Corin And The Courtier

The sun had finally slipped low enough behind the western peaks that Corin had to either leave off his correspondence until the following day or give in and light a lamp.

He chose to fling his half-completed letter across the desk and slump back in his chair.

No lamps.

Lamps were for people who gave a fuck.

Anyway, his cousin Fiora wouldn’t care about receiving a timely letter from him, not when he had nothing whatsoever to say, either about his own situation—dull and lonely, as always—or Fiora’s continuing struggles with his curse.

Still. He’d finish the letter eventually, if only to keep Fiora writing to him in return. His little cousin was the only person on earth who could still make Corin smile on occasion, with his melodramatics and his innocence and his vivid, amusing descriptions of the merchant town he’d chosen as his new home after finally escaping the clutches of his overprotective parents.

Even if he’d been as annoying as everyone else Corin knew, he was also the only person who bothered to keep in touch at all. The rest of the family had been distant at best ever since Corin first took up a sword.

A bitterly chilly breeze whispered through the open casement over the desk, rustling the papers and ruffling through Corin’s overlong dark hair—which he never bothered to cut these days, letting it go until it hung down into his eyes. Even in a thin linen shirt with the sleeves rolled up, the cold didn’t bother him. Dragons ran as hot in their almost-human shapes as in their draconic ones. Corin ran hotter than most.

But oncoming snow scented the air, crisp and damp. Damn it all, spring had already come and gone again a dozen times, and it couldn’t seem to make up its mind. Corin would have to go around the tower and close all the bloody windows again to keep the floors from getting wet, if nothing else, damn it to hell. He’d just opened them a few days before to air the place out.

It felt like an overwhelmingly impossible task.

Maybe he didn’t give a fuck if the floors were wet. Did he? He could always shift to his other body and stay scaly and entirely waterproof, as he had for much of the last seven months while winter wailed around him in an endless blizzard. The great hall downstairs held him perfectly well, and he wouldn’t need to be in his upstairs bed to be warm. Besides, it wasn’t as if anyone would be there to talk to with a human mouth.

Or share the bed.

As if in answer to the thought, the wind picked up a little and shifted slightly, bringing with it a breath of warmth and sweetness, like a rose blooming in the sun that would be shining far down the mountain, across the high valleys, by the coast and in the capital. The scent made Corin long for something…but before he could lose himself in imagination and memory, the breeze also brought him a more prosaic hint of sweaty horse.

His nose wrinkled. What a combination. And if he’d started imagining things, perhaps Fiora was right when he said Corin had been in this remote mountain hideaway for too long, and that only cussedness had kept him here.

As he shook his head, attempting to clear the hallucination, he heard the distant clop of hooves and a jingle of harness.

Well, fuck. Not a hallucination after all. His heart gave a leap and a twist, like a dancer at one of the court balls he hadn’t been to in two years or more. Another person. Perhaps someone had come looking for him again, of all the things; he’d thought he’d discouraged any such attempts for good, given that no one had tried in three hundred and seventy-three days.

Not that he’d been counting or anything.

In any case, Corin’s sword, let alone the possibility of a blast of fire (not that Corin would use it), tended to discourage even the most determined of guests.

On the other hand, this could be a lost traveler, led to Corin’s tower via taking the left-hand branch instead of the right a mile down the mountain.

He jumped up and strode across the messy bedroom, stepping over a pile of clothes and kicking a pair of boots out of the way. The window at the foot of his bed overlooked the steep, winding path that led up to the bridge in front of the tower’s main gate. Though Corin doubted a human’s eyes could detect him that far up, particularly in the twilight—and while he couldn’t be certain the approaching person wasn’t some other variety of magical being, he knew for certain no dragon other than himself would arrive somewhere on horseback—he still pressed himself against the wall, peering out from concealment. Why? He didn’t quite know. Only it had been so bloody long since he saw anyone face to face, or more precisely, since anyone had seen his human face. He collected supplies at the village at the foot of the mountain in his other body, scooping up the crates he’d preordered in his giant claws and flying back to the tower.

