Golden Lies - Barbara Freethy [40]
"Hello ..."
Paige's voice brought his attention back to her. "What?"
"I've been talking to you for five minutes."
"Sorry. What did you find?" He moved around the table so he could see the monitor better. Unfortunately, the close contact with Paige distracted him once again. Her hair smelled good, like a field of wildflowers that he wanted to roll around in for a few hours.
Paige tapped the screen with her fingernail. "A legend about a dragon that looks a lot like yours."
Riley forced himself to focus. The unsophisticated sketch could be his dragon, he supposed.
"The period referenced is the Zhou dynasty," Paige continued, "Which is the period my father thought your dragon might be from. What's interesting about this story is that it actually speaks of two dragons that connect together and open a special box."
"That doesn't sound like what we have at all."
"Maybe not. But ..." Her voice trailed away.
"But what?" he asked impatiently.
"It's a fascinating story. Do you want to hear it?" She turned her face toward him, and he saw the eager light in her brown eyes. Whatever she'd found had caught her imagination.
"Go ahead."
"It's about a little girl, the daughter of an emperor. The emperor suffered severe, violent headaches, and the kingdom was in despair over how to ease his pain. It was said that he went on rages during these episodes. People were killed. Things were destroyed. One day the daughter was in the woods, and she found a long piece of bamboo that made music when she blew through it. She took the bamboo flute back to the palace, and that night, when her father was suffering from another headache, she played it for him. The music was magical. It instantly soothed his pain. He pronounced the flute to be a gift from the gods, and this child, this daughter, had succeeded in comforting him when no one else could—"
"What does this have to do with a dragon?" Riley interrupted, sensing Paige could go on like this for a while. She was obviously captivated by the tale.
"I'm getting to that. The emperor decided that the flute must be protected above all else. He had a box created to hold the flute. Then he had two special dragons fashioned out of bronze to guard the box. The dragons had to be connected together in a special way in order to open the box. If either dragon was damaged or lost, the box could not be opened. And the little girl, the first daughter of his second wife, was treated like a princess."
"Yeah, yeah. So?"
Paige gave him an irritated look. "So, these three pieces were very valuable. Others in the kingdom were jealous of the little girl's new status. You can imagine what happened next."
"Someone stole the flute."
"The whole thing, the dragons, the box, and the flute. What was worse, the emperor had his daughter killed, because he was so angry. He then had a ton of bamboo brought to the palace, but no one else could make any of the pieces sing like the original flute. There was no longer any healing magic. Nothing could be heard but the sound of weeping throughout the kingdom."
"Where's the happy ending?"
"There isn't one. The emperor swore a curse of revenge on all first daughters. He said that until the box and the flute were put back in their rightful place, all first daughters of whoever came in contact with any piece of the set, the box, the dragons, or the flute would suffer terrible misfortune."
"So what happened?"
"I don't know."
"What do you mean you don't know?" He reached over and pushed the scroll key only to find that they had come to the end of the passage. "That's it? That's the whole story?"
"There's a moral."
"Right. I got that. Stealing is a bad thing. What I want to know is who took the box and the flute and the dragons, and what the hell happened to them?"
Paige smiled. "That sounds like a security expert talking. You have to solve the crime, otherwise the world is off balance. One plus one always equals two. Missing things