The Dragon Prince's Consort

Twenty

Setting her writing practice aside Fang looked up at the time and over at the prince hunched at his desk, scribbling steadily on his tablet with one hand holding an old ledger open and his tail swishing quietly under his chair. She stood, crossing to the desk and tapping him on the shoulder. Though his head came up fast, Fang was starting to recognize the way Valen's orange eyes went glassy when he was tired from poring over stacks of manifests and legal records all evening. "Hngh?"

"It's late, let's go to bed."

Valen's ears perked in that cute way he had that brought some of the light back into him. "Bed?" He glanced at the display on the wall, "Eyah, I didn't know it was that late." He marked his place with a silk bookmark embroidered with silver thread and switched his tablet off. Fang smiled to herself. It's like a magic word, always gets him moving. Not that it always led to sex – over the week that had passed since she'd practically dragged him into bed Fang had come to discover that Valen was quite the cuddler. Even in his sleep he stuck close, and Fang had decided she liked that. He's just so damned sweet – I'm used to Drass being more dominant. Valen was far from that, still shy and tractable even though they both knew he held most of the power. Not that I mind.

Valen stood, and reached out to pluck at Fang's sleeve. "It's been a few hours since dinner, do you need something to eat before we turn in?"

"Um... That's actually not a bad idea." She'd been practicing writing whole words and phrases while Valen drafted the proposal he intended to show his father by week's end, and the effort of getting her calligraphy just so left her hand tired and her head a little light. That, and Valen was trying to put weight on her so she wouldn't be as cold. "I'm not that hungry, though, so nothing too heavy."

Valen shook his head, "That's fine, we can share something out of the cabinet." He waved her on and Fang left him to find them something to eat. In the bedchamber Fang shrugged out of her dressing-robe and slid naked between the sheets – the staff had changed them from red to black – to wait for him. Listening to Valen shuffle around in the hearth-room, paper rustling and glass clinking, Fang twisted her hair into a rope and let her mind wander. I should ask Abita what she uses to make my under-robes so soft. When Fang had worked for a commercial laundry service, she'd learned that Drass preferred to pummel their linen fabrics in a tumbling machine loaded with small steel balls, literally beating the linen soft rather than treat it with chemical conditioners. It wouldn't surprise Fang if she learned that the palace compound had one of these giant tumbling drums, they had everything else. In the past week Valen had shown her enormous chambers deep in the mountain where they grew vegetables and fruit next to the heat of underground springs and lava tubes, the hydroponic systems shelved on rotating racks some thirty feet high. The kitchens next door housed not one but three bakeries, one exclusively for sweet pastries and cakes, as well as room upon room of smoked and cured meats, dry goods, liquid items like milks and juices, and a cavern larger than some villages packed with hundred-kilo blocks of butter and cheese. And near those sat even more caves stacked with cases and barrels of aging whiskey, spicy liqueurs, sweet wines and sparkling vintages enough to keep the port city of Kitsara properly tanked for several years.

Her thoughts were interrupted as Valen came into the bedroom, hooking his tail around the edge of the door to pull it behind him. In one hand he carried a paper parcel, the other balancing two glasses of pale orange-pink liquid. Fang watched him set the parcel down before handing her one of the glasses. "You know, I can't believe I've never asked before, but what's it like to have a tail?"

Valen's ears flicked, and he gave Fang a bewildered look before he looked behind himself. His tail, a long skinny thing covered in red scales like the rest of him with a black paintbrush tip, swished behind him an inch above the carpet; it was longer than his legs, though from the way it was constantly moving it was hard to tell at times. "Um... I guess it's useful? I've always had it, so I don't know what it'd be like without it." Shrugging, he added, "Sorry, that's not very helpful."