Rise of the Dragons by Morgan Rice

face. They all waited for him to respond.
    Finally, he turned and looked at Duncan,
his eyes bloodshot, watering.
    “No news that any man should have to
bear,” he said.
    Duncan braced himself, sensing as much.
    “Out with it, then,” Duncan said. “Bad
news grows only more stale with time.”
    The man looked back down at the table,
rubbing his fingers against it nervously.
    “As of the Winter Moon, a new Pandesian
law is being enacted upon our land: puellae nuptias .”
    Duncan felt his blood curdle at the
words, as a gasp of outrage emitted from up and down the table, an outrage he
shared himself. Puellae Nuptias . It was incomprehensible.
    “Are you certain?” Duncan demanded.
    The visitor nodded.
    “As of today, the first unwed daughter
of every man, lord, and warrior in our Kingdom who has reached her fifteenth
year can be claimed for marriage by the local Lord Governor—for himself, or for
whomever he chooses.”
    Duncan immediately looked at Kyra, and
he saw the look of surprise and indignation in her eyes. All the other men in
the room, all the warriors, also turned and looked to Kyra, all understanding
the gravity of the news. Any other girl’s face would have been filled with
terror, but she appeared to wear a look of vengeance.
     “They shall not take her!” Anvin called
out, indignant, his voice rising in the silence. “They shall not take any of
our girls!”
    Arthfael drew his dagger and stabbed the
table with it.
    “They can take our boar, but we shall
fight to the death before they take our girls!”
    The warriors let out a shout of
approval, their anger fueled, too, by their drink. Immediately, the mood in the
room had turned rotten.
    Slowly Duncan stood, his meal spoiled,
and the room quieted as he rose from the table. All the other warriors stood as
he did, a sign of respect.
    “This feast is over,” he announced, his
voice heavy. Even as he said the words, he noted it was not yet midnight—a
terrible omen for the Winter Moon.
    Duncan walked over to Kyra in the thick
silence, passing rows of soldiers and dignitaries. He stood over her chair, and
looked her in the eye, and she stared back, strength and defiance in her eyes,
a look which filled him with pride. Leo, beside her, looked up at him, too.
    “Come, my daughter,” he said. “You and I
have much to discuss.”
     

CHAPTER SEVEN
     
     
    Kyra sat in her father’s chamber, a
small stone room with high, tapered ceilings and a massive marble fireplace,
blackened from years of use, on the upper floors of their fort, as she and he
sat on opposite sides of the room, on piles of furs, staring at the crackling
fire in gloomy silence. Kyra’s mind spun from the news as she watched a log
crumble, and she stroked Leo’s fur, he curled up at her feet. Stunned that this
was really happening, she stared into the flames as if there were nothing left
to live for. It felt to her as if this were the day her life ended.
    Kyra usually took comfort in being here,
this room where she had spent countless hours reading, getting lost in tales of
battle, of valor, and sometimes of myth, of legends which neither she nor her
father knew were real or fantasy. Her father would read to her, sometimes into
the early hours of the morning, chronicles of a different time, a different
place. Most of all, she loved the stories of the warriors, their great
challenges. Leo was always at her feet and Aidan would often join them, and on
more than one night, Kyra would return bleary-eyed in the morning from having
read or listened all night long. She loved to read, even more than she loved
weapons, and as she looked now at the walls of her father’s chamber, lined with
bookcases filled with scrolls and leather-bound volumes passed down for
generations, she wished she could get lost in some of them now.
    But as she looked over at her father, it
brought back their awful reality. If there was anything that upset Kyra more,
it was the look on her father’s face; she’d