Total pages in book: 125
Estimated words: 120974 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 605(@200wpm)___ 484(@250wpm)___ 403(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 120974 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 605(@200wpm)___ 484(@250wpm)___ 403(@300wpm)
“Someone must have been having his lunch out in the smokehouse and got called away,” Valen speculates as he moves around our campsite, gathering branches for a fire. But when he starts to break some of the lower branches off the trees that are sheltering us, I put a hand on his arm.
“Don’t!”
He frowns and then, apparently seeing the worry in my eyes, his expression softens.
“Why not? We need firewood. Unless you’d like to eat the sausage cold.”
“No, I don’t want that, but we don’t want to make the trees angry either,” I tell him.”
“Make the trees angry?” Now he clearly thinks I’m going mad.
“I’m serious!” I say and tell him what I overheard from red-beard before Maud’s husband attacked me.
He frowns.
“So the trees bleed, do they?”
“I don’t know if these ones would,” I say, pointing at the shorter trees. “But we’re close enough to Thornmere that I’d rather not take a chance.”
“What you heard was just a lot of superstition, Princess,” he tells me.
But he wanders a little further, finding fallen branches instead of breaking them off, which I’m grateful for. It might be just superstitious nonsense that red-beard was spouting, but I’d rather not take a chance—especially not at night.
But when Valen piles all the wood in the center of our campsite along with some dry moss and leaves, I see a problem. We have all the makings of a good fire, but no way to start it.
“Did you find something to make a fire with in the smokehouse?” I ask anxiously.
He gives me a wolfish grin.
“Did you forget who you’re with, sweetheart?”
Then he leans forward, and I see his eyes glowing red again. His throat glows too and then he breathes onto the dried moss and leaves and wood. A small but powerful flame comes from his parted lips and lights the pile at once.
I stare at him, surprised.
“So…you can do that even when you’re not in your dragon form?”
He shrugs.
“Sure. Not all Drakes can—it’s not easy to do a partial Shift and let that part of me out enough to breathe fire without changing completely. I worked years to get the control to do it.”
I think to myself that I bet this little trick would have scared Maud into letting me keep my dress. But then, I suppose the situation might have escalated and turned into a life-or-death altercation.
I’m still upset over losing my dress and cloak though—without my dress, how will I prove to the Sorceress that I’m a princess she ought to help? I simply don’t look the part wearing nothing but my shift and panties!
Valen gets the fire going, then leaves me for a little while to scrub the rusty iron frying pan in a nearby stream. He’s gone long enough for me to think that every rustle from the forest is a monster…or possibly one of the patrons of The Slaughtered Lamb coming to find us.
I shiver and huddle closer to the fire. What if he decides to just leave me here and go? Could I stop him with the ring if I didn’t know he was Shifting? Is there some kind of distance limit between the ring and the collar? There’s so much I don’t know—I wish I could have read the entire manuscript that told about the magical implements instead of just that one ragged scrap…
“Don’t get so close to the fire—you’ll burn yourself.”
Valen’s deep voice makes me jump and I realize he’s back. Relief floods me—I’m not alone! But I push it down quickly. Yes, I have company, but Valen and I are still enemies, as he pointed out earlier.
He sits the pan over the fire and uses a knife with the tip of the blade broken off to slice up the sausage. He must have found that in the smoke house as well—I have to admit he’s resourceful. Having lived in a castle all my life, I’m not very good at foraging for myself. I should probably get better at it in a hurry, though—I can’t expect him to take care of me during this entire quest—especially when he hates me and I hate him.
But it’s not hate I feel as I watch him fry the chunks of sausage. The firelight plays over his long black hair, giving it reddish highlights and he handles the iron skillet as though it was cool instead of burning hot.
“Does fire never burn you?” I ask, when he accidentally flips a chunk of sausage out of the pan and into the fire and then reaches right into the coals to retrieve it.
“It can’t.” He shrugs. “It’s my element—part of me the same way my Drake is part of me.” He pops the hot chunk of sausage in his mouth. “Mmm—I think it’s done.”
He pulls the pan off the fire and cuts a few slices of the stale bread. Then he toasts them in the drippings from the sausage. He piles some slices of sausage onto one of the pieces of bread and hands one to me with a mock bow.