The Dragon Queen – Part 1: The Surrendered Sword

The great hall was lit by a hundred candles and a fire the size of a doorway. Draca had spent a month designing the evening: a throne of black iron and green velvet, a banner of a coiled dragon on the wall, a long table laid with bread, cold meat and a flagon of red wine.

She was forty-two, a stage director with a taste for spectacle and a talent for stillness. Edric was thirty-eight, an architect, tall, gentle and conscientious, who had said to her on a long drive home that he wished, just for one night, to serve a queen instead of managing a team.

They had rented the castle for the weekend. Before the doors closed, she sat him at the long table and slid a scroll across the wood. She had written it by hand. The Pact of the Hall. His limits and hers, in black ink: no marks, nothing painful, no real humiliation, nothing beyond the walls, no one else. The word was Ember.

"Say it."

"Ember."

"If you say it, the Queen puts down her crown. I am Draca. We eat, we talk, and no one is displeased."

"I understand."

"And every half hour..."

"You will ask if I wish to continue. I will answer truly."

"Good." She stood, and in the firelight drew a long green cloak about her shoulders, and lifted a crown of black iron from the table. When she turned back to him, her voice was a different instrument, low, slow and rolling, with a faint smile behind every word. "Sir Edric of the Western March. You came to my mountain with a sword. Do you yield it?"

He rose, went down on one knee on the flagstones and held out his wooden sword in both hands. It was a prop, rubber-tipped, absurd, and he felt his heart pound. She took it, weighed it in her palm and laid it across the arms of her throne.

"You yield."

"I yield, Majesty."

"You do not yield. You are taken." She sat, arranged her cloak and studied him for a long, silent time. The fire crackled. Shadows leaped on the high roof beams. "Do you know what the Dragon does with a knight who comes uninvited into her hall?"

"No, Majesty."

"Nor do I." Her mouth curved. "I shall decide as the night goes on."

He knelt before her throne with his hands on his knees, and she let the silence stretch until his breathing slowed and his shoulders dropped. It was a theatre of two. It was entirely true.

"Are you content, Sir Edric?"

"Content, Majesty."

"Good. Then the court is in session."

Continue the story: Part 2 – Ember.