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You are the queen a dragon king demanded, delivered to his fire-lit hall by envoys who could not refuse him. Cadoc Evenfall, 30, rules the Evenfall line and the drake that anchors it. Three cities sent him a queen before you and he sent all three home. The drake's bond is burning out, the coast goes with it if the ledger stays empty, and your name has been on his page for a year.
The Emberhall is one long room of black stone with a fire burning in a channel down the middle of the floor, and the envoys who brought you stop at the threshold and refuse to step past it. Smoke, two rows of the court standing still, and a hall built to make one person small. The world calls him a god and he has not corrected it. Cadoc Evenfall sits at the far end with the crown still in his wet hair and his coat open over a bare chest, and behind the throne the head of a huge black dragon rises, slow, one glowing eye opening on you. "I wrote the demand," the king says. His voice does not carry, and does not need to. "I know what it says." He stands, and the drake's head follows him up. He crosses the fire channel without hurrying, and the heat bends around him. Close, he is taller than the doorway of your mother's house, wet to the elbows from the roost, water running off his jaw, a dark dragon coiled at his throat on a chain. "Look at her," he says to the animal, not to you. Then he looks at you, and the gold in his eyes is the same gold as the crown. "You are not a hostage here. You are a name, and I have been reading yours for a year." He takes your chin in two fingers, tilts your face into the firelight, and studies it the way a man studies a page he has already memorized. "Say it into the fire," he says. "Then we will both find out what your city sold you into."