Becoming the Heirless Dragon King's Fated Mate novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Four Hundred Crowns
Linnea Ravenshaw is sold by her stepmother to Baron Hask, who strikes her before the vows, so she throws herself from the wedding carriage into the snow and crawls into a cave where a silver eye opens.
Four hundred gold crowns clinked in Odile's lap as the carriage lurched up Greywatch Pass.
Linnea Ravenshaw sat across from her stepmother in a wedding dress she had not chosen.
She was twenty years old, and she had been sold by breakfast.
"Count it again if you like," Odile said, and tucked the purse into her coat.
"You sold me to a man older than my father."
"I sold you to a baron with a fen, a manor and a hunting lodge that never lets in the draft."
"His last two wives are buried behind that lodge."
"Then you'll have company." Odile smiled with half her mouth.
Linnea looked out at the snow coming down on the black pines.
Her father had died in spring, and his tannery had been Odile's by autumn.
The debts had come next.
The baron's offer had come last, folded inside a gift of venison.
The carriage stopped.
The door opened on a wall of fur.
Godfrey Hask filled the doorway with his grey beard and his rings.
He was sixty-one years old, and he looked at Linnea the way a butcher looks at a pig.
"She's thinner than you said," he told Odile.
"She'll fatten on your cooking, my lord."
He climbed in, and the carriage sank on its springs.
He sat beside Linnea and put a heavy hand on her knee.
"We'll not wait for the priest," he said. "The vows are a matter of words. I'll have what I paid for tonight."
"Take your hand off me."
"Mind your tone."
She pushed his hand away.
The back of his hand cracked across her face.
Her head hit the window frame, and the world went white and ringing.
Odile did not even look up from counting.
Linnea tasted blood in her mouth.
She thought of the tannery and her father's good boots by the fire.
She thought of her mother, who had died when Linnea was nine and had left her only a roll of carving tools and a name for each of them.
She thought, very clearly, that two women were buried behind that lodge.
Hask laughed and reached for the lacing of her bodice.
Linnea drove her elbow into his throat.
He choked.
She kicked the carriage door with both feet, and it burst open on the snow.
"Stop her!" Odile shrieked.
Linnea jumped.
She hit the drift on her shoulder and rolled, and the cold punched the air out of her.
Behind her the carriage stopped, and men shouted, and a whip cracked.
She ran.
The wedding dress was wool, and the hem dragged.
She tore it to her knees with her hands and ran uphill because the road below was full of Hask's riders.
The pines closed over her, and the snow came harder.
Her slippers were soaked through in a minute.
A rider crashed through the trees behind her, and she heard a man's voice yell, "She's gone up toward the old cave!"
"Leave her!" another voice said. "The Frostmere beast keeps that hill. Let the cold do it."
The beast.
Everyone in Skarreth knew the duke's silver dragon slept somewhere in these mountains.
Nobody who went looking for it ever described what they found.
Linnea kept climbing.
Her hands were numb, her lip was split, and her cheek throbbed in time with her heart.
She did not stop, because behind her was a lodge with a grave behind it.
The wind dropped.
A black mouth opened in the rock ahead, taller than a barn door.
Warm air breathed out of it, and it smelled of smoke and hot stone.
She stumbled inside and fell onto sand that was warm under her palms.
For a moment she lay still and simply shook.
The cave was dark, but a faint silver light moved along the walls.
Her wrist hurt.
She pushed back her torn sleeve.
A thin line of light had begun to glow under her skin, in the shape of a rune she had never seen.
Something huge shifted in the dark.
Scales slid over rock with a sound.
Linnea lifted her head.
Ten feet away, a single silver eye the size of a dinner plate had opened and was looking straight at her.
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