35. Nothing Better to Do
Agadart is trapped in a losing game...
The Queen’s Aerie is a MMF fantasy romance (romantic fantasy?) in 57 parts that I serialized throughout 2023/2024! If you are just now joining the story, you can catch up by starting here. Full story ToC here.
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Previously: The Lost ver Kleelan reveals a world-changing secret...
Upon Duke Paruask’s absolutely ridiculous pronouncement, Agadart thought she would be immediately carted off to be set up at the Imperial Palace as a prisoner or something absurd like that.
Instead, the duke took her for a personal tour around the floating platform, which was a technological marvel, but more importantly to her situation was located near the middle of the Viretic Ocean. Short of trying to become a stowaway, she was not escaping. That seemed to be the whole point of the tour, since she was hardly qualified to comment on the fitness of the tall military ships surrounding it, all bristling with cannons and landing decks for dragons.
He talked the whole way, and she did not. He did not appear to even notice her rebellious silence, which took some of the rebellion out of it. He was convinced that he knew who she was, and he was also convinced that his emperor wanted to marry her, and so he was content to talk about everything but either of those things. She was not going to convince him that she was not who she, in fact, actually was.
When they finally returned to the receiving hall, instead of going back to his offices, he led her up a steep stairwell to the topmost deck, which covered the buildings. The squat cabin she had seen earlier from a distance sat to one side and up close looked more like a garden shed than anything nautical.
“Get used to it, Lady ver Kleelan.” He gestured out to the empty deck as if it were their finest horse stock. She looked at the deck, then back at him.
“Get used to what, precisely?”
“Your new home.” He looked ineffably smug about it.
She looked around. The wind blowing in over the ocean all around them was only broken by the ships, which wasn’t much when there was so much exposure. It whipped around them, making her skirt flap along with his jacket’s tails. “I’ll just be kept up here? In the elements?” Maybe the plan was to kill her off, after all.
He scoffed, and had one of his guards haul her over to the garden shack. Which was not a garden shack after all, but a small one-room cabin, with a bed and a wardrobe and a table with two chairs. No place to cook, but then, they were smarter than to give her the means to burn their precious military base to the waterline. Unfortunately.
She turned to face the duke, trying to radiate the haughty displeasure that her mother wore so well. “Am I supposed to thank you?”
“No, of course not.” He scoffed. “However, as you are trained, you will need to rest and recuperate. Hence your fine lodgings.”
“Trained?”
“I have it on good authority that you have never actually shifted into your flying form. I assume because you grew up in Kaaltendt and not the Isle of Watt.” He shook his head while she tried not to panic. They thought she was a dragon? He continued talking. “Can’t say I expect much more of the Kaaltendt barbarians, who don’t know what to do with dragons other than murder them in their sleep.”
“That was two hundred years ago!” she snapped.
He looked at her pityingly. “And yet dragons are still a rare breed there, aren’t they? Your mad king killed off all the breeding pairs and smashed eggs like a cannibal. What a tragedy.” He looked genuinely troubled, which to be fair Agadart could not fault him for. The Kaaltendt legacy of Mad King Maganrad was truly horrific. That much, she could not argue.
But.
“I am not doing anything for you,” she said sharply, turning her back to him. That she technically could not turn into a dragon at all was beside the point, she thought. Even if she could, she would not give him the satisfaction.
He was, unsurprisingly, unconcerned. “You will, you will.” He must have motioned for one of his guards to act, as she was summarily tossed fully into her small lodgings. The guard freed her from her bonds and another one threw a satchel into the room that landed with a heavy thud. The door slammed shut.
“Enjoy your stay, Lady ver Kleelan! Keep in mind there are always two guards stationed to protect you.”
To protect her. She snorted and did not deign to reply. She got up and tried the door handle to find it locked, which she had expected anyway. She looked around more carefully, and it was only then she realized that there were no windows, only a couple of narrow vents high up near the edge of the roof to let air circulate through. Everything in the room was well made but utilitarian in nature, down to the bed linens which were plain and roughly woven. Enough to keep her warm. She sat down in one of the chairs and dragged the heavy satchel over, finding it packed with warm, woolen overdresses and a long, heavy coat. All suitable for cold weather, all in the high-waisted Iskaryyva style. Better than nothing, she supposed.
It wasn’t until she had unpacked the satchel (for nothing better to do) that she realized that she had…nothing better to do. There were no books, no reading material of any kind, in the room. No paper or writing pens or drawing leads. Absolutely nothing.
She banged on the door. “Can I ask for something to read?”
She heard one of her guards scoff and mumble something in Iskaryyvan to his companion, so she assumed the answer was “no.”
Sitting down at the table, she wondered what the hell she was supposed to do. She had never thought too much about what being a prisoner might be like, and she was surprised to find that, mostly, it was boring. She decided to take a nap, or at least lie in bed under the covers, fully dressed, to warm up and stare at the ceiling while pretending she was not as panic-stricken as she was.
She was rousted from sleep by the door opening. She had no idea when she had succumbed to her exhaustion, but it was dark outside and the room had moved from “chilly” to “freezing.”
The man who had opened the door walked in, carrying a tray, and set it on the table. Behind him was a very well armed soldier holding a travel lamp, who did not look like she was happy to be there.
The man, clearly a servant, stood up after depositing the tray. “This place is too cold.”
“Not our problem, Vlet,” the soldier sighed, holding the lamp higher.
Vlet turned to Agadart, who had moved to sit up with her feet on the floor. “Dinner for you, hearty fare fit for a dragon. Eat all of it.” He stood back, waving an arm at the table.
Agadart blinked at them, but they did not leave. Were they going to watch her eat? And what did he mean, “fare fit for a dragon”? She buttoned up her coat and sat down at the table. The food consisted of three meat main courses, as far as she could tell, with minimal vegetables and only a few slices of bread. She loved meat dishes as much as the next person from the Orange Hills of Battenruck, and it was definitely a meal that a real dragon would dive into gratefully, but she had no idea how she was going to eat all of it.
She tried, but got through at most about half of each dish before pushing them away. “I’m full. Thank you.” She put the covers back on the plate just in case they did not get the hint.
Vlet and the guard, who had not introduced herself, frowned at her, then at the covered plates that were still filled with food, then back at her. “Are you not hungry?” the guard asked, clearly confused.
“Nope. I am very annoyed and very cold, but not hungry.”
“You are a dragon, so you could stop being stubborn and just shift and be warm,” the guard said reasonably, and suddenly everything became clear in Agadart’s mind.
With horror she realized that the whole purpose of keeping her there, of putting her on the top deck where dragons were landing and taking off all the time, of refusing her any creature comforts, was to try and stress her enough to shift into a dragon. Which she could not do, but which she could not tell them she couldn’t do. If they suspected she was not able to do it, or worse, that maybe they had kidnapped the wrong person after all, there was nothing preventing them from slitting her throat and dumping her into the ever-deep waters of the ocean right below them.
She sat in furious silence as Vlet cleared the table with a troubled expression, and stayed sitting there long after they locked her back up in the dark and in the cold.
