Dragon Soul by Jaida Jones Read Free Book Online

all that was a bedtime story. Shit like that wasn’t real anymore, and maybe it’d never been real to begin with, either. But I bit back on my anti-national way of thinking and looked away, off toward the cracked dome of the magician’s tower, lying overturned in a heap of its own rubble. Hatty’d take my drift.
    “Commoners,” he said, and shook his head as he pocketed the one piece of treasure I’d ever held in my hands. “You’re coming with us.”
    I had no choice, so I went.

CHAPTER TWO

THOM
    This was not the first time I’d ever been a part of a barroom brawl. However, it was the first time I had ever participated actively in one.
    It was difficult to deny Rook when he issued a command—something he’d learned, no doubt, from Chief Sergeant Adamo and saved only for special occasions. There was more power behind an order when it was bellowed in unfamiliar tones, making a man who’d otherwise remain neutral fall into a sudden alliance from which he could not withdraw. It was, in some ways, the most basic strategic lesson I had been given, inside the ’Versity or out.
    And so I had allowed myself to become a hooligan.
    While it wounded my pride, the main source of hurt was in my knuckles, which were swollen beyond my capacity to move them.
    I didn’t even remember the face of the man I’d struck—it might just as well have been a woman, save for the faint imprint of what seemed to be a beard spread across my stiffened fist. If we were arrested, which we might well be, I had no excuses or even any explanations. I had simply punched a man because Rook had told me to, and it was all over some item, now tightly secured in Rook’s hands, which I couldn’t even identify.
    “Didn’t know you could fight like that,” Rook said moodily, thesound of his voice cutting through my troubled thoughts and bringing me, somewhat miserably, back down to earth.
    “You forget my upbringing,” I replied.
    Rook snorted. “I wasn’t there for it,” he said. Then, perhaps because that was too much even for him, he fell silent again.
    We were in our rooms now, after being mobbed by an entire innful of country folk incensed at being insulted. And why shouldn’t they have been, I asked myself, since Rook had called them all thieves, liars, and the women whores. No one would take very kindly to that treatment, and they had only reacted as they saw fit. Besides which, he had confiscated something of theirs.
    I didn’t blame them, but still I had fought them tooth and nail. Even now, I felt it necessary to apologize, or at least to offer the innkeeper payment. At this very moment, he was no doubt calculating the extra cost to us for staying in his establishment and doing our level best to tear it down before we set out to our next target.
    “Rook,” I said, drawing in a steadying breath. “Since I have now been involved in actions I…am not entirely proud of…” Rook snorted again, and I tried to ignore it. “I’m waiting for an explanation,” I concluded at length. “Any reason at all for why we…Anything, really, would suffice.”
    Rook’s face was twisted into an expression of such deep unhappiness that, at first, it might have passed for anger. In point of fact, even I drew back, before the sum total of his features—his hard jaw, his tight lips, the redness around his eyes and the whiteness around his mouth—brought me up short.
    I had misread the situation—somehow—and on top of that, I was not the sort of partner he’d wanted.
    Of course not. I wasn’t one of the boys. Brawling was
not
my specialty, and I did not enjoy the rush of simple pleasure brought on by physical fights.
    But there was some other key element lacking—something that had to do with camaraderie—and when I thought too long or too well upon the subject, my heart began to hurt.
    I tried to move my hand to distract myself. That pain was simple and immediate, and it was a momentary distraction. A dirty tactic, but for the time