Dragon Prince 01 - Dragon Prince Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Part One - Faces in Fire

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Part Two - The Rialla

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Interlude

  Part Three - Vengeance

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  DAW Books Presents the Finest in Fantasy by MELANIE RAWN

  EXILES

  THE RUINS OF AMBRAI

  THE MAGEBORN TRAITOR

  THE CAPTAL’S TOWER*

  DRAGON PRINCE

  DRAGON PRINCE

  THE STAR SCROLL

  SUNRUNNER’S FIRE

  DRAGON STAR

  STRONGHOLD

  THE DRAGON TOKEN

  SKYBOWL

  THE GOLDEN KEY

  (With Jennifer Roberson and Kate Elliott)

  *Forthcoming in hardcover from DAW Books

  Copyright ©1985 by Melanie Rawn.

  All rights reserved.

  DAW Books Collectors No. 764

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious. All resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental.

  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal, and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  First Trade Printing, June

  DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED

  U.S. PAT. OFF AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES

  —MARCA REGISTRADA

  HECHO EN U.S.A.

  S.A.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-16664-2

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  In memory of my parents

  Robert Dawson Rawn

  August 24, 1921-

  February 24, 1987

  Alma Lucile Fisk

  August 28, 1928-

  June 19, 2002

  When my editor, Sheila Gilbert, mentioned that this printing of Dragon Prince was an opportunity to write a preface, I thought for quite a while about what I might say in it. Here was the chance to answer all the questions people have asked over the years; to comment on my writing in general and this book in particular; to acknowledge friends and relatives previously unmentioned.

  However.

  If I tried to address all those questions, I’d be stuck with the answers. If I started in on writing and so forth, I’d have to admit that when I wrote this interminable tome, I really had no idea what I was doing—and still don’t. And if I made a list of people to whom I owe large debts of gratitude, not only would it be longer than this book but I’d inevitably forget someone and embarass myself even further in public print.

  So I decided that there was only one thing to do in a preface to a new edition of Dragon Prince. The essential thing is to thank you for reading my work.

  You changed my life. Thank you.

  Melanie Rawn

  Flagstaff, Arizona

  Part One

  Faces in Fire

  Chapter One

  Prince Zehava squinted into the sunlight and smiled his satisfaction. All the signs were good for the hunt today: claw marks on the cliffs, wing marks on the sand, and the close cropping of bittersweet plants along the canyon ridges. But the prince’s perceptions were more subtle and had no need of these obvious signs. He could feel the presence of his prey all along his skin, scent it in the air, sense it in every nerve. His admirers said he could tell when the time was ripe for the hunt simply by glancing at the sky. His enemies said it was not surprising that he could sense such things, for he himself had been dragon-spawned.

  In truth, he seemed a human version of the dragon he hunted today. A long, proud nose reared out of a lean and predatory face, saved from ruthlessness by the humor lurking at the corners of his mouth. Nearly sixty winters had framed his eyes with deep lines, but his body was still tough and supple, his pose in the saddle easy, his back straight as his sword. The proudest of old dragons was Zehava, a cloak as black as his eyes billowing out behind him like wings as he rode a tall black war-horse into the Desert he had ruled for thirty-four winters.

  “We advance, my prince?”

  Zehava glanced at his son-by-marriage. “We advance,” he replied in the time-honored formula, then grinned. “We most certainly advance, Chay, unless your sword arm is already growing tired.”

  The young man grinned back. “The only time it ever did was when we fought the Merida, and then only a little, and only because you kept tossing so many in my direction!”

  “Tobin wanted to boast of your prowess, and I’ve never been able to deny my daughter anything.” He pressed his heels to the horse’s ribs and the troop advanced into the Desert behind him, bridles muffled and saddles devoid of the usual trappings that might clatter a warning to the dragon.

  “Another ten measures, I make it,” Chaynal said.

  “Five.”

  “Ten! That son of the Storm Devil will be holed up in the hills and strike from there.”

  “Five,” Zehava said again. “And he’ll be at the mouth of Rivenrock like High Prince Roelstra at Castle Crag.”

  Chaynal’s handsome face pulled into a grimace. “And here I was enjoying myself. Why did you have to mention him?”

  Zehava laughed. Inwardly, however, he was wishing that this fine young man was truly the son of his body, his heir. He felt much closer to Chay than he did to his blood son, Prince Rohan—a slight, quiet youth given to study and thoughtfulness rather than devotion to the manly arts. Rohan was a credible swordsman, an excellent hunter of everything but dragons, and a cunning whirlwind in a knife fight, but Zehava found his son incomprehensible in that these things were not the end and aim of life to him. Rohan’s taste for books and learned discussion was utterly beyond Zehava’s understanding. Honesty compelled him to admit that Chaynal had interests other than the hunt and the skirmish, but at least he did not prefer those other things to all else. Yet when Zehava attempted to press Rohan into other activities, his own wife and daughter flew at him like furious she-dragons.

  Zehava grinned to himself as he rode through the scorching heat toward Rivenrock Canyon. Tobin should have been born the male child. As a young girl she had been able to out-ride and out-knife any boy her age. Marriage and motherhood had calmed her, but she was still capable of black-eyed rages to match Zehava’s own. Part of Chaynal’s marriage contract stipulated that she was forbidden to bring a dagger into their bedchamber. Chay’s idea of a joke, of course, which had brought howls of laughter from everyone—including Tobin—but it added to the family legend, which was something Zehava despaired of Rohan ever doing.