Only once had one of the stupid young men, inflamed with a desire to make a name for himself, leapt out of the shadows and taken a good hard whack at Corin’s shoulder with an axe that had clearly spent most of its life chopping firewood.

Corin had blinked at the slight annoyance of the blow, which had glanced off completely, and turned his massive head to stare into the lad’s eyes. Another blink, and the fellow had squealed, turned nearly as green as Corin himself, and fled for the safety of his mother, who stood across the village square shouting at him in tones that promised punishment greater than Corin would’ve troubled to dish out.

Otherwise, the villagers had taken his money and given him food, candles, paper and ink, wine—a great deal of wine—and all the other necessities without any fuss or hassle. It probably helped that they’d figured out exactly who he was. Too many king’s knights had come strutting and jangling through the village seeking Sir Corin, the famed dragon knight, for the villagers to have any doubts about his identity. And Sir Corin had a reputation for being gallant and chivalrous almost to the point of idiocy: he wasn’t someone who’d lay waste to a helpless village. Not that any modern dragons would. They’d be much more likely to complain about the lack of amenities at the local inn.

So even if the rider coming up the path had taken a wrong turning to reach the tower, he’d know who Corin was. He’d have passed through the village on his way up the mountain, and the locals had nothing bloody else to do but issue dire, completely fabricated warnings about the dragon up the mountain, laughing in their sleeves the whole time.

God. He’d know who Corin was. Or more accurately, who he used to be. And even if he’d never met him previously, if he’d ever spent more than ten minutes in the capital he’d know why Corin had fled to the mountain.

If he’d ever spent more than fifteen minutes in the capital, he’d probably seen Belinda naked, too, since she rarely went longer than that without lifting her skirts. And half an hour would’ve gotten him the tale of Sir Corin’s final duel and the way he’d laughed like a madman while he scarred his opponent’s face.

Ugh. Perhaps he’d be lucky, and the rider would be some peddler or merchant who’d neither know nor care about court scandal, or would at least be too intimidated to mention it.

When the rider came around the large boulder at a turning in the path fifty yards below the bridge, Corin immediately knew he was not, in fact, lucky—not that that was anything new, of course, damn it to hell. The man seated on a really fine and well-groomed gelding wore a rich woolen tunic and a mail shirt along with equally expensive pants and boots, all topped off with a velvet cloak. The jeweled hilt of the long sword by his side caught the last ray of the setting sun, a ruby gleaming like fire.

A knight or a lord, certainly, which meant someone who’d know. Keen as it was, his eyesight couldn’t penetrate the shadow of the man’s fur-lined hood. That someone could be bloody anyone.

Turn around, Corin silently begged. The gate’s closed. This tower couldn’t possibly be less welcoming. And neither could I. Get lost, you courtly, popinjay prick.

The horse picked his way along the rocky path and then clopped over the bridge, stopping directly in front of the gate and out of Corin’s line of sight from the bedroom window. He could still hear, though, and the murmur of the man speaking softly to his horse and the squeak of leather as he dismounted carried clearly.

And then came the sound he’d been dreading: the clang of the large bell attached to the chain dangling beside the gate.

Bother, as Fiora would say.

The bell clanged again, more insistently this time. “Hello there!” called a pleasant tenor voice, as sweet as the scent of roses. Corin froze, his spine fusing into a steel rod, it felt like. He fucking knew that voice. “Hello, up in the tower! Sir Corin, I assure you I come in peace. And I request a night’s hospitality, if you please! I’ve gone too far to retrace my steps tonight before it’s dark.”

By the end of that, the voice remained pleasant…but strained. Perhaps even a shade desperate?

But Corin didn’t give a damn for his troubles, because God. It couldn’t be. He wouldn’t fucking dare. Hearing his name spoken aloud for the first time in over a year would’ve been odd enough, but in that familiar voice…