Steelhands - Jaida Jones [167]
Lucky for me, Troius was the kind of idiot who liked talking about himself more than anything else.
“Never seen anything like it before,” I grunted, ’cause he’d love that.
Sure enough, he brightened like I’d told him he was the son I’d never had and we were gonna go berry-picking in the fields together, just us and his pet dragon.
“I’m honored to be the man who gets to show it to you,” Troius said, passing his good hand through his hair. “Truly, I know that to you it must sound as though I’m repeating myself, but … I’ve admired you for a long time, Adamo. Well, anyway, this little gem solves the problem of loyalty quite handily. Once the dragon makes her selection, our Margrave takes the accepted donor’s blood and mixes it with the dragonsoul material. She obeys my commands, true enough, but our relationship goes deeper than that. I hate to throw philosophy in where it doesn’t belong, but you could say we’re one being. I hear her now and then, but unlike your ‘girls,’ she doesn’t have complete independence. She can’t act on her own; she needs me to approve or disapprove of her decisions. In turn, I issue the commands, and she fulfills them.”
I was starting to feel a little too much like a teacup in a tempest for my comfort. Even though I’d joked about Royston being the last person you’d want to come and bust you out of jail, I sure wished I had him there, to listen to all this, and not forget a single detail. He was an ace at sorting through shit piles of information real quick—not to mention he had a lot more experience in dealing with pompous jackasses than I did. My jackasses tended to be the regular type—the snotty ones that cried when you blew too hard in their direction.
I was just trying not to stare at Ironjaw.
She had begun pacing between me and Troius, sharp claws digging into the floor for purchase. Our girls had never done a lot of walking; I guess now I knew why. They’d practically been caged up, only let out on rare occasions; they definitely didn’t make good house pets.
This one could probably have slept curled up on a kiddie bed, having the whole run of an apartment without her tail slapping against any walls. That is, if nobody minded ruining the floorboards.
“So what you’re saying is th’Esar doesn’t need to worry about losing control of his dragons this time since he’s got ’em hooked up to some of his most loyal citizens,” I summarized. If I were ever to get out of there, I needed to make the story short, sweet, and scary enough that it’d be able to mobilize people to do something instead of just wag their tongues.
Th’Esar was crazy for trying to pull a stunt like this, and Troius so glory-hounded he would’ve gone along with anything to see a piece of the action.
“Something like that,” Troius admitted. “The Esar trusts me of course, but some of the others can hardly be called loyal. Or even citizens, for that matter. While we made a considerable number of improvements to the arrangement this time around, what we weren’t able to change was that pesky side effect of dragons needing to choose their riders. Or their owners, I suppose, given the circumstances and allowances made for size. We presented vials of each candidate’s blood, and wouldn’t you know it—I was the only member of the Esar’s trusted guard to be chosen at all. The others didn’t pass the test. I’m not sure whether that makes me lucky—I’m inclined to believe it makes me special. In any case, we mixed that blood with the well water in each dragon’s soul, binding machine and man together; part of that mixture resides in the dragons, and part is kept with the Esar. You see, in the absence of working with those he can trust, the Esar had to resort to a contingency plan. He has the power to destroy both dragon and guard if he sees fit should they attempt to betray him. Considering what occurred during the run of the first Dragon Corps, we thought it best to do