Song of Dragons The Complete Trilogy - By Daniel Arenson Page 0,41

rose in the forest like so many birch boles, Requiem's elders walking in green velvet embroidered in gold. Those memories were fleeting too. They emerged now only in dreams or in the moments of her greatest loneliness and fear.

Lacrimosa stepped among the ruins of the fort. Water pooled between the stones, and the waves whispered, entering and leaving the homes these stones formed for fish and crabs. Salt and seashells glistened in the sand. Lacrimosa knelt to lift a conch, pink and large as her fist, and beneath it she saw a bone emerging from the sand. A human bone.

She dropped the shell and walked on, a tear on her cheek. Thus it was these days, she thought. Whatever beauty she found hid darkness.

"Like my daughters?" she whispered.

No. She hated those whispers. Hated the doubts. Agnus Dei was beautiful, forever good and right, a future for their race, a hope. She could not conceal darkness. She could not have quickened that day, that day that hid beneath her memories of beauty. And yet the memories flooded her.

Lacrimosa had been fifteen, a wispy youth of marble skin, of hair that Benedictus said was woven of moonlight. Her father was a great lord, and her coming of age was a grand party, among the grandest Vir Requis girls had known, for she was among their fairest. She glistened in white silk inlaid with diamonds, and apple blossoms lay strewn through her hair. She had felt shy, but beautiful too, fearful yet joyous in the beauty of Requiem. She walked among lords and ladies in jewels.

Among the lords stood Prince Benedictus, the younger of the princes. He wore green velvet embroidered with gold, a sword upon his hip, and a crown atop his black curls. Lacrimosa thought him handsome, but she feared him. He was twenty years her senior, from a different world, destined to someday be her king.

Her lord father presented Lacrimosa to Benedictus that day, and they danced to the song of flutes, and drank wine. Benedictus was a clumsy dancer, and he did not speak much, but he was courteous and sober, holding her hand gently, praising her gown and beauty. She knew she would marry him; they all knew. Perhaps they had known for years, these noble families of their courts.

That evening she walked alone, leaving the palace for some solitude, some reflection in the woods. She often walked here alone among the birches, to speak with the birds and deer, to pray, to escape the lords and ladies and servants that forever fussed around her. She would find treasures here most days: acorns, or pretty stones, and once a golden coin lost two hundred years before. But this day, the day of her fifteenth birthday, her coming of age, she found something else in the forest. She found pain, and darkness, and a secret that would forever haunt her.

Dies Irae stood leaning against a birch, dressed in white. He looked much like Benedictus—the straight nose, strong jaw, tall brow. Yet his hair was golden, not black, and his eyes were not solemn but cruel, calculating.

"Hello, my lord," she said to him and curtsied, and he only stared with those cruel eyes, blue and hungry.

He spent many days in these woods, she knew, for his father scorned him. Dies Irae had been born without the magic. He could not shift, could not become a dragon. All her life, Lacrimosa had pitied him. How horrible it must be, to be forever in human form! How painful to be the elder brother, yet not heir to the throne—an outcast, a sad child.

"Let us return to the court," she said and smiled, hoping to soothe his pain. "There are honey cakes and wine."

But he wanted more than honey cakes and wine. He wanted the Griffin Heart, revenge against his family, revenge against the race that had outcast him. And he wanted her.

He took all those things.

Between the birches, he stuffed ilbane into her mouth, and muffled her screams with his palm. The pain stunned her, dazed her so she couldn't shift. He knew her there, pinning her down. With a clenched jaw, he made her swear to secrecy, to swear by their stars, on the honor of her forefathers. And she swore, vowed to never speak of how he'd hurt her, planted his seed inside her. When she cried that night, back in her home, all assumed that she was overcome by her party, by meeting Benedictus whom she would wed. She