1
The Dragon Submits to None
“He’s a monster! The man your father wants you to marry, he’s the foulest sort of depraved!”
Joselyn stiffened at her nurse’s words, her slender fingers wrinkling the page she’d been about to turn. Outside, torrents of rain pelted the study windows. “Tansy? Calm yourself. What’s wrong?”
Tansy, a stout, middle-aged woman with graying hair, clutched at Joselyn’s arm. She leaned forward to catch her breath. “Milady, I ran here as fast as I could. Straight from the council chamber.”
“They let you in?” Joselyn set the logbook down on her lacquered desk. It bumped against an untouched dinner tray. The area was a mess of quills and parchment, a testament to the long nights she’d spent ensuring everything at Fury Keep was in order. Ready for winter and her own final farewell.
Tansy ignored the question. “I heard it all! Every word. Dante Viridian has a heart black as soot. He’s not a man, he’s a demon. A demon born of the dirt at the bottom of the sea!”
“Tansy!” Joselyn took her beloved nurse by the arms. “Slow down. Tell me what happened.”
Through the window, a thick storm cloud shrouded the last of the sun’s rays, darkening her nurse’s reddened eyes. “Your father was meeting with your fiancé’s representatives, discussing the terms of your nuptials, when Lord Ellis barged right into the council chamber.”
Joselyn gasped at the mention of her former suitor, the man Joselyn had thought she would marry. “Lord Ellis? What did he want?”
“He wasn’t alone! There were so many men about, I thought surely the guards would flash steel, but he had a woman with him.”
“A woman? Who?”
“Just some peasant woman from Brance. A pretty little thing, or at least”—Tansy choked on her tears—“she used to be. Maybe. Before he got to her.”
Joselyn’s heart thrummed in her chest so hard it burned. She forced herself not to squeeze her nurse too tightly as she waited for the rest of the story. Tansy swallowed, her voice cracking.
“She’d been cut up. That monster carved up her face like a slab of raw meat. It was awful, Joselyn! I don’t know how the girl survived.”
“You’re saying my intended did this? Dante Viridian?”
As Tansy nodded, a crack of thunder shook the stone keep and the vibrations rumbled up Joselyn’s buckling knees. She gripped the desk, steadying herself as Tansy rushed on.
“Lord Ellis brought the girl to your father as proof. Swore there’s a dozen more victims just like her, but he only had time to hunt down the one. He begged your father to break off the marriage negotiations, or at least to slow things down. Begged him to reconsider.”
“And”—Joselyn licked her lips—“what did my father say?”
Tansy broke into an agonized sob and pressed her gray head into Joselyn’s shoulder. Hot tears soaked through the blue silk of her dress, onto her freckled skin. Joselyn swallowed hard.
What are you doing, Father?
She’d been shocked enough when her father had initiated marriage negotiations with House Viridian. Apart from their wool trade, Viridian was a house teetering on the edge of total obscurity. Not like her own house, whose lord was second in line for the throne. And now this? It couldn’t be true.
Joselyn stroked Tansy’s curls, reveling in the old woman’s love, the affection she gave so freely. Unlike the woman who’d borne Joselyn. Unlike the man who’d sired her.
“Hush, now, Tansy. All will be well. Lord Ellis is an ambitious man. He’d do anything to secure the alliance between his house and ours. It’s not so hard to imagine him staging the whole affair.”
Tansy tore out of her charge’s arms, sobering. “I’m an old woman, Joselyn. I know a kettle of tripe when I smell it. Those scars wasn’t fresh and they wasn’t staged. Where there’s smoke there’s a fire, and I tell you, Dante Viridian is the Butcher of Brance.”
Joselyn’s stomach dropped. She’d heard the rumors. Everyone had. The Butcher of Brance, a beast of epic brutality, had plagued the lands of House Viridian for the better part of the last decade. Dismembered stable boys, children lashed to death, women mutilated in such ways that Joselyn’s maids would not repeat the details. That the fiend had not yet been identified and brought to justice was brow-raising to even the most skeptical gossip. According to rumor, all victims had been serfs, and very few had ever survived.
“You can’t go through with it, milady. You mustn't.”
Joselyn frowned. “What would you have me do?”
“Tell your father no, child. Just this once. Refuse him!”
Joselyn squeezed her nurse’s hand. Tell Lord Fury no? Refuse him? Like the useless, petulant daughter he was always waiting for her to turn into? The one he expected her to be?
No. I think not.
Joselyn would get to the bottom of this. It made no sense. Lord Fury was no fool. If this was the decision he’d made, there was a good reason. And she’d be damned if she left her home behind without knowing what it was.
Tansy continued on in a panicked frenzy. “The barons will support you. Your father’s own steward disapproved of the match, and that was before we knew you was to be wed to the Butcher of Brance.” She whispered the title as though it would bring a curse upon them.
“I must speak with my father.”
“Yes, child, tell him! Tell that miserable bastard you won’t be his—”
Joselyn released her nurse. “That’s the Lord of Tirvine you speak of, Tansy. Your lord.”
Tansy stiffened, choking back her words. No one spoke ill of her father in front of Joselyn. Not even Tansy. Joselyn wouldn’t have it. If she had to show him respect, then, by the gods, so would everyone else.
“Despite what you think, my father has my best interests at heart,” Joselyn said.
The familiar lie slipped out, and Tansy, bless her heart, was wise enough to let the subject drop. The old woman’s lip quivered, and Joselyn’s heart ached for the only person who had ever shown her loyalty. She pressed a gray curl out of her nurse’s face. “No matter what happens, I will survive it. I’ll survive it and come out stronger. You believe me, don’t you?”
Tansy shook her head. A tear rolled down her plump cheek. “You can’t mean to go through with it. Surely you wouldn’t submit yourself to a beast.”
Joselyn fingered the golden pendant she’d been given the day she was born. One side depicted a great dragon, spewing fire. The other was engraved with her family’s credo.
“There is no greater beast than the dragon, Tansy”—she swept her thumb over the words and released the pendant—“and ‘the dragon submits to none.’ ”
Joselyn’s slippered footsteps echoed down the sweeping stone halls of her lifelong home. Shadows flickered in the torch light of a hundred iron sconces. The effect gave Joselyn a sense of vertigo as she hurried to her father’s chambers.
Thunderclaps shook the corridors, as if the storm were threatening to collapse the stone walls around her. Let it try. Fury Keep was as indomitable as it was cold. Nothing so wild and scorching as a bolt of lightning would master it.