  Not that Tobin was lacking in femininity, he mu
sed, glancing at Chaynal again. Only a completely enchanting woman could have captured and held the fiery young Lord of Radzyn Keep. After six years of marriage and the birth of twin sons, the princess and her lord were as besotted with each other as ever. A pity Rohan hadn’t yet found himself a girl to stiffen his spine and his manhood. There was nothing like the desire to impress a pretty girl to turn boy into man.

  Zehava’s prediction proved accurate: the dragon had chosen the lookout spire at the canyon mouth for 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 a bowl, subjecting their ruby gloss to a critical inspection. “You may think your princedom too rich and powerful to be threatened. But the High Prince is constitutionally incapable of abiding anyone richer than he. And Zehava hasn’t been exactly subtle about his wealth. I heard about the birthday present he sent Roelstra.”

  “It was entirely in keeping with—”

  “With Zehava’s conceit! Two horses or even four, nicely caparisoned, would have been fine. But twenty! And all in silver! He’s flaunting his riches, Mila, and that’s dangerous—like this imbecile dragon hunt today. He’s killed nine of the monsters, why does he need a tenth?”

  Princess Milar wore an expression before which scores of highborns had quailed; her face was none the less lovely for its icy hauteur. “It’s his duty to rid the Desert of dragons. It also demonstrates the cunning and strength which are so important in war. That’s politics.”

  “That’s stupidity. Better he should have sent Rohan out to kill this dragon, so his heir’s cunning and strength are made clear.” Andrade popped a grape into her mouth and split the skin with her teeth, drawing off the sweet juices before spitting out the remains into a silver bowl provided for the purpose.

  “Rohan has no heart for fighting dragons,” Milar admitted unhappily.

  “But he’s warrior enough with heart enough,” Andrade pointed out. “Dressing in common trooper’s uniform that last campaign against the Merida when you’d forbidden him to leave Stronghold—”

  “We’ve never worried about his spirit. But you know he spends too much time at his books and talking with the most unlikely people. I’ve defended him in the past, but now I’m beginning to agree with Zehava. Rohan ought to learn how to be the kind of prince his forefathers were.”

  “That’s precisely what he doesn’t need to learn! Building a princedom is fine work for a soldier, and Zehava’s done very well. He consolidated what his grandfather began, strengthened his hold on what his father grabbed from the Merida, and enlarged the whole through his own efforts. Actually,” Andrade said in thoughtful tones, “one can’t blame him for wanting to show off. He’s worked wonders, especially against the Merida.”

  “If I required a history lesson, I would send for my bard,” Milar snapped.

  Andrade ignored her remark. “Zehava’s problem is that he’s run out of things to do. All he can think of is to spend money on you and Tobin and this pile of rock we’re sitting in—and to waste his time killing dragons. Believe me, sister dear, Roelstra can think of many occupations for his own time, and none of them healthy as far as you’re concerned.”

  “I fail to see—”

  “You usually do,” Andrade interrupted. “Let Rohan read his books and talk with the ambassadors—yes, and even with the servants of the ambassadors! He’ll learn things that Zehava could never teach him.”

  “Why don’t you go back to your duties in that moldy old keep of yours, and leave the work of the world to the people who can do it?”

  “What do you think I do in my moldy old keep—knit?” Andrade snorted and picked out another fat grape. “While I’m training silly boys and girls to be good faradh’im, I listen to them. And what I hear these days isn’t pleasant, Mila.” She began ticking off points on her long, slender fingers, each one circled by a gold or silver ring with a different gemstone. The rings were linked by tiny chains across the backs of her palms to the bracelets of her office as Lady of Goddess Keep. “One, Roels
tra doesn’t plan to make war against anyone, so Zehava’s show of strength and skill in hunting dragons counts for nothing. Two, the High Prince has agents in every court—including yours.”

  “Impossible!” Milar scoffed.

  “Your wine steward has a nasty look about him, and I wouldn’t vouch for your assistant stablemaster, either. Three, the High Prince has seventeen daughters, some of them legitimate off poor, dead Lallante. All of them need husbands. Where will Roelstra find eligible men for them? I’ll tell you where: from the most important courts, even for the bastard girls.”

  The princess sat up straight on the blue velvet lounge. “Do you mean an offer might come for Rohan?”

  “Good for you!” Andrade exclaimed in a voice that dripped sarcasm. “Yes, an offer will be made. Can you think of a more eligible young man than your son? He’s rich, of the noblest blood, he’ll rule this wasteland someday—which, though not a recommendation in itself, does imply a certain amount of power. And he’s not all that difficult to look at.”

  “My son is the handsomest young man on the continent!” Milar defended. “He’s perfectly beautiful and I—”

  “And a perfect virgin?”

  Milar shrugged. “Zehava says you can tell a woman from a maiden just by the way she walks, but I’ve never heard of a similar test for boys. But what does it matter? It’s the prince’s bride who should come virgin to the marriage bed, not the prince himself.”

  “I only wanted to know if he’s heart-whole. He’s not the type to spread every pair of female thighs he can find just for the fun of it. Rohan’s the romantic kind, poor thing.” She mused on this for a moment, then sighed. “In any case, an offer will be made regarding one of the legitimate princesses, because a bastard would be an insult to your house, and—”