim you to ourselves would be an unbefitting thing. The Empire needs you to keep on being who you are, and acting how you have been acting, to flourish. For us to expect you to be ours alone would be…” she cast around for a word that might do her thoughts justice.
“Unbecoming of dragonmancers,” Saya said.
Elenari nodded.
“We know that any woman you bring into your bed will be special,” Saya said. “But we will also know that, after being married to one another, Elenari and I are just that little bit more special, perhaps?”
I smiled, reached out, and squeezed the hands of the two women sitting next to me. I hoped that the relief was not too plain on my face.
“I think it’s fair to say that, after all we’ve been through together, you two definitely stand alone,” I said.
Saya nodded her head and leaned back, adopting that self-assured manner of hers that I had found so intimidating on my first day at the Drako Academy. “You best not forget it,” she said, with a half-smile.
“That,” I said truthfully, “would be a fucking impossibility.”
Elenari laughed and slapped me on the chest.
A short while later, the rest of the dragonmancers came downstairs to relax on the comfortable couches and stare out of the porthole at the country below, as the fields, forests, rivers, and lakes slid by.
Once we had been served with some steaming goblets of lightning cider by one of the ship’s crew, a legend in dwarven shape going by the name of Olgan, we settled back and started discussing what might await us at journey’s end.
No one had ever been this far from the Academy before, even Renji and Tamsin, who had been sent out on more minor skirmishing missions than any of the rest of us Rank Ones. As for the Subterranean Realms, that was a land and a place that had been wrapped in the mist of legend for as long as anyone could remember.
“Many, many moons ago, when I was but a young Djinn,” Renji said, in her soothing, melodic tones, “my father used to say that if I was bad, I would be spirited away to the Subterranean Realms in the middle of the night.”
Tamsin laughed nostalgically at this. She took a sip of her drink and crossed her long legs in their leather breeches.
“It was the same with me,” she said. “My parents would use the Subterranean Realms as a threat if we little hobgoblins put a claw out of line. As you can imagine, hobgoblins are not easily scared. My parents had to get pretty damned inventive with the descriptions of what those folk of the Shadow Nations were supposed to do to us once they kidnapped us.”
“So, we’re heading to a place that has been used as a threat for most of your childhoods, is that about right?” I asked.
Saya nodded slowly. “Yeah,” she said, picking at her nails with a dagger, “my people in the lowland lake countries back south used to refer to them too. Made the Shadow Nations out to be the sort of creatures that prowled the edge of nightmares. Made the Subterranean Realms themselves sound like the tunnels leading down to the hells.”
The blonde sheathed her dagger and cracked her knuckles, looking around at our little company of dragonmancers with those x-raying blue eyes of hers. I noticed that her strong, tanned hand moved up to clutch at the necklace that hung around her graceful neck. She squeezed it and then tucked it down the front of her shirt.
“Of course, I doubt a single one of my people from the lowlands had been within about two hundred miles of Galipolas Mountain, so the legitimacy of the tales of the graybeards can be safely said to be pretty thin, I think,” Saya said.
Everyone else laughed.
“Saya is right,” Amara said, sweeping her own platinum blonde hair out of her eyes and beginning to braid it into a tight ponytail. “We can’t let ourselves get shaken by a bunch of tall tales from when we were ankle-biters. We are dragonmancers now. I’m willing to wager a handful of scales that the tales told of the mighty dragonriders of the Mystocean Empire’s Draco Academy are even more terrifying.”
There was much murmuring of assent at this comment.
“You know what I’m most curious on finding out about and seeing,” Penelope said, sitting forward in the comfortable armchair that she was seated in, “are the dragonmancers who are going to be acting as Mike’s bodyguards.”
“Why’s that, Pen?” Elenari asked politely.
“Because,” the Knowledge Sprite said, her all-blue eyes shining with enthusiasm, “they will be far more experienced than we ourselves are. I am intrigued to witness what their capabilities might be. To see the magic they might have access to.”
“True,” Tamsin said, flicking back the last of her lightning cider with a swift movement of her elbow. “Not to mention the styles of combat that they might have been taught in.” Her bright yellow eyes sparkled with the thought of picking up a few moves that she might add to her already impressive, and highly lethal, repertoire.
The sun rose outside the portholes, sending the shadows
