I helped Rapunzel to climb down the vines on the side of the tower.“This is not how I imagined this would be!” She complained to me as we descended.“How did you imagine it would be?” I wondered. I had an idea; my head having been filled with the same stories since childhood. “Liam would ride in upon a noble steed, draw his sword, climb the tower, throw you over his shoulder before descending and whisking you away to the castle that he owns that overlooks a beautiful town and possibly a beach?”“Well… yes actually,” she paused in her climb to look at me in surprise. “Isn’t that the proper way of things?”“Hmmm,” I pulled a face. “Not really. I guess. Maybe?”“Really?” She demanded. “That’s your answer?”“I’m… I’m just not qualified to answer the question,” I admitted. “I am a princess, but I’m fifth in line for the throne. My mother is mostly human, but my father is most definitely not. Most of my siblings take after him, although I don’t. And so, the proper way of things really hasn

“Daethie,” Aien stroked my hair back from my face. I opened my eyes. It was still dark, and his face was almost obscured in the shadows of the room, picked out by the fragile light of the embers of the fire. “It’s just dawn,” he told me.I rolled out of bed automatically. It had become the pattern of our mornings, to wake early and leave the castle before it stirred to the day and return to have our evening meal in the kitchen with the servants, avoiding anyone who might have noticed our absence during the day. It would not last, I knew. Our absence had to have been noticed. Whilst they could not find us, they could not punish us for our truancy, but sooner or later someone would decide that enough was enough and would go out of their way to trap us on our way in and out, and demand answers as to what we did.Aien slipped out of the room to go to his own as I used the chamber pot and splashed water on my face before dressing, pulling on my heaviest cloak against a morning that I knew

I decided not to tell Aien about the baby.I loved him. Oh, how I loved him. I could not imagine my life without him. He felt as much a part of me as my own body. I believed that he felt the same and that he, too, imagined a future together. However, neither of us spoke of such things, and the longer that it went without the words uttered, the harder it seemed to be to bring them onto my tongue.There also existed a fear, a small burrowing thing that was nonetheless insistent in its presence – that we hadn’t spoken about such things because he didn’t feel like that about me. Were we friends, companions, who shared our bodies? If I told him that I loved him, that to a dragon marriage was as simple as two people agreeing to be together so to me it felt that we were married, would he tell me that he felt the same and was happy to share that understanding, or would he tell me that he did not return my feelings.If he did not share my feelings, telling him about the baby might force him in

The night was a restless one, filled with Aien’s moans, and the spice of spell-component scented sweat as his body worked through the magic of Isyl’s potion. There was little that I could do but make him drink in order to replace the fluids that he lost and wipe the cloth over his face and chest in an effort to keep him cool and comfortable.I found that I could distract him from it with my hands, my mouth, and my body on his, confusing his senses with a combination of pleasure and pain. In the morning I awoke, therefore, bare, and in a tangle of sheets stained with tides of sweat and passion. Aien lay on his back, his face turned my way, the light that crept through a kink in the curtains picking out that faint silver-white scar that ran down his cheek, and his arm propped upon cushions.He was beautiful in the soft morning light, and I lay for a long time, as he slept, lulled by the rhythm of his breath, and watching the sunlight creep over his skin. He was exhausted from the night,

Aien did not want to talk to me and actively avoided doing so, locking his door each night, and either leaving in the morning before me or, when I tried to out-rise him, stubbornly refusing to leave his room until I was forced away by my own embarrassment at being caught by the servants scratching at his door like the distraught rejected lover that I was.He did, however, spend a lot of time in the training courtyard, practicing his sword skills with anyone who shared the grounds with him, attending classes although he did not need to do so as he was meant to be preparing for the campaign, and I even saw him attempt the gauntlet several times. If he saw me, he would turn the other way, and I wasn’t sure what was worse, the pain in my heart at his rejection, or the embarrassment that surely everyone had noticed.I concentrated on preparations for the campaign in order to distract myself and make his abandonment of me less noticeable. There was much to do, I found. Not only were there n