Dragon Blood

Four: Still The Princess

    Greta and Hal had tried to coax the blue dragon to shift back into the princess, but either it couldn't or it wasn't inclined too. Hal waited as long as he could, but he couldn't go any longer without talking to Violet.

    "You'll keep an eye on her? Don't let anyone in here until she shifts back into herself," he warned.

    "Of course, my lord," Greta looked at him as though he was crazy for even thinking that she would allow such a thing. Hal glanced at the clock on the mantle in the nursery. Two o'clock in the morning. It had been two hours since Sky had changed into the dragon and it didn't look like she was going to turn back into a human any time soon. The dragon appeared to have overcome its initial shock of suddenly being a reptile. It now around the room wreaking havoc. It would climb up the drapes and glide back down onto the bed with tiny wings. Then it would run around the room, knocking over toys and running into various pieces of furniture. It had stumbled into the fire twice, but it appeared that the blue scales were fireproof because both times she had stood up, shaken off the ashes, and then continued on playing. Currently, she was chasing her tail.

    "What do you think the queen will want to do?" Greta wondered tentatively.

    "I don't know, Greta," Hal sighed and rubbed his face. It wasn't likely that he was going to sleep that night and he was already exhausted thinking of tomorrow, let alone trying to convince his wife that their daughter wasn't a bloodthirsty monster.

    Greta nodded solemnly, but said nothing. She simply watched the adolescent reptile bounce around the room. Hal snuck quietly out of the nursery and down the silent hallway. It wasn't often that he was roaming the castle this late. Whenever he was about, there were usually servants still making rounds. The torches glowed eerily in the darkness. Even with the silver light of the full moon shining through the windows, Hal felt uncomfortable travelling in the dark, quiet hallway. It left him alone with his thoughts, which weren't pleasant.

    "Damn you, Draco," he cursed under his breath. It was the other king's fault they were in this mess. Hal wondered if Draco had known what the baby was before giving her to him. No, he decided, he hadn't. Draco was obsessed with dragons, especially hunting them down and killing them. If he had known that the little girl was one of them, he would have kept her and then forced her to hunt down the others. He would have turned her into a slave. Hal's father had been killed by dragons, so he hated them as much as anyone, but he didn't feel the same obsession that Draco did. He did not go actively searching for them unless they posed an immediate threat to his kingdom, as they had been when his father was killed. They had been attacking villages throughout his kingdom and Draco's, killing livestock and sometimes the farmers that defended them. Something then dawned on him that stopped him dead in his tracks. "They were people."
    His quiet voice echoed softly in the stone hallway, but he was too preoccupied in his realization to really notice. All of the dragons they had killed, had hunted down, were people. If they were what Skylar appeared to be, they were some sort of magical creature. They shifted from humans to dragons. Of course, he and Draco weren't aware of it because the creatures didn't want them to be. One of Draco's knights had kidnapped one of their babies. He wasn't sure how the shifting worked, but something was triggered in Skylar that caused her to shift for the first time tonight. Would the dragons sense it? Would they come looking for her? Would she eventually want to go look for them? He wasn't sure how many other parents had to deal with this worry, but he was sure that it wasn't many. Skylar was still a child, she wouldn't know what was going on. When she was older, she might begin to question it. All Hal knew was that he had to keep what she was a secret from everyone. Only he, Violet, and Greta could know that the princess wasn't all that she appeared. Dragons were hated because they posed a threat to humans. If it was discovered that the princess was one herself, the people would not hesitate to hunt her down. This situation was one where the help within the castle and the guards that protected it would not stand behind the royalty. Many were once peasants, who were directly attacked by the dragons on their farms and in their villages. They would not stand for having a dragon in the castle, whether their king ordered them to or not.

    For once in his life, Hal had no idea how to proceed.

    He reached the bedchamber he shared with his wife and opened the door quietly. She was seated before the fireplace, staring blankly into the dancing flames. Her hands were folded neatly on her lap. She had changed out of her gown and into her sleepwear, but she didn't appear any more comfortable.

    "Violet, we need to talk."
    "What took you so long to get here," she accused.

    "I was sitting with Greta and our daughter," he snapped, not fond of the tone in her voice.

    Violet broke down then and began to sob into her hands. "What are we going to do?"

    "I think that you're going to have to go apologize to the princess about the way you abandoned her when she needed her mother the most."

    "Is she herself again?"

    "No," he said shortly. "She's still a dragon."

    "How could our baby be a monster?" Violet sobbed.

    Hal shrugged out of his coat and threw it on the bed angrily. "Violet! She is not a monster! Did you see her in there? She was a baby. She could hardly walk on her own, let alone harm anyone. You are not being fair to her."

    "Where did you get her, Harold?" she demanded, ignoring his statements. "I assumed it was an orphanage, but I'm guessing now that I was, in fact, wrong."

    Hal sat down on the foot of the bed and Violet turned to look at him expectantly from her chair. The fire caused her to look like a silhouette to him, which was better. He found it difficult to look into her face and tell her that he'd been lying to her for six years. "I got her from Draco."

    "You got her from Draco?" she was in shock. Hal continued on to explain the encounter as well as he recalled it. He also told his queen about his theories about the dragons and why Skylar was one.

    "So what do we do now? Give her back?" Violet asked.

    "To Draco? No! He'll torture her!"

    "Of course not to Draco! Back to the dragons."

    "No. She's ours, Vi."

    "No, she isn't, Hal. She was never ours. She was stolen from her mother and father. Besides, what are we going to do with a princess who turns into a dragon?"

    "Love her and raise like we have been for six years. She isn't different, not really. She's just a little more than we expected."

    "Hal, keeping her here puts us and her in danger; you have to know that."

    "She is our daughter, Violet. She is our princess, and she is the heir to the throne. We aren't likely to get another one."

    "That doesn't mean we should keep someone else's stolen baby."

    "They didn't come looking for her."

    "They might have, but they're dragons! We would have thought they were just attacking things like dragons do!" Violet growled at him. Hal vaguely recalled an increase in dragon attacks in Draco's kingdom after they had adopted Skylar as their own; of course, he hadn't put two and two together until now.

    "She stays, Violet, and that's final."

    Violet sighed and rose to climb onto his lap. "I love her too, Hal, but you have to see that this isn't right. She doesn't belong here. She will only bring danger and war here."

    "No, she won't. No one will know what she is, other than the three of us. Everything will be fine. Everything will go back to normal."