The Dragon's Son Read Online Free Page A

human. His human legs could run faster, his human
arms were stronger, for Draconas was not human. He was a dragon who had been
magically given human form and then sent by the dragons, who were the true
rulers of this world, to live among humans, keep an eye on them, and report
back to the Parliament all the doings of their short and chaotic lives.
    By Parliamentary decree, Draconas was forbidden to intervene in those lives,
either for good or for ill. He’d recently been ordered by the Parliament to
break that law, because another dragon had broken it first. Unfortunately, in
trying to mend the crack, the dragons had shattered the pot. And they were
leaving it to Draconas to pick up the pieces. They had no idea what havoc they
had wrought in the lives of the humans.
    They were about to find out.
    One member of Parliament knew—the dragon who was the spy for Maristara, the
female dragon who had first broken the Law of Dragonkind by seizing a human
kingdom and holding it in thrall. Her spy was a male dragon and, so Draconas
believed, a member of the Parliament. He deduced this from the fact that
Maristara knew more about the goings-on of the Parliament of Dragons than did
most of the dragons who actually came to the meetings and who generally dozed
through them.
    Draconas had warned Anora of this, when she had summoned him to attend
Parliament and make a report. She had agreed with him, but there wasn’t much
she could do. As the current Prime Minister, she was being pressured by the
other dragons, who no longer slumbered through the meetings, to find a solution
to this problem. The other dragons were understandably nervous—two of their
kind had been murdered, presumably by other dragons. Such heinous acts had not
happened since the Dragon Wars centuries ago.
    Anora was being pressured by dragons like Malfiesto, the dragon who had
complained about Draconas being late. For all she knew or Draconas knew,
Malfiesto might be the murderer, might be the spy. Precisely the reason
Draconas had argued vehemently against holding a meeting of the Parliament. The
Parliament had nothing to say to him that he wanted to hear and there was
nothing he could tell them, lest it go straight back to their enemy.
    Anora insisted, however.
    “If Parliament is not to be consulted in this—our greatest emergency since
the end of the Dragon Wars—then we might as well disband the Parliament and
fall back into the old ways of governing,” she told him, the colors of her mind
dark-tinged with fear. “The old destructive ways.”
    Draconas was forced to grudgingly concede that she was right.
    He entered the enormous cavern, its ceiling far above him, lost even to his
far-seeing dragon sight, lost in darkness so profound that it might have been
the ending of the universe. The eyes of the assembled dragons fixed on him. He
could hear their fear, hear it in their inability to keep still—claws clicking
against the stone, the nervous thumping of a tail, the snap of teeth, the
rustle of wings. He could see the fear in the colors of their minds: ugly
greens and yellows, shot through with streaks of black.
    The dragons blended their thoughts to gray, mastered their emotions.
Draconas looked searchingly at each of them, thinking that perhaps he might
find a clue to the identity of the spy in the slant of the eyes, the twitch of
a nostril, the flick of a head. He concentrated especially on the males, for it
had been a male who had attacked him and Melisande, a male so crafty and
cunning •with his magic that he had fooled Draconas completely.
    Of the twelve Houses of Dragonkind, five were ruled by males, the rest by
females. The dragon who had been complaining—Malfiesto—was well over a thousand
years old, the eldest male member of the Parliament. His scales, once a vibrant
blue, had darkened to almost black. His teeth were yellow and his eyes clouded.
His joints creaked when he moved. Draconas could almost discount Malfiesto as
Maristara’s cohort,