Earth Born by N. E. Conneely

Author:N. E. Conneely [Conneely, N. E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: N. E. Conneely

Chapter Nine

Matilda whipped her head around. “It wasn’t her fault.”

Ignoring her daughter, Portia lowered her head until one eye focused directly on Shasta. “How was she taken under your watch?”

As her smile faded, she squared her shoulders and stood tall. Hopefully the dragon would notice her body language rather than her rapid heartbeats. “Magic.”

“We were told you have magic. Yet you couldn’t defend our young?” There was a hissing undertone to Portia’s voice, as if she was struggling to form the words in English rather than the dragon tongue.

Sometimes you had to fight fire with fire, though she hoped it didn’t come to that in a literal fashion. “You were told I have some magic, which is true.” For a moment Portia had a triumphant gleam in her eyes, but Shasta kept talking. “I’m not a witch. I don’t have that much or that type of magic. What I can do is rather limited, especially in comparison to my mother’s abilities. If you wanted a witch, your representative should’ve said as much to Mom. She would’ve found someone compatible.”

Portia pulled her head back, and both sets of eyelids blinked.

“Did you bother to use what magic you have?” a voice bellowed from the crowd.

Shasta suppressed an eye roll and a sarcastic remark. “I used every bit of my abilities. Several members of the group experienced in-flight attacks. I begged the air itself to keep them aloft. If I could have prevented Matilda’s capture, I would’ve.”

A myriad of dragons began shouting questions, each one doing their best to drown out the next. Shasta stood there, wishing she knew what to do. She couldn’t answer all their questions, mostly because there wasn’t an answer. While she could’ve made different choices or tried other things, she’d done her very best in the moment, and nothing was going to turn back time and give her a second chance. And, regardless of what some of the dragons seemed to think, Shasta suspected it wouldn’t have mattered exactly what she did. Mr. Evil from the cave was going to find a way to take one of the dragons.

Cord settled a hand on her shoulder and gently squeezed. While dragons bellowed at one another and at her, Shasta held her ground with Cord at her side, confident that they would get through this. Though, she hoped the meeting would move along. She was overdue for an evening appointment with her bed.

A hiss sliced through the air, silencing all the dragons. From the outskirts of the crowd, a giant ebony head rose above the crowd. Scyld, a nearly four-hundred-foot-long dragon, stretched his sizable wings, casting deep shadows across the gathering place. “You will behave like the civilized creatures we are, or you will spend a few decades residing with our underground cousins.”

Shasta didn’t know how you forced dragons to live underground or if wyrm tunnels were even large enough for dragons, but the dragons around her could’ve been statues. Not even the rustle of wings or the whoosh of deep breathing broke the silence.

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