The Dragonswarm Read Online Free Page A

past tense.
    "I fell in love with you the day we met at the palace," she said. "Did you know that? I told Father that very evening that I had met the man I would marry."
    She looked over as though she expected an answer, but I had none. "That was foolish," she said. "But sometimes little girls are foolish. Father told me how much you had angered the king. He told me how you left in a burst of fire and smoke, defiant of the crown. It all seemed terribly romantic."
    "The king hated me already then," I said. "That was the first step toward my crime. It was on the road from there to the Academy that I killed a man."
    She nodded. "I understand that now." She cast a long gaze out over the parched land before us. "I didn't know it then. I knew someone mysteriously turned up on the Academy's doorstep about a week later, bloodied and bruised by the King's Guard, and this dashing hero quickly befriended my scrawny little brother."
    I dropped my eyes. "It really worked the other way around."
    "Father never made the connection. But I knew it had to be you. I read every letter. I told myself stories about you. I fell more and more in love with this fantasy...."
    I couldn't bring myself to look, but I could hear the tears in her voice. I said, "I'm sorry I disappointed you."
    "That's just the problem," she said. "I had all these fantasies about you, but I never truly loved you until the day you showed up here. My town was doomed, and my family with it. I was captured. All hope was lost. And then you stepped into my tent, every bit the hero I'd imagined you to be."
    She caught her breath. I risked a glance, and she was looking right at me. Her smile was bent in kindness; her eyes were drawn in sadness. "And then you stayed. You stayed, and you were real. I made a fantasy out of you, Daven, and then I loved you for making that fantasy real."
    She dropped her eyes. She knotted the reins of the pack horses in her hands. "That's all I wanted from you," she said. "That's all I want from you now. I don't want any more apologies. I don't want any more fantasies. I want what's real."
    I licked my lips. "And if it's not as good?"
    She met my eyes and smiled through tears. "Something real is always better than a fantasy. Always. Have faith in me. Please."
    I nodded. Then I said, "Of course. I will." She gave me another smile, and we both took a hundred paces to catch our breath. Then I reached over to squeeze her hand again, and I asked gently, "Where would you have me start?"
    "Start in the City," she said. "I have never properly met a beggar before."
    I told her my story. I told her of my father who had run afoul of the king's justice and spent the last years of his life rotting in a public prison. I told her of the work I'd done to keep us fed. I told her of the grief that followed after his death, and then the liberty.
    We stopped for lunch and I told her how I'd fled to the luxurious Terrailles province outside the City and found a job as a shepherd. I told her of the other boys there I'd trained to fight with the sword, and of the night a Green Eagle from the King's Guard came to interrupt our duels. I told her of the wizard Claighan who had taken me to meet the king, and of his strange and foolish plan to teach me the value of magic.
    I told her of the soldier I killed by my own hand.
    She kissed me then, while tears burned in my eyes, and sometime later we returned to our horses and continued on to the south. I did not resume my story after that, and she did not ask me to. I would in time, and she knew that. I would keep no secrets from her, but this secret had cost me much in the telling.
    So instead she talked for a while. She told me stories about the lands we were passing. She seemed to know every family. She told me about the Carters who had lost seven baby daughters in seven years. She told me about the Dales whose grandfather had been the fifth son of a royal house but who moved to Teelevon for love of a farmer's daughter. She pointed