A Shade of Dragon 3 by Forrest Bella

Author:Forrest, Bella [Forrest, Bella]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Published: 2016-02-05T08:00:00+00:00

Nell

I had told Merulina to let me get some bandages for my hands, and we would venture down to the prisons, where I would be her lookout, and she could see Altair again. But apparently servants were the last people who got to decide what they were going to do over the course of their day. The life of a servant girl in the Eraeus castle was more like the life of a dog, or a ball of trash, or a speck of dust; you just got whipped from one place to the next, and if you got a moment to even think, you were lucky. It wasn’t until nightfall that I was finally able to pull Merulina aside without Dorid looming behind us. We’d been shunted from dinner to dishes to making beds to cleaning fireplaces and now laundry. We had folded a giant stack of white linens and deposited them on a cart to be taken by another couple of maids to an upstairs closet. Dorid had just departed for the servants’ quarters to settle some dispute about a missing vase.

“Come on,” I hissed in Merulina’s ear. “If we don’t go now, God knows we’ll never get the chance.”

Her emerald eyes shifted between the door to the hallway and the pile of folded laundry. “I don’t know,” she whispered. “You don’t understand, Nell—they’ll kill me if they find out.”

“Oh, I understand. And you’re right.” I wanted to tell her about how I had been carried off into a gigantic nest by some horrific bird-woman because I had dared to follow Theon out across the beach one night. I wanted to tell her that I had been tortured for him in the same dungeon Altair inhabited now. I wanted to tell her that I had stolen the mystical astrolabe and disappeared into a wild snowstorm for the mere chance to see him again, the mere chance to give him an edge in this war that wasn’t even my own to fight. But I held my tongue. It would be nothing but boastful. Merulina had to make her own decisions. It was possible that she didn’t love Altair in the same way that I loved Theon… and if that was so, it would do her well to realize it now and not waste too much of their time.

“If you don’t want to go, you can just say so,” I reminded her. “No one is forcing you. The risk is yours. The decision is yours.”

Merulina’s eyes shifted again between the folded sheets and the waiting door. She expelled a violent sigh and marched to twist the knob in her hand.

“Let’s go,” she said, flinging the door open and darting out into the hall. “Before I change my mind.”

As we trundled down the stone steps, I thought that perhaps I should have considered whether or not being caught would be worth it for me, too. After all, it wasn’t as if I would be innocent in all of this. I already had enough strikes against me.

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