Dragon Blood

Twenty-Eight: Sisters Don't Have to Get Along

Jonathan ran a rough yet fine-boned hand over his face. He was tired, and he missed his princess. Almost two weeks she'd been gone, and there hadn't been a trace.

He looked up at Hal, who looked just as exhausted as Jonathan felt, and met the king's kind blue eyes.

"My knights have found nothing, Your Grace. They're extending their search, but no one they've spoken with has seen or heard anything of value."

Hal rubbed his eyes and leaned forward on his elbows. "And the dragons your knights saw? Any sign of them?"

Jonathan shook his had, resentment rising inside him at the thought of the dragons. "Not since that night. None of my men saw the princess with them, but it was late and dark. It wouldn't be impossible that she was taken by them." The thought of Skylar in the grasp of monsters, with no one around to help her, it made him want to abandon everything and go after her himself. He'd wanted to follow up on the dragons, figure out where they were from, but the king forbid it. Their first and only priority was locating Skylar and bringing her home.

"It was like they just appeared and then vanished." Jonathan had no idea how beasts the size of dragons could manage something like that, they were just animals after all, but they'd snuck into the heart of the kingdom and then right back out.

Hal rubbed his chin, focused on the table in the council chambers before glancing back up at Jonathan. "What color were the dragons?"

"My men said silver and possibly gold. Hard to tell in the moonlight," Jonathan leaned back in his chair and stared at his king. "Why?"

Hal shrugged his broad shoulders. "Just making sure they haven't been making rounds and attacking my citizens. I usually get colors of the dragons before anything else." It was a logical enough reason, and Jonathan would have taken him at his word, except Hal had a hard time meeting his eyes as he said it.

"We should hunt them down anyway," the king's brother, Henry, suggested. "All and any dragons are a threat to the kingdom."

Hal spun on his brother. "Our focus is finding my daughter, Henry. You can hunt down dragons to your heart's desire any other time of the year, you're not good for much else. Now unless you have ideas on how to locate Skylar, I suggest you keep your mouth shut," he snarled.

Henry, a round, red-faced man, looked thoroughly chastened by his older brother. His beady brown eyes glanced around the room at the other council members in embarrassment. Even though the king's brother was six years his junior, the man looked a decade older. The brothers didn't get along well, not from what Jonathan had observed, but the king still kept him on the council from some unknown reason.

"Your Highness, what about the carriage Lord Greyson's men found?" Another council member nodded at Jonathan. He forgot sometimes that he was a Lord himself, that when his grandfather died he was due to inherit his title. Only the royal family called him by his first name, everyone else addressed him by his title.

"Unmarked," Jonathan answered the council member, an old man who was a duke of some kind. Jonathan knew he should know all their names and titles, but he didn't care for the men around him. They felt that just because they were on the king's council they were above everyone around them. "The men inside wouldn't talk. They don't remember what happened, how they ended up locked in the carriage or with those massive bumps on their heads. Either way, they wouldn't tell us anything about who they're working for, and a week and a half in the dungeon hasn't loosened any lips."

"Which tells me that they're more afraid of whoever hired them than they are of us," Hal frowned down at his intertwined fingers. "And that makes me more nervous than anything."