his perch. The hunt paused a full measure away to admire the beast, dark gold as the sands that had hatched him, with a wingspan greater than the height of three tall men. His malignant glare could be felt even at this distance.
“A real grandsire of a beast,” Chay murmured appreciatively. “Have a care, my prince.”
Zehava took the caution as it had been intended, not as a warning that he might lose this contest, but as a reminder not to damage himself during it. If he came home with more than a few scratches, his wife would alternately coddle his injuries and rage at his clumsiness in acquiring them. Princess Milar was as legendary for her temper as for the golden looks, so rare here in the Desert, that she had passed on to her son.
The twenty riders fanned out, taking up positions according to the etiquette of the game, and Zehava rode forward alone. The dragon eyed him balefully, and the prince smiled. This was a profoundly angry beast. The stench of oil was rank in the hot air, oozing from glands at the base of the long, spiked tail. He was ready to mate the females hidden in their caves, and anyone who distracted him from his purpose was marked for a painful death.
“Hot for it, aren’t you, Devil-jaws?” Zehava crooned low in his throat. He rode at a steady pace, his cloak blowing back from his shoulders, and stopped half a measure in front of the rocky spire. Striated sandstone in a dozen shades of amber and garnet rose like the Flametower at Zehava’s castle of Stronghold. The dragon clung to the stone with claws thick as a man’s wrist, balance easily kept despite the repeated lashings of the gold-and-black patterned tail. The two rulers of the Desert sized each other up. On the surface it was a ludicrously unequal contest: the massive, dagger-toothed dragon against one man on horseback. But Zehava had an advantage that had made him the champion in such encounters nine times before, more than any man living and part of the family legend. Zehava understood dragons.
This one burned to fill his dozen or more females, but he was growing old and knew it. There were battle scars on the dark golden hide, and one talon hung at an unnatural angle, damaged in some earlier combat. As the great wings unfurled threateningly, showing the velvety black undersides, badly healed tears were visible as well as crooked wingbones that had not remeshed properly after breaking. This might be the dragon’s last mating, and Zehava suspected that the beast knew it.
Nevertheless, he was capable of giving the prince a good long battle. But Zehava understood something else about dragons. Though notoriously cunning, they were entirely single-minded. This one wanted to mate. His fighting style would thus be direct and unsubtle, without the tricks a dragon used once mating was over for another three years. He had already been inhaling the stench of his own sexuality for days during the preliminaries—the sand-dance and the cliff-dance that had attracted his females to him. His brain was drugged now and his fighting wits would be dulled, for his one purpose was to seed his females and this made him at once more vicious and more vulnerable. Though Zehava had a healthy respect for those talons and teeth, he could also grin in his anticipation of a tenth triumph. He was going to out-think this grandsire dragon, and have a rousing good time doing it.
Fifty measures distant, in a fortress that had been carved out of solid rock by successive generations of Zehava’s family, Princess Milar sat with her sister Lady Andrade. The two were silent for the present; the entrance of a servant into the solar with cool drinks and fruit had interrupted a stormy passage between the twin sisters on the subject of Prince Rohan.
When the servant had bowed and departed, Lady Andrade flicked her long blonde braid back over her shoulder and glared at her sister. “Stop fussing the boy! Things are brewing in Roelstra’s court that Zehava can’t hope to understand, but Rohan will!”
“Are you calling my husband a fool?” Milar snapped.
“Save your theatrics, Mila. He’s a brilliant soldier and a fine man, but if you think the coming conflict will be one of arms, think again. The Storm God alone knows what Roelstra’s planning, but it won’t be something to march an army against.” She reached over and plucked a bunch of grapes from