The Dragon's Price (Transference #1)(13)

He turns and walks away, and Diamanta throws herself at his feet. “Please, Father,” she cries. “Don’t let them put her down there!”

“She chose this for herself.” He pulls his legs from her grasp and together my mother and father walk to their ornate carriage and get in, not once looking back. I am not sad to see them go. They have never loved me. They have never known me.

A rope is slipped over my head, and I am too shocked to cry, or fight, or even protest. I look up into King Marrkul’s face. His tan skin has gone white, and unshed tears are glistening in his pale eyes. “I’m sorry, child,” he whispers. “I thought all Faodarian princesses were cowards. I thought we would be putting a lamb down in your place.” He swipes his eyes with the back of his hand and tightens the rope around my chest. The pearl-crusted corset acts as a shield against the rope, and I can barely feel it. I can barely feel anything. “Hold the rope as we lower you to take some of the pressure off your ribs. We’ll get you down as quickly as possible.” He pulls a long, sheathed hunting knife from his belt and hands it to me. Somehow I manage to take it from him. “I’m sorry,” he says again.

Eight of his sons come to help him lower me down. Golmarr is standing apart, staring at me. The Antharian king walks me to the edge of the cliff and helps me wrap the massive layers of white petticoats and skirts around my ankles so they won’t tangle with my feet. And then I am walking backward, and my sisters are wailing, and the sun is shining too brightly, and the ground under my feet is changing from flat to sloped, until I am leaning back and walking down the sheer side of a cliff, and I am still too numb to even feel fear. After five steps, the cliff wall disappears, and I start to plummet.

The rope jerks taut, stealing my breath. It slides up under my armpits, popping pearl buttons off my corset, and I drop King Marrkul’s hunting knife. It clatters on the rock below. I gasp and cling to the rope with both hands and look at the opening in the cliff, and all at once, the numbness is torn from me and I start to scream. I am staring into a great, round mouth, filled with darkness and damp breath. I scream and scream, and squeeze my eyes shut. The more I scream, the more I begin to feel.

The rope stops being lowered and is yanked and shaken, making me swing back and forth. I suck in a breath of air and stop screaming, and crack my eyes open. Before me is a massive cave opening into the cliff face. Not a mouth.

Above, I hear raised voices. Men shouting. Arguing. Growling. The shouting increases, and the movement of the rope becomes jerky, pulsing to a tempo despite the fact that it still isn’t being lowered. Dirt and pebbles rain down on my head, so I look up. Someone is inching down the rope, his booted feet wrapped around it. It is the motion of him lowering himself, hand over hand, that is making the rope pulse. When he gets just above me, he stops and yells, “All right! Get us down quick!”

The rope is being lowered again, faster this time, until at last a small outcropping of rock touches my feet and I stand at the entrance of a cave. I peer over the side of the cliff, and my heart misses a beat. Far, far below, so far it looks like a piece of white embroidery floss, is the Glacier River flowing between jagged rocks. It springs from a glacier-fed lake cradled in the center of the mountains. Across from us is another sheer cliff face that rises up and turns into a snow-capped mountain peak.

Golmarr alights beside me and without a word takes a knife from his sleeve and cuts the rope from my ribs. More pearl buttons fall from my corset, bouncing on the ground and toppling over the cliff. Golmarr tugs the rope three times and it is whisked away. His eyes meet mine.

“Are you crazy?” My entire body is trembling, even my voice. “What are you doing down here?”

He scowls and puts the knife back into his sleeve, then bends and picks up his father’s hunting knife from the ledge, roughly pressing it into my limp hand. “I figured you didn’t stand a chance of surviving alone. But with me, your odds will be a little better. I am armed, and I have fought in half a dozen battles.”

My throat grows tight and I can’t talk, so I throw my arms around him and hug him as hard as I can. “Thank you,” I croak against his shoulder. Then I realize I am holding him and quickly push away.

“Don’t thank me yet.” He adjusts the bow on his back, loosens his sword in its scabbard, and strides into the cave.

“Wait!” I call. He turns around, a mere shadow in the darkness, and scowls at me. “Where are you going?”

“To find a way out before the dragon finds us.” He tilts his head to the side. “You weren’t going to just sit here and actually wait to be eaten, were you?”

Yes, that was my plan unless I could scale the cliff, but I don’t tell him. “It’s as black as pitch in there. How are we going to find our way through the cave if we can’t see anything?”

Golmarr strides back out into the sunlight and stops in front of me. He lifts the dragon scale flask that is attached to my necklace. “Do you know what this is?”

“Of course I do. It’s a dragon scale.”

“And do you know what they do in the dark?”

I look at the flask dangling from his hand. “Glow?” I guess.

He nods. “Yes. They have eternal light. At least until the dragon it came from dies. So if it glows, we know the dragon is still alive. It came from the fire dragon that lives in these mountains, right? Not from one of the others?”